A year later, experts say full effect of DOGE cuts may never be known

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk appeared in a White House news conference on Feb. 11, 2025, defending plans to cut "waste" in the federal government with the Department of Government Efficiency.

For months last year, his assembled squad and their exploits inside federal agencies dominated headlines. Musk even posed for cameras with a chainsaw, flaunting DOGE’s cost-cutting requested by President Donald Trump.

The fanfare over DOGE has faded, but hundreds of legal actions are in process over many of the nearly 30,000 grants and contracts that were terminated. USA TODAY analyzed the cuts reported during the new administration’s first 9.5 months to examine the extent of the reported cost-cutting. 

Here’s what we found, based on the most recent accounting provided by DOGE's website, last updated on Oct. 4:

• Grants and contracts were ended or prematurely terminated in 64 agencies, departments or federal bodies.
• DOGE reported $110 billion in savings from those canceled agreements, equal to about $323 for every U.S. resident.
• Nearly 30% of the grants and contracts had already been fully paid before they were terminated, providing either no immediate savings at all or savings of less than $1.
• The cuts touched Americans in every state, Puerto Rico, Guam and Washington, DC.
• The pace of terminations reached a height of more than 16,000 in February and March 2025, then slowed to only 373 in September.
• Terminations of grants and contracts, as well as freezes that aren't accounted for in the data, continue in the current year.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said the contract reviews are returning accountability to a federal government that “has long needed it.”

But there was a price to all the cost-cutting, measurable both in dollars and in life-saving health care removed, agency chaos, derailed research and uncertainties for local governments, libraries, museums and other community anchors.

Experts tell USA TODAY the full costs of the DOGE cuts and terminations, both direct and indirect, and the toll they’ve taken on Americans and impoverished people around the globe likely will never be fully known.

"They were a hurricane that just ran through government, with tornadoes in every agency," said Scott Delaney, a cofounder of Grant Witness, an organization formed during the height of DOGE cuts to track grants terminated and frozen at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the savings DOGE said it generated or whether its work had the desired impact.

Impossible to know the full extent of DOGE's cuts

Summarizing specific cuts is challenging because federal spending is so difficult to track, said Delaney, a former Harvard scientist whose own Alzheimer's research funding was among the cuts. "By virtue of being so imprecise, they screwed stuff up in a way that they can't fix," he said. "I do not think that we'll really know the full, full scope of damage."

Long-term costs of canceling the grants and contracts weren't tracked by DOGE and the numbers keep changing.

The available data doesn't account for agreements the administration was ordered by the courts to restore or that it negotiated with universities such as Columbia and Harvard.

It also doesn't account for grants that were frozen, which are much harder to track, Delaney said.

"It's really important to understand that just because DOGE said they did it, doesn’t mean that they actually did," he said.

The dollar amounts reported by DOGE have been widely disputed.

But even incomplete, Delaney said DOGE's data is important because it helps reveal the scope of what happened across the federal government.

Delaney and others acknowledge the federal grant-making process had plenty of shortcomings before the DOGE cuts. “We should always try to do better," he said, "but we should do it from a place of good faith, not from a place of just hostility towards the government and the scientific enterprise more generally."

Wasteful or crucial spending?

In the tiny Native Alaskan village of Kipnuk, the Environmental Protection Agency canceled a $20 million flood mitigation grant in May that was to help stabilize a riverbank. The project, recommended by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, aimed to curb erosion linked to thawing permafrost and an increase in coastal flood events.

Just five months later, Kipnuk was among several villages hit by disastrous storm surge and flooding when Typhoon Halong battered the remote Alaskan coast in October 2025.

EPA administrator Lee Zeldin defended criticisms by saying the project wouldn’t have been complete, even if it had not been cut, and likely wouldn’t have prevented “the destruction and tragedy caused by such a large and devastating typhoon.”

His post suggesting the cancellation prevented “$20 million of hardworking U.S. tax dollars” from being swept into the Kuskokwim River angered Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican.

“I am outright mad that some have suggested that it is a waste of taxpayer dollars to protect Alaskan communities,” Murkowski said in an October speech.

“We are Americans,” she said. “Every single person that has been impacted is an American that deserves to be treated with that level of respect.”

How the numbers stack up state by state

DOGE, rebranded from an existing department, sent operatives into offices almost immediately after Trump's second inauguration, demanding computer access and searching grants and contracts for keywords such as "equity," "gender" and "climate change." 

