The DOGE Days Are Not Quite Over

“And in the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget. We are going to balance it,” President Donald Trump declared in his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, 2025.

In one of the first acts of his second term, Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to help accomplish this longstanding goal of the Republican Party. DOGE’s mission is to cut waste and ensure federal agencies implement his policy agenda. To head the project, Trump tapped Elon Musk, who first conceived of the idea.

But Musk’s tenure in the role looks like it will be short-lived. Just 100 days into Trump’s term, the world’s wealthiest man is already preparing to scale back his role in the administration. President Trump thanked Musk for his work on DOGE at an April 30 cabinet meeting announcing, “You're invited to stay as long as you want…At some point, I guess he wants to get back home to his cars and his family."

Even if (or when) Musk departs, though, it’s unlikely to end Trump’s mission to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. Long before Musk arrived on the scene, Trump had promised to cut programs that are not ideologically aligned with his administration, and there’s no reason to think he won’t continue to pursue that goal, with or without Musk.

However, Trump’s ability to enact meaningful cuts hinges on decisions from the judicial branch—specifically, whether it agrees that the president has the authority to unilaterally impound federal funds without consulting Congress—or, as history suggests is very unlikely, on Congress’s willingness to pass rescissions into law.

Deciphering DOGE—and What Could Come Next

Trump’s executive order establishing DOGE tasked the group with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” It didn’t take much to create DOGE: Trump simply renamed the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), an Obama-era organization tasked with software modernization, and slightly altered its mission.

Subsequent orders tasked DOGE with developing a plan to hire and promote federal workers guided by “American ideals, values, and interests” and review federal regulations to ensure they aligned with Trump’s agenda.

Since then, however, DOGE’s activities have expanded well beyond its initial scope.

Musk has fancied himself as an “implementer.” In his words, implementing Trump’s executive orders is “one of [DOGE’s] biggest functions.” And bureaucracy, he has claimed, prevents “the will of the people” from being implemented.

DOGE levers so far include dismantling and restructuring government agencies, halting agency work, and firing personnel, including when he shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and severely scaled back work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The Trump administration has its sights set next on winding down the Department of Education, and DOGE will almost certainly play a role there, too.

In addition to the responsibilities delineated in the two orders, Trump has said that Musk will be “finding billions of dollars—and it will be hundreds of billions—of dollars worth of fraud…waste, and abuse.”

Trump and Musk, in tandem with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought, appear to have an expansive definition of waste, fraud, and abuse that includes programs with which Trump merely has ideological disagreements. But that hasn’t stopped the administration from moving against them. Vought has gone so far as to argue that Trump should be able to rescind funding for these programs unilaterally via the presidential power of “impoundment.”

Deficit reduction appears to be a secondary goal in targeting some of these programs, though both Musk and Trump have floated lofty cost savings goals. Musk set a goal of cutting $1 trillion from the federal deficit (without specifying a timeframe).¹ Musk has since significantly revised down his goal to a savings of $150 billion in FY2026 due to a “reduction of waste and fraud.”

Yet, even with Musk’s lower (and more attainable) goal for cuts, DOGE’s record of cost-cutting efforts is rife with errors that inflate possible savings. They have been documented only by a government website published earlier this year and various X accounts. Earlier this April, The New York Times found that roughly 40 percent of the $150 billion in savings claimed by the DOGE website is itemized—and that there are still errors within the itemized savings.

Questions have also arisen about buy-in from the rest of the administration. Musk has faced resistance to his orders from cabinet secretaries and is now preparing to exit the administration. After a tense meeting between Musk and Trump’s cabinet on March 7, Trump clarified that only cabinet secretaries will be responsible for personnel decisions going forward.

Even after Musk’s departure, Vought, a key campaign and administration adviser, will remain. And likely so, too, will the Trump administration’s belief that he has the power to impound congressionally mandated funds.

Nixon’s Revenge

Long before the idea of DOGE first materialized, Trump pledged during his campaign to implement spending cuts unilaterally via “[restoring] executive branch impoundment authority”—the refusal of the executive branch to spend funding appropriated by Congress, either by deferral or rescindment.

This argument is not without precedent in American history. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson, presidents have regularly and informally impounded congressional funding, though it was often small amounts related to military or foreign policy matters—areas where the president has primary constitutional authority. Otherwise, they have tended to defer to congressional appropriators.

