How Did DOGE Disrupt so Much While Saving so Little?

The website where DOGE tallied its successes, called the “Wall of Receipts,” has not been updated since Oct. 4.

At the White House, a spokesman declined to answer specific questions about DOGE’s work, instead sending a broad statement about the president’s goals: “President Trump pledged to cut the waste, fraud and abuse in our bloated government.”

The Times’s analysis helps answer a basic question about DOGE, which was hard to judge in the group’s chaotic heyday, when it had enormous power to cut federal spending and force out government employees who stood in the way. At the time, in the early months of 2025, DOGE listed real cuts alongside fake ones, and made it hard to tell the difference.

In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect.

That raised the question of whether DOGE, at its heart, was an exercise in budget cutting or in deception.

It had elements of both, The Times found. But among DOGE’s largest claims, the bogus savings were both larger and much more common than the real ones. Similar errors and exaggerations recurred across the group’s work.

To sort DOGE’s bogus cuts from its successes, The Times looked at federal records for the 40 largest items on the “Wall of Receipts.” In at least 28 cases, DOGE got it wrong.

Its errors included:

Double-counting. DOGE took credit for canceling the same Department of Energy grant twice, adding $500 million in duplicate savings.

Timeline errors. One contract that DOGE claimed credit for ending had actually been terminated by the Biden administration, weeks before DOGE began its work. Three more items on DOGE’s list had simply expired. These were pandemic-era contracts with pharmacies that provided free Covid-19 testing for the uninsured. They were originally allowed to spend up to a combined $12.2 billion, but they never came close to that level. Then, in May, the three contracts ended on schedule.

DOGE still claimed credit for killing them, highlighting $6 billion in savings.

Misclassifications. Seven programs that DOGE claimed to have terminated are not dead, including four that were resurrected by court rulings.

Exaggerations. In 16 cases, DOGE greatly exaggerated its cuts. Many, including those two large Defense Department contracts, relied on an accounting trick that produced “savings” with little real-world effect. DOGE lowered the official “ceiling value” of contracts — reducing the theoretical limit on what the government could eventually pay — without changing its actual spending.

Lambert here: The Times seems late to the party; that the Wall of Receipts was riddled with errors, if errors they were, was known from very early days.