Congress kept nearly every program DOGE tried to kill

The Department of Government Efficiency, launched by executive order on January 20, 2025, promised to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. EMElon Musk, who ran DOGE from the White House, later dropped that goal to $1 trillion, then $150 billion for the fiscal year. When Congress finished the fiscal year 2026 spending bills in early 2026, Brookings Institution budget analyst JRJessica Riedl put the actual verified annual savings at roughly $20 billion — about 1% of the original promise.

Of the 30 programs the Trump White House explicitly proposed to slash or eliminate in the fiscal year 2026 budget request, Congress cut just one. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for Democracy each received full or near-full funding after Trump requested their elimination — NEA and NEH each at $207 million and NED at $315 million.

The core constitutional reason DOGE's agenda failed in Congress is the Appropriations Clause: Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 states that no money shall be drawn from the Treasury except through appropriations made by law. This clause means the president can propose any spending plan, but only Congress can authorize the money. Presidents cannot unilaterally eliminate funded programs by simply refusing to spend — a tool called impoundment that Congress outlawed via the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

DOGE did achieve the largest peacetime reduction in the federal workforce on record. The federal payroll shrank by roughly 271,000 workers — about 9% — between January and November 2025. But overall federal spending increased, rising roughly $248 billion higher by November 2025 compared to November 2024. The reason: most federal spending goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other transfer payments — not worker salaries. A 10% workforce cut saves only about $40 billion annually in direct payroll costs.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan government accountability organization, estimated in April 2025 that DOGE's own operations would cost taxpayers approximately $135 billion in fiscal year 2025 — through costs of putting workers on paid administrative leave, rehiring mistakenly fired employees, and lost government productivity. That estimate did not include lawsuit costs or the IRS revenue shortfall Treasury officials projected would exceed $500 billion from staff cuts reducing tax enforcement.

Congress ultimately codified one significant batch of DOGE-inspired cuts: a $9 billion rescission package canceling funding for foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS. The House passed it 214-212 and the Senate 51-48, with only Senators Lisa Murkowski of 🐻Alaska and Susan Collins of 🦞Maine crossing party lines to oppose it. This was the only legislation directly enacting DOGE cuts that Congress sent to Trump.

Musk left DOGE in May 2025 after roughly four months at the White House. The agency was quietly disbanded in November 2025 — eight months before its July 2026 charter was set to expire — with OPM Director Scott Kupor telling Reuters that DOGE does not exist and that its functions had been absorbed by the Office of Personnel Management.

The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 grew directly out of President Richard Nixon's attempt to refuse to spend congressionally appropriated funds, withholding more than a third of all domestic discretionary spending in 1973. Courts repeatedly overturned Nixon's impoundments, and Congress passed the ICA over Nixon's veto — creating a formal process where presidents can request Congress cancel spending via a rescission package, but Congress has 45 days to act, and if it does not approve, the money gets spent.