Checking up on Doge 100 days in.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles.

On President Trump's 100th day back at the White House, we've been looking at the widespread economic effects.

A checkup now on the independent agency cutting programs and jobs at the federal government, not a department but called the Department of Government

Efficiency. Doge, as a reference to a kind of cryptocurrency, started as a joke, led by entrepreneur

Elon Musk, Doge claims to have saved the country $150 billion. Now, that is far short of what

Musk promised and analysts dispute even that number. Marketplaces Nova Suffo has more.

You may remember that moment during last year's election when Elon Musk was asked how much spending he thought he could cut from the federal government.

Well, I think we could do at least two trillion.

Yeah.

Trump's Department of Government Efficiency went from promising $2 trillion in savings to $1 trillion

to $150 billion.

Jessica Riedel is a senior fellow focused on budget, tax, and economic policy at the Manhattan

Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

And they really only verified about $5 billion in savings or less than one-tenth of 1% of federal spending.

Clearly, this is not successful by any means.

There are savings to be found.

Doche has been looking for waste, fraud, and abuse.

Experts say a good place to look is fraud. That's because we have actual figures, an estimate at least,

of how much money the federal government loses to fraud. Rebecca Shea came up with that estimate.

She's with the government accountability office,

the federal government's auditor. The government loses between $233 billion to $521 billion annually in direct financial fraud loss. Shea based her findings on patterns of previous fraud. The actual numbers

...