When the Biden administration enacted regulations last year slashing credit card late fees, government analysts calculated that the rule would save millions of customers an average of $220 per year.
Overall, they found that the new limit would save American households about $10 billion annually, mostly in avoided bank penalties.
But now that the Trump administration has abandoned the rule, the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative spearheaded by Elon Musk, claims the opposite — that the reversal will save Americans $9.5 billion.
DOGE promotes the purported savings on an “Agency Deregulation Leaderboard,” posted this month, where it claims that the Trump administration has saved Americans $29.4 billion as a result of reversing regulations in health insurance, bank fees, appliance efficiency standards and other areas.
But many of those regulatory reversals will actually pile more costs on to individual Americans in the form of higher bank fees, electric and water bills, and health insurance payments, according to experts and government analyses. The New York Times examined 10 of the largest claims on the leaderboard and concluded that several did not show evidence of savings to households.
The leaderboard, for instance, claims that the Energy Department’s proposals to reverse 16 efficiency standards on appliances like dishwashers and microwaves will save Americans a combined $4 billion. But government scientists’ own accounting says that appliance efficiency standards saved the average American household about $576 in 2024 on water and gas bills.
“This is just taking money from households and transferring it to banks and credit card companies, and to water and power utility companies,” said Steve Cicala, co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Project on the Economic Analysis of Regulation. “It means Americans will pay the costs in higher household bills.”
A White House spokesman declined to comment on the record about DOGE’s claims of deregulatory savings, but he emailed a statement from an unnamed senior administration official, who said that they “represent cost savings for regulated parties” — in other words, banks and other corporations. That position lines up with that of the American Bankers Association, which sued to overturn the credit card rule, contending that lower penalties cut into the costs lenders incur in recouping late payments.
But that accounting ignores the costs to American households and consumers, which, by law, government agencies must also demonstrate when justifying major rule changes. Multiple experts in regulatory policy said that many of the numbers DOGE and the Trump administration cite show little to no evidence of the comprehensive cost-benefit analysis to the broader economy, including individuals and households, that has historically undergirded agency regulations.
The DOGE website says that its savings estimates are drawn from notices of regulatory repeals published in the Federal Register, which typically provide cost-benefit analyses of regulatory actions. It adds that, “If a formal number is not available,” the numbers provided “are from internal agency calculations.”
But several experts, upon reviewing the DOGE website and the notices in the Federal Register that it links to, said many of DOGE’s numbers appeared to be plucked from nowhere.
“For many reasons, these numbers are not reliable,” said Susan Dudley, who is an expert in regulatory policy at George Washington University and served as the senior regulatory official in the George W. Bush administration. “It’s not at all transparent where these numbers come from.”
Mr. Musk, who indicated this week that he is scaling back his work in Washington, has hailed the DOGE leaderboard as an exemplar of the organization’s “maximum transparency,” claiming that it will allow Americans to clearly track the elimination of wasteful spending.
“I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization,” Mr. Musk said in the Oval Office this year.
An earlier Times analysis of DOGE’s related “Wall of Receipts,” — which shows purported savings to federal spending through staff reductions, lease cancellations and terminated contracts — found that the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.
The misleading claims come as the Trump administration has launched a push for mass deregulation of the American economy, with plans to rapidly undo hundreds of rules on clean air and water, food safety, labor protections, finance, health care, telecommunications and more.
Under a series of laws and executive orders, most major government regulations, including the reversals of them, must be justified by lengthy economic analyses detailing the net costs and benefits to the economy.
Mr. Trump has long had a fixation on appliance efficiency standards, complaining that the drip from modern shower fixtures leaves him “standing there five times longer” and gets in the way of coifing his “perfect” hair, and that LED lightbulbs make him look orange.
Asked to account for the claim that rolling back appliance standards would save Americans money, Andrea Woods, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, wrote in an email that “regulatory overreach” had raised costs for both consumers and businesses.
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“The cost savings from DOE’s unprecedented deregulatory actions represent projected savings to both consumers and manufacturers based on a variety of factors, including increased choice of lower cost appliances and lower compliance costs,” she wrote.
But government economists have for years calculated that such standards save Americans hundreds of dollars a year in lower water and power bills.
“One of the reasons that this is a fairly popular program is that it has been shown to save consumers money — a lot of money,” said Emily Hammond, a professor of regulatory law at George Washington University who served as the Energy Department’s deputy general counsel for regulation during the Biden administration.
“It causes consumers’ bills to go down over time,” Mx. Hammond, who uses they/them pronouns, continued.
Even appliance manufacturers say they don’t want the standards rolled back, and that doing so could raise costs for both consumers and manufacturers.
“By removing federal standards, we’re looking at states developing their own standards for these products, where we could be looking at a number of conflicting or state standards, and that’s where we have concerns,” said Jill Notini, a spokeswoman for the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers.
Among the proposed rollbacks that DOGE says is putting money back in Americans’ pockets is the repeal of a 2023 rule on energy efficiency standards for microwaves.
When it enacted the rule, the Energy Department estimated that it would have cost manufacturers like General Electric about $46 million a year to comply with its requirements — a cost that would likely have been passed on to consumers. But it found that those costs were outweighed by benefits of $620 million a year in savings to consumers.
Now, the Trump administration claims that reversing the rule would save Americans $64.9 million.
“I have no basis for understanding DOGE’s reported $64.9 million savings on this standard,” Mx. Hammond wrote in an email after reviewing the initial rule, the Trump administration’s proposal to undo it, and the DOGE savings claim. “It’s especially baffling considering there were real benefits to consumers here.”
DOGE claims that another proposed rollback, of water efficiency standards on commercial washers — the type used in laundromats and apartment buildings — would save Americans $1.9 billion. But the entire market for commercial washers is about $6.5 billion, pointed out Mr. Cicala, of the National Bureau of Economic Research. “There’s just no way that number makes any sense,” he said.
Ms. Dudley, the former regulatory chief in the George W. Bush administration, said she tasked one of her graduate students at the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center to spend days trying to decipher how DOGE came up with the $1.9 billion figure, but the student came up empty-handed.
“I don’t understand how anyone thinking this through could account for that claim of savings,” she said. “This was one of my concerns with DOGE from the beginning. They’re not doing their homework, and they’re not showing their work.”
David A. Fahrenthold contributed reporting.
Coral Davenport covers energy and environment policy, with a focus on climate change, for The Times.
Stacy Cowley is a business reporter who writes about a broad array of topics related to consumer finance, including student debt, the banking industry and small business.
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