In just a month of cost-cutting, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) saved the federal government $55 billion.
Or $24 billion.
Or $16 billion.
Or, barely over a billion dollars.
A spate of trackers keeping an eye on DOGE’s contract terminations has sprung up—including on DOGE’s own website—and no one can say, for sure, just how much Musk’s merry band of cost-cutting coders is accomplishing.
The agency claims to have saved $55 billion.
Only Polymarket, the political futures website, seconds DOGE’s $55 billion claim, sourcing information from DOGE’s own X account and news coverage featuring DOGE statements, rather than official government data.
An independent DOGE enthusiast also started his own site, DOGECount.com, which doesn’t parse information by government agency but rather “DOGE Wins” like cuts to diversity programs and foreign aid, and came up with a $24 billion approximation.
DOGE itself launched a site highlighting the numerous contracts it had cut.
DOGE’s site, which doesn’t have a running total, just line items for costs, amounts to approximately $16 billion, according to one estimate.
Adding up the line items amounts to $14 billion, the Daily Dot found.
But even that number might be wildly overstated.
G2X, a consultancy firm that helps companies win federal contracts, released its own tracker, based on data from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) and USASpending.
The tracker shows contracts that have been officially canceled across various government agencies and departments including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies Musk set his sites on.
Although it cautions it is not completely up to date, it estimates $1.5 billion in contracts have been cut in DOGE’s attempt to eliminate government waste.
On G2X, some of the savings claims made on DOGE’s website and X account can be compared against individual contracts that have been officially nixed.
DOGE has boasted about its efforts to strip USAID contracts, which saved the government $375 million on DEI-related spending alone.
However, on G2X’s tracker, only four contracts relating to diversity have been officially terminated since Trump took office, adding up to approximately $47 million.
Similar discrepancies abound in the data.
An ICE contract that DOGE claimed was worth $8 billion dollars turned out to be only worth $8 million.
G2X found a total of 403 contracts canceled under DOGE, which amounts to approximately $1.5 billion in savings.
DOGE’s site, though, lists over 1,300 entries, though not all are individual contracts, which total somewhere between $14-16 billion.
While it has over 250 entries for USAID, G2X found 11.
But despite all this, Musk is using the massive numbers to push for a DOGE Dividend, money given back to the people that he’s helped save.
A proposal went viral that said DOGE should take 20% of the $2 trillion in government spending, or $400 billion, that it promised to find and give $5,000 to every U.S. taxpayer.
“Will check with the President,” Musk wrote.
But given the current actual savings, even by DOGE’s wild estimates, fall well short, Americans shouldn’t be expecting that money soon.
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