Unfinished Business: The budget cuts Musk couldn't complete and what's next for DOGE

Though significant, the $175 billion is a far cry from the original $2 trillion-nearly a third of the federal government's total spending-that Musk originally set out to cut.

So, what went wrong?

Richard Stern, an economics policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital that DOGE "overestimated what legal flexibility they would have, and the agencies would have, to actually make good on that."

From the start, DOGE was hit with not only a tsunami of negative press and outraged Democratic lawmakers, but also a series of lawsuits, which bogged it down in protracted legal battles.

This, coupled with the reality of most of the major end cuts requiring congressional approval to carry out, relegated DOGE's impact on cutting around the edges of the big programs and agencies it likely would have liked to eliminate entirely.

Stern asserted that "at the end of the day, they were just a little overzealous about how much legal authority they would ultimately have to be able to make this many cuts themselves," 

Where Stern believes DOGE can have the greatest impact is on focusing on the information-gathering and whistleblower aspects of its mission.

"You can kind of break down DOGE into two very large buckets," he posited. "The first large bucket, which is the one that's mostly been not done, is actually making grand spending cuts themselves directly. I think the second one was identifying what cuts could be made."

Though less flashy, Stern believes this is where DOGE, going forward, can have its greatest impact.  

"There's a lot of think tanks, including Heritage, that have put together lists for a very long time as to policies that we don't think are good, where you could cut spending. But I think what no one has a window into is the really deep mechanics of how a lot of these programs work. And so, because of that, it's actually been very hard in a really robust fashion to even know what programs you could cut spending from or how you would do it or what the ramifications would be," he explained.

"So, DOGE, by being in the administration, has been in and continues to be in a position to actually make that public, to actually put a spotlight on that in a way that really almost nobody else was in a position to do," Stern went on. "That can feed rescission bills and congressional cuts down the road. But some admin needed to actually do that. And DOGE is finally doing that."