doge, government waste, government accountability, Elon Musk

An organization built to prove government waste turned out to be the biggest example of it.

"DOGE was a slapdash and deceptive effort that misled the American people while doing real damage to the government's ability to serve them."

Senator Gary Peters, releasing the GAO report on DOGE's Wall of Receipts

The Department of Government Efficiency spent 18 months telling the American public that it was saving the federal government $110 billion. A new Government Accountability Office report, released August 6, finds that number was not backed by evidence, methodology, or basic arithmetic.

The report, GAO-26-108615, covers the period from January 20, 2025 through July 7, 2026. It was requested by Senators Gary Peters and Richard Blumenthal, who serve as ranking Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. DOGE officials did not respond to GAO's requests for information or interviews.

DOGE's primary tool for demonstrating its results was the "Wall of Receipts," a public webpage launched on February 17, 2025. The site listed terminated contracts, grants, and leases alongside dollar figures for savings. As of July 7, 2026, it showed $61 billion in contract savings, $49 billion in grant savings, and $113 million in lease savings. The last update was posted January 1, 2026. The wall remains live.

GAO found fundamental problems across all three categories.

For contracts, DOGE listed 13,476 items as "terminated." Cross-referencing this against the Federal Procurement Data System, GAO determined that 2,503 of those contracts had no termination action taken at all. Those untouched contracts accounted for $27.4 billion of the claimed savings. Nearly a third of DOGE's entire contract savings figure was built on contracts that were never touched.

Translation: DOGE declared $27.4 billion saved from work it never did.

DOGE's stated methodology for calculating contract savings was "the difference between the contract's total value and the amount currently obligated." GAO found that this methodology was only applied to contracts representing 27.5 percent of reported savings. For 60.7 percent of contract savings, DOGE either used undisclosed calculations or GAO could not determine what calculation was used at all.

The most glaring single example: DOGE reported $1.7 billion in savings on a Defense Health Agency contract providing IT services at more than 700 military medical treatment facilities worldwide. DOD officials told GAO that DOGE initially flagged the contract for termination, but after discussions, DOGE agreed no action should be taken. The contract was never terminated, never reduced in scope, and never deobligated. No savings were achieved. The Wall of Receipts continued to list the $1.7 billion anyway.

On another Air Force contract, DOGE reported $4 billion in savings from an IT modernization initiative spanning 187 locations. The Air Force reduced the total contract value by $3.75 billion. An Air Force contracting official could not explain the $250 million gap. The contract was never terminated. The official noted that if obligations approach the new ceiling, the contract value can simply be increased again because of "critical mission need."

An Air Force contract for financial management modernization provides another pattern: DOGE reported $28 million in savings from descoping work and reducing the contract ceiling. The Air Force then extended the contract by six months and awarded a new $27.4 million non-competed contract to the same vendor to do the same work. A senior contracting official told GAO this approach creates inefficiencies, higher labor rates, and transition costs that can exceed the nominal savings.

The point is not that the contracts should not have been reviewed. The point is that DOGE reported savings it never achieved, then the work got done anyway at potentially higher cost.

For grants, the picture was even less transparent. DOGE reported $49.2 billion in savings from 15,887 grants. GAO could not verify the calculation method for 96 percent of that figure, or 13,553 individual grants. More than half the claimed grant savings came from 3,528 grants that GAO could not even identify in the federal spending database, USAspending.gov.

For leases, DOGE claimed $113 million in savings across 264 lease terminations. GAO found the actual figure was $53.5 million, a discrepancy of $59.5 million. Of the 264 leases, 108 were already in the termination process before DOGE was established. DOGE took credit for $15.3 million in lease savings that were already underway.

Senator Blumenthal connected this report to his own Permanent Subcommittee findings from last year, which showed DOGE had "wasted at least $21.7 billion" while the administration cut health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services. "My report with the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last year showed that DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money," he said.

A separate Peters investigation revealed that DOGE personnel at the Social Security Administration, the General Services Administration, and the Office of Personnel Management operated outside federal law, bypassed cybersecurity rules, and copied sensitive Social Security and employment data into unverified cloud databases. The same organization that could not account for its $110 billion in claimed savings was also unable to protect the personal information of millions of Americans.

The formal DOGE Temporary Organization ended on July 4, 2026, as mandated by executive order. The Wall of Receipts site remains live, still showing the same figures last updated in January. GAO's sole recommendation called on the Executive Office of the President to make the site's data quality problems and methodological limitations visible to the public. The U.S. DOGE Service did not provide comments.

Another Peters report found that implementing recommendations from the 19 independent Inspectors General that Trump fired unlawfully would have saved taxpayers more than $175 billion, far more than DOGE ever delivered.

The irony is almost too neat to be accidental. An organization created to expose waste, operating with zero oversight, zero transparency, and zero accountability, became the most wasteful, opaque, and unaccountable expenditure of the administration. The question is not whether the numbers were wrong. The question is why anyone believed them.