The US efficiency agency lied about terminating leases and published unverified grant cuts, the Government Accountability Office has found
The US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), suggested and initially spearheaded by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, credited itself with billions of dollars in federal budget savings that could not be independently verified, a government watchdog said Thursday.
US President Donald Trump launched the now-defunct initiative shortly after he took office last January, tapping Musk as his government efficiency czar. The agency was billed as a sweeping effort to cut waste and bureaucracy across the federal government and its sprawling $7 trillion annual budget.
DOGE claims to have saved around $215 billion – just over 3% of the federal budget – through contract and lease cancellations, grant cuts, workforce reductions, regulatory changes and other actions.
However, billions of the roughly $110 billion in savings published on DOGE’s ‘Wall of Receipts’ were either “incorrect or lacked supporting evidence,” the US Government Accountability Office found.
DOGE provided insufficient information to verify 96% of the $49.2 billion it claimed to have saved from terminating nearly 16,000 grants, the watchdog reported.
Auditors also found that more than a third of the lease terminations credited to DOGE, worth around $15.3 million, were already being phased out before the initiative was established.
In one case, DOGE claimed $1.7 billion in savings from a Defense Health Agency IT contract covering more than 700 military treatment facilities. The contract, however, was never terminated or reduced, GAO wrote. “Thus, no savings were achieved,” it said.
DOGE officially shut down in July, following months of rumors that the initiative was quietly being dismantled and its functions absorbed elsewhere in the federal government.
Its final tally fell far short of Musk’s early promises. Before the start of Trump’s second term, the tech mogul claimed that DOGE could slash as much as $2 trillion from federal spending, later scaling back that target.
The aggressive campaign quickly became a political flashpoint as tens of thousands of federal workers lost their jobs and government programs were targeted for cuts. Musk also clashed with several senior officials in Trump’s cabinet before publicly feuding with the president over the Big Beautiful Bill, calling it a “disgusting abomination” and accusing it of exacerbating the ballooning US budget deficit.
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