Thousands of contractors and grant recipients were caught up in the resulting purge, including more than 500 colleges and universities. Long-planned projects, work already midstream and ongoing research studies saw committed money vanish.

At least 5,400 of the grants and contracts terminated by early October could be sorted by specific states, including local governments and universities. Among those, the total “savings” reported by DOGE included at least:

• $13.7 billion to state governments.
• $4.6 billion to universities and colleges.
• $1.2 billion to local governments.
• $440 million to Indigenous peoples and tribes.

Among the terminations that could easily be linked to a specific state, the three states that lost the greatest number of grants and contracts were among the four most populous:

• 600 – New York
• 440 – California
• 310 – Texas

States with the largest monetary losses were:

• California – $1.9 billion.
• Texas –$1.8 billion.
• Florida – $1 billion.
• Minnesota – $858 million.

But the more sparsely populated states lost the most per capita:

• South Dakota – $187 per person, and a total of $166 million
• Alaska – $177 per person, and a total of $129 million
• Minnesota – $150 per person, and a total of $858 million
• Colorado – $123 per person, and a total of $708 million

In Dallas County, Texas, $4 million in federal funding was cut, leading to staff layoffs and canceled community vaccination drives, according to a federal harms tracker by the Partnership for Public Service.

The cuts, at every level of government, “took a wrecking ball to everything,” said Monica Medina, a former principal deputy undersecretary of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a former assistant secretary of state.

"It will be almost impossible for state and local governments to make up the difference," Medina said. She and others say the impacts will linger for years.

Which federal agencies and departments saw the greatest cuts?

Over the first nine months, 64 agencies, departments and other federal bodies saw contracts and grants terminated.

The contract scrutiny has been blamed for numerous delays across government, such as delays in providing emergency response during a disaster, clearance to repair faulty plumbing in a weather service office or authorizations for wildlife biologists to conduct field work.

• At the Department of War, formally the Department of Defense, at least 850 agreements were terminated, reaching a reported total of about $14 billion in savings.
• More than 4,300 agreements were cut at the Department of Health and Human Services, including money destined for decades-long medical studies and cancer research. DOGE reported savings at $25 billion.
• The most terminations – more than 5,900 – occurred with the dismantling of the Agency for International Development, aka USAID. DOGE reports the savings at $28.3 billion.

USAID worked to prevent infectious diseases such as HIV, and supplied medicines and water to people in nations stricken by war, famine and drought.

Trump, budget director Russell Vought and other Republicans cited examples of wasteful spending at USAID, including some identified by previous audits and inspector general reports and some that were later debunked.

Former USAID employees and other public health experts say shutting down the agency came at a high human cost. Health economist Brooke Nichols at ImpactCounter.com has estimated the cuts and disruptions contributed to the deaths of more than 788,000 people.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly stated that lives have not been lost as a result of the cuts, according to Reuters.

Lawsuits and challenges

In addition to dozens of lawsuits filed against the administration by states, many other grant recipients are challenging the terminations, said Jillian Blanchard, a vice president at the nonprofit Lawyers 4 Good Government.

“These grants were all congressionally mandated and obligated,” said Blanchard, whose climate change and environmental justice department at the nonprofit, is assisting more than 600 entities in the administrative process or federal claims court process.

“Someone signed on the dotted line and committed to the obligation and the agency or department just unlawfully terminated it,” she said. “A lot of times the reason was just as basic as a shift in administrative priorities, and that’s unlawful in many cases.”

"There are millions of people suffering across the country right now," Blanchard said.

In November, the White House contradicted reports that DOGE no longer existed, saying it was still active. It referred to an X post by DOGE, quoting Scott Kupor, Office of Personnel Management Director, who called the reports “fake news.”

The post stated DOGE had terminated 78 wasteful contracts and saved taxpayers $335 million over the previous week. Similar updates were shared in the following weeks, but the data available for download on its website hasn't been updated since Oct. 4.

The vision was always that DOGE would become institutionalized within agencies, Vought has said. By June, its leadership had been decentralized with agency heads in charge, but benefiting from DOGE consulting, he has said.  

When Musk left the White House in May 2025, after four months as a special government employee, he acknowledged DOGE might not reach the trillion-dollar goal he'd once projected, saying: "There’s a lot of inertia in the government with respect to cost savings."

Dinah Voyles Pulver, a national correspondent for USA TODAY, covers climate change, weather, the environment and other news. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X or dinahvp.77 on Signal.