For 17 months, DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” was the main evidence for its success: a running scoreboard of canceled contracts, grants, and leases. On Aug. 6, 2026, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s auditors, published its audit of that wall. GAO reviewed $110 billion in itemized claims made through July 7, 2026. It could not verify how DOGE calculated about 96% of the claimed grant savings. It found DOGE didn’t follow its own stated method for 60.7% of claimed contract savings. And it found credit taken for leases that were already being terminated before DOGE existed. DOGE didn’t answer GAO’s questions. Here’s what the audit shows, line by line.
The claim vs. the itemized list
DOGE’s headline number at the end was about $215 billion in “estimated savings.” GAO itself reports that figure: including categories beyond contracts, grants, and leases (asset sales, “fraud and improper payment deletion,” interest savings, workforce reductions and more), DOGE reported savings of $215 billion. But the part DOGE actually itemized on the Wall of Receipts, contracts, grants, and leases, totaled $110.3 billion as of July 7, 2026. The rest of the headline was never itemized in a way anyone could check line by line.
What GAO checked
- Grants: DOGE claimed $49.2 billion across 15,887 grants. For 13,553 of them, representing about 96% of the claimed grant dollars ($47.3 billion), GAO could not verify the method DOGE used or what the savings consisted of. About one in five grants on the wall didn’t have enough information to even find them on USAspending.gov.
- Contracts: DOGE claimed more than $61 billion across 13,476 contracts. GAO found DOGE followed its own stated method (total contract value minus money already obligated) for only 27.5% of those dollars ($16.8 billion). For 60.7% ($37.0 billion), DOGE either used some other calculation or GAO couldn’t tell what it did. Another 27.8% of the contracts (3,751, including every USAID contract) were posted without identifiers like contract numbers. DOGE listed every contract as “terminated,” but federal procurement data showed no termination action on 2,503 of them, representing $27.4 billion of claimed savings.
- Leases: The wall listed $113 million in lease savings, but the individual lease entries only added up to $53.5 million. GAO concluded DOGE overstated lease savings by $81.1 million in total and found no stated calculation method on the site.
Specific misfires
- The $1.7 billion contract that was never cut. DOGE claimed more than $1.7 billion in savings on a Defense Health Agency IT-support contract covering more than 700 military medical facilities. According to GAO, DOD officials met with DOGE, and DOGE agreed no action should be taken. No termination, no scope reduction, no deobligation. The wall kept claiming the $1.7 billion anyway.
- Leases that were already ending. According to GSA officials quoted by GAO, 108 of the 264 leases on the wall (about $15.3 million of the $53.5 million listed) were already being terminated when DOGE was established.
- Savings that reappeared elsewhere. In some sampled Air Force contracts, work was cut and then extended or re-awarded to the same contractor for the same requirement, so the claimed savings may never materialize.
The independent check that came first
A year before GAO, POLITICO ran its own test. Its August 2025 analysis built a database of roughly 10,100 traceable contract terminations posted through July 2025. Of the $32.7 billion in claimed contract savings POLITICO could verify, actual clawbacks (deobligations) came to about $1.4 billion. And because that money returned to agencies that are required by law to spend it, POLITICO reported that it would not lower the deficit unless Congress acted.
The key concept here is ceiling value vs. obligated money. A contract’s ceiling is the most the government could ever spend on it, including options it may never use. The obligated amount is money actually committed. Canceling a contract with a huge ceiling but little obligated money can look like a giant “saving” on paper when very little cash was ever going to move.
The other side
The administration says the cuts were real. At a June 30, 2026 House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, OMB Director Russell Vought said DOGE “made some really important strides” and that many of its reductions were carried out “through the normal appropriations process” and in the rescissions package. He also said, “We have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report.” GAO, for its part, says DOGE didn’t respond to its requests for interviews or written questions and didn’t comment on the draft report. GAO made one recommendation: that the U.S. DOGE Service prominently disclose known data-quality issues and limitations on the Wall of Receipts.
Receipts box: check it yourself
- Read the full GAO report, including Tables 2 through 6 and the appendix of sampled contracts: GAO-26-108615.
- Look up any contract by number on USAspending.gov or FPDS. Compare the “total value” (ceiling) with “obligated” and look for a termination modification.
Sources
- GAO, DOGE Wall of Receipts: More Transparency Needed on How Savings Are Derived from Contract, Grant, and Lease Terminations (GAO-26-108615, Aug. 6, 2026)
- POLITICO, “Just how much has DOGE exaggerated its numbers? Now we have receipts.” (Aug. 12, 2025)
- Federal News Network, “Vought: Trump admin won’t do DOGE after-action report” (July 1, 2026)
- Ars Technica, summary of the GAO report (Aug. 2026)
- Washington Post, coverage of the GAO findings (Aug. 6, 2026)
