The first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term have been a whirlwind of activity, punctuated by action at the border, tariffs, turbulent markets, DOGE, multiple lawsuits, and constant headlines. This Washington Examiner series, “100 Day Report Card,” will look at six key issues and how they have come to define the early days of this administration. Part 3 is on the Department of Government Efficiency.
The Department of Government Efficiency, a novel initiative led by tech titan Elon Musk to take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy, championed cost-cutting measures but also cost President Donald Trump politically.
At the 100-day mark of Trump’s second presidency, Musk’s efforts led to the ouster of thousands of federal workers, the end of government contracts deemed wasteful, and the uncovering of $160 billion in estimated cost savings.
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But despite the transparency of a rolling social media feed of government waste and a tracker of saving taxpayers money, the public has soured on the Trump-Musk effort.
A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that just 35% of people approve of Musk’s handling of the Department of Government Efficiency, while 57% disapprove. Musk’s approval rating is worse than Trump’s (34% compared to Trump’s 39%).
Meanwhile, Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle company, has been the target of nationwide vandalism attacks on cars and dealerships that the Justice Department has deemed domestic terrorism.
And though it looks like DOGE’s actual cuts to the federal budget will come in far short of the trillions once touted, both critics and supporters agree that the pace with which Trump and DOGE are transforming Washington is nothing short of unprecedented.
DOGE’S perception
Grading DOGE depends on who you ask. Republicans and supporters of the president largely give the initiative positive marks, though some have previously been critical of Musk’s tactics. Democrats, however, widely claim that Trump, Musk, and DOGE are undermining the federal bureaucracy and endangering critical services for people across the country in the process.
Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action for America, told the Washington Examiner Trump’s cost-saving efforts deserve an “A+” and that media narratives and claims from Democrats about how DOGE is handling government employees and systems are overblown.
“I come back to what is real, and less about what’s reported in the media, whether it be the way that the media was describing DOGE’s officials coming in sort of cloak and dagger in the middle of the night to these agencies — I don’t think that anything like that was actually occurring,” he explained. “If it was, it was dictated by the executive order, which required every agency to have a DOGE official on staff and implement the DOGE efforts. I think this administration has had the right focus.”
Trump signed an executive order on Day One of his second term to create DOGE, by renaming the U.S. Digital Service, a small organization founded by the Obama administration to aid agencies with tech services, to the United States DOGE Service. Other executive orders direct federal agencies to submit plans to reduce the federal workforce, to work with DOGE directly on personnel, and for DOGE to review wasteful regulations.
Andrew Bates, a White House deputy press secretary under former President Joe Biden and the principal at Wolfpack Strategies, gave DOGE an “F, for fraud” through Trump’s first 100 days.
“They lied about protecting Social Security and had their staff illegally rummage through Americans’ personal Social Security data. Also because they lied about savings, are cutting services that in total save taxpayers’ money, and because Trump’s tax giveaways for the rich will increase the deficit by trillions of dollars,” he said in a statement.
Polling on DOGE appears to show that voters are underwhelmed by DOGE’s fiscal impact thus far.
The Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll published Monday, a majority of respondents said that government waste had either not changed or had increased since January. And a poll published Tuesday from NPR, PBS, and Marist polling found that just 36% of respondents viewed DOGE favorably.
The DOGE cuts
The overarching theme of addressing government waste or fraud is not a partisan one. According to Gallup, people estimate that 59 cents out of every dollar spent by the federal government represents some kind of waste, the highest mark since Gallup began tracking the question in 1979. Meanwhile, the Cato Institute’s 2025 Fiscal Policy National Survey found that, out of 2,000 U.S. respondents, 98% believe that some “waste, fraud, and/or abuse” appears in the federal budget.
The Trump team predicted last year that DOGE would be able to shave $2 trillion a year, roughly one-third of the overall federal budget. Musk referred to the plan as “potentially, the Manhattan Project of our time,” with Trump suggesting it would be “the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution.”
So far, DOGE’s audits of federal departments and agencies have yielded more than 100,000 firings of federal workers in multiple agencies, including gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and sending termination notices to nearly 1,500 employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Courts have since paused some of the DOGE-sanctioned cuts and firings as lawsuits have piled up.
Still, DOGE hasn’t provided quite the level of cost saving that supporters had predicted. Musk revised down his estimates for DOGE’s yearly cuts by 50% in February, and again recently to roughly $150 billion a year.
DOGE has also had to publicly clean up its reported cuts, categorized in an online “Wall of Receipts” administered by the administration, on several occasions. That included outright rescinding some of its largest pots of savings, worth billions of dollars, on multiple occasions, and at other points failing to provide evidence of reported, ideologically driven waste identified by the department.
Bobby Kogan, senior director for federal budget policy at the Center of American Progress, argued that despite its soft numbers, DOGE has been effective in helping Trump reshape the federal government.
“If you say to people, ‘Hey, let’s cut waste, fraud and abuse,’ they say, ‘That sounds great,’ and Elon kind of pretends everything is in that category, and then goes out for things he hates,” Kogan explained, before adding that Trump’s streamlining of the government might accidentally lead to a future loss in government revenue.
“You might save hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe a billion dollars in salaries and expenses, and then you might lose tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars in no longer stopping very rich people from cheating on their taxes,” Kogan continued. “If he were really interested in efficiency and fraud, he wouldn’t be getting rid of the people whose job it is to catch fraud.”
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Alex Nowrasteh, the Cato Institute’s vice president for economic and social policy studios at the Cato Institute, agreed that DOGE’s cuts aren’t “going to move the bottom line.”
“The government is too big. The cuts that DOGE has done are too small,” he said. “We’re going to see some small changes here and there, the shuttering of a few small agencies here and there, like we already have, but in terms of showing up on the federal budget line, on their baseline, it’s a rounding error.”
Final DOGE grade: C-
So far, DOGE has produced mixed results. It’s impossible to argue that the department hasn’t had a noticeable impact on Trump’s quest to slim down the federal government. The speed with which Musk and company jumped at the task set off alarm bells for Democrats and caught much of Washington, D.C., by surprise.
Still, the errors along the way, failure to meet their own benchmarks, and infighting DOGE is causing among members of the president’s own Cabinet similarly can’t be ignored.
Musk’s “technologist” tactics have led him into direct conflict with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Transportation Secretary Scott Duffy on multiple occasions within the White House.
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Furthermore, the public backlash to Musk’s MAGA makeover, specifically the negative impact his dabbling in politics is having on his technology empire, led the DOGE chief to announce last week that he’d be scaling back his federal work ahead of the expiration of his special government employee contract next month.
Musk, who had been a fixture at Trump’s side, is no longer “physically” working out of the White House, and instead staying in touch mostly via the phone, chief of staff Susie Wiles told the New York Post.
He’ll be transitioning away from his official role in Trump’s good graces, with the president praising Musk during his 100-day rally in Michigan as a “great American.”
“He’s really helped us,” Trump said Tuesday. “They’ve saved us $150 billion in waste, fraud and abuse, DOGE. We want to thank him. He’s an incredible guy.”