DOGE's wild, unverifiable savings claims discredited in US government report

It won’t come as a surprise that Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) didn’t save taxpayers nearly as much as it claimed. Analysis from outside the government showed savings claims were heavily inflated, and now the government’s own watchdog has said it wasn’t able to confirm savings claims made in DOGE’s so-called “Wall of Receipts.”

For example, DOGE reported savings of $49.2 billion from cutting grants, but almost none of it could be verified, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its report yesterday. The GAO is the auditing and investigating arm of Congress and issued the DOGE report in response to a June 2025 request from Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

“The Wall of Receipts did not provide sufficient information to verify the method DOGE used to calculate savings, or what the savings consisted of, for 13,553 of the 15,887 grants it reported as terminated. This corresponds to about 96 percent of the DOGE-reported grant savings,” the GAO report said.

Beyond grants, the GAO concluded that “DOGE did not use its stated methodology to calculate” most of the savings from contracts it reported as terminated, and that it exaggerated savings from terminated leases. “DOGE did not respond to our request for interviews or clarification,” the GAO said.

In response to the report, Peters said that “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.”

DOGE claimed $215 billion in savings

The Musk-led DOGE tried to conduct much of its work in secrecy. Last year, Senate Democratic staff investigated DOGE activities at three agencies and found armed guards, locked doors, and windows covered with trash bags.

Overall, DOGE’s Wall of Receipts website claims it saved taxpayers $215 billion through “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.” Even that figure was far short of Musk’s goal of $1 trillion.