The Government Accountability Office just released what every displaced federal worker, every gutted agency, and every community that lost services already knew in their bones. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency inflated its numbers, took credit for work it never did, and then refused to show its math when auditors came asking. The GAO evaluated $110 billion in claimed savings on DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” and found the whole thing riddled with errors, phantom cuts, and outright fabrications.
Let’s walk through what the auditors actually found, because the specifics matter. Of the 13,476 contracts DOGE claimed it terminated, 2,503 had no termination action taken at all. Zero. They were listed as savings that never happened. DOGE claimed $113 million in lease savings. The real number was $53.5 million. And 108 of those 264 leases were already being wound down before DOGE even existed. They slapped their logo on someone else’s paperwork and called it efficiency.
https://kaboompics.com/ / PexelsThen there is the $1.7 billion DOGE claimed to save on a Department of Defense IT contract. The contract was never terminated. No action was taken. No savings were achieved. The number sat on a website for the public to marvel at while nothing happened behind it.
More than half the contracts listed on the Wall of Receipts were either not ended or lacked enough information for auditors to even determine their status. DOGE could not provide enough detail to verify its methodology for 96% of grant savings. And when the GAO came asking for explanations, DOGE officials simply did not respond. They ghosted the federal government’s own watchdog.
This is not a bookkeeping error. This is the pattern. A billionaire walks into the federal government with a chainsaw and a press team, promises $2 trillion in cuts, delivers a fraction of that, inflates the fraction, and then walks away before anyone can measure the damage. Musk stepped back after a few months. The executive order that created DOGE sunset on July 4. But hundreds of thousands of government jobs are still gone. Agencies are still hollowed out. The people who lost their livelihoods are still looking for work. The “savings” were a lie. The harm was real.
David Shankbone (CC BY 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsSenator Gary Peters of Michigan, who requested the audit alongside Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, called it exactly right. “A slapdash and deceptive effort that misled the American people while doing real damage to the government’s ability to serve them.” Peters noted that DOGE took credit for work already underway, refused to show its work, and put Americans’ sensitive data at risk, all while hollowing out critical agencies. That is not efficiency. That is looting with a spreadsheet.
The GAO is now recommending that DOGE’s website carry a prominent warning that it has data-quality problems and is not a reliable source of information. A federal savings tracker that needs a consumer warning label. That is the legacy.
Atlantic Ambience / PexelsBut the deeper accountability cannot stop at a website disclaimer. The people who built this operation, the officials who greenlit it, and the political apparatus that sold it to the public as fiscal responsibility owe this country a full accounting of what was actually cut, who was actually harmed, and what it will cost to rebuild what was destroyed. The GAO has done its job. Congress has the report. The question now is whether anyone in power will treat the dismantling of public infrastructure with the seriousness it demands, or whether we will be asked to move on to the next spectacle while the damage calcifies.
Every community that lost a field office, every family that waited longer for a benefit determination, every worker who was escorted out of a building they had served for decades deserves more than an audit. They deserve restoration. And the people who lied about the numbers deserve to answer for every dollar they fabricated and every job they erased.