As the levers of government were handed off to the guy who paid for Trump’s campaign and his adorable muskrats, Big Balls and all. the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, did the very best it could to achieve its ambitious goals. Now that it no longer exists and nobody talks about it, except perhaps the former federal employees with glowing performance reviews who were fired by terse emails written by twelve-year-olds who almost made it through their sophomore year of college, how did it do?

As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transitioned from internet meme to real-life government reform effort, the agency claimed it would achieve many far-reaching, seemingly improbable goals.

It was going to slash $2 trillion in federal spending, eliminate burdensome and unconstitutional regulations, upgrade the federal government’s “tech stack,” evict the woke deep state, and, time permitting, balance the budget.

When it launched, both DOGE supporters and critics seemed to believe the agency was striving for the wholesale dismantling of the federal government. As the dust settles one year later, we can get a more accurate sense of how much DOGE has done to shrink and streamline the federal government.

Before getting into the nitty gritty of Christian Britschgi’s post, there are some preliminary framing issues that need to be considered by presenting DOGE’s goals in a far more concrete and organized manner than reality suggested. Sure, Musk claimed he was going to slash $2 trillion in spending, but it was an empty claim to be achieved by arbitrarily cutting the workforce, which would never have accomplished anywhere near that amount and, even if he had fired the entire federal workforce, would only achieve savings if the value of the work performed was $2 trillion less than the cost of paying employees. This was never the case.

Then there was the elimination of DEI in government. Remember when they deleted the Department of Defense web page for the Enola Gay because it had the word “gay” in there? The DOGE geniuses did a cut and paste on the government with a list of “woke” words. Like the rest of their work, it was mindless, arbitrary and capricious, reflecting a cadre of kiddies without a clue about how government works or what purposes were legitimately served.

But as for the reduction of the federal workforce, Christian contends that it is the one area where DOGE actually made a dent.

DOGE’s biggest success on its own terms has been its reduction in federal employees.

When the second Trump administration came into office in January 2024, there were some 2.4 million civilian federal employees. That’s about 1.5 percent of all employed civilian workers.

Without context, the idea that 1.5% of the civilian workforce took home federal government paychecks seems quite astounding. That’s a lot of people. So what did DOGE do about it?

The Partnership for Public Service estimates that as of late September 2025, 201,000 people had left federal employment during the second Trump administration through deferred resignations, early retirements, reductions in force, and the layoffs of probationary employees. This measure isn’t a complete snapshot of the fall in federal employment, as it does not include new hires—like all those extra Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents—or people retiring on schedule.

The Trump administration estimated that number would reach 300,000 by the end of 2025. If that larger figure stands, the Trump administration will have managed to cut the federal workforce by some 12 percent.

If the only consideration was sheer numbers, perhaps a 12% reduction would seem like a modest accomplishment. Sure, it was far less than claimed, but any reduction was still a reduction. Except it is meaningless in the absence of context. They fired IRS workers, who bring in far more by the performance of their jobs than they cost. Nobody sat down and put serious thought into which jobs were being eliminated from which agencies and departments.

Nobody considered whether they were firing the hard-working people or the slackers. Nobody thought about the institutional memory, that by firing the people who knew how things worked, they would force others to reinvent the wheel and squander the salaries being paid for effort that should never have been needed. Slashing might work if the sole consideration was reducing numbers, but it’s a mindlessly foolish way to run a government.

A similarly acontextual consideration is proffered as to “deregulation.”

Early in his term, the president instructed agencies to impose total regulatory costs that were “significantly less than zero” and to eliminate 10 rules for every one rule adopted. According to a parsing of the latest Unified Agenda by the Economic Policy
Innovation Center, the administration is closer to a 5–1 ratio of deregulatory actions to regulatory actions.

It has taken 778 active deregulatory actions, compared to 161 active regulatory actions. Significant deregulatory actions (those with an estimated economic effect of $100 million or more) number 71, compared to 31 significant regulatory actions. That’s less than the Trump administration’s goal, but significantly more deregulation than the Biden administration managed, since it added $1.8 trillion in new regulatory costs.

But which regulations were cut and why? Were they regulations we want and need, or just the woke regs lingering from the Biden administration? Again, numbers without context mean little.

And then there were cost savings by cutting federal spending, itself of dubious constitutional propriety since spending is a Congressional power and the executive doesn’t get to cut appropriations for the hell of it.

The agency’s website says that it has saved taxpayers $214 billion by canceling contracts, grants, and leases. Unfortunately, DOGE’s “wall of receipts” tallying these savings is riddled with errors and accounting gimmicks.

For instance, the agency will count as a savings the entire value of a contract it canceled, even if much of the obligated money has already been spent.

Another DOGE savings gimmick is to lower the maximum amount the government could potentially spend on a contract, even though those funds had not been spent and likely never would have been spent. This practice,
it’s been pointed out, is comparable to taking out a credit card with a $20,000 limit, canceling the card, and then claiming you’ve saved $20,000.

There were two issues, the claim of fictitious savings and the cutting of programs and grants that should never have been cut. Cancer research? Even if money isn’t spent, is it a savings if the cost is not performing research for the purpose of curing cancer?

There was and remains much that could have, and should have, been done to reduce the size of the federal workforce, to eliminate regulations that were no longer needed or served an agenda that conflicted with current goals, to cut research into how many transgender folk it takes to change a light bulb. There are slackers working in government, and public servants who served the people.

The problem is DOGE failed to accomplish any of this, not because it couldn’t but because it was a mindless bulldozer driven by idiot children through the center of government. Capriciously running numbers is the means by which DOGE operated, and it’s a poor means by which to parse it’s “accomplishments.” DOGE was worse than a massive failure in that it didn’t achieve any of its “goals,” but did grave damage to the functioning of government in the process. Don’t believe me? Try calling social security.