- Elon Musk appeared to dramatically lower DOGE’s savings goal, projecting $150 billion for the year—far short of his earlier trillion-dollar figure. However, questions remain about the savings claimed by the team, with critics pointing to inflated numbers, retracted claims, and a growing list of controversial cuts.
Elon Musk has said DOGE is drastically scaling back its savings aims. In a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Musk told Trump the group expected to slash $150 billion from the federal budget over the fiscal year, which runs from the beginning of October 2025 to the end of September 2026.
“I’m excited to announce that we anticipate savings in ’26 from reduction of waste and fraud by $150 billion,” Musk told Trump in the meeting. The world’s richest man said these cuts “will actually result in better services for the American people.”
Musk, who has emerged as the public face of the DOGE team, had previously projected savings as high as $1 trillion. Earlier, during campaign trail appearances, Musk floated an eye-popping $2 trillion figure.
According to DOGE’s website, which tracks canceled contracts, grants, and leases and publicly displays a sample, the team has already saved an estimated $150 billion. It’s unclear if Musk meant to say the $150 billion was the final goal or just what the team had already found.
The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. However, an official told the New York Times the $1 trillion figure was still “the goal.”
Trump praised the team’s efforts during the cabinet meeting, telling Musk, “Your people are fantastic. In fact, hopefully, they will stay around for the long haul.”
Musk’s role at the White House is due to come to an end in May. He’s classed as a special government employee and is nearing the end of his 130-day period in the federal government. The White House has said Musk intends to leave when his time runs out.
DOGE’s website has been full of errors
DOGE’s website has been plagued with errors and miscalculations, making it hard to know if the team’s top-line figure of $150 billion can be trusted.
According to DOGE’s website, the savings are a combination of “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud, and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”
However, the team has deleted several contracts from its “wall of receipts” after reports undermined some of their claims. In one case, DOGE had to revise its largest contract down from $8 billion to $8 million after the contract’s vendor explained that the $8 billion listed on its procurement record was likely a clerical error.
One of the largest savings highlighted on the DOGE wall of receipts is a $1.9 billion figure, attributed to the cancellation of a Treasury Department contract with Centennial Technologies. However, the company previously told the New York Times that the deal had already been scrapped during the Biden administration—long before DOGE existed. After media coverage, the savings claim was briefly taken down, according to ABC, but has since reappeared. (Centennial Technologies did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.)
In addition, DOGE staff quietly removed more than 1,000 contract cancellations from its records last month, wiping out about $4 billion in previously reported savings.
Musk has claimed DOGE’s efforts are “maximally transparent,” but the team published only around a third of the cuts they’ve made, making a more thorough analysis more difficult.
Some of DOGE’s cuts and agency closures have been controversial, such as the shutdown of USAID and proposed changes to Social Security. Experts have warned that DOGE’s plans for the Social Security administration are essentially a “backdoor” way to cut payments.
