A Government Accountability Office review has concluded that the $110 billion in savings the Department of Government Efficiency claimed from cancelled contracts, leases and grants was largely "incorrect and unreliable," according to CNN.
The watchdog agency's findings undercut the headline figure DOGE has repeatedly cited as evidence of its cost-cutting success. Investigators found that 108 of the leases DOGE claimed to have terminated were already being phased out before the initiative was ever created, meaning no savings could actually be attributed to DOGE's actions, per CBS News.
Contracts, grants and a missing paper trail
The GAO also examined DOGE's claimed contract cuts and found that no termination action had actually been taken on 2,503 of the 13,476 contracts the initiative said it had cancelled. On the grant side, auditors determined that DOGE did not follow its own stated methodology for calculating savings in 96 percent of the grant cuts it publicized, raising further doubts about how the figures were derived in the first place.
The discrepancies span the three main categories DOGE has used to tout its work: leases, contracts and grants. In each case, the GAO found gaps between what was claimed publicly and what documentation could actually support, according to CNN's reporting on the review.
DOGE was created as part of a broader push to cut federal spending, with its savings claims — often published as a running tally — serving as a central selling point for the initiative's supporters. The GAO's findings, compiled through a review of the underlying cancellation records, suggest that tally significantly overstated what the government actually saved.
The report adds to scrutiny of DOGE's accounting practices and is likely to fuel further congressional questions about how the initiative verified and reported its numbers. Lawmakers on relevant oversight committees are expected to press for a fuller accounting of which of the claimed savings, if any, can be independently verified.
It remains to be seen whether DOGE or the agencies involved will revise the disputed figures or respond formally to the GAO's findings. The report is likely to become a reference point in ongoing debates over the initiative's overall record, given that the $110 billion figure has been cited widely as a measure of its impact on federal spending.
For now, the GAO's conclusion stands as the most detailed independent examination yet of DOGE's savings claims, and it found the underlying numbers wanting across leases, contracts and grants alike.
