A detailed new analysis finds that the federal government is spending more money than it did before Elon Musk’s “eliminating waste" DOGE program came to town, and that most of the supposed cost savings were simply just math errors.

Back when President Trump and Elon Musk were still best buds and hadn't had their little fallout yet, you’ll recall Musk was put in charge of something called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The name was a play on one of Musk’s favorite memecoin jokes, but the effort claimed that it would "reduce fraud" and “eliminate waste” in government.

We have some new receipts on the effectiveness of the DOGE program. The Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield just unearthed something on the Social Security Administration’s new DOGE-mandated three-day wait to process on retirement claims, intended to eliminate fraud.

“The three day hold for telephone retirement claims has reduced field offices' ability to process these claims timely by 25 percent. The result is fewer retirement claims processed overall, at a time when our agency is seeing record high new retirement claims,” a Social Security deputy commissioner wrote in the above unearthed document. “The three day hold for telephone claims has produced no appreciable results in terms of actual fraud.”

Additionally, the New York Times has a tour de force today proving how DOGE did not eliminate any waste and saw the federal government actually spend more money. We’ll go into some details, but your main takeaway here should be that the graph below depicts real savings in bluish-gray, and those savings that appear in orange were all just made-up horseshit.  

“The group did not do what Mr Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October,” the Times writes. “ On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up. How is that possible?”

Well gang, the main way that is possible is that DOGE simply published flat-out lies on their DOGE “Wall of Receipts.” “In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect,” the Times reports. They point out that DOGE listed two “canceled” $8 billion Department of Defense contracts, though both contracts are still very much alive and currently being paid.

“Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined,” the Times points out. “Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate.”

The Times found many other examples of double-counting eliminated costs, counting Biden-era cuts as if they had happened under Trump, and complete falsehoods presented as budget cuts that had actually happened, but never really did.

In fairness, the DOGE “Wall of Receipts” has removed some of the supposed cost-cuts that the press proved were complete bullshit. But given Musk’s personal financial interests in deregulation, you have to wonder whether the goal of DOGE was to actually increase government efficiency, or whether there were other goals in mind, as seen above.

Related: Wingnuts Impersonating DOGE Officials Enter SF City Hall, Demand to 'See Files' [SFist]

Image: WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 30: Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump to reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Musk, who served as an adviser to Trump and led the Department of Government Efficiency, announced he would leave his role in the Trump administration to refocus on his businesses. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)