AINEWS
Congress's watchdog said the Department of Government Efficiency could not substantiate $49.2 billion in grant terminations and refused to provide records.
A congressional watchdog said it could not verify the substance or method of roughly $49.2 billion in grant savings that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reported on its public "Wall of Receipts" dashboard, a site where the agency lists the cuts it claims to have made and the dollar values it attributes to them.
The Government Accountability Office, Congress's nonpartisan investigative arm, concluded that 13,553 of the 15,887 grants DOGE said it had terminated could not be substantiated, about 96% of the agency's reported grant savings. The finding, in GAO report GAO-26-108615, is the first independent, on-the-record look at whether DOGE's $215 billion in self-reported savings holds up.
It does not.
The audit reached similar conclusions on the contract and lease sides of the savings ledger, and DOGE did not respond to GAO's requests for interviews or records during the review.
In dollar terms, the gap is the difference between $49.2 billion in DOGE-claimed grant savings and roughly $2 billion in what GAO could verify. Ars Technica, summarizing the report, noted that the agency also did not follow its own stated formula for calculating contract-termination savings and overstated lease-termination savings.
The audit was requested in June 2025 by Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the top Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In releasing the report on Wednesday, the senators characterized the findings as evidence that "DOGE misled Americans about claimed savings." Peters said the report showed "the emperor has no clothes," an attribution, not a finding.
Two procedural details matter. A GAO audit is a statutory mechanism: Congress asks, the watchdog investigates, and the subject agency is legally obligated to cooperate. Refusal to engage is itself a documented finding, and it lands on the public record as a non-cooperation entry, not a refutation. The difference between a self-reported savings dashboard and a verified savings claim is the difference between a press release and an audit. DOGE publishes the savings dashboard to the public; it did not, on this record, publish the underlying termination records to the auditor. DOGE's "Wall of Receipts" is the press release; GAO-26-108615 is the audit.
DOGE has not publicly responded to the report. The agency's position, insofar as one is on the record, is the $215 billion headline figure and the $1 trillion savings goal Elon Musk announced at the start of the project. Both numbers are the subject's own claims, not verified outcomes, and GAO's finding is that the records DOGE used to support them are not available for independent checking.
The audit also lands alongside a separate Senate Democratic staff investigation that found armed guards, locked doors, and trash-bag-covered windows at DOGE workspaces inside three federal agencies. The procedural picture is consistent: a small, opaque operation that produces large public numbers and does not document them in a way outsiders can verify.
A stonewall does not change the math, but it does close the path to resolution on the watchdog's timeline. If DOGE produces the missing methodology and termination records, GAO can re-test the figure. The on-the-record result is the one in the report: roughly 96% of grant savings, $49.2 billion, could not be verified, and the subject agency declined to answer.