The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — formerly run by Elon Musk — ends 2025 with strikingly divergent results around its two primary goals.
On one front, government payroll numbers are down this year by about 9%, from 3.015 million federal workers in January to 2.744 million in November.
At the same time, government spending hasn’t slowed, despite Musk’s promises there. A tool from the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project tracks government money headed out the door in real time and shows outlays as of Dec. 19 have risen from $7.135 to 7.558 trillion.
That’s a nearly 6% increase.
“DOGE had no noticeable effect on the trajectory of spending,” the Cato Institute offered in its analysis of the agency’s 2025 results. “But it did help engineer the largest peacetime workforce reduction on record.”
Musk’s tenure at DOGE ended in May. His own year-end assessment of the effort — delivered earlier this month on a podcast with Katie Miller — was that DOGE had been “a little bit successful” and had stopped “entirely wasteful” spending, but that he wouldn’t personally want to do it again.
DOGE is no longer a standalone government entity, though it says its cost-cutting work continues and is still posting updates on social media, even as the “latest work” section of its website was last updated in August.
Where DOGE’s effects have been most directly felt
Musk began to sketch out DOGE in 2024 with a promise of “at least” $2 trillion in annual savings. That campaign trail pledge was later revised in 2025 down to $1 trillion and then again to $150 billion.
Musk had said he wanted to wield a “chainsaw for bureaucracy” to cut federal staffing during his time in Washington — even literally holding up the tool during an appearance at an event in February.
He targeted a range of offices for cuts — from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to Social Security offices — in rapid-fire layoffs and other moves that consumed Washington in the early months of Trump’s term before Musk’s abrupt departure at the end of May.
The biggest drop in the federal workforce, exceeding 150,000, came in October as former federal workers accepted a deferred resignation offer that Musk had initiated earlier in the year.
All told, federal rolls have fallen by more than 270,000 workers compared to when the year began, with many involuntary cuts in addition to those leaving government service voluntarily (though some of those layoffs were later reversed).
But 2025 ends with things moving in the other direction on the spending side.
The Hamilton Project tool shows how far Musk fell short of his savings goals. The federal government surpassed 2024 spending levels on Dec. 9, with three weeks to go in the year.
Yet a DOGE effect is clearly in evidence in select parts of the government.
USAID spent over $30 billion in 2024, but as a standalone agency, it didn’t make it to November, when it was slashed and then folded into the State Department.
The overall State Department is also on pace to spend almost $10 billion less this year than in 2024.
The Department of Education is another wing of the government that Trump has promised to eliminate completely. For the time being, it’s on pace to spend over $40 billion less in 2025.
Regulators have also seen cuts. The Federal Communications Commission is on track to spend about one-third as much this year as it did in 2024. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission are also pacing lower.
Overall spending increases
The savings in those areas have been dwarfed by other increases — from the Department of Commerce to Homeland Security to Defense to Justice — where spending is up in 2025.
And what’s known as mandatory spending remains the primary driver of government spending. Social Security payments alone are set to be over $100 billion higher in 2025.
Interest payments on the national debt will also be about $100 billion higher in 2025, with the national debt growing over $2 trillion since Trump was sworn in on Jan. 20.
“DOGE failed to cut spending because most federal spending was for entitlement programs,” according to the Cato Institute, which noted that spending there remains on “policy autopilot.”
Musk himself in recent weeks has been focused on the workforce reductions. “The matrix was reprogrammed,” he posted recently about the drop.
The world’s richest man — who has since returned to focusing full-time on his companies, including Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX (SPAX.PVT) — has also returned to the GOP fold after his high-profile falling out with Trump this spring.
Musk, who floated the possibility in the summer of launching a third party, has instead in recent months resumed making donations to the GOP.
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
