It was almost two years ago when candidate Donald Trump delivered a new campaign pledge: If elected to a second term, the Republican said, he would appoint Elon Musk to lead some kind of government “efficiency” panel.

To hear Trump tell it, the endeavor was going to work miracles. The Musk-led commission, he boasted, would save taxpayers “trillions of dollars” and implement “an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months.”

Two years later, the rhetoric sounds like the punch line to a sad joke. Early last year, Trump did in fact launch the Department of Government Efficiency, but as it officially wrapped up its work last month, it was exposed as a failed experiment in amateurism.

To be sure, DOGE officials and their allies have continued to insist the initiative successfully identified wasteful spending and generated meaningful savings, but independent reporting for months has shown those savings were illusory, misleading or both.

As the debate over DOGE’s legacy moves forward, even more evidence is adding to the indictment against the endeavor. The Washington Post reported:

The U.S. DOGE Service, the cost-cutting group spearheaded by Elon Musk, consistently overstated its savings in online posts, taking credit for lease cancellations initiated before the group existed, according to a report from a government watchdog to be released Thursday.

DOGE also claimed contracts were terminated that had not been and loaded its database with savings that could not be verified, the report said.

The report was produced by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional agency that conducts federal audits for lawmakers.

In this case, two Democratic senators, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Gary Peters of Michigan, sought a comprehensive assessment of DOGE’s public accounting. The GAO did exactly that, and the results were not flattering. Auditors specifically concluded that the officials who oversaw the initiative “did not accurately report” many of its actions.

GAO auditors offered DOGE personnel an opportunity to defend the office’s work and to push back against the findings, but they “did not respond” to GAO inquiries.

“Elon Musk and the Trump administration claimed billions of dollars in savings it could not substantiate, took credit for work already underway, and refused to show its work, all while putting Americans’ sensitive data at risk and hollowing out critical agencies,” Peters told the Post said in a statement.

Well, sure, when you put it that way — which is to say, accurately — it doesn’t sound great.

I’m mindful that the nation is still dealing with the fallout of DOGE’s work, and as recent Minnesota wildfires help to prove, the damage it did remains highly relevant to many people here and around the world.

But the bottom line remains the same: DOGE’s goals went unmet, its promises went unfulfilled, and it envisioned one set of results but delivered quite the opposite.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Audit finds DOGE operation overstated its savings, ‘did not accurately report actions’ appeared first on MS NOW.

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