Story Highlights
- DOGE claims approximately $215 billion in savings through job cuts, contract cancellations, lease terminations, and grant rescissions, but independent analysts say the figure cannot be verified
- Current and former officials told CNN that DOGE cuts at cyber, counterintelligence, and State Department agencies have hampered U.S. preparedness during the Iran war
- FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen agents from the counterintelligence unit tasked with monitoring Iranian threats just days before U.S. military operations began in February
What Happened
President Donald Trump began his second term with a promise to cut “billions and billions of dollars” in government spending, empowering Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate programs and fire workers it deemed wasteful. One year later, cuts to programs and personnel at federal agencies have hampered the U.S. government’s abilities to prepare for domestic emergencies, monitor terror threats, guard against cyber-attacks, broadcast U.S. information into Iran, and quickly help U.S. citizens stranded abroad, according to current and former government officials.
DOGE’s toll on people’s lives is clear — what was actually saved in the process of upending them is not. Musk set a target of $2 trillion in savings. The DOGE website says it has saved about $215 billion through job cuts, contract and lease cancellations and asset sales, as well as grant rescissions. But independent experts and the Government Accountability Office have not been able to verify that figure.
Organizations that have examined elements of the DOGE operation, along with the Government Accountability Office, have not been able to pinpoint how much was saved or lost by the reform efforts. A budget analyst at the Cato Institute said there were basic mistakes on the DOGE pages tracking savings, leading him to believe the numbers were too high. Even terminating leases and contracts wasn’t as simple as it sounds. “In the end, we don’t know how much DOGE has saved,” the analyst said.
Just days before the U.S. began military operations against Iran, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen agents and staff members from a counterintelligence unit tasked with monitoring threats from Iran. The officials were removed because they were involved in the investigation into Trump’s alleged retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The dismissals hamstrung the Washington, D.C.-based FBI counterintelligence unit, known as CI-12, that tracks foreign spies operating on U.S. soil.
The DOGE cuts have also put a spotlight on domestic preparedness for potential retaliatory attacks from Iran or its proxies. Cuts to cyber personnel and resources at the Department of Homeland Security have meant less information-sharing with critical infrastructure firms on potential Iranian hacking threats than in similar situations in years past, according to current and former U.S. officials and industry executives. CNN
Why It Matters
The accountability question at the center of the DOGE story is fundamental: Americans deserve to know whether the pain inflicted by mass federal layoffs, abrupt contract cancellations, and the dismantling of agency programs has produced genuine fiscal savings — or whether the disruption was primarily ideological, generating headline numbers while quietly transferring costs, risks, and inefficiencies elsewhere.
Beyond just the loss of personnel, DOGE-led cuts at the State Department created a culture in which career staff are afraid to push back against political leadership for fear of retaliation. “When you have people who are only politically oriented and want to appear like they’re following the Trump administration, they’re less likely to speak up when there’s lack of preparation,” one former State official told CNN. That institutional chilling effect is a long-term governance cost that does not appear in any savings estimate. CNN
The firings of Inspectors General — the nonpartisan watchdogs responsible for detecting fraud, waste, and abuse within federal agencies — represent perhaps the most direct accountability failure of the entire DOGE project. The administration proposed cutting funding for Inspectors General by up to 30 percent in the president’s fiscal year 2026 budget request. Trump also removed the director of the Office of Government Ethics and the head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which safeguards federal employees from illegal personnel actions and enforces whistleblower protections. The agencies designed to hold the executive branch accountable are precisely the ones that have been most aggressively targeted. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
A Yale University Budget Lab report from March 2025 forecast that if 22,000 IRS employees left their roles, the agency would lose $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 as a result of fewer personnel available to conduct audits. Over a decade, that loss could snowball to nearly $198 billion in lost revenue. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that more than 17,000 IRS employees left the agency last year. That dynamic — cutting revenue-collecting capacity to claim savings — illustrates how DOGE’s accounting framework can show large savings while simultaneously creating large hidden losses for taxpayers.
Economic and Global Context
DOGE’s 10 months of operation under centralized leadership eliminated the roles of more than 300,000 federal employees and claimed to have canceled 13,440 contracts. A DOGE staffer acknowledged in a court deposition that the operation was unable to lower the federal deficit, the stated rationale for the entire enterprise.
The IRS cuts deserve particular economic scrutiny. An IRS employee told Fortune the mass layoffs have decreased the efficiency of employees, increasing call times and slowing down the processing of paperwork. “When we look back historically, we’re going to see that the gutting of the bureaucracy that keeps the government running will be the trigger that collapses America,” the employee said. That assessment may be hyperbolic, but the revenue loss from reduced audit capacity is a documented and growing problem.
CREW’s review of programs targeted for cuts by DOGE found that the elimination or reduction of government agencies have directly cost over 50,000 people their jobs, could result in a loss of over $10 billion in U.S.-based economic activity, and shut down programs that had put over $26 billion in funds directly back into the pockets of taxpayers. Those figures cover only a fraction of the full DOGE scope but illustrate the self-defeating economics of poorly targeted cuts.
The national security costs identified during the Iran war have prompted bipartisan concern on Capitol Hill. A former FBI special agent and federal prosecutor told CNN that lawmakers should look at whether there are “any negative implications from what was done through that process and if it’s having any negative impact on any aspect of our government, including our national security and national defense.”
Implications
As the 2026 midterms approach, the DOGE legacy is becoming a political liability in ways the administration did not anticipate. The promised $2 trillion in savings never materialized. The claimed $215 billion cannot be independently verified. And the visible costs — fired workers, closed offices, weakened intelligence units, and reduced audit capacity — are concrete and attributable in ways that resonate with both liberal and conservative voters who depend on functioning government services.
For Congress, the DOGE episode has exposed critical gaps in legislative oversight of executive branch restructuring. The administration directed agencies not to cooperate with the Government Accountability Office and hid legally required budget data used for oversight of spending compliance. Whistleblowers who attempted to speak out faced a culture of retaliation, and an informal policy allegedly emerged within at least one Inspector General’s office not to contradict or criticize DOGE.
For future administrations, the DOGE experiment will stand as a cautionary case study in the limits of rapid, top-down government restructuring. Cutting federal capacity in domains ranging from counterintelligence to tax enforcement does not simply save money — it transfers costs to other parts of the system, creates vulnerabilities that adversaries can exploit, and erodes institutional knowledge that takes years to rebuild.
For ordinary Americans, the most immediate implication is uncertainty about the quality and reliability of government services they depend on — from tax processing and Social Security administration to food safety inspection and emergency management — in an era when the institutions responsible for those services have been deliberately and rapidly diminished.
Sources
“How the DOGE government spending cuts are hampering the US government amid war with Iran”
