Elon Musk and DOGE promised up to $2 trillion in government savings. How much have they actually saved so far?

As the head of President Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Tesla CEO Elon Musk has vowed to cut between $1 trillion and $2 trillion from the annual federal budget by 2026.

“I think we can do at least $2 trillion,” Musk said at a Trump rally last October. “Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that.”

Musk later revised that number down — but not by much.

“We’ll aim for $2 trillion, which I believe is the best-case scenario,” Musk said in a January interview on X, the social media site he owns. “But you need to allow for some margin. If we target $2 trillion, I think there’s a strong chance we can achieve $1 trillion in spending cuts."

In pursuit of that ambitious goal, Musk and his team have spent their first weeks on the job waging war on the federal bureaucracy: canceling contracts, terminating leases, firing civil servants, blocking payments and dismantling America’s top foreign aid agency.

At the same time, both Trump and Musk have expressed their support for sending $5,000 refund checks to taxpayers as a “DOGE dividend.”

“There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the [$2 trillion] DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% goes to paying down debt,” Trump said in Miami on Wednesday.

“I love it,” the president said that night, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One.

So how much money have Musk and DOGE actually “saved” so far — and are they on track to hit their targets? Yahoo News is updating this story when DOGE releases new information; here are the latest numbers.

DOGE claims $65 billion in savings — but its own ‘wall of receipts’ shows just $9.6 billion

On Feb. 24, DOGE posted its second self-audit online in the form of a ‘wall of receipts.’ At the top of the page, the organization claimed $65 billion in savings (up from $55 billion a week earlier).

“DOGE's total estimated savings are $65 billion,” the site declared, “which is a combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.”

But the actual data didn’t compute.

For one thing, only $9.6 billion in savings were listed on the page — not $65 billion.

For another, a series of mistakes have consistently reduced the amount DOGE claimed to be saving — so it's unclear why the group's top-line number has continued to rise.

On Feb. 18, the New York Times discovered that DOGE’s single-biggest line-item — a contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — was erroneously listed at $8 billion.

Its real value? $8 million, with an m.

On Feb. 19, CBS News reported that DOGE was purporting to save $2 billion by canceling a trio of USAID deals worth $655 million each — but actually, Musk's team was just counting the same $655 million contract three times.

Finally, on Feb. 20, the Intercept found that while DOGE was claiming to have a canceled huge, $232 million information technology contract at the Social Security Administration, they had really only nixed a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project that let users mark their gender as “X.”

"Nobody's going to bat a thousand," Musk previously said during a Feb. 11 appearance with Trump in the Oval Office. "We will make mistakes. But we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes."

By Feb. 24, Musk & Co. had done just that, and all five of these "receipts" — which initially totaled more than $10.2 billion — were adjusted to reflect their true value (about $663 million) in DOGE's second self-audit.

At the same time, DOGE added another $2.4 billion in itemized cuts to its wall of receipts, increasing the total from $7.2 billion to $9.6 billion.

Still, that $9.6 billion in itemized receipts is a lot less than the $65 billion in "total estimated savings" that DOGE claimed at the top of their page. DOGE has yet to provide documentation to explain the discrepancy.

And the real number could be much lower

Even as DOGE more than doubled the number of items on its wall of receipts since Feb. 17 (from 1,127 to 2,299), a full 34% reported zero savings.

And many of the "newly added receipts also contain apparent errors and instances of double, triple and even quadruple counting," according to CBS News.

For example, four companies provided DEI training and assessment services under a single $25 million contract with the Department of Agriculture — but DOGE mistakenly listed four separate $25 million contracts totaling $100 million.

Previously, National Public Radio found that since the aforementioned $8 million ICE contract began in 2022, the agency had already used it three times for work totaling $3.5 million. So canceling the contract now could only save the remaining money (i.e., the $4.5 million that hadn't been spent yet).

In addition, “just over half of the contracts touted by DOGE, accounting for $6.5 billion in alleged savings, haven't actually been terminated or closed out” as of Feb. 19, according to NPR’s analysis of a federal government procurement database.

All in all, NPR found the “estimated savings from the initial DOGE list of just over 500 contracts” that have actually been canceled “runs closer to $2 billion” — with “ending research studies into early childhood education improvements, canceling access to financial market resources and the proposed halting of billions in international foreign aid work” among those cuts.

From a few billion to … $2 trillion?

It’s early yet — but it’s clear from DOGE’s initial rounds of accounting that Musk & Co. still have a long way to go.

If DOGE’s cuts continued at the current (itemized) rate of $9.6 billion every five weeks, for example, they would total just $100 billion by the end of February 2026.

It’s possible that DOGE might get some help from congressional Republicans in the months ahead. Seeking to cram Trump’s entire agenda into a single budget bill that can survive the Senate with 51 votes through a process known as reconciliation, the House GOP just passed a package with $2 trillion in cuts — mostly to Medicaid and antipoverty programs.

It’s an approach that Trump has endorsed (even though he has also promised not to touch Medicaid).

The problem is that Musk’s deadline is 2026 — and those savings would be spread out over 10 years, not one. The House bill also includes extensions to Trump 2017 tax cuts that would reduce government revenue by $4 trillion over the next decade, more than offsetting any savings.

Experts say that if the Trump Administration actually wants to slash trillions from the annual federal budget, they will either have to eviscerate sacrosanct defense spending and social-safety net programs that remain popular with the public — things the president has already declared off-limits — or eliminate everything else.

"It is completely impossible for DOGE to save $2 trillion," Jessica Riedl, an economist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, recently told CBS. "Two-thirds of the $7 trillion federal budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, defense, veterans and interest on the debt — all of which has been taken off the table by President Trump. Saving $2 trillion would require eliminating nearly every remaining federal program.”

Unfortunately, Riedl continued, “DOGE has no legal or constitutional authority to cut this spending; Congress must pass a law.”

Graphics by Mike Bebernes