As Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, splurged more than $250m on Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign, the US president commissioned his new ally to oversee a sweeping “efficiency” drive across the federal government.

The Tesla and SpaceX boss, who had no experience inside government, was tasked with eradicating waste and cutting spending as part of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) – and was quick to stoke expectations.

“I think we can do at least $2tn,” Musk declared of the potential savings during a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City a week before Trump’s re-election.

Following Trump’s return to office in January, these ambitious plans were swiftly on a collision course with reality. Tens of thousands of federal workers were fired, leaving agencies in disarray and triggering myriad legal challenges.

Just four months into the administration, Musk abruptly announced his exit. Six months later, it was reported that Doge was no more. Musk has even said he wouldn’t do it again.

‘Moving fast and breaking things’

“That was all complete bullshit from the beginning,” Elaine Kamarck, a former White House official and expert on government reform, told the Guardian. “The fact that they even said it and then had to go roll it way, way, way back into the low hundreds of billions, tells you they didn’t know what they were doing.”

Kamarck created and managed the National Performance Review, which aimed to improve efficiency and reduce costs, during the Clinton administration.

By March, Musk had tapered his bold projection to $1tn, savings he told Fox News seemed “really quite achievable” as Doge wielded the axe.

As of December, the agency’s purported savings, which reports have demonstrated are rife with errors, inaccuracies, and exaggerations, have reached $214bn.

However much has been cut from the federal budget, the urgency surrounding Doge in its early weeks and months prompted widespread disruption, and even mistakes. Analysis by the Brookings Institution recorded 26,511 occasions where the Trump administration fired people, and then hired them back.

“What they did was they sowed chaos to no avail,” said Kamarck. “Doge was done in an incredibly careless way, without regard for what the agencies did and whether and moreover, whether or not Americans liked what they did.

“You can cut the government. I did it in the Clinton administration,” she added. “We cut the government by 420,000 people, but we did it over a period of seven years, and we did it in the context of mission and what we no longer needed to do, etc.

“In other words, we had a plan that works with the mission of the agency. This business of coming in and moving fast and breaking things which they like to do in Silicon Valley just doesn’t work in the government.”

Questions were raised last month about whether Doge was even still operating. “That doesn’t exist,” the office of personnel management (OPM) director, Scott Kupor, told Reuters. (An account for the agency on X, formerly Twitter, disputed this claim.)

But Musk had long moved on. During a recent podcast interview with former Doge adviser Katie Miller, the tycoon described the effort he once suggested could identify $2tn in savings for the federal government as “a little bit successful”. Asked if he would do it again, he responded: “I don’t think so ... Instead of doing Doge, I would have, basically, built … worked on my companies.”

‘They had really no understanding’

How much efficiency can be achieved from having multiple operations inside the federal government, seeking efficiencies? Philip G Joyce, professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, said Doge was “unnecessary” given the longstanding existence of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has logged $1.45tn in savings across over 29,000 federal operations since 2002.

Russell Vought, the White House office of management and budget director and architect of the rightwing Project 2025 blueprint, said in September that he believes the GAO shouldn’t exist.

“I can understand why he thinks that,” said Joyce. “Because the Government Accountability Office, as an agency of the Congress, is helping the Congress to try to hold the executive branch accountable. It’s uncomfortable to be held accountable, but that doesn’t make it bad.”

Rather than reinforce the balance of power between the different branches of government, Joyce argued that Doge was a mechanism to eliminate and cut things the government does that are ideologically opposed by the Trump administration – without congressional approval.

“What Doge was doing was not trying to take the operations of government and make it more efficient. They were basically just trying to come in and almost randomly sort of decide that they were going to just eliminate a significant number of things that the government does,” he said. “Even upfront, it was clear that they had really no understanding of the federal budget. And then when they went into the agencies, it became even clearer.”

‘Minimal transparency, maximal authority’

When Doge descended on the Social Security Administration in February, Chuck Borges was serving as chief data officer. Musk was touting false and misleading claims alleging fraud and abuse at the agency, including claims people over 120 years old were still receiving benefits.

Borges resigned in August, and filed a whistleblower complaint over how Doge left the public’s social security data exposed. “What I identified was that social security data was apparently being copied into an insecure or unsecured cloud environment, or you could characterize it as a cloud environment without independent security monitoring,” he told the Guardian. “What I was alleging was that there was a risk being put on the data by keeping it in a manner not consistent with agency policy, agency requirements and industry best practices.”

Borges is now running for a state senate seat in Maryland. “I believe that if we don’t find a way to build strong, sustainable, growing communities locally, and I’d like to start with where I live, then the nation isn’t going to have a lot of seeds which it can use to grow and recover from where we are today,” he said.

Many Doge staffers are now reportedly embedded inside federal agencies across government. Many of the issues it posed around transparency, and the impact of sweeping decisions, are still being fought over in court.

“Doge has been operating with minimal transparency but maximal authority,” said Donald K Sherman, executive director and chief counsel of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against Doge in February, alleging that it had failed to comply with recordkeeping and transparency laws.

“There’s pretty significant misalignment in terms of how the administration claims Doge has been beneficial to the American public, and what information it wants the American public to have access to about Doge’s operations,” said Sherman. “We’ve spent months litigating because this administration does not want the public to know what Doge is doing, how Doge is operating.”

Approached for comment, the White House did not provide detailed responses to questions on Doge’s record.

“President Trump pledged to cut the waste, fraud, and abuse in our bloated government, and the Administration is committed to delivering on this pledge for the American people,” said spokesperson Davis Ingle.