Federal agencies are rehiring workers and spending more after DOGE's push to cut

toggle caption J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency effort has failed to deliver on its outsized promises to cut costs and increase efficiency, NPR's latest analysis of federal data finds.

Agencies ordered to drastically slash their workforces over the last eight months are now hiring back hundreds of workers, as they struggle to perform basic operations or carry out some of President Trump's top policy priorities.

Despite DOGE's promise that canceling contracts and terminating leases would help reverse the trend of the government spending more money than it brings in, the most recent Treasury data shows an increase in expenditures by hundreds of billions of dollars more than the year before. The bulk of that spending goes to debt service, national defense, and entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

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When it first launched this year , NPR found DOGE's savings and efficiency tracker to be riddled with factual errors, overstatements and unverifiable claims. As a new fiscal year begins, that remains true today.

White House assistant press secretary Liz Huston said in a statement to NPR that President Trump has been "given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government, and he is delivering on that commitment."

"President Trump's policies, moreover, have made the federal government more efficiently work for the American people again — deporting illegal alien criminals, predicting natural disasters, reducing health outbreaks, and restoring law and order in our cities," Huston added.

The White House declined to answer NPR's questions about rehiring workers, increasing federal