President Richard Nixon, however, interpreted this authority more broadly, calling impoundment an “absolutely clear…constitutional right” of the president. In 1972, his administration dubbed Congress the “credit card Congress.” Nixon pledged to veto any budget that exceeded $250 billion and moved to impound larger amounts of funding for domestic programs. He targeted liberal priorities, including funding for the Clean Water Act, subsidized housing programs, and farm aid. However, the courts often blocked his attempts to roll back funds.

To clarify the president’s role, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA) requiring presidents to seek congressional approval of proposed impoundments. The bill passed by vast bipartisan majorities a month before Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal.

The ICA distinguishes between the deliberate rescission of funds and funds going unspent due to cost savings or other efficiencies. Although DOGE or the OMB may justify reductions in the federal budget as savings, such a defense is legally dubious if the White House is clearly acting against the purpose of appropriations.

The Trump administration will likely make the case before the Supreme Court that ICA is unconstitutional and that the executive branch should be able unilaterally to impound funds.

Regardless, Congress has historically permitted the executive to exercise substantial discretion over appropriated funds, before and after the passage of the ICA. Executive agencies may allocate funding how they see fit (like paying salaries, rent, or contracts) or reprogram funds within an account to achieve a purpose “other than those contemplated at the time of appropriation.”

Moving money around, however, is a far cry from not spending it.

Moreover, Nixon’s repeated failure to convince the Supreme Court of the executive’s unilateral ability to impound funds suggests that Trump policies will not be an easy sell, despite the Court’s 6–3 conservative majority. In fact, there is at least one early bellwether for how the Supreme Court may rule on Trump’s second term spending policies. In a 5–4 ruling in March, the Court ordered the Trump administration to pay $2 billion in payments to USAID contractors, which were initially halted during a 90-day foreign aid funding freeze.

Musk: No Vote On the Hill

Barring a successful court challenge to the ICA’s prohibition on executive rescissions, the executive branch may not unilaterally cut spending simply because it does not like a program. Trump would thus need to work with Congress to cut spending.

What might this look like? GOP lawmakers have suggested working with the White House to pass a rescissions package of DOGE cuts, much as they tried (but failed) to pass during Trump’s first term. A rescissions package would only require a simple majority for passage in both chambers, creating an easier path to success for the cuts and without need for impoundment court battles. One opportunity to pass such a package would be as part of the reconciliation process, a time when appetite for spending cuts is high.

The White House has already requested an expedited vote on about $9.3 billion in proposed rescissions aimed at cutting funding for foreign aid (which makes up the vast majority of the package), NPR, and PBS. The $9.3 billion number represents only a fraction of the cuts they seek, however, and suggests they are aware of the political difficulty of passing bigger cuts.

While Congress may ultimately approve the White House’s scaled-back rescissions package, lawmakers’ incentive to codify larger-scale cuts is scant. Budget math means that meaningful spending cuts will necessarily be politically unpopular. Let’s say, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has previously discussed, the administration refuses to cut mandatory spending (e.g., Social Security and Medicare) and defense spending. Excluding obligatory annual interest payments on the federal debt, that leaves only about 15 percent of federal government outlays on the chopping block. However, to balance the budget in 10 years, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that what remains would need to be cut by 70 percent.

Yet even achieving goals far short of fully balancing the budget—including actions that DOGE has already taken—requires uncomfortable cuts. Key members of Congress began aggressively pushing back on Musk only weeks into Trump’s second term. Republicans’ top House appropriator, Tom Cole (OK-04), criticized the effort for lapses of competence, saying, “[Musk] doesn’t have a vote up here...you are certainly complicating the lives of individual members, and you might be making some mistakes and hurting some innocent individuals in the process.”

While not an advisable way to shore up the federal deficit, it is politically safer for Republican lawmakers creatively “score” the tax bill to count revenue such as executive-driven rescissions or tariffs that have not been codified by Congress. Doing so could render the bill more politically palatable to fiscal conservatives in Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he will count DOGE cuts as “pay-fors” as he searches for possible budget cuts to justify an extension of Trump’s deficit-expanding 2017 tax cuts.

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History suggests that Trump’s ambitious, executive-led effort to “end the flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars” will fall well short of its goals. Yes, the executive has discretion to move money around, and restructuring agencies may prove to be lasting as future administrations struggle to undo Trump’s moves.

But Trump has said his effort will save in the “hundreds of billions”—and roughly 100 days into his term he is already facing pushback from both his cabinet and members of his own party Congress over his proposed cuts. Whether or not Trump manages to convince the judiciary of his expanded power is likely to determine the success of his efforts to overhaul the executive branch.

Ava Kelley is the U.S. Director at Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm.

1. According to the executive order creating the organization, DOGE is supposed to sunset on July 4, 2026.