The so-called Department of Government Efficiency effort has failed to deliver on its outsized promises to cut costs and increase efficiency, NPR's latest analysis of federal data finds.
Agencies ordered to drastically slash their workforces over the last eight months are now hiring back hundreds of workers, as they struggle to perform basic operations or carry out some of President Trump's top policy priorities.
Despite DOGE's promise that canceling contracts and terminating leases would help reverse the trend of the government spending more money than it brings in, the most recent Treasury data shows an increase in expenditures by hundreds of billions of dollars more than the year before. The bulk of that spending goes to debt service, national defense, and entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
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When it first launched this year, NPR found DOGE's savings and efficiency tracker to be riddled with factual errors, overstatements and unverifiable claims. As a new fiscal year begins, that remains true today.
White House assistant press secretary Liz Huston said in a statement to NPR that President Trump has been "given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government, and he is delivering on that commitment."
"President Trump's policies, moreover, have made the federal government more efficiently work for the American people again — deporting illegal alien criminals, predicting natural disasters, reducing health outbreaks, and restoring law and order in our cities," Huston added.
The White House declined to answer NPR's questions about rehiring workers, increasing federal spending and DOGE data errors.
The ad-hoc DOGE initiative's controversial and often haphazard insertion into the federal government is now further complicated by a government shutdown that began Wednesday.
The White House has floated using the budget impasse as an opportunity to enact more widespread job cuts that would circumvent Congress' role in appropriations — and used taxpayer funds to send partisan messages to federal workers ahead of the shutdown.
After deep cuts, some agencies are rehiring — sort of
The Office of Personnel Management estimates the federal government could see about 1 in 8 civilian workers gone by the end of the year, or about 300,000 employees out of 2.4 million — most of them voluntary. More than 150,000 took the Trump administration's "Fork in the Road" buyout offer.
By comparison, the federal government has typically shed 6% to 8% of its total workforce annually in recent years.
A more precise accounting of how many federal workers have already left through voluntary buyouts, retirements, and job cuts is difficult because the government's own data is compiled and published on a several month delay.
But amid those departures, some agencies have sought to bring people back — a pattern that has picked up in recent weeks ahead of the end of the fiscal year.
Hundreds of employees whose jobs had been cut or who had taken the "Fork" deferred resignation deal, which sent them home from work but kept them on the federal payroll through the end of the fiscal year, are now being offered their jobs back, according to multiple federal workers who requested anonymity because they fear reprisal from the Trump administration for speaking publicly.
That includes around 285 employees at GSA's Public Building Service division, who manage the federal government's real estate portfolio — out of around 600 to 700 whose jobs were eliminated earlier this year, according to multiple GSA employees. In an initial email communication, staffers who had lost their jobs were told that their reinstatement did not guarantee future job security amid the agency's ongoing restructuring efforts. But in a follow-up message, they were told that if they turned the offer down, they would "forfeit severance and other entitlements associated with an involuntary separation."
They were given a deadline of Oct. 1 to decide.
GSA employees are also scrambling to find office space to accommodate a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in cities across the country after DOGE pushed for the firings and termination of a sizable chunk of federal leases.
Even as the administration is recruiting 10,000 new ICE officers, President Trump's push for increased immigration enforcement has been undercut by increased firing of immigration judges, with the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review losing more than 125 judges since the start of the year, down from about 700, due to firings and voluntary resignations.
Other agencies are also juggling real estate needs in the wake of DOGE's cuts. The Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration is seeking new lease agreements for space for mine inspectors after DOGE canceled some leases, according to a Labor Department employee.
The Labor Department is also bringing back some workers who took the government's deferred resignation offer, while other employees whose jobs were eliminated received notices that they would instead be assigned to new positions at the department. They were told they would "remain on administrative leave" until more details could be provided.
As the government shutdown arrives, employees are still waiting for those further details.
The Labor Department's IT website briefly had a banner welcoming back employees who had taken the deferred resignation offer, but it was quickly taken down, the Labor Department employee said. "They definitely want minimal noise about it," they said.
At some agencies, workers were never officially laid off, but haven't been working, either. Many Department of Agriculture employees, including high-ranking officials, have been on administrative leave, with pay, for months "with no plan for them in sight," according to one USDA employee. They haven't received severance notices or further information about whether they'll be asked to return.
"This was all a giant waste of money," the employee said.
Elsewhere, however, federal employees say they are scrambling to keep doing their work with fewer colleagues, and are being hampered by an executive order that says agencies can only hire one employee for every four who leave their jobs.
