Elon Musk Admits That His Efforts Have Been a Dismal Failure

Late last year, billionaire Elon Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion from the government's budget with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

It didn't take long for that number to drop to $1 trillion, indicating little thought had gone into the original calculation.

And judging by the latest news, DOGE is woefully behind even that target. As the New York Times reports, Musk told president Donald Trump this week that DOGE anticipated "savings in '26 from reduction of waste and fraud by $150 billion," referring to the fiscal year that runs from October 2025 to the end of September 2026. (It's even unclear if Musk meant that the so-called department had saved $150 billion so far, or if that was how much he's now predicting it would save in total.)

Needless to say, that would mean DOGE had missed its targets by an overwhelming trillions of dollars, though a Trump administration official told the NYT that $1 trillion is still "the goal."

Either way, DOGE's existing claims of how much it has cut from the government's budget so far remain hotly contested. Earlier this year, experts found that DOGE's public ledger, or "wall of receipts," was riddled with errors.

The ledger double- or triple-counted some contracts, massively inflated some totals, and included claims that entire projects had been cut, even though they had only been partially reduced. And some contracts it took credit for were already terminated during George W. Bush's administration, decades ago.

In late February, DOGE claimed it had already saved the federal government $55 billion, raising plenty of eyebrows among experts. Less than a week later, DOGE tried to make its mistakes harder to find by obscuring its calculations on its website, revising its tally to just $10 billion from a total of 3,489 cut federal grants.

As of mid-March, that number rose to $115 billion, claims that were also met with widespread skepticism.

Earlier this month, Bank of America Securities analysts contested DOGE's claims that it had cut $24.8 billion from canceled or renegotiated contracts alone, arguing that they were "overstated."

Put simply, nobody really knows how much money DOGE is saving, including the operatives in charge of slashing budgets.

Musk's repeated claims of having found widespread fraud in government have also been challenged. The billionaire has accused the Social Security Administration of being an "immense waste," promising to address "extreme levels of fraud."

However, as the Washington Post reported last month, that fraud is proving extremely hard to find, as less than one percent of the agency's payments in recent years were determined to be improper in a 2024 audit.

In short, DOGE appears to be dramatically far off of Musk's original target of $2 trillion, indicating the billionaire has massively oversold on his promises yet again.

The mercurial CEO has already garnered a reputation for making overreaching and misleading claims when discussing his businesses — and it appears that the same goes for his efforts to make the lives of Americans as miserable as possible.

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