On March 13, 2025, an X user posted a video (archived) that purportedly depicted former U.S. President Barack Obama announcing an initiative to cut government spending. "2011. Obama announces a DOGE department and puts Joe Biden in charge of it!" The post claimed.
One user asked Grok — X's AI chatbot — whether the video was real, and Grok determined it was "likely fake" based on the fact that it could find no record of Obama announcing a Department of Government Efficiency in 2011 and 2011 archives from the White House showed no such event. Grok also pointed out that Trump established DOGE in 2025.
However, the video is real. It is currently available to watch in the official archives of the Obama White House, which posted it on YouTube on June 12, 2011.
Although the video is real — not AI-generated or altered — and Obama did announce a campaign to cut government waste in 2011, he did not establish DOGE. The campaign he announced was also not a department; it was an initiative headed by former President Joe Biden, who was then Obama's vice president.
An executive order accompanied the announcement, titled "Delivering an Efficient, Effective, and Accountable Government" and issued the day after Obama's administration posted the above video.
In the video, Obama explained:
Everyone knows that getting rid of the deficit will require some tough decisions. And that includes cutting back on billions of dollars in programs that a lot of people care about. But what should be easy is getting rid of the pointless waste and stupid spending that doesn't benefit anybody. Waste we should be getting rid of even if we didn't have a deficit.
He then went on to identify areas the federal government could cut back on spending, and claimed they had already identified about $33 billion in savings just for one year.
Toward the end of the video, Obama introduced Biden as the head of the campaign:
We need to go after every dime. We need to make government work for you. That's why, starting today, I've asked the vice president to lead a renewed effort to hunt down misspent tax dollars in every agency and department of this government. We're calling it the "Campaign to Cut Waste," and I know Joe's the right man to lead it, because nobody messes with Joe.
Biden then spoke, saying that "the American people are entitled to transparency."
In sum, the video is authentic. However, in it Obama announced a campaign to cut government spending, not DOGE itself. It was unclear how similar the efforts by DOGE and by Obama's "Campaign to Cut Waste" were.