Forget the press releases and check the ledger. Treasury’s final Combined Statement for fiscal 2025 reports total outlays of $7,010 billion, an increase of $275 billion over fiscal 2024. That happened in the year DOGE was supposed to take an axe to Washington. The cuts were real somewhere else: people. Pew Research Center’s analysis of federal personnel data finds the civilian federal workforce shrank 10.3% in 2025, a net loss of nearly 238,000 workers. USAID fell from just under 4,900 staff to 370. So DOGE helped shrink the workforce, but total spending still went up. Here’s how both can be true, using the government’s own spreadsheets.
The promise vs. the ledger
At a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27, 2024, Elon Musk said he could cut the federal budget by “at least $2 trillion.” By Jan. 8, 2025, in an interview with Mark Penn broadcast on X, he called $2 trillion the “best-case outcome,” adding, “if we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting 1” (CNBC).
The ledger tells a different story. Treasury’s FY2025 Combined Statement shows outlays of $7.010 trillion, up about $275 billion. And the year that just ended went the same direction: Treasury’s final Monthly Treasury Statement for fiscal 2026 (through Sept. 30, 2026) reports outlays of about $7.396 trillion and a deficit of $1.992 trillion.
One fairness note: fiscal 2025 began Oct. 1, 2024, almost four months before DOGE existed. So FY2025 is not a clean test of DOGE alone. FY2026, the first full fiscal year after DOGE started, also shows spending rising.
Why the cuts didn’t dent the total
Most federal spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, and veterans’ benefits. You can see this in Treasury’s outlays by function. Canceling discretionary contracts and grants, which is where DOGE focused, barely moves a total that size. Even taken at face value, DOGE’s itemized contract, grant, and lease claims came to about $110 billion over 17 months, and GAO couldn’t verify much of that.
Where the cuts actually landed
Pew’s analysis of Office of Personnel Management data compares December 2024 with December 2025:
- Education Department: −42.6%
- USAID: −92.4% (4,895 to 370)
- Small Business Administration: −32.9%
- Housing and Urban Development: −28.8%
- Social Security Administration: −12.5%
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement: +36.1%, ending 2025 at 28,272
Some of the job losses fell on the people who answer the public: tax examiners (−4,309), internal revenue agents (−3,141), and “contact representatives,” who explain policies and handle benefits for the public (−6,629). Who answers the phone now?
Counting departures carefully
Pew counts 348,219 separations from the federal workforce in 2025 (quits, retirements, layoffs and other exits), against 116,912 new hires. Bloomberg separately reported about 317,000 departures after a year of DOGE and Trump-era cuts. The two counts use different methods and time windows, so don’t add or mix them.
The other side
Supporters argue that a smaller workforce lowers long-term costs, and that the payroll savings will build over time. OMB Director Russell Vought told a House Appropriations subcommittee on June 30, 2026 that Congress “passed many of the reductions that DOGE found just through the normal appropriations process” and in the rescissions package (Federal News Network). Those are real arguments. They still don’t change the top-line numbers in Treasury’s own reports.
Do it yourself
- Treasury’s Monthly Treasury Statement and the annual Combined Statement
- Agency profiles on USAspending.gov
- Pew’s workforce analysis and its downloadable data, built from OPM’s federal workforce data
Sources
- U.S. Treasury, FY2025 Combined Statement of Receipts, Outlays, and Balances
- U.S. Treasury, FY2025 outlays by function
- U.S. Treasury, Final Monthly Treasury Statement, FY2026 through Sept. 30, 2026
- Pew Research Center, “Federal workforce shrank 10% in Trump’s first year back in office” (Mar. 13, 2026)
- Bloomberg, federal workforce departures (Dec. 10, 2025, paywalled)
- CNBC, “Elon Musk says DOGE probably won’t find $2 trillion in federal budget cuts” (Jan. 9, 2025)
- GAO, GAO-26-108615 (Aug. 6, 2026)
