President Donald Trump’s second term was a whirlwind of activity that included actions at the border, taxes, stormy industry, Expand, multiple lawsuits, and regular articles. This Washington Examiner line,” 100 , Day , Report , Card”, may seem at six key issues and how they have come to define the early , days , of this leadership. The Department of Government Performance is the topic in Part 3.
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The public has criticized the Trump-Musk effort despite the transparency of a rolling social media feed of government waste and a monitor of saving taxpayers ‘ money.
Only 35 % of people approve of Musk’s handling of the Department of Government Efficiency, according to a recent poll conducted by the Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos, and 57 % disapprove. Musk’s approval rating is worse than Trump’s ( 34 % compared to Trump’s 39 % ).
Tesla, Musk’s electronic automobile company, has also been the goal of national theft attacks on vehicles and retailers that the Justice Department has deemed domestic violence.
Both critics and supporters of DOGE agree that the speed with which Trump and DOGE are transforming Washington is little short of extraordinary, even though it appears as though the exact cuts to the federal funds will come in much short of the billions when promised.
DOGE’S perception
Depending on who you ask, the grade DOGE depends. Republicans and president’s supporters receive largely positive reviews of the initiative, despite some criticizing Musk’s methods in the past. Democrats, however, widely claim that Trump, Musk, and DOGE are undermining the federal bureaucracy and endangering critical services for people across the country in the process.  ,
The Washington Examiner should know that Ryan Walker, executive vice president of Heritage Action for America, believes that Democrats ‘ claims about how DOGE is handling government employees and systems are exaggerated while also claiming that his efforts to save money are merited an” A+.”
” I come back to what is real, and less about what’s reported in the media, whether it be the way that the media was describing DOGE’s officials coming in sort of cloak and dagger in the middle of the night to these agencies — I don’t think that anything like that was actually occurring”, he explained. The executive order, which mandated that every agency employ a DOGE official on staff and carry out the DOGE initiatives, dictated what it was. I believe that this administration focused properly.
Trump signed an executive order on Day One of his second term to create DOGE, by renaming the U. S. Digital Service, a small organization founded by the Obama administration to aid agencies with tech services, to the United States DOGE Service. Other executive orders direct federal agencies to submit plans to reduce the number of federal employees, to collaborate with DOGE directly with personnel, and to review wasteful regulations.
Andrew Bates, a former White House deputy press secretary under former president Joe Biden and Wolfpack Strategies ‘ principal, gave DOGE an” F, for fraud” throughout Trump’s first 100 days.
They lied about protecting Social Security, and their employees were able to systematically search through Americans ‘ personal Social Security records. Also because they lied about savings, are cutting services that in total save taxpayers ‘ money, and because Trump’s tax giveaways for the rich will increase the deficit by trillions of dollars”, he said in a statement.
Polls on DOGE appear to indicate that voters are underwhelmed  by DOGE’s fiscal impact so far.  ,
The Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll published Monday, a majority of respondents said that government waste had either not changed or had , increased since January. And a poll from NPR, PBS, and Marist polling on Tuesday found that only 36 % of respondents had a favorable opinion of DOGE.
The DOGE cuts are made.
The overarching theme of addressing government waste or fraud is not a partisan one. The highest mark since Gallup began tracking the question in 1979 is estimated to be that 59 cents out of every dollar spent by the federal government represents some kind of waste. In addition, according to the Cato Institute’s 2025 Fiscal Policy National Survey, 98 % of U.S. respondents believe that some “waste, fraud, and/or abuse” is found in the federal  budget.
The , Trump , team predicted last year that DOGE would be able to shave$ 2 trillion a year, roughly one-third of the overall federal budget. The plan is “potentially the Manhattan Project of our time,” according to Musk, with Trump claiming that it would be” the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution.”
More than 100, 000 federal employees have been fired as a result of DOGE’s audits of federal departments and bodies, including the US Agency for International Development ( USAID ) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which have so far received termination notices from nearly 1,500 employees. Courts have since paused some of the DOGE-sanctioned cuts and firings as lawsuits have piled up.
Still, DOGE hasn’t provided quite the level of cost saving that supporters had predicted. Musk revised his projections for DOGE’s annual cuts by 50 % in February, and once more by 50 %, to roughly$ 150 billion a year.
Additionally, DOGE has had to publicly correct its reported cuts, which were included in a” Wall of Receipts” that the administration administered andnbsp on numerous occasions. That included outright rescinding some of its largest pots of savings, worth billions of dollars, on multiple occasions, and at other points failing to provide evidence of reported, ideologically driven waste identified by the department.
Despite its soft numbers, DOGE has been successful in assisting Trump in reshaping the federal government, according to Bobby Kogan, senior director for federal budget policy at the Center of American , Progress.
” If you say to people,” Hey, let’s cut waste, fraud and abuse,” they say,” That sounds great, and Elon kind of pretends everything is in that category, and then goes out for things he hates,” Kogan said before mentioning that Trump’s streamlining of the government might unintentionally lead to a loss in government revenue.
” You might save hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe a billion dollars in salaries and expenses, and then you might lose tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars in no longer stopping very rich people from cheating on their taxes”, Kogan continued. ” He wouldn’t be getting rid of the people whose job it is to catch fraud if he were really interested in efficiency and fraud,” he said.
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Alex Nowrasteh, the Cato Institute’s vice president for economic and social policy studios at the Cato Institute, agreed that DOGE’s cuts aren’t “going to move the bottom line”.
The government is too large, they say. He claimed that DOGE’s cuts are too small. ” We’re going to see some small changes here and there, the shuttering of a few small agencies here and there, like we already have, but in terms of showing up on the federal budget line, on their baseline, it’s a rounding error”.
C- in the DOGE final grade:
DOGE has so far had mixed results. It’s impossible to argue that the department , hasn’t had a noticeable impact on Trump’s quest to slim down the federal government. Democrats were sounded the alarm and the speed with which Musk and company jumped at the task caught a large portion of Washington, D.C., by surprise.
However, the infighting and errors that DOGE is making in the president’s own Cabinet can’t be ignored.
Musk’s “technologist” tactics have led him into direct conflict with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Transportation Secretary Scott Duffy on multiple occasions within the White House.  ,
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Furthermore, the public backlash to Musk’s MAGA makeover, specifically the negative impact his dabbling in politics is having on his technology empire, led the DOGE chief to announce last week that he’d be scaling back his federal work ahead of the expiration of his special government employee contract next month.
Musk, who had a reputation at Trump’s side, is no longer “physically” working from the White House and prefers to communicate with people mostly over the phone, according to chief of staff Susie Wiles.
He’ll be leaving his official capacity for Trump’s good graces, with Musk praising him at his 100-day rally in Michigan as a “great American.”
” He’s really helped us”, Trump said Tuesday. They have saved us$ 150 billion in DOGE from waste, fraud, and abuse. We want to say thanks to him. He’s an incredible guy”.
