Almost a year after its launch, DOGE’s legacy is mixed

In transitioning the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from an Internet meme to a real-life government reform effort, the agency claimed it would achieve many far-reaching, seemingly impossible goals.

It would cut $2 trillion in federal spending, eliminate burdensome and unconstitutional regulations, upgrade the federal government’s “tech stack,” eliminate deep red tape, and, time permitting, balance the budget.

When it began, both DOGE supporters and critics seemed to believe the agency was attempting a wholesale dismantling of the federal government. As the dust settles after a year, we can get a more accurate sense of how much DOGE has done to shrink and streamline the federal government.

Its cost-cutting efforts have failed, but it has accomplished little toward shrinking the federal government’s workforce. The Trump administration’s deregulatory drive has been moderately successful, although it is debatable how much credit the DOGE should receive.

DOGE’s biggest success on its own terms has been reducing its federal staff.

When the second Trump administration came into office in January 2024, there were about 2.4 million civilian federal employees. That’s about 1.5 percent of all employed civilian workers.

In its August 2025 jobs report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found 97,000 fewer federal workers by the end of that month. That figure does not include the 154,000 workers who accepted DOGE’s “fork in the road” offer to voluntarily quit their federal jobs in lieu of pay at the end of September 2025.

The precise impact of these deferred resignations on federal employment is difficult to parse, as the October government shutdown delayed the release of BLS employment reports that would count federal employees lost through deferred resignations.

The Partnership for Public Service estimates that by the end of September 2025, 201,000 people would have left federal employment through deferred resignations, early retirements, reductions in force, and layoffs of probationary employees during the second Trump administration. The measure is not a complete snapshot of the decline in federal employment, as it does not include new hires—all those additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents—or people who are retiring on schedule.

The Trump administration estimates that number will reach 300,000 by the end of 2025. If it’s a large number, the Trump administration will be able to cut the federal workforce by 12 percent.

A key component of DOGE’s core mission, as outlined in The Wall Street Journal The op-ed, co-authored by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, was to unilaterally cut federal red tape.

The real deregulation we’ve seen under the Trump administration has come from more traditional routes: individual agencies issuing regulatory rules and actions.

Early in his term, the president directed agencies to implement “significantly less than zero” total regulatory costs and eliminate 10 regulations for every rule adopted. According to a parsing of the latest integrated agenda by the Center for Economic Policy Innovation, the administration has a close to 5-1 ratio of regulatory actions to non-regulatory actions.

It has 778 active deregulatory actions compared to 161 active regulatory actions. Significant nonregulatory actions (those with an estimated economic impact of $100 million or more) number 71 compared to 31 significant regulatory actions. That’s less than the Trump administration’s goal, but significantly more deregulation than the Biden administration managed, as it added $1.8 trillion in new regulatory costs.

DOGE’s influence on federal spending is problematic, mainly due to its inability to accurately and transparently account for its own claimed savings.

The agency’s website says it saved taxpayers $214 billion by canceling contracts, grants and leases. Unfortunately, DOGE’s “wall of receipts” reconciling these savings is riddled with errors and accounting tricks.

For example, the agency will count the entire value of a canceled contract as savings, even if most of the obligation money has already been spent.

Another DOGE savings gimmick is to lower the maximum amount the government can potentially spend on contracts, even though those funds were not spent and probably never were. This practice, it has been pointed out, is comparable to taking out a credit card with a $20,000 limit, canceling the card, and then claiming you saved $20,000.

A politics DOGE’s investigation of claimed savings found that of the $145 billion it claimed to have saved through canceled contracts by the end of June 2025, only $1.4 billion — less than 1 percent — were actual, proven cash savings.

DOGE helped identify and pause spending that would become the $8.9 billion recession package passed by Congress in July. For context, that rescission package is less than one percent of the federal discretionary budget. Federal spending in FY 2025 is $6.66 trillion, compared to $6.29 trillion in FY 2024. The deficit is $1.8 trillion.

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