On August 6 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report of an audit that it conducted from June 2025 to early August 2026 of the claims of savings by Elon Musk’s invented “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) as listed on its own online “Wall of Receipts.” With much bravado, DOGE originally claimed that it would cut $2 trillion from federal spending. However, its Wall of Receipts only purports a total savings of $215 billion, but even this greatly reduced figure is now disputed by this audit. The GAO report states, “we found that DOGE did not accurately report actions taken on contracts.”
This GAO audit only examined contracts, grants, and leases which totaled $110 billion in federal spending, and found that nearly 2,000 “terminated” contracts were never terminated; 108 terminatehereclaims of savings with no documentation or attempt to identify where these savings could be found; and some claims of savings were removed from the list on its website. Before the GAO released this report it sent a copy to DOGE in order to offer DOGE the opportunity to respond or correct any errors, but DOGE made no attempt to challenge any of the GAO findings.
The GAO report was requested by Senators Gary Peters (D-MI) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). Peters told the Washington Post, “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.”
According to Wikipedia DOGE is estimated to have cost taxpayers over $135 billion due to productivity losses, paid leave, and the costs associated with dismissing and re-hiring employees. Additionally, it has generated over $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government. In June 2025 the Washington Post interview three dozen federal workers from 19 federal agencies who could all cite numerous examples and horror stories about how DOGE made their jobs more inefficient and caused more red tape.
