The Trump administration’s claim that it is saving billions of dollars through DOGE-related cuts to federal contracts is drastically exaggerated, according to a new POLITICO analysis of public data and federal spending records.
Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.
Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.
DOGE’s latest figures on contract cuts ticked up to $54.2 billion in an update posted on Tuesday.
POLITICO’s findings come on top of months of scrutiny of DOGE’s accounting, but the magnitude of DOGE’s inflated savings claims has not been clear until now.
Even so, President Donald Trump claimed hundreds of billions of dollars had already been used to reduce the federal deficit. The former head of DOGE, Elon Musk, initially promised the organization would reduce the deficit by $2 trillion. Many in Trump’s Cabinet have also celebrated DOGE’s efforts, including his secretaries of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture.
DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.
Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.
“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.”
The White House disagrees. DOGE has produced “historic savings for the American people,” White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields wrote in an email in response to questions about DOGE’s activities. DOGE’s site, he said, provides up-to-date and accurate information. “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials and updated in real time based on current information,” he said.
DOGE’s public list of records, or what it calls its “wall of receipts,” says the site only represents a subset of the organization’s overall savings. However, even among the sample of contracts it posted through July, roughly 40 percent of claimed savings could not be verified due to a lack of identifying information.
DOGE’s fuzzy math
DOGE claims it has saved $202 billion across the whole of the federal government from a combination of contract, lease and grant cancellations, workforce reductions, regulation clawbacks and more.
To create savings from canceling contracts or other awards, DOGE has a few options: The president could formally claw back funds through Capitol Hill — a process where Congress cancels dollars it had previously appropriated, which it did this month for the first time in decades — or agencies could reclaim awarded funds for later use, an action known as a deobligation.
To assess DOGE’s actual savings so far from canceled contracts, POLITICO created a database of every traceable termination posted on DOGE’s wall of receipts through July 26 that was at least one month old, about 10,100 contracts.
Over this period, agencies have issued clawbacks, or deobligations, on less than 30 percent of those awards, recovering $1.4 billion in funds.
Even if agencies immediately recovered all unspent funds from these 10,100 contracts, the total savings would amount to less than 40 percent of what DOGE has taken credit for. And agencies would still be on the hook to spend those dollars unless Congress or the president intervened, though some in the administration have said they could simply spend less.
Roughly 2,400 cancellations on DOGE’s termination list through July cannot be independently verified. Some of these cancellations were simply too recent to show up in public records, but most had their identifying information redacted by DOGE, which has often labeled those entries as “unavailable for legal reasons.”
DOGE’s list is filled with exaggerated savings claims across the federal government. Some contracts included on DOGE’s termination list have only been modified and not canceled; others have been removed from the list without explanation.
Under the VA, for example, DOGE’s page reported savings of $932 million from contracts canceled though June, including awards for a cancer registry, suicide prevention services and other health care support. Federal records show the VA recovered just $132 million from these awards, or less than 15 percent of what DOGE claimed, and that the VA reinstated the contract for suicide prevention support.
These contracts were canceled because VA staff could perform the necessary work in-house, VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz wrote in an email. The VA, he said, has avoided up to $27 billion in costs from reviewing and downsizing thousands of contracts “to ensure each one of them benefits Veterans and is a good use of taxpayers’ money.”
But the bulk of DOGE’s actions show a different approach to savings entirely: lowering the ceiling value, which experts equate to an accounting trick.
Lowering the ceiling decreases the potential price tag, but it’s not guaranteed those dollars would have been spent to begin with.
“Voila! Half a billion saved. Time for lunch,” said one federal contracting lawyer with nearly four decades’ experience advising government contractors who was granted anonymity to explain the practice freely.
At most, for contracts where the ceiling exceeds the obligated amount, this kind of action amounts to avoiding future expenses that were never guaranteed to happen.
In total, the administration removed $14 billion from contract ceilings on the traceable contracts on its “wall of receipts” through July — a far cry from the $32.7 billion DOGE claimed to have saved from terminating them.
In reality, the ultimate savings from terminations are nearly impossible to predict.
DOGE’s calculations, for instance, don’t account for expenses that come from ending contracts prematurely, like payments for outstanding leases, subcontractors, or work already performed, which can add up quickly.
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