DOGE Fell Short of Its Big Promises but One Major Success Is Impossible to Ignore
One of President Trump’s most consequential moves after taking office in 2025 was creating the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The idea was to apply Elon Musk’s business instincts, in cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, to the federal government and, presumably, produce savings and efficiency on a heroic scale.
In many respects, DOGE failed to deliver what conservatives had hoped for: massive cuts to the federal bureaucracy, a surge in efficiency, or taxpayer savings anywhere near its promises. And the mainstream media made sure to focus on those failures. But it did achieve one major success, according to the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Judge Glock. DOGE massively shrank the size of the federal workforce.
It is important to recognize that shrinking the federal workforce was not, by itself, DOGE’s primary goal. The stated aim was deregulation, spending cuts, contract reductions, and less red tape, with a smaller workforce expected to follow. In practice, nearly the opposite occurred.
According to Glock, most cuts to contracts and grants were limited and often temporary. Many are even likely to return once a Democrat retakes the White House. Yet since January 2025, the federal workforce has fallen by about 270,000 employees, a 12 percent decline from its peak of 2.3 million, and the fastest reduction since World War II.
Even more striking, most of those departures were voluntary. Roughly 140,000 workers left through the Deferred Resignation Program, agreeing to resign in exchange for full pay and benefits through September 30, 2025, while retaining service or retirement credit.
The Department of War saw the largest workforce reduction, shedding more than 85,000 employees, a decline of more than 10 percent since Trump’s inauguration.
In this case, Glock argues that DOGE should not be judged by its failure to significantly cut spending and waste, but by its reduction of the federal workforce, especially since the federal government has largely continued to function without the nearly 300,000 employees who left. DOGE’s legacy has also been carried forward by the White House’s Fraud Task Force, which has sought to reexamine welfare rolls and root out fraud, work the federal government presumably should have been doing all along.
On DOGE's stated goal, it achieved very limited success. Musk initially promised $2 trillion in cuts, later revised that to $1 trillion, and even on a generous estimate, DOGE has saved taxpayers only about $150 billion.
Conservatives still want those larger cuts. But it has become increasingly clear that vowing to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse is not the same as doing it. Until policymakers are willing to eliminate parts of the federal bureaucracy wholesale and confront entitlements, those savings will remain firmly out of reach.
