CNN
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President Donald Trump made numerous false claims in his Tuesday speech to a joint session of Congress. The falsehoods spanned a variety of topics, including the Department of Government Efficiency, inflation and immigration.
Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s statements:
DOGE savings: Trump claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk, has “found hundreds of billions of dollars” in fraud.
This figure, which is uncorroborated, needs context.
As of the day of Trump’s address to Congress, DOGE claimed on its website that its work has saved an estimated $105 billion for taxpayers.
But it hasn’t provided evidence to corroborate a figure that high.
DOGE listed about 2,300 contracts it claimed to have canceled across the federal government for a total claimed savings of about $8.9 billion. It also listed nearly 3,500 grants it claimed to have canceled for a total claimed savings of about $10.3 billion, but it provided no links or documentation for those cuts. And it listed about $660 million in savings from canceled government leases.
DOGE’s public tally has been marred with errors, and it has been repeatedly changed in recent weeks to remove some contracts identified as flawed by CNN and other media outlets — including a previous claim that it had saved $8 billion by canceling a contract that was actually worth a maximum of $8 million. Its website’s so-called wall of receipts has included contracts that were canceled during previous presidential administrations.
Musk and other Trump allies have claimed DOGE’s work is aimed at targeting waste, fraud and abuse. But DOGE has not released evidence that the contracts it has canceled were fraudulent. And at least some of the cuts have been reversed amid criticism.
From CNN’s Casey Tolan
DOGE and transgender mice: Trump falsely claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency identified government spending of “$8 million for making mice transgender.”
Between the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, the National Institutes of Health awarded a total of $477,121 to three projects that involved administering feminizing hormone therapy to monkeys to understand how it may affect their immune system and make them more susceptible to HIV. Feminizing hormone therapy is a gender-affirming treatment used to block the effects of the male hormone testosterone and promote feminine characteristics among transgender women.
Transgender women are nearly 50 times more likely to be infected with HIV than other adults, according to one study from 2013 across 15 countries, including the US. It’s not clear where the $8 million figure came from or why Trump referenced studies in mice instead of monkeys.
From CNN’s Deidre McPhillips
Trump’s tariffs: The president’s claim Tuesday night that the US “will take in trillions and trillions of dollars” — a claim he has made repeatedly about his plan to slap tariffs on imports from various countries, which he already started to do — needs context. Tariffs are paid by US importers, not foreign exporters, and it’s easy to find specific examples of companies that passed along the cost of the tariffs to US consumers.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Tami Luhby
Small-business optimism: Trump said that “small-business optimism saw its single-largest one-month gain ever recorded — a 41-point jump.”
This claim needs context. If Trump was referring to the commonly cited NFIB Small Business Optimism Index (his spokespeople didn’t respond to a previous CNN request to clarify), his claim about a 41-point increase appears to be a reference to one component — the percentage of small-business owners expecting the economy to improve. That measure did soar a net 41 percentage points from pre-election October to post-election November.
And Trump didn’t mention that the total index then declined in January, to a level that is still high but lower than it was under Trump in September 2020 and October 2020 – less than five years ago.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Egg prices: Trump on Tuesday made the misleading claim that former President Joe Biden “let the price of eggs get out of control.”
The avian flu has caused egg prices to rise because the United States Department of Agriculture requires the culling of entire flocks to stop the spread if the virus is detected. It’s a practice that occurred during the Biden administration, but also one that is continuing under Trump as the virus continues to infect flocks nationwide.
When Biden took office, the average price of a carton of a dozen grade A eggs across US cities was $1.47, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. By January 2023, as avian flu spread to flocks nationwide, a dozen eggs rose to $4.82 on average, a 228% increase. By the time Biden left office in January, a carton of eggs cost $4.95 on average, a 2.7% increase from a year prior. Due to short supply, egg prices are projected to increase by 41.1% this year, according to the USDA’s food outlook as of February 25.
From CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, Elisabeth Buchwald and Vanessa Yurkevich
Trump and “the Green New Scam”: Trump claimed that he terminated the “Green New Scam.”
This claim is inaccurate in various ways. Former President Joe Biden didn’t pass the original “Green New Deal,” a nonbinding resolution introduced by progressive congressional Democrats in 2019 that was never turned into law. Trump hasn’t yet terminated the major environmental law Biden did pass, which is what Trump might be referring to as “the Green New Scam.” Trump has previously claimed the policy cost $9 trillion.
Biden signed a law in 2022 known as the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, containing $430 billion in climate and clean energy spending and tax credits. Independent estimates later raised the cost of that law to over $1 trillion by 2032, but the IRA actually saved the government $240 billion because of its increased tax enforcement and prescription drug savings, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. And importantly, the IRA’s tax credits spurred companies to build new factories and solar and wind farms in the US, creating jobs with it.
Trump and congressional Republicans haven’t killed the law, although they are aiming to take parts of it out later this year. Trump has effectively killed other climate policies Biden imposed through executive order, but it will take an act of Congress to reverse the former president’s signature climate bill.
From CNN’s Ella Nilsen
Paris climate agreement: Trump touted withdrawing a second time from the Paris climate agreement, claiming in his speech to Congress that the landmark climate deal was costing the US “trillions of dollars that other countries were not paying.”
