The U.S. DOGE Service, the cost-cutting group spearheaded by Elon Musk, consistently overstated its savings in online posts, taking credit for lease cancellations initiated before the group existed, according to a report from a government watchdog to be released Thursday. DOGE also claimed contracts were terminated that had not been and loaded its database with savings that could not be verified, the report said.

In an audit spanning from June 2025 through this month, the Government Accountability Office examined savings claimed by DOGE, the group that swept through federal agencies after President Donald Trump began his second term last year, dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and much of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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The report, which came after a request by Democratic Sens. Gary Peters (Michigan) and Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), provides the most comprehensive government assessment of DOGE's public accounting of its impact, bringing the organization's figures further into doubt.

Though Musk aimed to cut $2 trillion in federal spending, even by DOGE's own estimates it fell well short. A sporadically updated website tallying its cuts in a "Wall of Receipts" stated that its initiatives had saved $215 billion.

The GAO examined $110 billion of this claimed savings that derived from contracts, grants and leases.

Among the issues identified by GAO:

DOGE's "Wall of Receipts" "includes leases identified for termination before [the group] was established," according to the report. In total, 108 of 264 leases DOGE identified on its website "were already in process for termination" when it came into being, the GAO said.

In addition, DOGE claimed to have terminated 13,476 contracts, but the GAO analysis showed nearly 2,000 of these contracts "were not terminated."

Of $61 billion in contracts savings DOGE reported, the GAO said more than half the funds - nearly $35 billion - were either not terminated or unable to be corroborated by the investigators, because DOGE's data was not specific enough to identify it.

Roughly $27.4 billion of the savings DOGE claimed from cancellations were from contracts that were not actually terminated, the GAO said. "In these cases, another action, such as reducing the contract value or deobligating some funds could have occurred," it said.

From the watchdog's analysis of federal procurement data, "we found that DOGE did not accurately report actions taken on contracts," the GAO said in the report.

Musk and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

"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," Peters said.

The GAO investigation was conducted at the request of Senate Democrats who sought greater accountability of DOGE's dealings. The findings were shared with administration officials and lawmakers ahead of its release Thursday.

Although DOGE promised massive savings, the accounting of its cuts on its website didn't come close, fact-checkers and media outlets found. Updates to the website slowed to a trickle after Musk left and some of the "savings" were later removed. Federal workers told The Post that DOGE added red tape and extra hurdles even as it touted regulation cuts on its website.

The GAO said it sought to speak with DOGE officials and submitted written questions to the group. However, it said, "the U.S. DOGE Service did not respond to our inquiries."

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President Donald Trump felt the need to defend his embattled Pentagon boss, former Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth, after a series of bombshell reports indicating that the Department of Defense has blown through nearly all the precision-guided rockets in its inventory and could take years to replenish those stocks.

In a 148-word post on Truth Social Thursday, Trump accused news organizations of "spreading false and completely unfounded rumors" about his relationship with the defense secretary and insisted he's "very happy" with Hegseth's job performance.

"Everything has been extraordinary, including our attack on Venezuela, where the result was accomplished in less than one day, allowing us to bring one of the worst criminals anywhere in the World, Nicolas Maduro, to Justice! Likewise, Iran, where the country has been decimated for the purpose of NOT ALLOWING IT TO EVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, is going very well," Trump wrote.

The president went on to claim that Hegseth, a former major in the Army National Guard who has presided over the firings of more than two dozen senior admirals and generals and personally edited promotion lists to deny advancement to female and officers and officers of color is "highly respected within the Military, and has made tremendous improvements, including getting rid of DEI, and increasing recruitment to historic levels."

He closed out his missive with an attack on The Washington Post, which earlier this week reported on a confrontation between him and Hegseth at last Friday's cabinet meeting over precision munition shortages he'd believed to have "been fixed," calling the reporting "treasonous."

Publicly, Trump claims the U.S. has "massive amounts" of the expensive weapons and has said that "large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed" while lashing out a "leakers" for providing information about the depleted stockpiles to the press.

But the reality of America's post-Cold War defense industrial base is that the few major defense contractors that remained amid a wave of consolidation after the fall of the Soviet Union don't have the capacity to produce weapons such as the Patriot air defense missile, the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile used to intercept ballistic missiles at a scale that would replace the thousands that have been expended since Trump started an unprovoked war against Iran this past February.

Concerns about the pace at which American forces have expended the costly munitions have persisted among defense officials for months, even as Hegseth has publicly insisted that all is well.

At least one senior administration official who has spoken to The Independent has expressed concerns that the former Fox talking head has been presenting overly rosy forecasts of imminent success in the war.

According to the Post, the defense chief's response when confronted by the president was to blame his deputy, Stephen Feinberg.

Trump's expression of support for Hegseth comes hours after he lashed out at the negative reporting on the weapons supply concerns in a separate Truth Social post, claiming that contractors "are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country's history" and calling for "long-term jail sentences" for "leakers.

"Defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country's history. The 'leakers' of these treasonous statements are being hunted down. Long term jail sentences will be sought!" he vowed.

But multiple administration spokespersons have claimed instead that the unflattering stories are fabricated rather than inaccurate.

One of them, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, said a confrontation between Trump and Hegseth "literally never happened" and added that Trump "has the utmost confidence in Secretary Hegseth."

Late last year, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials agreed to make a surprisingly damaging but until-recently little-noticed admission in court: the Trump administration had cancelled several grants worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars largely because the money was slated to be sent to states that did not support the president in the last election. 

