At the start of Donald Trump's second term, Elon Musk vowed to take an Argentina-sized chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy and cut $2 trillion in government spending.
That number didn't hold. The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, quickly halved its target to $1 trillion — then scaled back even further to $150 billion.
Now that the 2025 fiscal year is over, the results are in. DOGE didn't move the needle.
The U.S. government spent $6.6 trillion between October 2024 and August 2025, according to available Treasury Department data. That's $376 billion more than the previous fiscal year — a 6% increase. The cycle of growing government spending? Still unbroken.
DOGE claimed $214 billion in savings through federal workforce cuts and canceled office leases. But those figures are unverified — and, as NPR reported, include inaccurate and overstated numbers.
Federal spending has risen gradually almost every year, across both defense and non-defense programs. The pandemic made things worse, triggering a $6 trillion spending surge under both Trump and Biden.
A big reason cuts are so hard to make: most of the budget runs on autopilot. Over a third goes straight to Social Security and Medicare — programs that keep getting more expensive as the population ages and healthcare costs rise. Only about a quarter of the federal budget actually goes through Congress for annual debate.
The federal deficit for 2025 came in at $1.8 trillion, per the Congressional Budget Office — flat from the prior year and slightly above 2023. The drivers are the same as always: mandatory entitlement spending, a growing national debt, and annual discretionary spending that Congress fights over every year.