How much has Elon Musk's Doge cut from US government spending? (April 2025)
www.bbc.com

... Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) - set up to cut US government spending - claims to have saved, on average, more than $10bn a week since President Trump entered office.

"We're talking about almost $200bn and rising fast," Trump told the BBC when talking about Mr Musk's cost-cutting drive on 23 April.

Doge's website says it is focusing on cancelling contracts, grants and leases put in place by previous administrations, as well as tackling fraud and reducing the government workforce.

BBC Verify has looked at the agency's biggest claimed savings, examining the figures and speaking to experts.

Our analysis found that behind some of the large numbers, there is a lack of evidence to back them up.
How does Doge report savings?

In October, Mr Musk pledged to cut "at least $2 trillion" from the federal government budget. He subsequently halved this target and on 10 April talked about making savings of $150bn from "cutting fraud and waste" by the end of the next financial year in 2026.

The US federal budget for the last financial year was $6.75tn.

Doge publishes a running total of its estimated savings on its website - which stood at $160bn the last time the site was updated on 20 April.

However, less than 40% of this figure is broken down into individual savings.

We downloaded the data from the Doge website on 23 April and added up the total claimed savings from contracts, grants and leases.

Our analysis found only about half of these itemised savings had a link to a document or other form of evidence.

US media has also highlighted some accounting errors, including Doge mistakenly claiming to have saved $8bn from cancelling an immigration contract which in fact had a total value of $8m. ...

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