Elon Musk once pledged that his Department of Government Efficiency would find $1 trillion in savings in the federal budget by Sept. 30, the date the government closes its books on the fiscal year.
That date has now come and gone, Mr. Musk has long since left Washington, and DOGE never came close to cutting as much money as he promised. But because its work has been obscured by crude accounting and White House maneuvers, it's impossible to know how much DOGE and its allies actually did cut from the budget -- or even what happened to that money.
Outside budget experts can't nail down a number. Even congressional appropriators -- the people who decide how federal funds should be spent in the first place -- don't know. And the public may never have a clear answer.
This conclusion is an undercurrent of the Democrats' government shutdown fight: Congress and the public simply can't follow what the Trump administration has done with federal spending. And now the fiscal year is over, with untold sums unaccounted for.
"The fact that Congress, who constitutionally has the power of the purse, can't figure out what's been going on is a deep, deep, deep constitutional issue," said Zach Moller, director of the economic program at the center-left think tank Third Way.
Funding that Congress intended to be spent by Sept. 30 seemingly never was. Some of it may have expired at midnight that day, in direct opposition to Congress's will. In the mystery over what happened to it -- and how much money is at stake -- Congress has been losing more of its power.
Mr. Musk promised transparency in his sprint to slash the federal budget, but DOGE's accounting of its cuts, which it estimates have totaled $214 billion in savings, was error-prone from the start. The New York Times and other news organizations reported that DOGE inflated the savings from many contracts it cut, counted others multiple times and discounted the expense (and lawsuits) from shutting down programs.
The group's more lasting impact may be reducing the federal work force. The Trump administration has already laid off thousands of government employees and started another round of cuts Friday. But those numbers are in flux, too. Some layoffs remain tangled in court challenges, and other departed workers have been rehired. The Office of Personnel Management said it expected about 300,000 federal workers to leave their jobs by the end of the year, though it has not provided data on cost savings or hiring over the same time.
But with the fiscal year closed, a thornier problem remains: DOGE, established by an executive order, may have canceled contracts and fired workers, but it never had the authority to cut spending in the first place. Once Congress has appropriated money, only Congress can claw it back. Without that step, money meant for, say, collecting educational data must still be spent on collecting educational data even if DOGE has canceled particular contracts.
Imagine that Congressional appropriations are like credit cards.
In this metaphor, though, the credit limits are like budgets that agencies must use. The executive branch can't just not spend the money by refusing to swipe the cards (or by not activating them).
The only legal way to cut funding is to return to Congress and have legislators pass a "rescissions" bill retracting funds they had previously appropriated.
"When push comes to shove, the savings number is in the rescissions," said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. It is not, he said, in any of the numbers DOGE has promoted.
But during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the White House submitted just two rescission requests, outside of some climate investments canceled in Republicans' signature budget bill passed this summer. One request was for $9 billion in foreign aid and public media funding that narrowly passed in July, and the other was for nearly $5 billion of further foreign aid in a legally contested "pocket rescission" meant to run out the clock without congressional action.
It seems likely, however, that the Trump administration has left money unspent at the end of the year totaling far more than this $14 billion reported to Congress.
"There absolutely must be -- they did cancel a bunch of contracts worth a lot of money," Mr. Malkus said. "There are open questions about, Where did that money go?"
His own analysis, matching the contracts DOGE said it canceled to federal spending data, found about $16 billion in cuts (about one-third of what DOGE claimed). Congressional Democrats have tracked a larger universe of $410 billion in spending that they believe has been canceled or frozen, according to public documents, agencies and unpaid grantees. Money appropriated in multiyear cycles could legally still be spent in the new fiscal year. Some money may have been redirected elsewhere. But other funds may have expired Sept. 30, putting them out of reach of the people Congress meant to receive them.
The administration appears to have halted money by intervening at multiple steps in the illustration above -- with the White House Office of Management and Budget declining to activate funds meant for agencies, and with DOGE or agencies canceling work that had already been contracted. As a result, funds were delayed or blocked for emergency food and shelter, public health research, community development and government oversight programs, to name just a few. And some of these moves have prompted protests from Democrats and Republicans alike.
"This administration has flagrantly broken our spending laws, cut off funding owed to communities nationwide, and then systematically worked to obscure what it's doing from the public -- and Congress's -- view," Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democratic appropriator, said in a statement.
The White House declined to respond to such criticism or to comment on DOGE's impact, saying only that President Trump was committed to his pledge to cut waste, fraud and abuse.
How O.M.B. entered the picture
The conflict with Congress underscores one last challenge with assessing Mr. Musk's project. It's hard to distinguish where DOGE ends and where O.M.B. begins. The White House budget director, Russell Vought, has previously described his role in part as making permanent the cuts DOGE initiated. Increasingly, the push to cut government has moved to his office.
During the months when DOGE was most aggressively canceling contracts, O.M.B. was concealing how it was moving money through to agencies. Mr. Vought removed a legally required public database tracking those records. When a court forced the administration to restore it in August, the spending logs showed O.M.B. exerting unusual control over agency spending using other documents the public can't see.
Under a 1974 law, it's illegal for the administration to "impound" or block money appropriated by Congress (to not spend the funds on those credit cards). But Mr. Vought has made clear he believes that law is unconstitutional and wants to test it in court.
Democrats have said they're fighting during the shutdown to restore expiring Obamacare subsidies and reverse recent cuts to Medicaid. But the impasse is about this larger issue, too: They don't want to vote for bipartisan spending bills if the Trump administration is simply -- and secretly -- going to choke off the parts it doesn't like.
"This crisis is not happening in a vacuum," Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democratic appropriator in the House, said of the shutdown in a statement. She blamed Mr. Vought and Mr. Trump for undermining the division of powers -- Congress passes spending laws, and the president is supposed to carry them out.
In trying to measure the effect of all of this, budget analysts on both sides noted it's always hard to track real-time spending across a vast government with outdated data systems. But this situation is different, they said.
"When the administration is actively undermining transparency by hiding databases and filling the ones they do release with elementary accounting errors, budget analysts just throw their hands up," said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow with the conservative Manhattan Institute.
That confusion has outlasted Mr. Musk's focus on the federal budget. And with it, the president has expanded his power to act without cluing in either legislators or the public, said Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute.
"That's the struggle we're witnessing: ultimately not so much about reducing the size and scope of government in a sustainable manner," she said,"and more about increasing executive power and finding out how much you can actually just do with the executive."
By that measure—and not total dollars saved—DOGE may have been more effective.