The Department of Government Efficiency has helped federal agencies terminate 8,500 contracts, saving taxpayers up to $160 billion in the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term, it says. It also axed nearly 10,000 grants totaling $33 billion, including many from USAID.
It’s terminated nearly 650 leases, resulting in about $311 million in savings.
That totals about a fifth of the trillion dollars that Elon Musk hoped to cut from the federal budget — though many of the big-ticket savings were costs set to be spread over multiple years. And it remains to be seen whether it can keep cutting at the same pace, or whether the trajectory will slow with low-hanging fruit exhausted.
Musk has said he will soon spend significantly less time on DOGE as he returns focus to his private companies. He is currently classified as a “special government employee,” meaning he can only serve 130 days per year.
Other savings, not included in those figures, are likely to be realized over the long term thanks to process reforms spurred by DOGE. That includes revamping how federal expenditures are tracked, requiring each outlay to have an explanation, and cross-referencing expenditures with other databases to stop fraudulent or disallowed payments.
DOGE’s most important accomplishment may be shaking up Washington’s culture with a new spirit of optimism and creativity. Its existence has inspired department heads to make bold decisions in their own right. Items that conservatives had criticized for decades, but believed they had no choice but to accept, are now on the table. Some small agencies have been essentially abolished outright.
The office is operating out of the organizational skin of the U.S. Digital Service, an entity established by President Barack Obama to bring Silicon Valley talent into government for short-term stints. Obama created the legal structure for the group to operate out of the White House, and set a precedent of partisanship. The old USDS was so overtly liberal that when The Daily Wire visited its office on the White House complex on February 7, it was taunting the president with a “Hate Has No Home Here” poster in its window.
Now renamed the U.S. DOGE Service, it is formally run by Amy Gleason, a healthcare executive who worked at USDS during the first Trump administration.
Many of the contract terminations listed on DOGE’s website have relied on tech expertise, axing shockingly expensive payments for software to Beltway consulting firms. The biggest contract terminations are:
- Nearly $3 billion for an “Office of Refugee Resettlement Influx Care Facility” to house “up to 3,000 unaccompanied alien children.” The contract was to Family Endeavors, which hit a contracting jackpot after adding a former Biden administration official to its payroll. Half a million children were separated from their parents because of a loophole that granted them the ability to stay in the United States if they were unaccompanied. The federal government kept the children secret from state child welfare agencies, even though they were vulnerable to sex and labor traffickers, and one-third of unaccompanied minors disappeared after they were sent to live with “sponsors.”
- Up to $1.9 billion for a seven-year contract providing technology services to the IRS. The contract to Centennial Technologies was signed in August 2024, and no money was spent before it was cancelled, according to federal records. In the last 10 years, Centennial has been listed as receiving only $15 million in government contracts.
- Up to $1.7 billion to A1FedImpact LLC for tech work for the Defense Health Agency. Federal contracting records list the potential total as $2.4 billion.
- A $1 billion contract to Securigence LLC, another government IT company in the Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C., was cut in half. The contract was for “multi-network support services” for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
- A proposed $318 million contract to the Office of Personnel Management for “human resources related products and services” was cancelled before it was awarded.
The largest grants cancelled were:
- $2.6 billion from USAID to the Gavi Foundation for “the global community’s Immunization Agenda 2030, which was endorsed by the World Health Assembly in May 2020.” Nearly a billion dollars was spent before it was cancelled.
- A $1.5 billion contract from the Department of Health and Human Services to Texas was cut in half, with no details provided.
- Most of the money from a $1 billion USAID grant to the World Health Organization for “polio and immunization” was halted before it went out the door.
- Nearly half a billion was shaved off a $1.5 billion grant to Public Health Foundation Enterprises, Inc., operating as Heluna Health. Since 1998, the nonprofit had received a few million per year from the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, operating as a pass-through that sends the money to other groups performing public health research or interventions. In 2020, that jumped to half a billion, and nearly $3 billion in 2021.
In other ways, DOGE has fallen short of its hopes, sometimes after running into the buzz-saw of institutional Washington. Courts, appeals panels, unions, and government rules have all bogged down attempts to implement layoffs or access government data.
The “Fork in the Road” buyouts offered to federal employees to reduce salary expenses — modeled after the choice Musk offered to Twitter employees after acquiring the company, were underwhelming — with fewer employees accepting the offer than would typically retire or leave government on their own in a given year.
Thousands of employees who didn’t accept the buyout have since been targeted with “reduction in force” layoffs, but some have been ordered reinstated by courts, and are now on paid leave. Federal personnel rules, which the Office of Personnel Management has not moved to rewrite, give strong deference to employees with the longest tenure, and could wind up pushing low-paid junior employees out of the workforce, while keeping more highly compensated and deeply entrenched ones — sometimes doing junior work at senior salaries.
Related: A DOGE Origin Story: How Barack Obama Laid The Groundwork For Elon Musk
Katie Miller, a spokesperson for DOGE, declined to provide The Daily Wire with a list of DOGE’s top accomplishments or comment on whether it is on track.
Ultimately, savings will only reduce the deficit if Congress aggressively slashes annual funding to agencies or passes “recision” packages that claw back money that was previously appropriated.
DOGE earned the support of the American people, even though its cuts could be painful, because Musk made a compelling case that spending money we don’t have was irresponsible and would lead to a debt bomb where a significant portion of federal expenditures did nothing more than pay interest on past debt. But Republicans may weaken that justification, and imperil support for DOGE, by passing a budget that makes the deficit grow even faster, thanks to military spending increases and tax cuts that more than cancel out any spending savings.
So far, the Republican-led government has not returned spending to pre-pandemic levels, much less cut it below that baseline. Between 2015 and 2018, the government spent about $5 trillion a year, according to the Treasury Department. That jumped to $8 trillion in 2020 and 2021, and $7 trillion in 2024.
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Republican-led Senate’s plan for a 2025 budget would allow legislators to add $5.8 trillion to deficits over the next nine years, and require only 0.005% of projected spending through 2034 to be cut in order to pay down the deficit.
It said the Senate plan’s lack of spending reductions coupled with its tax breaks means that it would be worse for the deficit than major welfare programs and Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, and that the Senate plan would cut only a few billion from Democrat priorities like urban affairs, while adding hundreds of billions in deficit spending to Republican priorities like the military.
The Daily Wire has outlined remaining opportunities for savings, including:
