Federal Spending Largely Unchanged in 2025 Under Trump Compared to 2024 Under Biden, Despite DOGE Cost-Cutting Pledges

Details

U.S. Treasury data shows federal government spending in 2025 under Trump remained largely unchanged—and by some measures increased—compared to 2024 under Biden. This falls far short of the dramatic cuts promised by the Trump administration and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which formally ceased to exist on July 4, 2026, without ever bending the trajectory of federal spending downward.

The Numbers

Federal fiscal years run from October 1 through September 30. The most recent comparable data covers the first two months of each fiscal year:

• FY2025 (Oct-Nov 2024, under Biden): $1.25 trillion in outlays
• FY2026 (Oct-Nov 2025, under Trump): $1.2 trillion in outlays

According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's analysis of Treasury Department data, this represents a nominal decrease of $55 billion, or 4.4%.

However, much of this apparent decrease is attributable to payment timing shifts rather than actual spending cuts. November 1, 2025 fell on a weekend, causing certain payments (mostly Medicare-related) to shift into October. When adjusted for these timing effects, the Congressional Budget Office estimates actual spending was approximately $27 billion higher than the same period in 2024 under Biden.

The spending categories driving increases include:

• Medicare: Up $21 billion (adjusted for timing)
• Net interest on debt: Up $19 billion
• Social Security: Up $18 billion (reflecting cost-of-living adjustments)

DOGE's Unfulfilled Promises

The modest spending changes stand in stark contrast to the ambitious cost-cutting goals announced during and after the 2024 campaign. At a Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in October 2024, Elon Musk claimed DOGE could eliminate "at least $2 trillion" from the federal budget.

That figure was subsequently revised downward multiple times after Trump took office in January 2025: first to $1 trillion at the administration's first cabinet meeting in February 2025, then to $150 billion by April 2025. The official DOGE executive order signed January 20, 2025 established the initiative's stated mission as modernizing federal technology and software to "maximize governmental efficiency and productivity."

By the time DOGE effectively disbanded in November 2025, it claimed approximately $214 billion in savings—a figure that independent analysts disputed, and one that would tick up only marginally to a final claim of $215 billion before the initiative's charter expired in July 2026. A comprehensive New York Times analysis found that DOGE's 13 largest claimed cuts were all incorrect, including two Defense Department contracts listed as "terminations" that were actually still active; E&E News by POLITICO reported that the Times ultimately found 28 of DOGE's top 40 claimed savings to be inaccurate.

Independent Assessments

Multiple nonpartisan analyses concluded that overall government spending increased in calendar year 2025 under Trump compared to 2024 under Biden, despite DOGE's efforts:

The Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project tracking tool found that as of December 19, 2025, government outlays had risen from $7.135 trillion to $7.558 trillion—a nearly 6% increase compared to 2024.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, concluded: "DOGE had no noticeable effect on the trajectory of spending. But it did help engineer the largest peacetime workforce reduction on record."

CBS News analysis of Treasury Department daily reports found that in Trump's first 100 days (January-April 2025), the federal government spent more than $200 billion more than during the same period in 2024.

Structural Constraints

Budget experts note that the Trump administration faces fundamental constraints on cutting spending. According to Treasury Department data, approximately 60% of federal spending goes to mandatory programs—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' benefits, and interest on the national debt—that Trump pledged not to cut during the 2024 campaign.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget noted that interest payments on the national debt reached nearly $971 billion in FY2025 (which ended September 30, 2025)—the fourth-largest federal expense and approximately $100 billion more than defense spending.

Jessica Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute (a conservative think tank), offered this assessment to NPR: "Think of Congress and its budget as the debt-ridden dad on the way to buy a $250,000 Ferrari on the credit card, and DOGE is the $2 off gas card he used along the way."

Coda: DOGE Formally Dissolves on July 4, 2026, With Spending Never Meaningfully Cut

The story reached its formal conclusion on July 4, 2026, when DOGE's charter expired under a built-in termination clause. As E&E News by POLITICO reported, Trump's January 2025 executive order—which had renamed the Obama-era U.S. Digital Service as the U.S. DOGE Service—provided that the initiative would "self-delete" on Independence Day 2026. Trump had said a smaller, more efficient government would be "the perfect gift" for America's semiquincentennial.

The expiration was less a finale than a formality. By July 4, DOGE's social media account had been dormant for months, its official doge.gov "wall of receipts" had not been updated since January 1, 2026, and no final review or accounting of its work was planned. Fox Business reported that the DOGE website went dark on July 4 after claiming $215 billion in federal cuts—advertised as $1,335.40 per taxpayer. That final figure amounts to roughly a tenth of Musk's original $2 trillion promise, and E&E News characterized it as "a pittance" against an annual federal budget of roughly $7 trillion—a budget that, as documented above, grew rather than shrank during DOGE's existence. Even the $215 billion claim remains disputed: independent analysts have long challenged DOGE's receipts, and the cuts that could be verified were comparatively modest items such as duplicative software licenses, DEI grants, and underused office leases.

The initiative's leadership had scattered long before the sunset. Co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy departed almost immediately after launch to run for governor of Ohio; Musk left in May 2025 after 130 days as a special government employee; and acting administrator Amy Gleason moved on to lead a health-technology office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with several DOGE veterans relocating to the National Design Studio. DOGE's most measurable legacy remains its impact on the federal workforce: roughly 140,000 federal employees had enrolled in the "deferred resignation" buyout program as of May 2026, consistent with the Cato Institute's earlier finding that DOGE engineered the largest peacetime workforce reduction on record even as spending kept rising. The U.S. DOGE Service technically continues to exist with a technology-modernization mission.

Assessments of the experiment's end were sharply critical. Harvard Kennedy School professor Elizabeth Linos told E&E News that DOGE "told the American people that they can't trust government" and caused "a near-immediate loss of expertise and life-saving programs" without delivering the promised efficiency gains. Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) said it "will be remembered as a hugely destructive failure," and MSNBC's Maddowblog—an opinion outlet—called it "the White House's failed DOGE experiment" coming to "an official and overdue end." No comparably prominent defense of DOGE's fiscal record accompanied the sunset; the administration allowed the deadline to pass without a final report. The bottom line for this file's thesis is now settled: from DOGE's creation in January 2025 to its dissolution on July 4, 2026, federal spending was never meaningfully cut.