Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
DOGE-watchers in Washington and around the desolated turf of the federal bureaucracy have been eagerly waiting for Elon Musk’s announced ramp-down of his destructive activities for Donald Trump, at the request of business associates and shareholders who would like him to pay more attention to his companies. It should be clear by now that DOGE’s nihilistic mission will endure insofar as its agents are now deeply embedded in federal agencies being run by Trump appointees who largely share Musk’s hatred for the “deep state”; meanwhile the real ultimate leader of the demolition squad, OMB director Russell Vought, is still very much around and working full-time.
But the bigger question is exactly what DOGE will accomplish in the end. It’s been obvious for a while that federal spending has continued to rise despite DOGE’s much-discussed if outlandish goals. And as Jessica Riedl explains in The Atlantic, the numbers are looking worse every day. She estimates annual DOGE-generated spending cuts at about $15 billion, less than a tenth of Musk’s $165 billion claim and vastly short of his initial $2 trillion target. But the bigger picture looks even worse:
[M]ore reliable sources than DOGE’s self-reported figures exist. The best is the Treasury Department’s monthly accounting of spending by agency and program. Any true DOGE spending reductions should show up in these budget totals, as should the results of other White House initiatives, including cuts to public-health spending and the ongoing efforts to eliminate USAID and the Department of Education.
These spending data do not flatter the Musk project. Total federal outlays in February and March were $86 billion (or 7 percent) higher than the levels from the same months a year ago, when adjusted for timing shifts. This spending growth — approximately $500 billion at an annualized rate — continues to be driven by the three-quarters of federal spending allocated to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest costs. These massive expenses have been untouched by DOGE’s focus on small but controversial targets such as DEI contracts and Politico subscriptions.
Many of DOGE’s mostly symbolic “wins,” of course, may well be unraveled by adverse court decisions, and to the extent that personnel cuts are reversed, the whole exercise may cost more than it saves, even aside from the impact on government services and benefits. The underlying reality is that DOGE cuts will remain highly vulnerable to neutralization so long as they rely on dubious executive powers stolen from Congress. That means the only way to make them effective is by congressional ratification. Yet that seems increasingly unlikely.
For a while there was brave talk that OMB would send Congress a big batch of rescissions (i.e., cancellations of previously appropriated current-year spending) to legalize DOGE’s various efforts to gut programs. Now such talk has been whittled down to the possibility of a $9 billion rescission package that would just cover some of the administration’s most politically vulnerable and MAGA-hated targets like foreign aid and public broadcasting. And as the Washington Post recently reported, even that may not happen:
[A]dministration officials are running into resistance not just from Democrats, but also from congressional Republicans, who have in private conversations made clear that it would be difficult to codify even a small fraction of the measures that Musk’s team unilaterally implemented, according to lawmakers and several other people familiar with the discussions….
The impasse over DOGE reflects a looming challenge for the administration’s vision of a sprawling overhaul of federal agencies. With both the courts and Congress refusing to provide legal cover to spending cuts that Musk forced through, the administration is running out of options for ensuring that its unilateral reductions take effect — potentially limiting DOGE’s lasting impact despite the disruption it brought to the government.
Key House and Senate appropriators are warning that even a small rescission package could meet the same fate as a Trump rescission effort in 2018, which the Senate rejected within the 45-day window where such cuts must be approved.
So if the courts take apart DOGE’s actions and then Congress refuses to retroactively approve them, what’s left? Non-defense discretionary spending isn’t really part of the “one big, beautiful” budget-reconciliation bill Congress is working on; its focus is tax cuts and entitlement programs and long-term budget trends. There would be just one more opportunity to cut the programs that have been DOGE’s main target: in the regular appropriations bills for the fiscal year that begins in October once the stopgap spending measure passed by Congress in March expires. And indeed, the official Trump budget for FY 2026 (a “skinny” or bare-bones version of which Vought released last week) nudged Congress in the direction of deep cuts (roughly 23 percent of all non-defense discretionary spending). But totally aside from cold Republican feet on deep and unpopular budget cuts, passage of appropriations bills will require Democratic votes, at least in the Senate. And it’s unlikely the “cave” by Chuck Schumer on appropriations in March that got him into such hot water with the Democratic base will be repeated later this year, when the fear of letting DOGE run wild during a government shutdown should have abated a bit after the administration loses a few more court cases.
In other words, the idea that DOGE will have made any sort of permanent dent in federal spending is increasingly threadbare, in part because Musk & Co. weren’t focused on the big sources of spending; in part because its wildly illegal tactics won’t hold up in court; and in part because Congress can’t or won’t give DOGE cuts legal cover. What will be left is a legacy of brutal and essentially stupid raids on the federal government bereft of any real strategy or coherent policy goals, along with the sheer fear and chaos DOGE used to intimidate its enemies and titillate MAGA yahoos.
