It’s been clear for some time now that the Department of Government Efficiency fell well short of its target, coming nowhere close to the $2 trillion in savings that were envisioned by tech mogul Elon Musk in the early days of the second Trump administration. Even the more modest $215 billion in savings proclaimed by the cost-cutting effort has come into question, and a new analysis by a government watchdog indicates that DOGE’s numbers are riddled with errors and unverifiable claims.
In a report published Thursday, the U.S. Government Accountability Office took a close look at the claim made by DOGE on its “Wall of Receipts” that it had saved the federal government $110 billion by canceling or otherwise modifying specific contracts, grants and leases. GAO analysts could not verify many of the claims, citing several persistent issues:
- DOGE did not explain how it calculated its claimed savings. For grants, GAO was unable to verify 96% of the savings claimed by the agency.
- DOGE claimed millions of dollars in savings for lease cancellations that had been initiated before the agency was established.
- DOGE mixed potential savings in contract cancellations with realized savings. “For example, DOGE reported $1.7 billion in savings on the Department of Defense’s Defense Health Agency contract for IT services at more than 700 military treatment facilities worldwide,” the report says. “While DOGE initially identified the contract for termination, in the end, no action was taken to terminate the contract, or to reduce scope, value, or funding. Thus, no savings were achieved.”
Although DOGE formally closed up shop in July, as originally scheduled, its webpage is still live and some of its employees have remained in the federal government. While in operation, DOGE officials refused to answer questions about their methods or to provide public notification of the limitations of the quality of their data, GAO said.
GAO recommends “that the Executive Office of the President, through the U.S. DOGE Service, should ensure that known data quality issues and limitations are prominently displayed on the Wall of Receipts.”
Democrats bash DOGE: Sens. Gary Peters, the senior Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Richard Blumenthal, the senior Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, requested the GAO analysis, and on Thursday highlighted the findings.
“Everyone supports rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, but DOGE was a slapdash and deceptive effort that misled the American people while doing real damage to the government’s ability to serve them,” Peters said. “Elon Musk and the Trump Administration claimed billions of dollars in savings it could not substantiate, took credit for work already underway, and refused to show its work, all while putting Americans’ sensitive data at risk and hollowing out critical agencies.”
Blumenthal said that, according to a separate analysis he conducted, DOGE was ultimately a waste of more than $20 billion in taxpayer money that harmed ordinary Americans.
“The Trump Administration has used DOGE to recklessly slash government programs, ransacking critical services and resources and proudly displaying supposed ‘savings’ on its Wall of Receipts,” Blumenthal said. “GAO’s report, though, reveals data quality concerns and a lack of clarity regarding how savings were calculated, making DOGE’s findings unreliable and unclear.”
What comes next: Probably nothing. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought recently said he has “no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report,” indicating that there will be no final accounting for the ill-fated cost-cutting effort.