It will not come as a surprise that Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) didn’t conserve taxpayers almost as much as it declared. Analysis from outside the federal government revealed cost savings claims were greatly inflated, and now the federal government’s own guard dog has stated it wasn’t able to verify cost savings claims made in DOGE’s so-called “Wall of Receipts.”

DOGE reported cost savings of $49.2 billion from cutting grants, however nearly none of it might be validated, the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated in its report the other day. The GAO is the auditing and examining arm of Congress and provided the DOGE report in action to a June 2025 demand from Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

“The Wall of Receipts did not supply enough details to validate the approach DOGE utilized to determine cost savings, or what the cost savings included, for 13,553 of the 15,887 grants it reported as ended. This represents about 96 percent of the DOGE-reported grant cost savings,” the GAO report stated.

Beyond grants, the GAO concluded that “DOGE did not utilize its specified approach to determine” the majority of the cost savings from agreements it reported as ended, which it overemphasized cost savings from ended leases. “DOGE did not react to our ask for interviews or information,” the GAO stated.

In reaction to the report, Peters stated that “Elon Musk and the Trump administration declared billions of dollars in cost savings it might not corroborate, took credit for work currently underway, and declined to reveal its work, all while putting Americans’ delicate information at threat and burrowing vital companies.”

DOGE declared $215 billion in cost savings

The Musk-led DOGE attempted to carry out much of its operate in secrecy. In 2015, Senate Democratic personnel examined DOGE activities at 3 companies and discovered armed guards, locked doors, and windows covered with garbage bags.

In general, DOGE’s Wall of Receipts site declares it conserved taxpayers $215 billion through “property sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, scams and inappropriate payment removal, grant cancellations, interest cost savings, programmatic modifications, regulative cost savings, and labor force decreases.” Even that figure was far except Musk’s objective of $1 trillion.