WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Elon Musk promised taxpayers big savings, maybe even a “DOGE dividend” check in their mailboxes, when the Department of Government Efficiency was let loose on the federal government. Now, as he prepares to step back from his presidential assignment to cut bureaucratic fat, Musk has said without providing details that DOGE is likely to save taxpayers only $150 billion.

That is about 15% of the $1 trillion he pledged to save, less than 8% of the $2 trillion in savings he had originally promised and a fraction of the $7 trillion the federal government spent in fiscal 2024.

The errors and obfuscations underlying DOGE’s claims of savings are well documented. Less known are the costs Musk incurred by taking what Trump called a “hatchet” to government and the resulting firings, agency lockouts and building seizures that mostly wound up in court.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that studies the federal workforce, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, rehirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year.

At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000.

Neither of these estimates includes the cost to taxpayers of defending DOGE’s moves in court. Of about 200 lawsuits and appeals related to Trump’s agenda, at least 30 implicate the department.

“Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”

Stier and other experts on the federal workforce said it did not have to be this way. Federal law and previous government shutdowns offered Musk a legal playbook for reducing the federal workforce, a goal that most Americans support. But Musk chose similar lightning-speed, blunt-force methods he used to drastically cut Twitter’s workforce after he acquired the company in 2022.

“The law is clear,” said Jeri Buchholz, who over three decades in public service handled hiring and firing at seven federal agencies, including NASA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. “They can do all the things they are currently doing, but they can’t do them the way they’re doing them. They can either start over and do it right, or they can be in court for forever.”

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, defended DOGE’s cuts and called the $150 billion that the administration had saved “monumental and historic.”

“It’s important to realize that doing nothing has a cost, too, and these so-called experts and groups are conveniently absent when looking at the costs of doing nothing,” he said. At the IRS, “every single cut has been done to make the government more efficient and not to be a burden to the American people or cut any critical resources or programs they rely on.”

Based on the latest available information, the DOGE cuts have targeted at least 12% of the 2.4 million civilian employees in the federal workforce. But a wide gap exists between DOGE’s planned cuts and the number of people who actually leave.

Buyouts and firings initially trimmed about 100,000 workers — thousands fewer people than those who typically retire in a year, according to Office of Personnel Management figures.

At least one-quarter of those 100,000 employees have been rehired at full pay, most after judges ruled that their firings were illegal and some after Musk said DOGE had “accidentally” sacked workers safeguarding nuclear weapons, ensuring aviation safety and combating bird flu and Ebola.

When judges ordered that the workers be hired back, the government put them on paid leave, meaning taxpayers would foot the cost of rehiring them, plus the salaries they collected while staying home.

Layoffs of 10,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services wiped out the entire team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention combating HIV among mothers and children around the world.

Musk’s methods have cast a pall over the latest effort by an American president to trim the federal bureaucracy. In congressional town halls and interviews, even Trump voters have said they are tired of Musk’s bloodletting. In a poll released last month, 58% of those surveyed said they disapproved of how Musk was handling DOGE’s work, and 60% disapproved of Musk.

In mid-February, the Office of Personnel Management targeted all 220,000 of the federal government’s probationary employees, who are new or newly promoted professionals serving a one- to two-year trial period with fewer worker protections. They included a cadre of younger, tech-savvy professionals hired at great expense to replace a wave of baby boomer retirees. Hiring and training them cost about $10,000 for a clerical worker to more than $1 million for an elite spy.

“This is the equivalent of a Major League Baseball franchise firing all of their minor league players,” said Kevin Carroll, a former CIA officer and lawyer who represents some of the fired workers. “It’s a huge amount of money being deliberately wasted.”

The CIA confirmed in March that some officers hired in the past two years had been summoned to a location away from the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and asked to surrender their credentials to security personnel. About 80 officers were let go.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said it cost $400,000 to get a CIA recruit through the security clearance process and specialized training.

The theatrics around the firings, including an appearance by Musk at a conservative political convention waving a chain saw, suggest that they are also about inflicting pain on a bureaucracy that Trump perceives as a subversive “deep state.”

That was a goal for federal employees set by Russell Vought, who now leads the Office of Management and Budget. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” he told a conservative gathering in 2023.

Buchholz and Stier emphasize that the government is indeed inefficient and needs reform. But by “gleefully torturing people,” Buchholz said, DOGE has hurt the government’s ability to recruit young, talented workers to lead a modernization.