Special Government Employee Elon Musk says that he’s eliminated around $16.5 billion in U.S. federal spending through reductions in Executive-branch programs, workforces and more, although an NPR investigation pegs the real figure closer to just $2 billion. Musk’s actions have raised a number of overlapping controversies, with critics saying that he is deliberately targeting agencies that investigated Musk’s companies or which are simply disliked by the MAGA political camp with no regard to actual cost-effectiveness.

Many Republican voters indicated that they nonetheless support Musk’s actions and say that President Trump has a popular mandate to cut spending.

Watch the above video as Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman reviews the numbers and math behind DOGE’s alleged budget cuts and questions whether or not the effort will effectively save even a single penny.

The following is an excerpt from the above video:

But the most important misunderstanding here is that the process of budgeting, proposing a budget, approving a budget, obtaining the money, dispersing the money, these are yearlong cycles, and there is no mechanism to take 30 grand [$30,000] saved from a DEI program and give it to anything [else].

And I would even go further, even conceptually. We run a deficit right now in the United States. We have for a very long time. Bill Clinton had a surplus. Trump said he was going to get rid of the deficit, he never did, it actually got bigger. We run a deficit. If you take a budget on paper and cross off a couple things, that money doesn’t go anywhere. It just means the deficit is a tiny bit smaller. Which they claim to support, fine, right? Support the smaller deficits.

But because of that, it’s even more remote and fantastical as an idea that if Elon starts slashing DEI programs, anybody’s going to get any money. It would, at least theoretically, just cut the deficit by a little bit. So do they not understand this? I don’t know. I think some of them do. I think Trump and Elon Musk probably do understand that if they cut things on paper, they don’t end up in anybody’s pocket.

It might, if you genuinely do it, which these are recommendations, they don’t have to be accepted by the departments. That’s a whole other story. They might just cut the deficit. A tiny sliver, 30 grand in the deficit is nothing. I do think that there are lower-information Republicans who don’t get it. They don’t understand that the money doesn’t come back in that way, and they are cheerleading in, they actually think that Elon Musk is saving a lot of money. I would actually question right now whether the cost of the entire DOGE infrastructure is even saving a penny.