Trump’s second term is already the most-failed Presidential term in U.S. history.

28 December 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The New York Times Sunday top-right front page lead story on 28 December 2025 — headlined “For DOGE, Big Disruption Returned Meager Savings: Largest Claims Were Wrong and Real Cuts Were Small, Times Analysis Finds”, had been posted online on December 23rd under the headline “How Did DOGE Disrupt So Much While Saving So Little? The group’s biggest claims were largely incorrect, a New York Times analysis found. And its many smaller cuts added up to few savings.”

It opened:

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it made more than 29,000 cuts to the federal government — slashing billion-dollar contracts, canceling thousands of grants and pushing out civil servants.

But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

How is that possible?

One big reason, according to a New York Times analysis: Many of the largest savings that DOGE claimed turned out to be wrong. And while the group did make thousands of smaller cuts, jolting foreign aid recipients, American small businesses and local service providers, those amounted to little in the scale of the federal budget.

In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect.

Nowhere in this 3,000-word article did any such phrase as “total savings” nor even “small savings” appear (were there any REAL net savings from DOGE?); and, so, its allegations such as that “Most DOGE savings claims were small” conveyed NOTHING about WHETHER DOGE produced any net SAVINGS in Governmental expenditures — which is the core concern that intelligent readers would have about DOGE.

Furthermore: the article carefully avoided blaming Trump, and it always blamed Musk, for the deceits and the failures that it pointed out: it never referred to Trump except to say that Musk worked for the Trump Administration, and it twice stated the phrase, “Some of DOGE’s employees are still working in the Trump administration.” Perhaps this targeting of Musk, instead of his boss, is done because the owner of the New York Times, Arthur Gregg Sullzberger, fears Trump; but, in any case, his company is a Democratic Party propaganda-medium, not a Republican Party one; and, therefore, one can reasonably expect it to be reporting news that Democratic Party billionaires, whose corporations advertise heavily in his newspaper, want to be published.

So, I Googled (pardon the typo in it)

“Did DOGE, in the end, produce savings, or instead losses, to te U.S. government, in total?”

and here was Google’s “AI Overview” that resulted:

AI Overview

Independent analyses overwhelmingly indicate that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives will likely result in net losses for the U.S. government in total, despite the agency’s claims of significant savings. While DOGE claimed hundreds of billions in savings, these figures have been widely debunked as vastly overstated by nonpartisan experts and news organizations. 

DOGE’s Claimed Savings vs. Independent Analyses

• DOGE Claims: The official DOGE website has claimed up to $214 billion in total savings through contract/grant cancellations, workforce reductions, and other changes.
• Independent Findings: Multiple analyses by entities like the Cato Institute, the Partnership for Public Service, the New York Times, Politico, and CBS News found the actual, verifiable savings to be only a small fraction of what was claimed (potentially as low as $5 billion in actual money freed up for other agency uses). 

Factors Contributing to Net Losses

The discrepancy between claimed savings and actual impact is attributed to several factors:

• Flawed Accounting: DOGE calculated savings based on the maximum potential value (ceiling) of contracts rather than the amount the government was actually committed to spending (obligations), an accounting practice widely criticized by procurement experts.
• Implementation Costs: Independent analyses estimate the direct and indirect costs of DOGE’s actions, including severance payments for laid-off workers, legal fees from lawsuits, lost productivity due to low morale and chaos, and the costs of rehiring essential staff, could amount to approximately $135 billion.
• Loss of Revenue: Staffing cuts at revenue-generating agencies like the IRS and the Department of Justice Tax Division are projected to lead to hundreds of billions in lost tax revenue over the next decade due to reduced enforcement and compliance.
• Increased Overall Spending: Despite the cuts to discretionary programs, total government spending has actually increased due to rising mandatory expenditures in areas like Social Security and Medicare, which DOGE did not target. 

In summary, when accounting for the inflated claims, the significant costs of implementation, and potential long-term revenue losses, the consensus among independent experts is that the DOGE initiative will result in a substantial net loss for the U.S. government. 

Google, since the billionaires who control it use it as a propaganda-medium, and since Google was created by the CIA, fails in its “AI Overview”s to link to its sources for each one of its allegations, can, in its “AI Overview”s, reasonably be used not necessarily as conveying only truths, but is, itself, propagandistic instead of authentically journalistic, I searched farther, to find specific sources on this question; and here is what I found that’s of particular relevancy:

On 25 April 2025, he BBC headlined “How much has Elon Musk’s Doge cut from US government spending?” and reported that

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – set up [BY Trump — BBC like NYT fears him] to cut US government spending – claims to have saved, on average, more than $10bn a week since President Trump entered office.

“We’re talking about almost $200bn and rising fast,” Trump told the BBC when talking about Mr Musk’s cost-cutting drive on 23 April.

Doge’s website says it is focusing on cancelling contracts, grants and leases put in place by previous administrations, as well as tackling fraud and reducing the government workforce.