"A primary reason" for withholding the funds in question was that "the grantee was located in a 'Blue State,'" the DOJ wrote in a December 2025 court filing called a stipulation, an agreement entered into by the parties involved in a lawsuit agreeing to certain facts. 

A review by TPM identified multiple other instances of the administration making the same concession in court. One, from July, was recently covered by the New York Times; TPM found other examples of the same concession, documenting that the administration's lawyers have been open for several months now about having withheld money in part or entirely to punish the president's perceived political enemies.

"This is unprecedented to admit, but I also think it's unprecedented to do," David Super, law professor at the Georgetown University Law School, told TPM. 

Yet in admitting that the reason for the grant terminations was at least partly to do with the states' perceived partisan bent, attorneys for the Trump administration avoided having to hand over records or sit for depositions that might have revealed something even worse, experts said. 

"What the administration is admitting to have done in court is so blatantly illegal and derelict that it has to at least make you wonder what kind of communication passed between the White House and the department, or within the department, that could have led to it," Devin O'Connor, a senior fellow at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' federal fiscal policy team, told TPM.

It's a winding story that illustrates the often haphazard nature of Trump II-era retribution under Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought. OMB cancelled the grants during the October government shutdown, trying to strongarm Democrats into caving by revoking millions of dollars for clean energy and other awards in their states. The whole case is a reminder of how directly the White House controls granular questions around grant-making, and how pettily it can wield that newfound power. 

In this case, it's backfired in court. DOJ attorneys were left scrambling to cover up for a decision that came after Vought bragged on X that the administration was "cancelling" "Green New Scam" funding from 16 states, which he listed. They were 16 of the 19 states that voted for Kamala Harris during the 2024 election and that typically elect Democratic candidates statewide. Grantees in at least some of the same states Vought threatened suddenly lost funding administered as part of a Department of Energy (DOE) program to promote green energy.

By December, Trump officials were already bargaining with grantees who were suing to have their funding restored. TPM's review of court filings and interviews with lawyers involved in the cases found that the Trump administration made the damaging admission as part of an attempt to avoid responding in greater detail to requests from the grantees about how and why their awards were terminated. 

"The purpose of this stipulation is, you know, let's resolve the major factual issues so we can avoid the need for discovery and get this matter consolidated," one of the DOJ lawyers on the case said in a hearing, according to court transcripts.

On December 23, 2025, DOJ officials admitted that "Blue State" status was "a primary reason" for terminating the grants. In another stipulation in July 2026, Trump officials went further and said that the only reason it cancelled the grants was because the states were blue. 

"What seems to be really going on is that the government in these cases is absolutely terrified of discovery," one attorney familiar with the litigation told TPM.

"Discovery is burdensome for DOJ and client agencies, and this decision streamlined the litigation without prejudicing the jurisdictional and other arguments DOJ made," a DOJ official told TPM when asked about the stipulation.

The DOE did not respond to a request for comment.

An 'Unprecedented' Motive

Since taking office, the Trump administration has focused on cutting federal support to blue states. Acting on Trump's campaign trail promises of "retribution," officials have targeted an array of programs, at times intimating that an easy way out of the situation would be for states and cities to cooperate with the federal government's mass deportation campaign or other Trump administration priorities. 

"This is unprecedented to admit, but I also think it's unprecedented to do."

 

As of this writing, groups of plaintiffs have filed at least three separate lawsuits over the DOE's green energy cancellations, City of Saint Paul v. Wright, American Institute of Chemical Engineers v. Wright and Thakur v. Trump. The grants covered projects like electric car charging and rewiring buildings to increase energy efficiency. Of the three, the government admitted that the state's political leaning was a "primary reason" for cancelling the grants in two. In a class-action suit filed on behalf of the University of California, first reported by the New York Times, the government went a step further, admitting in July that grant cancellations were based "solely" on whether they were based in "Blue States."

What makes these cases unique is that the Trump administration conceded before a judge what its critics have alleged since January 2025: that these cuts were made for purely political reasons. It's a bare-faced admission that, at least in these cases, the administration was willing to deprive states of grants based on funds collected from the entire country out of partisan disagreement. 

That is an "unprecedented" motive for the federal government to admit to in court experts told TPM.

"There will be situations where political favoritism certainly comes in, but very much at the margins," Super, the Georgetown professor, told TPM, adding that he could recall "nothing remotely on the scale of cutting off funds to states that they dislike and then admitting to it in court documents."

'They Were Absolutely Determined to Avoid Discovery'

The first time Trump's DOE agreed to make this stipulation — in the City of Saint Paul v. Wright case — it admitted in court documents that one of its main reasons for terminating grants was based on whether the grantees were located in "Blue States."

"A primary reason for the selection of which DOE grant termination decisions were included in the October 2025 notice tranche was whether the grantee was located in a 'Blue State,'" the December 2025 court filing reads.

In that case, the plaintiffs and the government lawyers agreed to a set of stipulations instead of seeking further discovery or a trial. During the back and forth between the two sides, defense lawyers from the DOJ appeared desperate for the case to not go to discovery.

"What the administration is admitting to have done in court is so blatantly illegal and derelict that it has to at least make you wonder what kind of communication passed between the White House and the Department, or within the Department, that could have led to it."

 

Based on those stipulations, the judge eventually ruled in favor of the Saint Paul plaintiffs and ordered the grants in question to be restored.

In another case, American Institute of Chemical Engineers v. Wright, the plaintiffs relied on the stipulations the government already agreed to in the City of Saint Paul case. The plaintiffs and the government basically agreed to the