Blumenthal & Peters Release GAO Report Finding DOGE Misled Americans About Claimed Savings

[Hartford, CT] - U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal, Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finding that DOGE's claims of massive taxpayer savings on its "Wall of Receipts" were severely overstated and plagued by unreliable data, unexplained calculations, and a lack of transparency.

"The Trump Administration has used DOGE to recklessly slash government programs, ransacking critical services and resources and proudly displaying supposed 'savings' on its Wall of Receipts," said Senator Blumenthal. "GAO's report, though, reveals data quality concerns and a lack of clarity regarding how savings were calculated, making DOGE's findings unreliable and unclear. My report with the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last year showed that DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money-wasting at least $21.7 billion at the time while the Trump Administration cut health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services. This GAO report underscores the need for increased transparency and accountability from the Trump Administration so the American public can better understand DOGE's activities as the organization guts vital government programs."

"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," Senator Peters said. "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 GAO report, requested by Blumenthal and Peters in June 2025, finds that DOGE failed to provide enough information to verify 96 percent of its claimed grant savings. GAO also found that no termination action had been taken on 2,503 contracts associated with $27.4 billion in claimed savings, and two-thirds of DOGE's purported contract savings were unverifiable or did not follow stated methodology. Of the 264 leases DOGE identified for termination, 108 were already in the termination process.

Since last year, the Trump Administration has been forced to reverse numerous staff purges and contract cancellations carried out by DOGE after the cuts created staffing shortages and serious operational problems-further exposing the recklessness of DOGE's approach.

Last year, a Blumenthal report found that DOGE generated at lease $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government between January 20 and July 18, 2025. This included $14.8 billion through its Deferred Resignation Program for paying approximately 200,000 employees not to work for up to eight months, $6.1 billion for over 100,000 employees who have involuntarily separated from federal service or who remain on prolonged periods of leave pending separation who were paid not to do their jobs for extended periods of time, and $263 million in lost interest and fee income at the Department of Energy due to dozens of loan freezes.

The report is available here.

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