- DOGE says it's saved the federal government $115 billion. However, the team's claims have consistently included inaccuracies and inflated numbers, stoking criticism for its chaotic approach and lack of government expertise.
Elon Musk's cost-cutting DOGE wants to cut $1 trillion in federal spending by the end of the year.
The team provided a fresh update on its progress toward this lofty goal on Wednesday. In an update to the "Savings" section of the team's official website, DOGE claimed to have saved an estimated $115 billion, up $10 billion from the week before. They say this equates to $714 saved per taxpayer.
According to DOGE's website, the savings are a combination of "asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud, and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions."
A part of these savings are laid out in the team's "Wall of Receipts," which lists some canceled contracts, grants, and real estate. However, the team says the receipts provided on the website only represent approximately 30% of the full savings, making the top-line figure unverifiable.
And even the selected savings provided by DOGE for public review have been unreliable.
Harry Kraemer, an executive partner with Madison Dearborn Partners and a clinical professor of Leadership at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told Fortune that DOGE's figures could not be relied upon. He said in his view the total savings were overstated by up to 80%.
"Where they've claimed to have taken up to a billion dollars, some of the specific items are really like a couple hundred thousand or a couple million dollars. My guess would be from what they've said they've eliminated, no more than 10% to 20% of the numbers are actually important," he said.
Even if DOGE's stated savings held up under the scrutiny, Kraemer noted that "the net savings in all of this is very, very small."
DOGE's math problem
DOGE has been under scrutiny for some of its savings claims, which have been drastically overstated in some instances.
The team has deleted several contracts from its wall of receipts after media reports undermined their legitimacy. In one case, DOGE had to revise its largest contract down from $8 billion to $8 million after the contract's vendor explained that the $8 billion listed on its procurement record was likely a clerical error.
The savings on DOGE's updated wall of receipts still appear to be inflated or significantly rounded up. For example, the team claims to have saved approximately $20 billion from 5,356 contract terminations, but according to an analysis conducted by Fortune, the total savings listed on those contracts only add up to $17.97 billion, more than $2 billion short.
On Wednesday, before the page was updated, DOGE was claiming it had saved approximately $15 billion in savings from 4,083 canceled contracts, but according to Fortune's analysis, the figure was more than $4 billion shy of that at $10.23 billion.
The wall of receipts was also littered with at least 14 errors on Wednesday morning. Several savings totals appeared as $NaN, which stands for Not a Number and typically means a particular value of a numeric data has been undefined as a number. These issues had been resolved by Thursday.
The team also claimed it had produced $17 billion in savings from 7,488 grant terminations, but the exact figure appears to be $16.62 billion. The savings from 793 lease terminations are also slightly inflated from $489 million to $500 million.
The group may just be rounding up the figures, and they note that the totals are approximations. However, DOGE's calculations have been consistently found to be erroneous—undermining the team's claim of "maximum transparency."
The group has also obscured some of the details of the new claims it's made on the website, making it harder to fact-check the savings. When asked by the New York Times, a White House official said that identifying details about the cuts had been removed for security purposes.
Some of the contracts DOGE is claiming credit for cutting have also been questioned.
The largest saving listed on the wall of receipts is $1.9 billion, achieved from cancelling a contract in the Department of Treasury with software company Centennial Technologies. However, last month, the company told the New York Times that the contract was canceled under the Biden administration, not by DOGE. The team then deleted the charge, per ABC, but since then it has been re-added. (Centennial Technologies did not immediately respond to Fortune's request for comment by press time.)
The Times reported, citing federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list, that at least five of the 20 largest “savings” in the updated claims appeared to be exaggerated.
Earlier this month, the team also quietly removed over 1,000 contract cancellation claims from its "wall of receipts," reducing reported taxpayer savings by $4 billion.
A chaotic approach
DOGE's strategy has come under fire from legal and management experts.
Kraemer, who was previously the CEO of health care company Baxter International, said the random way the cuts were being carried out didn't follow traditional business logic.
"The insanity of all this is, they basically said we're just going to start the cutting without any logic as to what they're cutting, no plan as to what they're cutting. And the reality is, it's complete bedlam," he said. "Every CEO in the United States would do a thorough analysis of: Where can we cut? How are we going to do it? What is the process? What's the plan? How do we treat people?"
DOGE has said it wants to cut $1 trillion this year, but the team is also not currently addressing the government's big spending drivers. The majority of the $2.4 trillion that the U.S. government has already spent this fiscal year has been on programs like Social Security and Medicare, according to NPR.
"DOGE has created this false perception that the entire budget deficit can be eliminated by going after waste, fraud, and abuse and without making the difficult decisions elsewhere in the budget," Jessica Riedl of the Manhattan Institute told NPR last week. "And this exaggeration is making it even harder to do the real hard things that are going to be needed to fix the deficit beyond waste."
Musk's "undisciplined and reckless" followers
Musk is holding a strange role in the Trump administration. Despite being the public face of DOGE, the billionaire is not legally leading or even an employee of the agency on paper.
As Michael Herz, a constitutional law professor from Cardozo School of Law, put it: "Musk is simultaneously in control of and had nothing to do with DOGE." This grants him a position of power within the administration that experts say may be inappropriate due to his lack of understanding of how the federal government works.
While Kraemer noted that Musk was a "very bright guy," he also questioned how much the billionaire knew about the structurally complex federal government.
"What training does he have to figure out what to cut, where to cut, how to cut? He has no knowledge about it at all. So it's just completely insane right now," he said.
He's not the only one who's taken issue with Musk's role. Herz told Fortune that Musk was an "undisciplined and reckless leader who has hired a bunch of undisciplined and reckless followers."
"The whole thing is being done with an artificial but ferocious sense of urgency by people with no government experience. How could they not make mistakes?" he added.
Herz said he expected that the way DOGE was terminating grants and refusing to spend congressionally appropriated funds would eventually be found to be illegal.
"The constitutional point is that the President lacks the authority to impound funds. If Congress says 'spend this,' then the President, who is constitutionally obliged to ensure that the laws are 'faithfully executed,' must do so. He can’t just say, “I think this is a stupid idea so won’t pursue it'; it’s Congress’s call," Herz said.
Kraemer also blames DOGE, in part, for the market chaos currently playing out under the Trump administration.
"The level of uncertainty on every single topic right now is incredible," he said.
Representatives for DOGE did not respond to a request for comment from Fortune, made outside normal working hours.
Are you a government employee with information to share about DOGE? Contact this reporter at bea.nolan@fortune.com or securely via Signal at beatricenolan.08 from a non-work device.
