Americans have spent the past year hearing that the Department of Government Efficiency had saved taxpayers more than $215 billion.
It sounded like exactly the kind of promise many voters wanted to hear: cut government waste, shrink bureaucracy, and save money without raising taxes.
But what if much of those savings could not actually be proven?
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) review released August 6 found that DOGE’s public “Wall of Receipts” website contained widespread data problems, including savings claims tied to contracts that were never canceled, leases that were already being terminated before DOGE existed, and grant savings that auditors could not verify.
The findings challenge one of the central claims behind DOGE’s mission: that the initiative delivered historic reductions in government spending.
So how did a cost-cutting effort that promised unprecedented transparency end up facing accusations that its own savings scoreboard lacked the documentation needed to prove its numbers?
DOGE’s promise was simple: find waste and return savings to taxpayers
When DOGE launched in February 2025, it presented itself as an aggressive effort to eliminate unnecessary government spending. Its public “Wall of Receipts” became the centerpiece of that mission, listing canceled contracts, terminated leases, and reduced spending that DOGE said would save taxpayers money.
The savings figure grew quickly.
The initiative initially talked about finding as much as $2 trillion in savings, later lowering that target to about $1 trillion. Over time, the public total increased from roughly $55 billion to $65 billion, then $170 billion, before reaching the final figure of $215 billion.
The GAO investigation, requested by Democratic Sens. Gary Peters of Michigan and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, examined whether those savings claims could be independently confirmed.
The answer, according to auditors, was often no.
GAO found that DOGE did not consistently follow its own methodology for calculating savings and failed to provide enough supporting information for many entries. The agency said the data-quality issues “limit the value of the Wall of Receipts to policymakers” and recommended that the website clearly disclose those limitations.
The audit found billions that could not be traced
The GAO review examined about $110 billion of DOGE’s claimed $215 billion in savings and found problems across nearly every category it reviewed.
Contracts represented the largest category of DOGE’s claimed savings, with the website reporting $61 billion in savings from 13,476 terminated contracts.
GAO found significant problems with those figures.
Auditors determined that 2,503 contracts listed by DOGE as terminated had no documented termination action. Those contracts represented approximately $27.4 billion of the claimed savings.
More than a quarter of contract entries also lacked enough identifying information for auditors to properly verify them. GAO found that every USAID contract listed in the database lacked sufficient identifying details.
The audit also found that DOGE did not apply its stated savings methodology consistently. For more than half of reported contract savings reviewed by GAO, auditors could not confirm that the calculations matched the agency’s own approach.
One example involved a Defense Health Agency information technology contract. DOGE claimed the termination created $1.7 billion in savings, but GAO found that no termination action had actually occurred, meaning the claimed savings did not materialize.
Related: The DOGE Death File Scandal Is Worse Than a Database Error
Grant calculations faced even greater scrutiny
GAO said it could verify only about 4% of DOGE’s estimated grant savings using three different methods. The remaining 96% could not be traced or explained using available records.
About one in five grants listed as terminated lacked enough information to even locate them in USASpending, the government’s official spending database.
Some savings were counted before DOGE arrived
The lease numbers faced similar criticism.
DOGE listed 264 federal leases as terminated, but GAO found that 108 of those leases were already being ended before DOGE was created.
Those leases represented about $15 million in claimed savings.
The audit also found that DOGE overstated lease savings by more than $80 million, including nearly $60 million in unexplained calculation errors and approximately $7 million connected to leases that were still active.
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The concerns existed before GAO released its findings
The GAO audit was the most formal review of DOGE’s claims, but outside analysts had raised concerns about the numbers almost from the beginning.
In February 2025, Politico reported that DOGE had counted duplicate contracts totaling $325 million and highlighted a major error where an $8 million contract was presented as an $8 billion savings opportunity.
CBS News found that DOGE had misunderstood certain government contracting mechanisms, including indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts, which are not guaranteed spending commitments. CBS reported that these errors could have overstated savings by as much as $1.96 billion.
NPR’s early review found that only about $2 billion to $2.3 billion of DOGE’s claimed savings could be independently verified at the time, compared with tens of billions advertised by the initiative.
Independent analysts also questioned the methodology. Former Labor Department chief economist Betsy Stevenson estimated that actual savings were closer to $1 billion to $7 billion compared with the much larger figures DOGE promoted.
The recurring issue was how DOGE defined “savings.”
Did taxpayers actually see the promised savings?
DOGE’s final reported savings figure was $215 billion, but only a small portion became actual budget reductions approved through Congress.
Approximately $9.4 billion of the claimed savings were formally codified through congressional rescission packages.
That means most of the $215 billion remained a self-reported figure rather than legally binding reductions in federal spending.
Government savings can mean several different things. A canceled contract, a projected reduction, and an actual reduction in federal spending are not always the same thing.
Despite DOGE’s claims, the national debt continued increasing during the initiative’s existence. The federal debt reached roughly $39 trillion, making DOGE’s reported savings equivalent to about 0.55% of the total debt.
The initiative also fell far short of its original ambitions. DOGE initially targeted $2 trillion in savings before later lowering the goal to $1 trillion. The final $215 billion claim represented about one-fifth of that reduced target.
Related: Journalists Push Back After Musk Says No Child Died From DOGE’s USAID Cuts
The White House defended DOGE’s numbers
The Trump administration has defended DOGE’s figures, arguing that the savings were carefully reviewed.
A White House spokesperson, Harrison Fields, previously told Politico that DOGE’s numbers were “rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials and updated in real time.”
Following the GAO report, Democratic lawmakers argued that the findings showed DOGE exaggerated its accomplishments.
Sen. Gary 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 their work.”
The White House has not accepted GAO’s conclusions as a rejection of DOGE’s overall impact.
What counts as Government savings?
Americans generally support reducing wasteful spending, but determining whether a cut actually saves money requires more than announcing a canceled contract or removing a budget item from a spreadsheet.
Did the government avoid spending money it would have otherwise spent? Was a contract truly unnecessary? Did a cancellation reduce costs or simply move expenses elsewhere?
Those questions become especially important when savings numbers reach hundreds of billions of dollars.
With DOGE’s official charter expiring on July 4, 2026, and the administration saying it does not plan to release a final closing report, the GAO audit may become the most detailed independent assessment of the initiative’s results.
When the government says it saved billions, can the public see exactly where those savings came from?
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