Elon Musk’s much-hyped chainsaw failed to make the desired impact.

Despite the Trump administration’s attempts to cut government spending via the Department of Government Efficiency, federal expenditures rose during the fiscal year 2025.

According to a fresh investigative report from the New York Times, many contracts that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by tech mogul Musk, claimed to have cut were either nearing their natural conclusion or were not projected to use their full budget allocations.

The report’s revelations were striking: All of the top 13 contract cancellations listed in DOGE’s database were mischaracterized, as reported by the Times. Among the top 40 cancellations, 28 were found to be inaccurately reported.

Of the top 40 contracts and grants identified as canceled, 28 were determined to be incorrect by the analysis.

An example highlighted was a $500 million Department of Energy contract, which was mistakenly counted as canceled twice.

Other cancellations were already in the works during the final weeks of the Biden administration, and others still simply expired but were still counted by DOGE as a win.

Perhaps most telling: 80 percent of the cancellations touted on DOGE’s public dashboard claimed savings of $1 million or less—a rounding error in the federal budget.

The bottom line? Overall government spending rose from roughly $6.95 trillion in fiscal 2024 to approximately $7.01 trillion in fiscal 2025, despite DOGE canceling more contracts than were cut during the final year of the Biden administration.

Elon Musk holds a chainsaw reading ‘Long live freedom, damn it’ during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 20, 2025.

A worker removes the U.S. Agency for International Development sign on their headquarters on February 07, 2025 in Washington, DC 

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2025, Musk appeared on stage with a chainsaw that had been handed to him by Argentine President Javier Milei, who uses the chainsaw as a symbol of cutting government bloat. 

Musk waved it around, called it “the chainsaw for bureaucracy,”

Other cost-cutting attempts from DOGE faced legal challenges, and were reversed.

Over 1,000 I.M.L.S. grants to local museums, libraries, and history centers were axed by DOGE, but reinstated after a court ruling. Those ‘cancelled’ grants are still being touted as saving $134 million in total. The reinstatement order came on December 3rd, nearly two months after DOGE’s wall of wins was last updated.

One cut that remained, however, was the elimination of the entire U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID.) The $21.7 billion spent by USAID in fiscal year 2024 amounted to just 0.3 percent of federal spending. 

The most expensive government programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, as well as interest payments on the national debt, remained untouched. 

Lease cancellations were another element of cost savings touted by DOGE, yet an analysis from the CoStar Group, a commercial real estate company, found that the Trump administration was set to fall well below the target for leased office space it had set to cut down.

250 cancellations amounted to $112 million in annual cost savings, a significant decrease from the $730 million in cost savings once touted by an employee at the Government Services Administration (GSA). 

A current Trump administration official did not directly respond to the report’s findings when challenged, instead stating to the Times that ‘President Trump pledged to cut the waste, fraud, and abuse in our bloated government.’

Yet, former DOGE head Elon Musk, who has now returned to the private sector after his short stint as a special government employee, said in a recent interview that he views his time in DC as ‘a little bit successful.’

‘We were somewhat successful. I mean, we stopped a lot of funding that really just made no sense. That was just entirely wasteful,’ Musk told his interviewer Katie Miller, wife of Trump White House official Stephen Miller, and a former DOGE leader herself.

 Musk also admitted to Miller that he doesn’t think that he would ‘do DOGE’ again.

‘I think instead of doing Doge, I would have basically worked on my companies, essentially,’ Musk told Miller.

Musk announced in late May that he was leaving his position within the US government after leading DOGE in a controversial effort that aimed to slash federal spending. 

‘As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President Donald Trump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,’ he wrote on his social media platform X at the time.