Around 40% of DOGE’s Cancelled Contracts Is Money That’s Already Been Spent

The Department of Government Efficiency’s “Wall of Receipts” is a litany of failure. According to reporting from the Associated Press, a full 40% of the federal contracts won’t save America any money at all. The AP’s report came the same day the Government Accountability Office, a 103-year-old institution, published its own report on the places Washington could trim the budget and save money.

GAO is an old office that knows how Washington works, knows its players, and takes the time to make careful and well-researched recommendations about how to save the U.S. taxpayer money. DOGE is only a few months old and more interested in memes and social-media frenzy than actual spending cuts.

The proof is in the results.

Elon Musk made a big deal of DOGE being accountable to “the people” and that there would be plenty of receipts that show just how good his extra-governmental cost-saving enterprise is. He’s published an enormous list of 1,125 contracts that DOGE has terminated. In many of the cases listed, the money is already spent and there’s no getting it back. It’s not so much a list of savings as an organized list of places the government is spending money, or has spent money, in ways Musk doesn’t like.

According to the AP, 417 of the government contracts won’t save anyone any money. Musk and his DOGE cronies apparently don’t know how to read a government contract. There’s a lot of that going around. It’s also possible that they’re simply lying.

The Wall of Receipts is a long and ever-updating list that contains simple descriptions of what was canceled, the total value of the contract, and the amount the government saves by canceling it. It even contains a link to the contract’s page in the Federal Procurement Data System, an online database of government contracts.

A lot of the stuff on DOGE’s list is subscriptions to news services like Bloomberg and Politico that have already been paid, sometimes years ago. There’s also training for software licenses that have already been purchased and training that’s already been completed. In 2024, USAID paid Winzip $20,472.38 for software licenses. Also in 2024, the Department of Agriculture spent $23,520 for a Politico subscription. In both cases, the money is already spent. Yet both are on the DOGE list.

One of the things that’s so frustrating about DOGE and Musk’s approach is that waste, fraud, and abuse in the U.S. government is a real problem. Another contract on DOGE’s cutting board is a USAID media project that spent $227,392 to make YouTube videos about big cats and conservation issues around them. That seems like a lot of money to produce YouTube videos about cats.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is a research group that works for Congress. Every year it publishes a “High-Risk” list of places in the federal budget that are prone to waste, fraud, and abuse. This year’s report is 303-pages-long. It highlights 38 areas that D.C. should probe if it wants real savings.

The GAO has a proven track record. “Over time, progress on our List has led to about $759 billion in savings—but there’s still more on the table,” the GAO said in its report. By its own reckoning, the GAO has helped save U.S. taxpayers $84 billion over the last two years.

So what does the GAO see as the big spending problems? The increased number of disasters due to climate change, back taxes due to the IRS, mismanaged real-estate holdings, payment fraud, and out-of-control spending at the Pentagon.

Of these issues, the Pentagon is at the top of the list. It’s the trillion-dollar monster that spends more money than most other government agencies combined. DOGE and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth promise that cuts are coming, but the proposed $50 billion is a drop in the bucket of the almost trillion dollar spend it makes every year. And a lot of the DoD’s most costly programs are on an exemption list, including a $1.7 trillion upgrade of America’s nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The other issues probably won’t improve under Trump. The administration has cut employees from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (EMA) and the IRS. That’s going to make it harder to manage the disasters that come from climate change and collect taxes owed to the government.

Another important tool to fight government waste, fraud, and abuse is the offices of the Inspectors General. These independent agencies within the government lead complex investigations into the various branches of government and constantly turn up waste, fraud, and abuse.

Trump fired 17 of them.

DOGE, Trump, and Musk’s cuts to federal spending are performative. There’s no plan here and no real goal. The U.S. federal government spends too much money, it’s true, but Trump and Musk are firing all the people who know where the bodies are buried. They could go through long and complicated reports and work with congress to slash real spending to a lot of expensive and unnecessary government programs.

Instead, they’re doing what looks good online. They’re posting a big list on a dumb website named after a meme-dog. A list that includes their myriad failures.