Turning the government’s power to his own ends

He handed Elon Musk a mandate to cut waste. The nonpartisan GAO found DOGE's savings claims were mostly unverifiable or wrong.

Trump created DOGE and put Elon Musk in charge of cutting federal spending. DOGE published a 'Wall of Receipts' claiming about $215 billion in savings. In August 2026 the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office examined $110 billion of it and could not verify most of what it checked: two-thirds of the claimed contract savings were unsupported or did not follow DOGE's own method, 96 percent of claimed grant savings could not be substantiated, and $27.4 billion was credited to 2,503 contracts that were never terminated. Of 264 leases DOGE claimed it canceled, 108 were already being terminated before DOGE existed.

SourcesGAO report (GAO-26-108615)

He handed Elon Musk a mandate to cut waste. The nonpartisan GAO found DOGE's savings claims were mostly unverifiable or wrong.
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His Homeland Security signed a $464 million no-bid contract for planes it said it urgently needed to deport people, then let them sit parked for months, turned three into luxury jets, and lent one to the FBI director.His DHS waived dozens of laws to bulldoze a border wall through Big Bend National Park, over a cease-and-desist from Texas’s Republican land commissioner and the objections of seven former park superintendents.He ordered the Navy to rip out the electromagnetic catapults on its newest carriers and go back to 1950s steam, at a cost of billions, just as China put the very same technology to sea.

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