GAO finds Elon Musk’s DOGE inflated claims on federal government savings

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.

The report was requested last year by Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) who are, respectively, ranking members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and of the panel’s investigations subcommittee.

The GAO is recommending that the DOGE website should prominently caution readers that the site has data-quality problems and other limitations and is therefore not a reliable source of information.

In their review, the GAO said it checked DOGE’s Wall of Receipts claims about cut contracts, grants, and leases from Jan. 20, 2025, when Trump took office, through July 7, 2026, three days after DOGE announced on social media it had wound down. The GAO said it compared DOGE reporting to official data from publicly available federal databases.

The GAO said DOGE did not respond to the its requests for information and interviews.

“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 in a statement.

Musk and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC on the GAO report.