A government watchdog agency has found that big parts of the $110 billion in savings claimed by DOGE, the cost-cutting group led by Elon Musk, are wrong or can't be proven. The audit was published on August 6, 2026, and looked at savings DOGE reported from January 2025 through July 2026. GAO

The review was done by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO. The GAO is a nonpartisan agency that audits federal programs for Congress to make sure taxpayer money is being handled honestly. Senators Gary Peters and Richard Blumenthal, both Democrats, requested the review. As of May 2026, Orice W. Brown served as the acting head of the GAO.

The audit found several problems with DOGE's numbers. The most serious one: DOGE did not provide enough information to check how it calculated 96% of its reported savings. Think of it like a store telling you it cut prices by millions of dollars but refusing to show the receipts. Without the math behind the numbers, there is no way to confirm they are real. BBC News

The GAO found specific examples of inflated or non-existent savings. DOGE claimed $1.7 billion in savings from canceling a Defense Department technology contract, but the contract was never canceled and no savings happened. The GAO also found that 108 of the 264 building leases DOGE said it ended were already scheduled to end before DOGE even existed. Those leases accounted for about $15.3 million of the $53.5 million in lease savings DOGE claimed.

DOGE was not actually an official government department, despite its name. It started at the beginning of President Trump's second term in January 2025 and shut down in July 2026. Elon Musk led the effort but left in May 2025. DOGE's own website claimed total savings of $214 billion, far below Musk's original goal of up to $2 trillion per year. A White House official told the GAO that all DOGE employees were required to complete ethics training and follow financial disclosure rules.

There is also a gap between two different savings numbers. The GAO audit focused on the $110 billion listed on DOGE's "Wall of Receipts." But DOGE's website claimed $214 billion in savings. The higher number likely includes categories the GAO did not review, so the audit may only cover part of what DOGE claimed.

The broader context here is the tension between a president's push to cut costs and Congress's responsibility to check whether those cuts are real. The GAO is Congress's main investigative arm, and its conclusion means lawmakers have no verified starting point to judge whether DOGE actually saved money or whether canceling contracts and leases disrupted government operations. The White House's statement about ethics training addresses questions about how DOGE was run, but it does not address the core problem the GAO found: the savings numbers themselves are unreliable.

Because DOGE no longer exists, fixing these documentation gaps will be very difficult. The group that created the savings claims is gone and cannot provide the missing information. Any future attempt to verify what DOGE actually saved would mean trying to rebuild records that, according to the GAO, were never fully written down in the first place.