DOGE in 2025: historic federal workforce cuts amid continued spending
The Department of Government Efficiency – DOGE – began 2025 spearheaded by technological visionary Elon Musk, and will end the year without him at the helm, with mixed results
by Summer Lane | December 29, 2025
Elon Musk’s DOGE kicked off 2025 with a bang, setting massive goals for cutting wasteful spending and exposing abuse.
As the year ends, Musk has long since departed the Trump administration as a senior advisor, and DOGE is heavily decentralized. Reports indicate that, while the federal workforce did indeed shrink and continues to be reduced, federal spending was up.
The Cato Institute analyzed government data and found that the federal apparatus spent a whopping $7.6 trillion between January to November 2025, nearly $250 billion more than in the same period in 2024.
As for the federal workforce, according to the Trump administration, the U.S. is on track to lose nearly 320,000 federal employees in 2025. Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, explained on X that 92.5 percent of these departures were “voluntary resignations.”
“The 7.5% involuntary resignations were split as follows – about 2/3 were reductions-in-force (i.e., elimination of functions) and 1/3 were probationary terminations (i.e., employees with less than 1 or 2 years of service),” he continued.
The Cato Institute observed that federal employment (in November cut down by 271,000 workers) shrank by nine percent from January, with the majority of that federal reduction taking place in October:
“The sharp October drop of over 150,000 was driven by the federal civil service buyout offer rather than normal attrition. The number of employees continued to fall in November, but at a slower pace. We won’t see a single month of federal employment decline that resembles October 2025 for the rest of the Trump administration.”
Director Kupor said on X that increasing the efficiency of the workforce was a top priority for the Trump administration.
“Increasing the efficiency of the workforce and ensuring that we have the right talent focused on the right objectives are key priorities. Yes, change is hard, but we are doing so in service of the American people,” he said.
It’s unclear what the purpose and direction of DOGE will be in 2026. Last month, Kupor offhandedly remarked to Reuters that the agency “doesn’t exist” when asked about it, despite its future self-termination date of July 2026.
Kupor later clarified his comments and said the outlet “spliced my full comments across paragraphs 2/3 to create a grabbing headline[.]”
However, he did confirm that DOGE no longer has centralized leadership, and instead said the “principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.”
Photo: Adobe Stock
