The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) built much of its public case around the promise to identify and cut wasteful federal government spending. It also promised to show Americans the receipts.
Congress’s actual auditors, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), recently checked those receipts and the results weren’t pretty.
In August, the nonpartisan GAO released a 52-page review of DOGE’s online “Wall of Receipts,” which catalogued contracts, grants and leases the initiative claimed to have eliminated or reduced. As of July 2026, DOGE reported roughly $110 billion in savings from those three categories alone. While GAO found evidence of some savings, it also identified significant problems with how other savings were calculated, supported and presented.
For grants, GAO said there was not enough information to verify the methodology behind 96% of the savings DOGE reported. Of the 264 leases listed for termination, 108 were already in the process of being terminated before DOGE was established. One Defense Department IT contract provides perhaps the clearest example of the problem: DOGE credited itself with $1.7 billion in savings, but the contract was never terminated, reduced or otherwise changed. The actual savings from that action were zero.
Even some basic arithmetic proved troublesome. DOGE reported $113 million in savings from terminated leases, while the individual entries on its own site added up to just $53.5 million. GAO also found that almost 2,000 contracts DOGE described as terminated had not actually been eliminated, although other cost-reducing actions may have occurred in some cases. DOGE officials did not respond to GAO’s requests for interviews or additional information.
None of this means the government should stop looking for waste. Federal agencies obligated more than $2 trillion in fiscal year 2025 through contracts, grants and leases, making serious oversight essential. But claims of government savings deserve the same scrutiny as the spending they are supposed to replace.
That is the larger lesson here. Transparency is not simply publishing a number on a website. It is showing enough of the work that Congress, watchdogs, and taxpayers can determine whether the number is actually true.