It won’t come as a surprise that Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) didn’t save taxpayers nearly as much as it claimed. Analysis from outside the government showed savings claims were heavily inflated, and now the government’s own watchdog has said it wasn’t able to confirm savings claims made in DOGE’s so-called “Wall of Receipts.”

For example, DOGE reported savings of $49.2 billion from cutting grants, but almost none of it could be verified, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its report yesterday. The GAO is the auditing and investigating arm of Congress and issued the DOGE report in response to a June 2025 request from Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

“The Wall of Receipts did not provide sufficient information to verify the method DOGE used to calculate savings, or what the savings consisted of, for 13,553 of the 15,887 grants it reported as terminated. This corresponds to about 96 percent of the DOGE-reported grant savings,” the GAO report said.

Beyond grants, the GAO concluded that “DOGE did not use its stated methodology to calculate” most of the savings from contracts it reported as terminated, and that it exaggerated savings from terminated leases. “DOGE did not respond to our request for interviews or clarification,” the GAO said.

In response to the report, Peters said that “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.”

DOGE claimed $215 billion in savings

The Musk-led DOGE tried to conduct much of its work in secrecy. Last year, Senate Democratic staff investigated DOGE activities at three agencies and found armed guards, locked doors, and windows covered with trash bags.

Overall, DOGE’s Wall of Receipts website claims it saved taxpayers $215 billion through “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.” Even that figure was far short of Musk’s goal of $1 trillion.

Trump and Musk claimed that DOGE would cut government waste, but its whirlwind approach resulted in what one Brookings researcher called “cut[ting] muscle, not fat.” The researcher found “25,747 occasions where the Trump administration abruptly fired people and then hired them back.”

The GAO analysis examined a portion of the claimed savings, specifically $110.3 billion related to contracts, grants, and leases. Besides the $49.2 billion in claimed savings in grants, DOGE claimed $61 billion in savings from contracts and $113 million in savings from leases. DOGE reported making cuts affecting 15,887 grants, 13,440 contracts, and 264 leases.

DOGE ignored “complexities and nuances”

With contract cuts, GAO evaluated whether DOGE followed its own stated methodology for determining the amount of savings. It found that DOGE followed its stated methodology for 27.5 percent of reported savings and did not follow its stated methodology for 60.7 percent of savings. The GAO could not determine whether DOGE followed its stated methodology for the remaining 11.8 percent because of missing contract identifiers.

“Even in cases in which DOGE followed its stated methodology, it did not account for many complexities and nuances of federal contracting or sufficiently identify limitations,” the GAO said. “For example, the savings reported for terminated contracts do not account for subsequent obligations and deobligations that may be associated with termination settlement costs or contract closeout. As such, the amount of reported savings is likely misstated. Finally, whether reductions in contract value will result in savings will depend on circumstances that are not yet known.”

Although DOGE claimed $113 million in savings from leases, the GAO said the lease cuts listed on the Wall of Receipts came to only $53.5 million. “Because DOGE declined to meet with us, we could not obtain an explanation for the error,” the GAO said. Moreover, of “108 of the 264 leases identified for termination on the Wall of Receipts, about $15.3 million of the total $53.5 million in savings, were already in process for termination when DOGE was established,” the GAO said.

DOGE scaled back some of its claims in the year before GAO’s report. As of March 30, 2025, DOGE “reported 679 leases as terminated, totaling approximately $400 million in reported savings.” After that, “145 of the leases DOGE reported as terminated—accounting for about $346 million in reported savings—were removed from the Wall of Receipts because the leases were no longer being considered for termination,” the GAO report said.

The GAO recommended “that the Executive Office of the President, through the US DOGE Service, should ensure that known data quality issues and limitations are prominently displayed on the Wall of Receipts.”

DOGE ethics report lacking information

The GAO also issued a separate report this week on DOGE’s personnel and ethics activities. The GAO identified 206 DOGE personnel in the Executive Office of the President (EOP), many of whom also were detailed to other executive-branch agencies.

“EOP officials told GAO that DOGE personnel within EOP receive the same ethics and records management training as other EOP personnel,” the report said. “However, EOP did not respond to GAO’s requests for access to training records and financial disclosures for DOGE personnel. As a result, GAO could not determine all DOGE personnel who received training or completed financial disclosures with EOP.”

When contacted by Ars today, the White House press office said “the Trump Administration told GAO numerous times that all employees, whether in DOGE or not, are required to complete ethics training and follow financial disclosure requirements.” The White House did not provide us with any statement on the GAO report examining DOGE’s alleged savings.

Trump’s DOGE executive order in January 2025 established a temporary DOGE service and renamed the US Digital Service to the US DOGE Service. The temporary DOGE service had a mandate that expired on July 4, 2026, and said on that day that “the formal mission of DOGE has come to an end.”

But the US DOGE Service doesn’t have an expiration date, the GAO noted. “We agree that the USDS temporary organization terminated on July 4, 2026, pursuant to the terms of the EO [executive order] that created it. However, the EO did not terminate the broader USDS entity within EOP,” the GAO said.