Peters & Blumenthal Release GAO Report Finding DOGE Misled Americans About Claimed Savings
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senators Gary Peters (D-MI), Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, 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.
“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 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. 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,” said Senator Blumenthal.
The GAO report, requested by Peters and Blumenthal 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 Peters report found that the federal government could have saved taxpayers more than $175 billion by implementing recommendations from the 19 independent Inspectors General that President Trump fired unlawfully, far more savings than DOGE ever delivered. A separate Peters report revealed how DOGE personnel at the Social Security Administration (SSA), the General Services Administration (GSA), and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) operated outside federal law, bypassed cybersecurity rules, and copied sensitive Social Security and employment data into unverified cloud databases, putting Americans’ personal information at high risk.
The report is available here.
###
Legal Disclaimer:
EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
