GoKawiilElon Musk listens to U.S. President Donald Trump speak in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., Feb. 11, 2025.
Elon Musk's DOGE promised to slash $2 trillion in federal spending and to make the federal workforce lean and efficient. But even the cost savings it has claimed in an online "Wall of Receipts" of the smaller amount of $110 billion didn't check out, according to a report the Government Accountability Office published Thursday.
The GAO evaluated $110 billion of savings DOGE claimed on a website with its "Wall of Receipts" from cuts including federal contracts, grants and leases. The GAO said it found multiple "issues limiting the transparency and reliability of these reported savings." Including additional categories beyond contracts, grants, and leases, DOGE tallied $215 billion in cuts, the GAO said.
The findings further undercut claims by Musk and President Donald Trump that they have made meaningful cuts in government spending and call into question the effects of the DOGE effort that slashed federal spending with little notice to agencies and slashed hundreds of thousands of government jobs.
The GAO found that of the 13,476 contracts DOGE claimed it terminated, "no termination action" was taken on 2,503 of them. The report also noted DOGE had claimed $113 million in savings from cuts to 264 leases, but GAO found that information overstated the savings. The leases cut and referenced on DOGE's website "actually summed to $53.5 million" in savings, the report found. Of the 264 leases, about 108 were already in the termination process before DOGE was formed after Trump began his second term as president, the GAO report also said.