Washington D.C. – In a comprehensive audit, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that many of the savings reported by Doge, the former cost‑cutting initiative founded by Elon Musk, are either missing evidence or mistakenly calculated. Gigantic claims of a $110 bn ($82 bn in pounds) reduction in federal spending, presented through what the agency called the “Wall of Receipts,” have been called into question by a watchdog that specializes in federal accountability.
The GAO’s report, released on Tuesday, thoroughly examined data from January 2025 to July 2026. It uncovered a number of red flags: 108 of the 264 leases Doge announced for termination were already set to expire before the initiative even launched, accounting for just £15.3 m of the claimed savings. Moreover, a projected $1.7 bn in savings from ending a defense department IT services contract never materialized because the contract was never cancelled.
Accusations of opaque methodology are also at the heart of the audit. The DAO noted that “96 % of Doge‑reported savings” were based on calculations that the watchdog could not verify. “The Wall of Receipts does not explain how savings from terminated leases were computed, nor does it provide sufficient detail to assess data quality and limitations,” it said.
White House officials responded by stressing that all employees of the initiative had completed required ethics training and adhered to financial disclosure rules. Yet the initiative, no longer an official agency and recently offline, had courted controversy with aggressive cost‑cutting proposals, including serious reductions in federal workforce and the shuttering of agencies such as USAID.
“Everyone supports rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, but Doge was a sloppy and deceptive operation that misled the American people while damaging the government’s ability to serve them,” Democratic Senator Gary Peters stated after the audit release. As Doge closes, the watchdog’s findings may shape future debates over how government spending savings are reported and verified.
