Elon Musk’s DOGE has promised big savings for the federal budget but a new analysis finds that spending is actually up this year versus recent years.

The non-profit news organization NOTUS looked at daily Treasury statements to find that since President Trump returned to the White House the federal government has spent $171 billion more than in the same period for the two prior years.

Once promising $2 trillion in savings, Elon Musk is now saying the savings this year will be around $150 billion. Adding up the potential costs of the disruptions caused by DOGE, those savings could more than disappear.

“Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, Max Stier, told the New York Times. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”

Another report claims between lost tax income and the cost of paying severance to employees that are being laid off, DOGE could cost substantially more than the money the agency says it has already saved, INC reported.

One issue is that many employees who are being targeted for cuts can’t be fired yet because of a court fight. Thousands of employees are still getting paid and benefits while they remain on administrative leave.

Another concern is the potential for lost revenue due to cuts at the Internal Revenue Service. The Washington Post claims that up to $500 billion in lost federal revenue could come from people who won’t feel inclined to file with a reduced threat of audits.

The Budget Lab at Yale University claims the lost revenue is even higher. It says it could be more than $562 billion over the next decade.

Another problem is that the areas that the cuts are targeting are such a small part of the federal budget. Social Security, debt payments, and defense spending dwarf the spending of the rest of the budget.

“The government is too big; the cuts that DOGE has done are too small,” vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute Alex Nowrasteh told NOTUS. “We’re going to see some small changes here and there, the shuttering of a few small agencies here and there, like we already have, but in terms of showing up on the federal budget line, on their baseline, it’s a rounding error.”
The Cato Institute says any meaningful cuts to government spending will have to come from Congress since it controls the budget. It says that DOGE has brought attention to mismanaged federal spending but lawmakers are the ones that need to follow through or it will be a wasted opportunity to bring meaningful change to government spending.