Elon Musk is planning to return soon to his multibillion-dollar companies, mostly wrapping up his work at the Department of Government Efficiency and effectively recoiling from runaway American government spending that even the world’s richest man can’t seem to rein in. 

DOGE’s efforts have so far uncovered thousands of illustrations of a bloated bureaucracy — pet projects, wasteful contracts, duplications of effort, and downright antediluvian systems. But savings from waste, fraud, and abuse have totaled only about $170 billion so far, or 8.5 percent of the $2 trillion in savings promised at the beginning of Mr. Musk’s grand experiment. 

Despite legal challenges at nearly every step of the process, the Trump administration has unilaterally implemented some of those savings through the sale of assets, workforce reductions, cost-saving programmatic and regulatory changes, and cancellation of grants, contracts, and leases.  

Additional and permanent reductions, however, require congressional action, an increasingly difficult task as President Trump pushes his various pet issues and Congress embraces the growing national debt with little apparent alarm.

The president argues that the spending bill now awaiting debate in the Senate will reduce the need for additional cuts because the extension of his first-term tax cuts will increase economic growth. Congressional forecasters disagree. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill will add $5 trillion to the deficit over the next decade — a figure that would raise annual interest payments to $1 trillion annually, pushing meaningful savings even further from the goalpost at which DOGE was aiming. 

The economy would need to grow 6.2 percent annually to cover the amount of the deficit estimated in the reconciliation bill, the budget office says, a figure that most independent analysts consider patently absurd. Federal forecasters predict the economy will grow 1.4 percent in 2025. 

Republicans caught between living up to their parsimonious campaign promises and not leaving middle America empty-handed call the president’s reconciliation bill immoral. Senator Johnson — the Wisconsin Republican — notes that the tax and spending bill adds $1 trillion in “mandatory” spending, for instance border patrol and defense spending, that is not really mandatory in the way entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are.

“The first goal of this Republican budget reconciliation should be don’t add to the deficit,” Mr. Johnson told the “All-In” podcast over the weekend. Mr. Trump is “not focused on reducing spending. This is our one opportunity and right now we’re blowing it.” 

Mr. Johnson and Senator Paul noted that Congress can’t cut spending via DOGE without the president sending a formal “rescission” bill.  “That’s the law. It only takes a simple majority to pass — but so far, no bill has been sent,” Mr. Paul posted on X on Sunday night. 

The rescission bill that Mr. Paul wants, however, would result in only about $9 billion of additional DOGE savings — a drop in the bucket, he acknowledges, but a sum that even congressional Republicans don’t appear to have the wherewithal to address. “$9B is a rounding error, but it’s something. Caving to big-spending Republicans is business as usual for GOP leadership,” he wrote. 

Administration officials promise that legislation to enact DOGE reductions will come after the additional spending in the reconciliation bill is approved by Congress.

“We need to get the costs under control; we need to get government efficiency under control; and we need to make the government work better for the American people,” Secretary Bessent posted on Sunday. “We did not get into this fiscal mess overnight. … We are not going to fix it overnight.” 

At the very least, DOGE, run by a crew of Mr. Musk’s employees, tech entrepreneurs, data engineers, and Trump 45 alumni, has laid out the template for where to strike the iron to achieve big reductions promised by the ambitious efficiency project. 

The official website itemizes the savings from each of the canceled programs and lists savings achieved in every department, rated most to least. The DOGE Tracker, which interprets the department’s data for oddsmakers and cryptocurrency traders, notes that more than 23,000 initiatives have been addressed since the project began. 

After four months of DOGE exercises, Mr. Musk conceded last week that improved productivity may be the only way out of debt.

“I have come to the perhaps obvious conclusion that accelerating GDP growth is essential. @DOGE has and will do great work to postpone the day of bankruptcy of America, but the profligacy of government means that only radical improvements in productivity can save our country,” he wrote on X.