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.
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.
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.
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.
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