The Government Accountability Office said Thursday that DOGE’s Wall of Receipts was riddled with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims, and that the savings it boasted were overstated by billions of dollars. As of July 7, 2026, the watchdog found that $110 billion in savings DOGE said it had found through cuts to contracts, leases and grants were either incorrect or could not be backed up.
That finding lands now because DOGE built much of its public case on those figures, posting itemized savings to its account on X as it tried to show how much government money it had saved. The probe covered contracts, grants and leases DOGE listed from Jan. 20, 2025, through July 7, 2026, and it was requested by Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Gary Peters. Peters called the effort misleading and deceptive in a statement Thursday, saying the public had been shown claims that could not be substantiated.
The most basic problem was scale. Of the 264 leases DOGE said it terminated, the Government Accountability Office said 108 were already on the way out before DOGE was established by President Trump in January 2025. DOGE also said it saved $1.7 billion by identifying a Pentagon Defense Health Agency IT contract to terminate, but the watchdog found it never followed through on terminating or cutting that funding.
The same pattern showed up across other categories. The Government Accountability Office said DOGE did not provide enough information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of its reported grant savings, and that it failed to use its own stated methodology in most of the savings it associated with contracts it said were terminated. Those gaps make the headline numbers look precise while hiding how little of the math could actually be checked.
There is a broader issue behind the report, too. DOGE was launched by Elon Musk soon after President Trump took office, and Musk oversaw and heavily influenced it in its early months before leaving government in late May to return to his companies. The Wall of Receipts might have had value, the watchdog said, if DOGE had clearly shown how the numbers were calculated and flagged the data-quality limits attached to them. Instead, it left a public ledger that promised accountability and delivered confusion.
DOGE concluded its operations on July 4, 2026, but the damage from its accounting is still being measured. The remaining question is not whether some savings were real, but how much of the $110 billion will survive once unsupported entries, already-planned cuts and unproved calculations are stripped away.
