Elon Musk said he would cut $2 trillion of federal spending with his Department of Government Efficiency. When it disbanded, the U.S. DOGE Service estimated that it had achieved $215 billion in savings. Alas, even that figure was wildly exaggerated.
A Government Accountability Office investigation concluded that billions in supposed savings weren’t realized and a lack of transparency by the White House leaves other claims uncorroborated.
A “Wall of Receipts” on DOGE’s website claims the effort identified 264 leases for termination, but the GAO report issued last week found that 108 of the 264 “were already in process for termination.”
Almost $35 billion of the $61 billion DOGE claimed in contract savings was either not terminated or could not be identified by the GAO because of poor recordkeeping.
As for government grants, the report says that “DOGE did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings.”
Taken together, these findings are another blow to the vital goal of actually reducing the size of government and improving the quality of its core services.
The federal government ran a $1.8 trillion budget deficit last fiscal year and enacted tax cuts that will cost trillions more in the coming years. This is reckless and unsustainable.
Musk’s months in D.C. created chaos, squandered political capital and left little appetite in either party to actually cut spending. Meanwhile, the biggest driver of the $39 trillion debt, mandatory entitlement spending, keeps roaring ahead, untouched.