Unfinished Business: The budget cuts Musk couldn’t complete and what’s next for DOGE

Though Elon Musk leaves behind a legacy of massive cuts to government programs which left many members of the Washington, D.C., establishment enraged, he was not able to accomplish all the lofty goals he set at the beginning of his time as head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

According to a May 26 update on DOGE’s website, the initiative has saved an estimated $175 billion through asset sales, contract cancellations, fraud payment crackdowns and other spending cuts. That translates to about $1,087 in savings per taxpayer.

Though significant, the $175 billion is a far cry from the original $2 trillion–nearly a third of the federal government’s total spending–that Musk originally set out to cut.

So, what went wrong?

Richard Stern, an economics policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital that DOGE “overestimated what legal flexibility they would have, and the agencies would have, to actually make good on that.”

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Though Elon Musk leaves behind a legacy of massive cuts to government programs which left many members of the Washington, D.C., enraged, he was not able to accomplish all the lofty goals he set out to at the beginning of his time as head of the Department of Government Efficiency.  (AP/Evan Vucci and AP Photo/Etienne Laurent, File)

From the start, DOGE was hit with not only a tsunami of negative press and outraged Democratic lawmakers, but also a series of lawsuits, which bogged it down in protracted legal battles.

This, coupled with the reality of most of the major end cuts requiring congressional approval to carry out, relegated DOGE’s impact on cutting around the edges of the big programs and agencies it likely would have liked to eliminate entirely.

Despite Musk’s efforts, in many cases agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could only be shrunk and limited, while total elimination requires an act of Congress.

Just last week, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell blocked the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Institute of Peace, writing in a ruling that the removal of its board members and the takeover of its headquarters by members of DOGE are actions that are “null and void.” 

Stern asserted that “at the end of the day, they were just a little overzealous about how much legal authority they would ultimately have to be able to make this many cuts themselves,” 

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A federal judge has blocked DOGE efforts to dismantle the US Institute of Peace (USIP), whose building is shown in this March 2025 file photo. (Getty Images)

Where Stern believes DOGE can have the greatest impact is on focusing on the information-gathering and whistleblower aspects of its mission.

“You can kind of break down DOGE into two very large buckets,” he posited. “The first large bucket, which is the one that’s mostly been not done, is actually making grand spending cuts themselves directly. I think the second one was identifying what cuts could be made.”

“The original plan was that DOGE could come in and do both these things that they could find specific spending to cut … and then the other part of that was identifying this information and making it public that people didn’t have that would allow for really thought-out spending cuts to come in from Congress,” he explained.

Though less flashy, Stern believes this is where DOGE, going forward, can have its greatest impact.  

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Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, on Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025. The Conservative Political Action Conference, launched in 1974, brings together conservative organizations, elected leaders, and activists. Photographer: Jason C. Andrew/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Getty)

“There’s a lot of think tanks, including Heritage, that have put together lists for a very long time as to policies that we don’t think are good, where you could cut spending. But I think what no one has a window into is the really deep mechanics of how a lot of these programs work. And so, because of that, it’s actually been very hard in a really robust fashion to even know what programs you could cut spending from or how you would do it or what the ramifications would be,” he explained.

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“So, DOGE, by being in the administration, has been in and continues to be in a position to actually make that public, to actually put a spotlight on that in a way that really almost nobody else was in a position to do,” Stern went on. “That can feed rescission bills and congressional cuts down the road. But some admin needed to actually do that. And DOGE is finally doing that.” 

Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this report.