What Did DOGE Accomplish?

Elon Musk once pledged that his Department of Government Efficiency would find $1 trillion in savings in the federal budget by Sept. 30, the date the government closes its books on the fiscal year.

That date has now come and gone, Mr. Musk has long since left Washington, and DOGE never came close to cutting as much money as he promised. But because its work has been obscured by crude accounting and White House maneuvers, it’s impossible to know how much DOGE and its allies actually did cut from the budget — or even what happened to that money.

Outside budget experts can’t nail down a number. Even congressional appropriators — the people who decide how federal funds should be spent in the first place — don’t know. And the public may never have a clear answer.

This conclusion is an undercurrent of the Democrats’ government shutdown fight: Congress and the public simply can’t follow what the Trump administration has done with federal spending. And now the fiscal year is over, with untold sums unaccounted for.

“The fact that Congress, who constitutionally has the power of the purse, can’t figure out what’s been going on is a deep, deep, deep constitutional issue,” said Zach Moller, director of the economic program at the center-left think tank Third Way.

Funding that Congress intended to be spent by Sept. 30 seemingly never was. Some of it may have expired at midnight that day, in direct opposition to Congress’s will. In the mystery over what happened to it — and how much money is at stake — Congress has been losing more of its power.

‘Where did that money go?’

Mr. Musk promised transparency in his sprint to slash the federal budget, but DOGE’s accounting of its cuts, which it estimates have totaled $214 billion in savings, was error-prone from the start. The New York Times and other news organizations reported that DOGE inflated the savings from many contracts it cut, counted others multiple times and discounted the expense (and lawsuits) from shutting down programs.

The group’s more lasting impact may be reducing the federal work force. The Trump administration has already laid off thousands of government employees and started another round of cuts Friday. But those numbers are in flux, too. Some layoffs remain tangled in court challenges, and other departed workers have been rehired. The Office of Personnel Management said it expected about 300,000 federal workers to leave their jobs by the end of the year, though it has not provided data on cost savings or hiring over the same time.

But with the fiscal year closed, a thornier problem remains: DOGE, established by an executive order, may have canceled contracts and fired workers, but it never had the authority to cut spending in the first place. Once Congress has appropriated money, only Congress can claw it back. Without that step, money meant for, say, collecting educational data must still be spent on collecting educational data even if DOGE has canceled particular contracts…

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Democrats have said they’re fighting during the shutdown to restore expiring Obamacare subsidies and reverse recent cuts to Medicaid. But the impasse is about this larger issue, too: They don’t want to vote for bipartisan spending bills if the Trump administration is simply — and secretly — going to choke off the parts it doesn’t like.

“This crisis is not happening in a vacuum,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democratic appropriator in the House, said of the shutdown in a statement. She blamed Mr. Vought and Mr. Trump for undermining the division of powers — Congress passes spending laws, and the president is supposed to carry them out.

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