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Receipts! DOGE Fails an Audit
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As some of the stories reporting the results of a GAO study of DOGE’s fabricated savings claims, we’ve long known that DOGE was lying about its savings. For example, in Politico’s story on GAO’s report notes, they identified that most of Elon Musk’s claims of savings were bullshit a year ago.Number fudging at the Department of Government Efficiency — the executive agency spearheaded by Elon Musk to ostensibly eliminate excess spending — had already been documented in a myriad of news reports. Among them, an August 2025 analysis of DOGE’s receipts by POLITICO found only $1.4 billion of its claimed $32.7 billion in contract savings was legitimate.
I’ve got a whole page of stories debunking DOGE’s false claims. This GAO report makes almost 70, and I’ve been missing a good many, such as the disclosures in court filings that show the DOGE boys basically made shit up or proved that the bad data from the DOGE boys was getting citizens dropped from voting rolls.
But this DOGE report matters.
It matters, first of all, because this is GAO, Congress’ official accounting body. This was an official attempt to test DOGE’s claims, and like all the other ones, it found a great deal of fluff and bullshit, with more claimed contract terminations remaining than actually terminated.
As many news outlets had before, it showed that many of the lease terminations Musk took credit for had been terminated during Joe Biden’s presidency — over 40% of the claimed lease terminations. And of the leases they claimed to have terminated, over 70% of claimed savings were bullshit.
My favorite detail of the lease analysis (which was always just a small fraction of DOGE’s claimed savings, but an important part because DOGE was attempting to reshape government by eliminating the physical infrastructure of it) explains that an attempted DOGE cut led to a $1.5 million increase in rent after the government rescinded the lease termination, only to have the landlord jack up the rent.
we found at least one instance when a lease identified for termination that was later rescinded led to higher costs. Specifically, officials from a tenant agency we spoke with provided an example where the building owner refused to rescind the lease termination, which forced GSA to renegotiate a new lease at a higher rate of over $1.5 million more per year than before with a 5-year firm term.
But the most important finding, in my opinion, is that GAO couldn’t replicate either Musk’s results or even his claimed accounting method. GAO could only confirm that DOGE used its claimed methodology in 27.5% of its claims. Over sixty percent it did not.
Coming from GAO, this is an actionable finding, one that makes the prospect of subpoenas for Musk and Katie Miller’s testimony next year positively delightful. They didn’t just lie about their savings, they lied about what they claimed were their savings.
And when President AOC (or whoever) takes over in 2029, Musk’s fraudulent accounting claims by themselves should be reason to revisit all the federal contracts he relies on.
This all also matters, now, because it comes at a time when the gild may finally be coming off of Elon Musk’s ability to dupe investors. SpaceX, at least, is not working out the way all Musk’s past inflated companies have, even in spite of dominating in several growth sectors.
And it matters because Musk has just renewed his sometimes unlawful effort to keep the GOP in power, at least in the Senate. Musk is going to spend $100 million dollars to attempt to ensure that Elizabeth Warren, among others, will not have the ability to subpoena him to see whether there’s a tie between his fraudulent claims about DOGE and his reliance on government contracts and regulatory forbearance.
In a report Warren did last year, she pointed to a range of regulatory agencies that had either ended enforcement actions or intervened to help Musk out (click through for the links and the many other details).
Ending enforcement actions against Musk’s businesses During the Trump Administration, federal agencies have dropped investigations into Musk companies, declined to enforce regulations against them, or foregone penalties that appear to have been warranted.
28. Dormant cases abound: reportedly “in more than 40 other federal agency matters [related to Musk], regulators have taken no public action on their investigations for several months or more.”
29. The Air Force declined to even review SpaceX for suspension or debarment as a contractor, despite concerns that Musk is repeatedly engaging with top Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin.
30. Similarly, it is unclear whether the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security has continued its review of Musk allegedly failing to report communications with foreign leaders, as required by DoD’s continuous vetting process.
31. The Department of Justice (DOJ) dropped its immigration case against SpaceX for discriminating against refugees and asylees in hiring.
32. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) took steps to settle allegations against SpaceX.
33. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) closed an investigation into Tesla for allegedly violating workplace safety rules.
Undercutting agencies regulating and investigating Musk’s businesses Largely guided by Musk’s DOGE, the Trump Administration has hamstrung the agencies overseeing Musk’s companies, gutting their staff, throwing sand in the gears of their operations, and embedding DOGE staff loyal to Musk.
34. Musk has direct business interests before over 70% of agencies and departments targeted by DOGE.
35. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was a top target. Musk called for “delet[ing]” the agency and DOGE attempted to fire up to 90% of CFPB staff, who would regulate X Money.
36. President Trump fired the CFPB Director and the new head of CFPB forbade the agency from doing work — after CFPB had received over 300 consumer complaints about Tesla.
Musk was orchestrating these government benefits from himself while lying about his purported purpose in having access to them all, cutting waste fraud and abuse.
Elon Musk got government benefits while pretending to hunt fraud — and his claims to have found waste and abuse are based on fraudulent accounting; he doesn’t even use his own stated methodology most of the time!!!
And all this matters because just yesterday, Trump rolled out the successor to the fraudulent DOGE receipts site, a similarly packaged Fraud Ledger.
The website shows even less rigorous methodology than the discredited DOGE one. Much of the claimed savings on there amount to labeling Trump’s decisions to roll back social spending to blue states as fraud, rather than his own decision (mirrored in the DOGE cuts to grants to Blue states now being confirmed in court filings) to simply defund his political opponents. Some of the categories tracked here are deliberately different than the ones in which fraud would normally be tracked — rather than confirmed fraudulent payments, it lists intended fraud amount. Over and over, it relies on allegations of fraud rather than verdicts of it.
The criminal charges — the one category here subject to normal standards of evidence — are buried at the end, and there are no links to the criminal cases.
And of course, it doesn’t include the long list of fraudsters Trump has pardoned, often eliminating restitution payments to the victims.
It doesn’t list Trump’s convicted, confessed, or ongoing fraud.
DOGE came in promising to reverse all the bad government accounting that Elon Musk’s fever dreams were sure existed (and existed, except in the billion dollar contracts to him).
And instead, it set new standards for bad government accounting.
It was both wasteful and fraudulent. And Trump has just moved that effort to defraud under a new name, the Fraud Task Force, which is exercising similarly fraudulent accounting.
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