BBC Verify has looked at the agency’s biggest claimed savings, examining the figures and speaking to experts.

Our analysis found that behind some of the large numbers, there is a lack of evidence to back them up. … Our analysis found only about half of these itemised savings had a link to a document or other form of evidence. …

What’s the evidence behind the biggest saving?

BBC Verify examined the four largest savings listed on the Doge website which had receipts attached.

The department claims these add up to $8.3bn, but after examining the evidence provided and speaking to people familiar with federal contracts, this figure appears to be overstated.

For three of the savings, Doge links to documents on the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS). This is a database which records contracts given out by the US government.

The documents show a contract’s start and end date, the maximum amount the government has agreed to spend, and how much of that has been spent.

David Drabkin, a federal contracts expert who helped develop the FPDS database, said the maximum figure listed should be treated with caution. …

Doge’s largest listed individual saving is $2.9bn.

It comes from cancelling a contract – which started in 2023 under President Biden – for a facility in Texas to house up to 3,000 unaccompanied migrant children.

Doge appears to have taken the “total contract value” until 2028 – the end date listed – and subtracted the amount spent so far to get the $2.9bn figure.

But the contract was reviewed annually, meaning renewing it until 2028 was not guaranteed.

A source familiar with this contract – who spoke on condition of anonymity – told BBC Verify that Doge’s figure is “based on speculative, never-used figures” and that the actual spending depended on how many children were placed at the facility and the services they required.

“In truth, the government never incurred those costs and could never reach that ceiling amount. The real, documentable savings from early termination were approximately $153 million”, they estimated. …

While Doge may have cut a significant amount of government spending, the lack of evidence provided for its biggest claimed savings makes it impossible to independently confirm exactly how much.

As-of today, the Trump Administration’s website on this alleges “Estimated Savings: $214B” and says that this comes from “Combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

On 23 June 2025, the Democratic Party billionaires funded Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington headlined “DOGE’s big illusion: the heavy costs of the Trump administration’s so-called efficiency” and listed, and documented, numerous ways in which DOGE’s cuts are virtually certain to increase the future federal deficits, such as by slashing IRS enforcement, and by increasing diseases and pandemics and medical expenses vastly more than the slashed or eliminated federal programs will save the federal Government.

Perhaps the best news-report about this matter, however, was on CBS News before Trump essentially allowed his friend, and the biggest donor to Israel’s army, Larry Ellison, to buy for Larry’s son David (likewise an intense Zionist), CBS; headlining, on 28 April 2025, “DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says.” It stated:

The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP) [part of Our Public Service dot Org, representing U.S. Government employees, but this wasn’t mentioned by CBS], a nonpartisan [hardly] nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce. 

PSP’s estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE’s actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn’t include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE’s actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS. 

DOGE has sought to slash federal spending by urging government workers to accept a deferred resignation plan, which allowed many employees to retain full pay and benefits through September without working. Another 24,000 government employees who were fired as part of the reform effort have since been rehired after a court ruling. 

Other agencies also have rehired some workers after mistakenly firing them, such as bird flu experts who were dismissed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Federal workers have also had to take on tasks such as documenting their weekly accomplishments, which has lowered productivity, Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, told CBS MoneyWatch.

“We haven’t seen much focus on the waste [DOGE] is creating,” Stier told CBS MoneyWatch about his group’s decision to analyze the costs of DOGE’s cuts. “This is an effort that was created to address waste, but we were seeing the opposite.”

“Ultimately it’s the public that will end up paying for this,” he added, noting that he expects the taxpayers costs to grow after other DOGE cuts take effect.

The White House took issue with the analysis. 

“The continued attempts to sow doubt in the massive accomplishments of this never-before-seen effort to make government more efficient speaks more about the illegitimacy of those peddling these falsehoods than good work of DOGE,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields said. “The American public are in lockstep with the president’s mission and will not be swayed by more lies coming from the legacy media.”

However, even that is far from being anything like the final word on this, because DOGE lied so much about the “savings.” It’s virtually certain that the alleged $160B in cuts will turn out to have been far less than that; and, so, whether the net result of DOGE will be increased instead of decreased federal deficits, isn’t yet clear.

As regards the OurPublicService.org website, it lists numerous analyses (by Democratic Party billionaires-controlled news-media) of individual budget cuts, headlined such as “Federal funding cuts inhibit local measles responses as case counts rise” and “Food quality testing suspended due to staff cuts at Food and Drug Administration” and “Staff responsible for enforcing penalties on tobacco sales to minors laid off, then asked to come back as temporary volunteers” and “Major breakthroughs in cancer treatments delayed by layoffs at the National Institutes for Health” and “Unclear DOGE orders for Federal Emergency Management Agency aid blocked disaster relief funds for victims in North Carolina, Florida, Hawaii” and “IRS officials expect a 10% drop in tax revenue partially due to turmoil caused by the Department of Government Efficiency” and “Food banks across the country are scrambling after funding for $500 million in food shipments was frozen” and “Firings at weather agencies threaten the reliability of routine and extreme weather forecasting” and “Preventing another financial crisis gets harder due to cuts of regulatory staff” and “Justice Department cancels grants supporting crime victims, violence prevention, addiction services” and “Firefighting capacity reduced by staff cuts at the National Forest Service, sparking fears ahead of wildfire season” and “Deep staff cuts halt research on black lung in coal miners and cancer deaths of firefighters” and “State and local health departments lose access to data tracking the spread of viral hepatitis as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention labs shut down” and “AmeriCorps discharges thousands of volunteers in program that supports domestic disaster recovery” and “National Institutes of Health funding and staffing cuts threaten American biotech industry and innovation of lifesaving medical tools.”

