The Government Accountability Office said Thursday it could verify solid support for only 4% of the $110.3 billion in savings the Department of Government Efficiency claimed to have delivered for taxpayers before shutting down in July.
DOGE tracked its claimed cuts on a public “Wall of Receipts,” including credit for terminating 13,476 federal contracts. GAO investigators reviewed the underlying contract data and confirmed only 43% of those contracts were actually ended or reduced. In 45% of cases, GAO found the contract was never terminated at all. The remaining 12% lacked enough information in DOGE’s public materials to determine what happened.
“For grants, DOGE did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings,” GAO wrote in the report.
The audit also examined 264 leases DOGE claimed to have canceled. GAO found 108 of them, more than 40%, were already in the process of being terminated before DOGE existed.
Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., who along with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., requested the report through the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said the findings confirmed his concerns about the office.
“Everyone supports rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, but DOGE was a slapdash and deceptive effort that misled the American people while doing real damage to the government’s ability to serve them,” Peters said.
GAO cited specific examples of contested savings. DOGE claimed it got the Defense Department’s health agency to cancel a $1.7 billion technology contract. Investigators said the contract was never cut or reduced. “Thus, no savings were achieved,” the report states.
In another case, DOGE took credit for cutting more than half of a $43.5 million Air Force financial management contract. GAO found the Air Force had awarded a new contract, for roughly the same amount, to the same company, for the same work.
DOGE also claimed it trimmed $4 billion from a $12.5 billion Air Force Base Infrastructure Modernization plan. GAO said the Air Force actually agreed to $3.75 billion in reductions, a $250 million gap investigators could not account for. An Air Force official told GAO the service may need to award a new contract to cover work lost in the cuts.
According to the committee’s release, roughly $27.4 billion of DOGE’s claimed contract savings traced back to 2,503 contracts on which no termination action had actually been taken.
GAO said it attempted to obtain DOGE’s cooperation while compiling the report but was rebuffed.
