U.S. watchdog GAO finds Doge’s $110bn savings claims unsupported.
The Government Accountability Office released a detailed report Thursday on a former Trump‑era initiative called Doge, which promoted itself as a budget‑cutting powerhouse.
Doge, short for the Department of Government Efficiency, was never an official agency but operated as a think‑tank aiming to slash federal spending. In 2025 it announced that it had cut $214bn of taxpayer dollars, but the GAO’s audit—requested by Democratic senators Gary Peters and Richard Blumenthal—showed that many of those figures were incorrect or lacked evidence.
The GAO noted that “several issues limit the transparency and reliability of these reported savings.” It highlighted that Doge did not disclose the methods it used to calculate 96 % of its claimed savings and that a large portion of the claimed lease terminations had already been pending before Doge was established.
One example was that 108 of the 264 leases flagged by Doge were already ending before its intervention, accounting for about $15 m of the $53.5 m savings it reported. The audit also uncovered that a claimed $1.7 bn saving from ending a defense‑department IT services contract never materialized because the contract was never terminated.
“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,” Senator Peters said.
Under Musk’s leadership Doge pushed for massive reductions in the federal workforce, closed programs, and even agencies such as USAID. Some reforms prompted legal challenges or were reversed, as when USDA bird‑flu officials were rehired after furloughs.
Doge closed last month, but a statement on its website pledged that the mission to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse would continue beyond its formal existence.