Back on 25 February 2025, I had headlined “It’s time to fire President Trump.”, and opened:

America has had rotten Presidents since 2000, but Trump has now gone too far:

“Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE”

WASHINGTON (AP), 25 February 2025

More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.” …

There is huge waste in the federal Government, and most of it goes to the 53% of the annually authorized federal budget that goes to the military, including to the Defense Department but also including to Veterans Affairs, the Intelligence Community, Energy Department, and even the Treasury Department, and others — but the ONLY federal Department that has never been audited is the Defense Department, which alone constitutes around $900 billion per year (all of the OTHER military expenditures, amounting to over $600 billion per year from other Departments, ARE audited) out of the $1.5 trillion per year that goes to the military. And, of that roughly 53%, half, or roughly 26%, of annually appropriated federal funds go to the U.S. firms that sell weapons to the U.S. Government (here are the top ten of those) — and those 26% are among the Defense Department’s 53% — all of which is unaudited money!

This President is using the “cut waste, fraud, and abuse” motto so as to go after the REST (the remaining 47%) of the federal budget, and perhaps EVEN to cut the MANDATORY (not annually congressionally appropriated) federal expenditures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

An important point to be made here is that both #s 4&5, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid, are “discretionary federal spending” (i.e., controlled by the annual appropriations that get voted into law each year), whereas #s 1&2 (Social Security and Medicare) are “mandatory federal spending” (i.e., NOT controlled by Congress and the President). So, Trump and the Republicans are going after the poor because they CAN; they can’t (at least as-of YET) reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, by now, it is crystal clear that Trump’s Presidency will be an enormous boon to America’s billionaires, and an enormous bane to the nation’s poor. The aristocratic ideology has always been: to get rid of poverty, we must get rid of the poor — work them so hard they will go away (let them seek ‘refugee’ status SOMEWHERE ELSE).

This is obviously a dictatorship, with little if any (other than of only the most formalistic type) of actual democratic legitimacy. It heads what it and its colonies (‘allies’) call “the free world,” but it is itself ripe for a Second American Revolution — not only because of the emergency-situation regarding the current President, but ALSO because clearly the U.S. Government NO LONGER IS ANY REAL DEMOCRACY AT ALL — the scientific studies have shown that at least ever since 1980, what the U.S. Government does has NO correlation with what its public want but VERY HIGH correlation with what its billionaires want. Corruption has killed whatever democracy America had.

Right now, both the prior Biden Administration and the new Trump Administration are pressuring their colonies (‘allies’) to increase their military expenditures, in order to keep this soaring wealth for their billionaires going. (Six of the ten biggest armaments-manufacturers in the entire world are American.) Continuation of the current U.S.-backed wars and perhaps starting some new ones, will be needed in order to make this happen (especially because no nation is trying to conquer America but America craves to conquer every nation it doesn’t already control — so, virtually all of this money is waste); and, therefore, as the U.S. Government has been doing ever since 1945 and especially after 1991 (when the Soviet Union ended), what’s needed is creating international chaos, civil wars, and failed states. But this also means that existing wars must be continued as long as possible. Furthermore, on 8 January 2025, the President-elect Donald Trump indicated that if his previously announced intention for the U.S. to buy Greenland, and the Panama Canal, gets rejected in the negotiations, then he will seize them militarily, because “We need them for economic security.” For his billionaires — NOT for the American public. …

The reason why I say that Trump’s second term is already the most-failed Presidential term in U.S. history is that his federal budget priorities — to increase ‘Defense’ and ‘Homeland Security’ spending and to reduce the spending in all other federal Departments — are exactly the opposite of the American public’s governmental budgetary priorities (as were reported by the AP/NORC poll on 14 April 2025); and, consequently, the ONLY way that Trump can win, and keep himself in office, is by constantly lying to the public — such as by his saying “I’ll cut waste, fraud, and abuse.” So, it is, by now, manifestly clear that he came into office with lies as his public promises, and that he never even had any real intention of fulfilling on them but ONLY on fulfilling on the promises that he had made privately and in secret to his political megadonors and friends. This is the most failed Presidential term in American history because it is the most corrupt Presidential term in American history. It is what one would expect from such a stupid psychopath. Basically, he’s got nothing else going for him except his megadonors and his (their) fools — and he knows it. He is even more corrupt than President Biden was.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.