DOGE Achieved More than You Think

The effort’s biggest cuts were to the civil service—and they worked.Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) went from an inside joke about a Musk-favored cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, to the biggest story in Washington to a near-nonentity—all in under a year. During DOGE’s whirlwind tour in power, the press highlighted its improbable promises of trillions of dollars in savings, its exaggerations of the savings it did achieve, and its occasional naivete about the politics and policy of Washington.Yet the media spent so much time disputing DOGE’s claims that they largely ignored how it did change spending. In the end, while DOGE...