DOGE continues to cut back: List of lease cancellations updated with major impact on New York
As Elon Musk prepares to pare down his role at the DOGE, there are new developments in the body’s efforts to “get the national house in order”.
Cuts to spending on federal leases in New York have risen in recent weeks, despite the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) listing fewer sites for termination.
That’s according to analysis provided by USA TODAY Network’s Emily Barnes, who has been running a regular watch of the DOGE’s ’wall of receipts’.
DOGE chief walks back on $2tn initial claims
Headed up by Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, the DOGE has been tasked with slashing federal spending in the U.S. since January, when President Donald Trump began his second stint in the White House.
Musk initially pledged to oversee savings of $2 trillion, but has since revised that figure down significantly. “Unless we’re stopped, we will get to a trillion dollars of savings,” the 53-year-old told Fox Business in early March.
How much does DOGE say it’s saving in New York?
On its website, DOGE is currently claiming overall savings of $160 billion across the U.S., of which $311 million is attributed to federal lease cancellations.
In New York, says Barnes, the number of lease terminations listed on DOGE’s website has dropped from 23 in late March, to 22 as of this week. But during this period, the claimed savings amount has increased past the $6.5 million mark.
Check out the full list of New York federal lease terminations listed by DOGE, and their status, in Barnes’ report.
Musk stepping back from DOGE
Although DOGE is well short of Musk’s 13-figure target, the South Africa-born billionaire says he’s preparing to pare down his role at the body (which, as is noted by the BBC’s Jennifer Clarke, does not qualify as an official governmental department as this requires an act of Congress).
In a Tesla earnings call on Tuesday, Musk said his “time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly” from May, and that he plans to “spend a day or two per week” on the body’s efforts to “get the national house in order”.
“I’ll have to continue doing it for, I think, probably the remainder of the president’s term,” he said, “just to make sure that the waste and fraud that we stop does not come roaring back - which it will do if it has the chance.”
In his time at the DOGE helm, Musk has notably targeted the Social Security Administration (SSA), describing entitlement programs as “the big one to eliminate” and claiming that Social Security benefits are beset by widespread fraud - an assertion not backed up by official statistics.
It was announced in February that the SSA’s workforce is to be reduced by 7,000, while the DOGE website lists numerous lease terminations on Social Security offices nationwide.
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