The DOGE mindset is still central to the Trump administration’s agenda as 2025 ends

Earlier this month, billionaire Elon Musk, the one-time DOGE leader and Trump adviser, sat down with Katie Miller on her podcast to reflect on his time with the administration.

He called DOGE’s work “a little bit successful” but said he wouldn’t do it again if given the chance.

“We were somewhat successful, Musk said. “I mean we stopped a lot of funding … that really just made no sense, that was just entirely wasteful.”

Musk left his role with DOGE in May after legal setbacks and clashes with Trump’s cabinet.

Yet even as he retreated from Washington, the idea that slashing wasteful spending will lead to profound cuts to the nation’s growing deficit remains central to the Trump administration’s vision of a slimmed down bureaucracy.

While many of DOGE’s initial outsized promises to increase efficiency and slash spending never fully materialized, the Trump administration has not given up on those goals.

Here’s a look back at some of what DOGE did and did not accomplish in its inaugural year and how the Trump administration is calibrating its tactics to make more incremental and less high-profile tweaks to federal agencies.

Shrinking the federal workforce 

Agencies ordered to fire employees earlier in the year by DOGE were hiring back hundreds of workers ahead of the end of the fiscal year in September, while the Office of Management and Budget tried to lay off more people during the longest-ever federal government shutdown in October.

Still, by the end of 2025, some 317,000 federal employees will be out of the government, according to the Office of Personnel Management. Some federal agencies and programs, like the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and much of the Education Department have been effectively eliminated.

Despite those reductions and a push to cut contracts and terminate leases, the federal government is still spending more money than it brings in.

Focus on slashing ‘Democrat priorities’

Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought is leading the push to streamline the federal workforce. Vought has long called for the federal government to have a smaller footprint, most recently including efforts to enact mass reductions-in-force at several agencies during the federal government shutdown that started in October and was blocked by the courts.

Also during the shutdown, the Trump administration announced several rounds of funding cuts aimed at what the president called “Democrat priorities” like transportation and energy grants, continuing the trend of spending money on policies they like and removing funding from policies that Trump disagrees with.

Trump’s priorities rely on the sharing of sensitive data

DOGE’s push to consolidate sensitive personal data across federal agencies has survived legal challenges and been used for the administration’s immigration enforcement priorities.

That includes the transformation of a federal citizenship verification database, demands for states to hand over information about federal food aid recipients and more. At least some of those efforts have wrongly flagged U.S. citizens, NPR has previously reported.

Government restructuring efforts still exist

Even though the DOGE entity has not dominated the headlines in recent months since Musk departed the federal government, the focus of its work has not stopped.

Many of Musk’s top allies and DOGE lieutenants have transitioned to become full-time employees at the agencies they were detailed to.

An Aug. 21, 2025 executive order signed by the president created the National Design Studio that aims to “fill the digital potholes” of the federal government’s online systems and websites.

The Chief Design Officer in charge of this effort, Joe Gebbia, is an Airbnb cofounder and Musk associate who led DOGE’s overhaul and digitization of the federal employee retirement system at the Office of Personnel Management.

The studio is responsible for the website for the new “Trump Accounts,” tax-advantaged investment accounts for U.S. children created under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” signed earlier this year. Other projects include the Energy Department’s “Genesis Mission” and the US Tech Force, a two-year program seeking “an elite corps of engineers to build the next generation of government technology.”

Federal spending still isn’t reigned in

One of the stated reasons DOGE was created was to tackle the national debt, which grew more than $2.2 trillion from October 1, 2024 to Sept. 30, 2025 to more than $38 trillion.

That number is expected to grow by at least three trillion additional dollars in the next decade over baseline projections due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law earlier this year that includes tax cuts and new spending on Trump’s priorities.

“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,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement provided to NPR.

The White House did not directly respond to NPR’s questions about the government’s deficit spending or the increase in the national debt.

From the start of the new fiscal year in October to the end of November, the federal government has spent nearly a half trillion dollars more than it has brought in, according to the latest Monthly Treasury Statement. That’s slightly less than the same period last year.

The vast majority of federal spending — about 65% this fiscal year — goes toward Social Security, Medicare, health programs, income security and veterans’ benefits and services. Another smaller percentage has been interest payments towards the country’s debt, plus 14% for national defense.

DOGE’s work did not touch on these broadly popular programs that would require Congressional action to change.