This claim is inaccurate. President Joe Biden pledged to pay $11.4 billion per year toward international climate financing upon taking office. However, the US contribution to a global finance goal ended up being far lower because Congress appropriated far less money than Biden’s goal. Biden’s State Department announced it had allocated $5.8 billion to international climate finance by 2022. US climate finance contributions have never reached trillions of dollars.
The US wasn’t the only laggard on its climate finance commitments; other nations have struggled to meet a collective $100 billion climate financing goal meant to help countries vulnerable to sea level rise and droughts. China, the UK and the EU have all contributed. That goal was tripled to $300 billion annually by 2035 at the most recent United Nations Climate Conference.
From CNN’s Ella Nilsen
Trump on border crossings and migrants
Illegal border crossings: Trump claimed that, since taking office again, he has already achieved the lowest number of illegal border crossings “ever recorded.” That’s false.
He could have accurately said the number of Border Patrol apprehensions at the southern border in February – the first full month of his second term – is the lowest in many decades, at least if it’s true that the number was 8,326, as he claimed on social media before the speech. But official federal statistics show there were fewer Border Patrol encounters with migrants at the southwest border in some of the months of the early 1960s.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Devan Cole
Migrants coming from mental institutions: Trump repeated his familiar claim Tuesday night about how other countries have supposedly released people from their “mental institutions and insane asylums” into the US as migrants. There is no evidence for the president’s claim, which Trump’s own presidential campaign was unable to corroborate. (The campaign was unable to provide any evidence even for his narrower claim that South American countries in particular were emptying their mental health facilities to somehow dump patients upon the US.)
Trump has sometimes tried to support his claim by making another claim that the global prison population is down. But that’s wrong, too. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List compiled by experts in the United Kingdom.
“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” Helen Fair, co-author of the prison population list and research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London, said in June 2024, when Trump made a similar claim.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Haley Britzky
Weaponizing the Justice Department: Trump claimed that then-President Joe Biden used his office to “viciously” prosecute him. That’s false.
Trump’s two federal indictments were brought by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Smith was appointed in November 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, but that is not proof that Biden was involved in the prosecution effort, much less that Biden personally ordered the indictments. Garland had said that he would resign if Biden ever asked him to act against Trump but that he was sure that would never happen. For Trump’s part, he has never provided any evidence that Biden was personally involved in the federal prosecutions.
The two cases were dropped by Smith after Trump was reelected.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Devan Cole
Inflation under Biden: Trump falsely claimed in his address to Congress that under the Biden administration America suffered the “worst inflation in 48 years, but perhaps even in the history of our country, they’re not sure.”
Trump could fairly say that the year-over-year US inflation rate hit a 40-year high in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but that’s not “48 years” — and this 9.1% rate was not close to the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920. The rate in the last full month of the Biden administration, December 2024, was 2.9%. It was 3% in January 2025, a month partly under Biden and partly under Trump.
Trump did qualify the claim with the word “perhaps” and “they’re not sure,” but there is no basis for the claim regardless, and those numbers are certain: The Consumer Price Index data goes back to 1913.
Inflation’s rapid ascent, which began in early 2021, was the result of a confluence of factors, including effects from the Covid-19 pandemic such as snarled supply chains and geopolitical fallout (specifically Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) that triggered food and energy price shocks. Heightened consumer demand boosted in part by fiscal stimulus from both the Trump and Biden administrations also led to higher prices, as did the post-pandemic imbalance in the labor market.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Alicia Wallace
Twenty-one million undocumented immigrants: Trump falsely claimed Tuesday that 21 million undocumented immigrants came into the US during President Joe Biden’s tenure.
Through December 2024, the last full month of Biden’s presidency, the country had recorded under 11 million nationwide “encounters” with migrants during that administration, including millions who were rapidly expelled from the country; even adding in so-called gotaways who evaded detection, estimated by House Republicans as being roughly 2.2 million, there’s no way the total is “21 million.”
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Devan Cole
Money paid to millions over age 100: In an extended claim, Trump said 4.7 million people who are at least 100 years old are still listed in the Social Security Administration’s database and that “money is being paid to many of them.” However, this claim needs context.
The vast majority of these people do not have dates of death listed in Social Security’s database. But that doesn’t mean they are actually receiving monthly benefits.
Public data from the Social Security Administration shows that about 89,000 people age 99 or over were receiving Social Security benefits in December 2024, not even close to the millions Trump invoked.
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, who was elevated to that post by the current Trump administration, tried to set the record straight in a February statement.
“The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record.
These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,” Dudek said.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby and Daniel Dale
Panama Canal deaths: Trump repeated his false claim that 38,000 Americans died during the building of the Panama Canal. That figure is not even close to true, experts on the canal’s construction say.
While the century-old records are imprecise, they show about 5,600 people died during the canal’s American construction phase between 1903 and 1914 – and “of those, the vast majority were Afro-Caribbeans,” such as workers from Barbados and Jamaica, said Julie Greene, a history professor at the University of Maryland and author of the book “The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal.”
The late historian David McCullough, author of another book on the building of the canal, found that “the number of white Americans who died was about 350.”
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
This story has been updated with additional information.
