Aaron Schwartz/CNP/ZUMA
Elon Musk appears to be flailing these days. Now, after trolling federal workers over the weekend, only to get undercut by the Trump administration, and then watching his bid to propel Germany’s far-right party to victory fall flat, a new report reveals that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) also appears to be struggling to fulfill its mission.
An analysis conducted by the Associated Press found that nearly 40 percent of the cuts allegedly enacted by DOGE are not expected to save the government any money.
The AP—which is suing three Trump administration officials over their blockage from the Oval Office and Air Force One over the AP’s refusal to use the term “Gulf of America” to refer to the Gulf of Mexico—analyzed data published on DOGE’s website, where it maintains a so-called “Wall of Receipts” that purport to show the alleged savings that come from contracts DOGE claims to have canceled. It found that over 790 of the more than 2,200 contract cancellations have not produced any savings; the AP attributes this to the fact that the government is legally required to spend the funds or may have already done so.
In other words, these 790 are all but certain to never produce savings.
The data undermines Trump officials’ near-constant refrain that the DOGE bros are cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” across government. Some of the canceled contracts were for agency subscriptions to media outlets and academic journals, which federal workers say they need to stay informed, the data shows; others were for software, training, research studies, and office furniture and cleanings, the AP reports.
While the DOGE webpage claims the cuts have produced an estimated $65 billion in savings, the cuts have instead unleashed chaos across the government, as my colleagues and I have covered. The upheaval includes mass firings and layoffs, the undermining of critical research, and the gutting of international humanitarian aid provided by the government.
The chaos has continued in recent days, as President Donald Trump, Musk, and federal officials have all sent mixed messaging after Musk seemingly directed the Office of Personnel Management to inform federal employees that they must send a list of five things they got done last week by Monday night or risk resignation if they failed to respond. Several agency heads—including newly-confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel—then reminded employees that Musk is not their boss and directed them not to respond to the email, prompting a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management to tell the press “[a]gencies will determine any next steps.” But that guidance again seemed to be discarded Monday, when Trump told reporters that employees who did not respond to the email would be “semi-fired” or “fired“; Musk later added even more confusion to the mix, writing on X: “Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”
At the White House Press Briefing on Monday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the mass email, saying more than one million workers—including herself—had responded. But she also reiterated the claim that agency heads would decide on employees’ futures, which runs counter to both Trump’s and Musk’s Monday comments.
Adding to the chaos on Tuesday was the reported resignations of more than 20 civil service employees from DOGE, who refused to “dismantle critical public services.”
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” 21 staffers wrote in a resignation letter obtained by the AP. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
In a post on X, Musk claimed, “These were Dem political holdovers who refused to return to the office. They would have been fired had they not resigned.” According to the AP, the staffers were formerly employed by the US Digital Service, which was created by former President Obama in 2014 to fix technical problems on Healthcare.gov.
Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Tuesday afternoon.
For all the drama that he is bringing, it’s worth noting that, according to the White House, Musk isn’t even DOGE’s official administrator. On Tuesday, a White House official told Mother Jones that Amy Gleason is the acting DOGE administrator.
Update, Feb. 25: This post was updated with information about the identity of the acting DOGE administrator.
