DOGE Ends as GAO Calls Its $110 Billion Savings Claim Unreliable and the Federal Workforce Shrinks 11%

The Department of Government Efficiency formally ended on 4 July 2026, the date written into the executive order that created it. There was no closing report. OMB Director Russell Vought said there wouldn’t be one. In practice DOGE had stopped existing months earlier. In November 2025, Reuters quoted OPM Director Scott Kupor saying of it, “That doesn’t exist.” Its functions had been folded into OPM.

What DOGE leaves behind is two sets of numbers: the savings it claimed and the people who left government. GAO has now checked both.

The savings

The targets fell fast. Elon Musk first talked about $2 trillion, then $1 trillion. DOGE’s final public claim was $215 billion, which it put at about $1,335 per taxpayer. That figure was never independently verified.

GAO examined an earlier DOGE claim of $110 billion, and its findings were reported in August 2026. The watchdog called the claim vastly inflated and unreliable. It couldn’t verify 96% of the claimed grant savings. About half of the claimed savings didn’t follow DOGE’s own stated method. $27.4 billion came from contracts that were never actually cancelled. $7.2 billion had no identifying information attached at all. A $1.7 billion Defense Health Agency contract was counted even though nothing had changed.

Then a second GAO report, in September, looked at the cost side. It found $9.5 billion went in 2025 to federal employees who weren’t working, about 70% of it through the deferred resignation programme, which paid people to leave later. Use of paid administrative leave rose 435% between 2023 and 2025. OPM’s Kupor says the workforce cuts will save $20 billion a year.

The people

The workforce numbers are clearer than the savings numbers.

GAO’s June 2026 report counted about 378,000 separations across 22 agencies in 2025 against about 127,000 hires. The federal civilian workforce fell by nearly 256,000, more than 11%, between December 2024 and January 2026. OPM’s own running count, through July 2026, puts the net decline since inauguration at 271,363, about 12%.

The cuts were deep in some places and almost absent in others. Between December 2024 and January 2026, USAID shrank by 95%, the Education Department by 46%, GSA by 37%, OPM itself by 34%, the National Science Foundation by 33% and HUD by 31%. The Department of Homeland Security changed by less than 1%. In absolute terms the Defense Department lost the most people, about 61,600, while Treasury lost about 28% of its staff, mostly at the IRS.

Most of it was voluntary on paper. OPM figures for 2025 show about 92% of departures were voluntary, many through deferred resignation.

The rebound

Some of it is already reversing. The IRS was cleared to fast-track 8,000 hires. HHS plans 12,000. In September a federal judge ruled DHS’s plan to cut FEMA’s staff in half unlawful.

How other governments do it

Most governments that set out to shrink the civil service do it slowly: hiring freezes, attrition targets, multi-year spending reviews. Britain’s coalition government cut the civil service substantially after 2010 over several years through spending reviews. Washington tried the reverse, a fast cut first and a reckoning afterwards.

GAO’s reports give that reckoning its first hard numbers. The headcount fell by about a quarter of a million. The savings that were supposed to justify it can’t be traced. Both things are true at once, and the rehiring wave suggests agencies are now finding out which of those jobs they needed.

For what came next on the budget side, see the 2026 shutdown fights and the stopgap running to December.