The Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s federal cost-cutting baby, significantly overstated its savings, a new investigation found.
Musk’s original ambition was to save the government $2 trillion in federal spending. DOGE itself touted $215 billion in savings, as of its last update in January 2026.
Its website promises that its numbers “will initially be updated weekly; over time, the website will improve, and the updates will converge to real-time.”
The initiative, which officially ceased operations on July 4, 2026, did not update its numbers for the last six months of its existence.
The broken promise to update its numbers in real time is representative of the whole DOGE operation, as confirmed by the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s new analysis of its savings that don’t add up.
The congressional watchdog found Thursday that roughly $110 billion of DOGE’s claimed savings came from contracts, grants, and leases, including “108 leases it reported that it cut were already being phased out when DOGE was established.”
DOGE also said it terminated 13,476 government contracts, but the new report showed that number was overstated by nearly 2,000, adding up to about $27.4 billion in contracts that were not actually canceled.
The GAO noted: “In these cases, another action, such as reducing the contract value or deobligating some funds, could have occurred.”
“We found that DOGE did not accurately report actions taken on contracts,” the analysis reads.
Of the $61 billion in contract savings Musk’s initiative claimed, more than half—nearly $35 billion—either was not canceled or couldn’t be verified because DOGE’s records weren’t specific enough.
The GAO also found that DOGE failed to provide enough information about how it calculated its savings. GAO said DOGE did not use its stated methodology for 96% of the savings it claimed from grants.
“Elon Musk and the Trump administration claimed billions of dollars in savings they could not substantiate, took credit for work already underway, and refused to show their work, all while putting Americans’ sensitive data at risk and hollowing out critical agencies,” said Sen. Gary Peters, the Michigan Democrat who requested the assessment.
The report comes a day after the watchdog said it still cannot fully reconstruct the size of DOGE’s workforce. Investigators identified 206 DOGE personnel but said missing records from multiple federal agencies mean the true size of the operation remains unknown.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
