DOGE’s “wall of receipts” riddled with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims, congressional watchdog says

Washington — The Department of Government Efficiency’s infamous “Wall of Receipts” listing billions of dollars DOGE said it saved was riddled with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims, a congressional watchdog found. 

A Government Accountability Office report released Thursday confirmed previous reporting from CBS News and other news outlets that found the DOGE team’s updating “Wall of Receipts” overstated how much it was saving taxpayers by billions of dollars. As of July 7, 2026, GAO found that $110 billion in savings DOGE claimed from slashing federal contracts, leases and grants displayed savings estimates that were incorrect or lacked supporting evidence. 

For instance, GAO found that 108 of the 264 leases DOGE said it terminated were already in the process of being eliminated before DOGE was established by President Trump in January 2025. 

In another case, GAO said DOGE reported it saved $1.7 billion by identifying a Pentagon Defense Health Agency IT contract to terminate, but it never followed through on either terminating or slashing the funding. The GAO probe, requested by Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Gary Peters, covered contracts, grants and leases DOGE listed from Jan. 20, 2025, through July 7, 2026. 

DOGE was launched by Elon Musk soon after President Trump took office, and he oversaw and heavily influenced DOGE in its early months. In late May, he left government to return to his companies. Many of the itemized so-called savings were posted to DOGE’s account on Musk’s social media platform X, which has 4.7 million followers.

“Everyone supports rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, but DOGE was a slapdash and deceptive effort that misled the American people while doing real damage to the government’s ability to serve them,” Peters said in a statement Thursday. “Elon Musk and the Trump administration claimed billions of dollars in savings it could not substantiate, took credit for work already underway, and refused to show its work, all while putting Americans’ sensitive data at risk and hollowing out critical agencies.”  

The congressional watchdog noted that information like the Wall of Receipts “can have significant value,” but went on to say that it would be more useful to policymakers and the public if DOGE provided more information about how it calculated savings and disclosed data limitations. 

GAO criticized DOGE for lack of transparency and its failure to use its own stated methodology in calculations of the “majority of savings associated with the contracts reported as terminated.” 

“For grants, DOGE did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings,” GAO said. 

“While the Wall of Receipts includes some information about the data and sources underlying reported savings, it does not sufficiently disclose limitations affecting data quality,” GAO said. It recommended DOGE “prominently” display data quality issues and limitations on the Wall of Receipts. 

CBS News previously identified other issues with DOGE’s reporting, as well. DOGE stopped publishing details of canceled U.S. Agency for International Development contracts due to what was described as “legal reasons.” 

And a CBS News review of three of the largest cuts DOGE claimed by August 2025 indicated the savings from those contracts were less than 3% of what DOGE said they were. 

DOGE concluded its operations on July 4, although the Trump administration has long said agency heads would work to save taxpayers money. 

GAO said DOGE “did not respond to GAO’s request for information or interviews.”