"There is a serious worry of too many people leaving or retiring and us not being able to function," said a Bureau of Land Management employee in the Mountain West. "It's so bad in some of our offices that leadership told local managers to do anything short of begging or breaking policy to keep people," this person said.
Heightening that uncertainty is the fallout of the government shutdown. In a memo last week, the White House Office of Management and Budget told agency heads to prepare for a "reduction in force" that would permanently eliminate some federal jobs during a shutdown, rather than temporarily furloughing workers as is usually done.
At an agency-wide town hall meeting on Sep. 25, an anonymous GSA worker asked, "So are our jobs safe or are we getting RIF'ed anyway on Oct 1rst," according to a screenshot shared with NPR by another GSA employee.
The GSA and Departments of Labor, Interior, and Agriculture didn't respond to requests for comment.
The federal government is spending more, even with DOGE
Trump and other DOGE backers say the effort is needed to cut federal spending and decrease the deficit.
Treasury data shows the federal government collected $4.69 trillion in revenue from Oct. 1, 2024 through the end of August, a 7% increase over the same period the prior fiscal year. But during the same time, the government spent $6.66 trillion, an increase of $376 billion, or about 6%. Looking at monthly expenditures published by the U.S. Treasury, spending is down compared to last year at some agencies and programs that the Trump administration has sought to cut back or eliminate, like the Department of Education, the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Others have seen an increase, like the Office of the Secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services. Overall, however, HHS has undertaken massive layoffs, claiming they are necessary to reorganize the department to align with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s goal to "Make America Healthy Again."
Fiscal year data covers the end of the Biden administration and the beginning of the Trump administration.
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The overwhelming majority of federal spending — about 64% — is on Social Security, Medicare, health programs, income security and veterans' benefits and services. Another 14% has been interest payments towards the country's $37.5 trillion in debt, plus 13% for national defense.
That leaves a tiny slice of the budgetary pie for discretionary spending and little room to cut without targeting overwhelmingly popular benefit programs.
Jessica Riedl of the center-right Manhattan Institute previously told NPR that any meaningful changes to how the federal government spends taxpayer money would have to come from Congressional action.
"DOGE has created this false perception that the entire budget deficit can be eliminated by going after waste, fraud and abuse and without making the difficult decisions elsewhere in the budget," Riedl said. "And this exaggeration is making it even harder to do the real hard things that are going to be needed to fix the deficit beyond waste."
Still, billionaire and on-and-off Trump ally Elon Musk, who oversaw DOGE until the end of May, set an ever-shifting goal that eventually landed on $1 trillion in cuts to federal spending from Jan. 20 to the end of September.
Even taking DOGE's savings claims at face value, U.S. Treasury Department data shows the federal deficit has grown by nearly $2 trillion from Oct. 1, 2024 to the end of August 2025 — an increase of $76 billion from the same period the year before.
DOGE claims still can't be verified
DOGE has never given an accurate or transparent accounting of how its work has saved the taxpayer dollars it claims, and its "wall of receipts" page only accounts for part of the unverifiable estimate of $206 billion saved.
As NPR has frequently reported, DOGE's claims are overstated, full of errors and seem to reflect little understanding of the federal procurement process.
The most recent contract termination on DOGE's website purports to show $4.3 million in savings from canceling a $4.4 million consulting contract for the Federal Aviation Administration. The linked contract is not terminated, is worth about $150,000 and almost all of the money has been spent already.
The largest claim is $4 billion in savings from a decade-long multiple-vendor contract worth up to $12.5 billion for the Air Force's Base Infrastructure Modernization (BIM) project. There's no public evidence to support that claim. A review of federal contracting data shows the nearly two dozen companies involved have been awarded about $12,000 so far to kick off the project.
It's not just contracts: some of the leases touted on the DOGE tracker as terminated still appear as active on the GSA's Inventory of Owned and Leased Properties.
The White House has declined to answer specific questions from NPR over the last eight months about how DOGE operates, how its savings claims are calculated and about specific errors and exaggerations.
Have information you want to share about DOGE, spending, hiring, the government shutdown or other restructuring changes across the federal government? Reach out to the authors via encrypted messaging on Signal. Stephen Fowler is at stphnfwlr.25, Jenna McLaughlin is at JennaMcLaughlin.54, and Shannon Bond is at shannonbond.01.
NPR's Ximena Bustillo and Andrea Hsu contributed to this report.
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