Beware of the DOGE Math When Assessing the Administration’s Anti-Fraud Claims

With a thin record of accomplishments on their own, Republicans hope to make their fight against fraud — primarily that allegedly committed under the nose of blue state governors — a centerpiece of their midterm campaign. Essentially, they want to portray Democrats and their supporters as a burden on taxpayers and themselves as their noble saviors.

First of all, the fight against waste and fraud — which we will get to in a moment — is a worthy cause. The federal government currently spends about $7 trillion annually, and even if we subtract the $1 trillion that goes toward interest for the massive debt it has run up, that means there is a lot of potential for contractors, recipients of benefits, healthcare providers, and public servants to slice off a bit more than they are entitled to from this massive pie.

Of course, it is a ironic that an administration led by Donald Trump would cast itself as an anti-fraud champion.

For example, when Vice President JD Vance, who is spearheading the effort, said last week that he “[doesn’t] care what your name is. If you’re committing fraud against the American people, all of us in public leadership should be trying to stop it and try to throw you in prison for enriching yourself off of the American taxpayer,” it’s difficult not to think about his boss and his boss’s family and the many ways in which they are doing just that.

From no-bid contracts for vanity projects, pardons for sale, favors to donors, and self-dealing, to immunity from IRS audits, it is clear that Vance should look no further than to the Oval Office or a hotel at a Trump property (where the Secret Service will undoubtedly pay top dollar to stay for the privilege of protecting the president) if he wants to find a government official who is lining his own pockets.

However, there is another matter to consider when analyzing the White House’s claims that it has already uncovered $230 billion in fraud since the start of 2025 (and let’s keep in mind that this would be about 2 percent of all the money the government has spent during that time): This administration has a record not only of misrepresenting the price of gasoline and groceries but also of inflating its own accomplishments.

And that brings us to the claims of Elon Musk’s DOGE team.

While the tech billionaire, who has been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in GOP campaigns (including Trump’s), initially claimed that he could save the government $2 trillion by cutting wasteful spending, reality soon settled in, and he scaled back those lofty expectations.

In the end, according to their “Wall of Receipts,” he and his DOGEsters ended up saving the government $110 billion (while being responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths).

Yes, we know that the DOGE website says $215 billion, but when you actually add up all the numbers, you get about half that… which is part of the problem. Musk and his team just seem to be bad at math.

And even the $110 billion figure is exaggerated.

Last week, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO), also known as the “congressional watchdog,” found that DOGE wasn’t transparent in how it calculated the savings it allegedly achieved and that some of its estimates are “incorrect or lack supporting evidence.”

In addition, some contracts that it claims to have terminated weren’t canceled at all.

Specifically, GAO stated that “no termination action was taken on 2,503 of the contracts, representing $27.4 billion of reported savings,” which accounts for nearly half of the alleged contract savings, and that “DOGE reported no savings for 5,812, or 43.2 percent of all contracts it included on the Wall of Receipts.”

It should also be noted that members of the DOGE team did not respond to GAO’s requests for information.

“Therefore, we were unable to clarify how DOGE estimated savings when the reported savings did not correspond to their stated methodologies or other calculations,” GAO said in a letter to the Democratic senators who had requested the review.

What all of this means is that, along with everything else anybody in this administration says, any claims of savings from detecting waste and fraud should be taken with a big grain of salt.