When Elon Musk and President Donald Trump launched the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), they promised to cut trillions in federal spending and bring the receipts.
In the end, they didn’t cut nearly as much as was promised.
As for the “wall of receipts” that DOGE highlighted on its website? Many of those seem to have been exaggerated, fabricated, or impossible to verify, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
In all, $110 billion of DOGE’s claimed savings could not be verified by GAO auditors. That doesn’t mean those savings did not occur, but it certainly underscores the chaotic manner by which DOGE operated, which likely limited its effectiveness.
The GAO says it could not verify a staggering 96 percent of the savings DOGE claimed from cutting various federal grants because the department “did not provide sufficient information to verify” those cuts. Similarly, the GAO points out that “several issues limit the transparency and reliability” of savings DOGE claimed to have achieved by terminating federal contracts and leases.
In some cases, DOGE seems to have completely fabricated those “savings.”
For example, DOGE initially called for terminating a $1.7 billion contract that provides information technology assistance to military medical facilities around the world. After meeting with Pentagon officials, however, DOGE “agreed no action should be taken to terminate the contract,” the GAO report explains.
The contract was never terminated. No spending was cut. And yet, that $1.7 billion is included in the “savings” listed on DOGE’s “wall of receipts.”
That’s hardly the only example.
There are 13,476 contracts listed on the DOGE “wall of receipts” that were supposedly terminated to save taxpayers about $61 billion, but in many cases those contracts were never actually ended, the GAO found. “No termination action was taken on 2,503 of the contracts, representing $27.4 billion of reported savings,” the GAO reports.
The new GAO report seems to confirm earlier reports by various media outlets that raised questions about the validity and accuracy of DOGE’s claimed savings.
While the DOGE remains perhaps the best policy idea of the second Trump administration, the effort was undeniably hamstrung by a lack of execution and a preference for scoring political points rather than a serious attempt at reducing spending. As I’ve argued before, DOGE should have sought more assistance from libertarians and conservatives who actually understand how the federal budget works.
Yes, Congress did pass a paltry rescission bill that cut $9 billion in federal spending as a direct result of the DOGE effort. Despite that, overall government spending increased during Trump’s first year in office.
The conclusion is inescapable. DOGE was a well-intentioned failure that may have harmed future, hopefully more serious, attempts at cutting spending.
“The data quality issues identified in this report limit the value of the Wall of Receipts to policymakers,” concludes the GAO report. “In addition, when government data are not reliable, it can hinder the public’s trust in government.”
The DOGE was a good idea, but the Trump administration failed to deliver on its promise.
