DOGE Claimed $1.7 Billion in Savings on a Contract It Never Touched

By Tammy-Jo Pritchett · August 10, 2026

Opinion

DOGE Claimed $1.7 Billion in Savings on a Contract It Never Touched

Let me tell you something. When my nine-year-old tries to tell me he cleaned his room and I open the door and every Lego is still on the floor, there are consequences. When a federal agency does the same thing with $1.76 billion of our money, apparently there are none.

The Department of Government Efficiency, which I’m told was going to save us all from waste and fraud and whatever else they put on the bumper sticker, posted a big shiny number on its Wall of Receipts: $1.76 billion saved by terminating a Defense Health Agency IT contract. IT services for more than 700 military treatment facilities. Hospitals. Clinics. Dental offices. The places that take care of our service members and their families. They said they cut it. They said they saved the money.

They didn’t cut anything.

The Government Accountability Office released a review on August 6, and here is what they found. No termination. Not partial, not complete. No work removed. No reduction in scope or value. No funds deobligated. The contract is sitting right there doing exactly what it was doing before DOGE ever existed. The people at the Defense Health Agency told GAO straight up: there were no savings because nothing was canceled.

And here’s the part that would be funny if it weren’t my tax dollars. DOGE actually met with DHA officials, talked about the contract, and agreed that no action should be taken to terminate it. They agreed! And then they left the $1.76 billion savings claim on their website anyway. The Wall of Receipts was last updated January 1, 2026, and it was still live when GAO finished its review in July. They didn’t remove it, revise it, or correct it. They just left it there like a trophy for a game they didn’t play.

DOGE’s own website says contract savings are calculated as the difference between a contract’s total value and the amount currently obligated. GAO couldn’t even figure out how they arrived at their numbers because DOGE refused to respond to the watchdog’s requests for meetings or documentation. They ghosted the government’s own accountability office. Imagine trying that with the IRS.

And it gets worse. This isn’t one bad line item. GAO found that 2,503 of the 13,476 contracts DOGE listed as terminated were never actually canceled. Those phantom terminations account for $27.4 billion in claimed savings. DOGE followed its own stated methodology for only 27.5 percent of its contract savings numbers. On grants, they couldn’t verify the calculation method for 96 percent of reported savings. On leases, DOGE claimed $113 million in savings across 264 terminations. The real number was $53.5 million. And 108 of those leases were already moving toward termination before DOGE even existed, so they took credit for work someone else started.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put out a memo on April 10, 2025, directing the termination of several Pentagon contracts and claiming $5.1 billion in spending cuts. Four days later, the DOGE Wall of Receipts entry appeared. The White House has not explained how they arrived at the figure. DHA has not responded to questions about whether they asked DOGE to correct the claim. The company named in the entry, A1FedImpact, hasn’t responded either.

Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, who requested the GAO review along with Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, called DOGE what it is: a slapdash and deceptive effort that misled the American people. GAO’s one recommendation was that the Wall of Receipts should display its own known data quality problems so people looking at it know the numbers are garbage. That’s where we are. The government’s watchdog had to ask the government to label its own savings claims as unreliable, because the people who posted them won’t answer the phone.

I do my own budget every month. I know what it means when the numbers don’t add up. It means somebody is lying. And when the somebody works for you and me, and the number has a B in front of it, and the contract they said they killed is still alive and serving military hospitals, I have one question for the manager.

Where’s the money?

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