The Trump administration reduced more than 10 percent of the federal workforce through its Department of Government Efficiency project, yet the government hasn't shrunk when measured by dollars spent rather than people employed, according to a new analysis published October 16, 2026, by Judge Glock, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writing in City Journal. The report examines the substantial gap between the dire predictions surrounding DOGE's cuts and the reality that emerged more than a year after the project shut down. Despite the workforce reduction representing one of the few genuinely libertarian accomplishments by the Trump administration, the initiative fell dramatically short of its stated spending goals.
DOGE's own accounting claimed it cut $170 billion, far below the $1 trillion to $2 trillion in federal spending reductions that Elon Musk repeatedly promised when he and Vivek Ramaswamy were appointed co-chairs in late 2024. Overall federal spending increased in each of Trump's first two years in office, and the budget deficit widened as well. The decline in federal workers was offset by an increase in federal contractors, with the new contractors overwhelmingly concentrated in the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, while the cuts mostly targeted other areas like the Department of Health and Human Services. The workforce reduction aside from a modest downsizing in the 1990s reversed decades of steady growth in the number of people employed by the federal government.
According to Glock, DOGE "had a massive impact on the federal civil service" despite having only a modest impact on spending. The report notes that most of the contractor increase "came from the buildup in homeland-security and defense contracting, including purchases such as surveillance aircraft and tanks, rather than substitutes for government workers." Glock writes that "DOGE achieved real contract savings, but these were more than offset by higher spending elsewhere, reflecting a shift in priorities rather than an overall reduction in contracting." The initiative proved that a president can slash bureaucratic jobs, particularly the bloated managerial and administrative types, without doing much damage to the government's core responsibilities.
The report explains that Musk and Ramaswamy presented workforce reduction as a natural consequence of cutting spending, not as the primary goal itself. The DOGE project looks less like a meaningful attempt at cutting government spending or employment levels and more like a way to purge parts of the federal workforce likely to obstruct Trump during his second term, according to the analysis. There's nothing inherently good about a government policy that cuts jobs in some areas just to create more room in the budget for poorly trained immigration enforcement agents and defense contractors, which may even represent a negative outcome for liberty. The report notes that contractors are less likely to hold those jobs for life compared to government employees, offering some libertarian advantages.
The report concludes that DOGE worked only if graded on a pretty dramatic curve. The project demonstrated that eliminating bureaucratic positions won't cause government to crash, a lesson future administrations should remember. But as long as Trump's larger commitment is to extending his power rather than rolling back power itself, the government won't stop growing. Maybe someday, a president will try applying the same logic to government spending too.