It won't come as a surprise that Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) didn't save taxpayers nearly as much as it claimed. Analysis from outside the government showed savings claims were heavily inflated, and now the government's own watchdog has said it wasn't able to confirm savings claims made in DOGE's so-called "Wall of Receipts."

For example, DOGE reported savings of $49.2 billion from cutting grants but almost none of it could be verified, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its report yesterday. The GAO is the auditing and investigating arm of Congress and issued the DOGE report in response to a June 2025 request from Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

"The Wall of Receipts did not provide sufficient information to verify the method DOGE used to calculate savings, or what the savings consisted of, for 13,553 of the 15,887 grants it reported as terminated. This corresponds to about 96 percent of the DOGE-reported grant savings," the GAO report said.

Beyond grants, the GAO concluded that "DOGE did not use its stated methodology to calculate" most of the savings from contracts it reported as terminated, and that it exaggerated savings from terminated leases. "DOGE did not respond to our request for interviews or clarification," the GAO said.

In response to the report, Peters said that “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.”

DOGE claimed $215 billion in savings

The Musk-led DOGE tried to conduct much of its work in secrecy. Last year, Senate Democratic staff investigated DOGE activities at three agencies and found armed guards, locked doors, and windows covered with trash bags.

Overall, DOGE's Wall of Receipts website claims it saved taxpayers $215 billion through "asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions." Even that figure was far short of Musk's goal of $1 trillion.

Trump and Musk claimed that DOGE would cut government waste, but its whirlwind approach resulted in what one Brookings researcher called “cut[ting] muscle, not fat." The researcher found "25,747 occasions where the Trump administration abruptly fired people and then hired them back."

The GAO analysis examined a portion of the claimed savings, specifically $110.3 billion related to contracts, grants, and leases. Besides the $49.2 billion in claimed savings in grants, DOGE claimed $61 billion in savings from contracts and $113 million in savings from leases. DOGE reported making cuts affecting 15,887 grants, 13,440 contracts, and 264 leases.

DOGE ignored "complexities and nuances"

With contract cuts, GAO evaluated whether DOGE followed its own stated methodology for determining the amount of savings. It found that DOGE followed its stated methodology for 27.5 percent of reported savings and did not follow its stated methodology for 60.7 percent of savings. The GAO could not determine whether DOGE followed its stated methodology for the remaining 11.8 percent because of missing contract identifiers.

"Even in cases in which DOGE followed its stated methodology, it did not account for many complexities and nuances of federal contracting or sufficiently identify limitations," the GAO said. "For example, the savings reported for terminated contracts do not account for subsequent obligations and deobligations that may be associated with termination settlement costs or contract closeout. As such, the amount of reported savings is likely misstated. Finally, whether reductions in contract value will result in savings will depend on circumstances that are not yet known."

Although DOGE claimed $113 million in savings from leases, the GAO said the lease cuts listed on the Wall of Receipts came to only $53.5 million. "Because DOGE declined to meet with us, we could not obtain an explanation for the error," the GAO said. Moreover, of "108 of the 264 leases identified for termination on the Wall of Receipts, about $15.3 million of the total $53.5 million in savings, were already in process for termination when DOGE was established," the GAO said.

DOGE scaled back some of its claims in the year before GAO's report. As of March 30, 2025, DOGE "reported 679 leases as terminated, totaling approximately $400 million in reported savings." After that, "145 of the leases DOGE reported as terminated—accounting for about $346 million in reported savings—were removed from the Wall of Receipts because the leases were no longer being considered for termination," the GAO report said.

The GAO recommended "that the Executive Office of the President, through the US DOGE Service, should ensure that known data quality issues and limitations are prominently displayed on the Wall of Receipts."

DOGE ethics report lacking information

The GAO also issued a separate report this week on DOGE's personnel and ethics activities. The GAO identified 206 DOGE personnel in the Executive Office of the President (EOP), many of whom also were detailed to other executive-branch agencies.

"EOP officials told GAO that DOGE personnel within EOP receive the same ethics and records management training as other EOP personnel," the report said. "However, EOP did not respond to GAO’s requests for access to training records and financial disclosures for DOGE personnel. As a result, GAO could not determine all DOGE personnel who received training or completed financial disclosures with EOP."

When contacted by Ars today, the White House press office said "the Trump Administration told GAO numerous times that all employees, whether in DOGE or not, are required to complete ethics training and follow financial disclosure requirements." The White House did not provide us with any statement on the GAO report examining DOGE's alleged savings.

Trump's DOGE executive order in January 2025 established a temporary DOGE service and renamed the US Digital Service to the US DOGE Service. The temporary DOGE service had a mandate that expired on July 4, 2026, and said on that day that "the formal mission of DOGE has come to an end."

But the US DOGE Service doesn't have an expiration date, the GAO noted. "We agree that the USDS temporary organization terminated on July 4, 2026, pursuant to the terms of the EO [executive order] that created it. However, the EO did not terminate the broader USDS entity within EOP," the GAO said.

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The White House is drafting an executive order on the disproven link between vaccines and autism, according to independent reports from The Washington Post and Bloomberg, which both cited unnamed sources with knowledge of the efforts.

Bloomberg reported that the executive order, which is still taking shape and is subject to change, could be issued as soon as next week. The Post said the order's drafting so far is aimed at the childhood vaccine schedule, autism research, and parental choice for vaccinations.

Dozens of high-quality studies encompassing data from millions of children worldwide have already been carried out on the topic and have consistently found no link between childhood vaccines and autism. The claim of a link stems from an unethical, fraudulent study that was retracted years ago, and its author was stripped of his medical license.

Leading medical groups, scientists, and autism patient advocacy groups have strongly rejected any continued pursuit of the disproven link, seeing it as fearmongering and a waste of precious time and resources to find real causes and treatments. The majority of American voters also reject the claim, and promoting the false link has been deemed "politically risky" by analysts.

Still, for Trump, holding onto the debunked and dangerous claim appears to be a personal issue. Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is an ardent anti-vaccine activist who has long promoted the false link while generally disparaging life-saving immunizations. But even Kennedy has recently shifted from publicly discussing vaccines, given the political peril.

Recent reporting indicates that the White House's continued effort to forge a false connection between vaccines and autism is coming from Trump directly. The octogenarian reportedly wants to be remembered as the president who cured autism and believes he can achieve that by scaling back vaccines, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

Given the push, Trump has reportedly chastised Kennedy on multiple occasions for not doing more on the issue. Kennedy confirmed the Journal's reporting in a combative August 2 CNN interview. (He otherwise made a barrage of false claims during the interview; a comprehensive fact check can be found here.)

As Trump and his administration continue to flout the science on vaccines, White House spokesman Kush Desai gave a statement to the Post claiming, once again, the administration would use "gold standard science" to ensure the US has the "best childhood vaccine schedule in the world."

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On Thursday, a US District Court in Oregon ordered the US government to restart the process of approving wind projects. All new wind development in the US has been on hold since August of 2025, when the Department of Defense (DoD) stopped participating in a process that allows it to compel developers to alter projects in order to limit their interference with radar equipment. The court ruled, however, that the DoD's national security claims did not allow it to opt out of a process that is legally mandated.

The Trump administration has made many attempts to block wind development, both offshore and land based. Its attempts to stop offshore wind included the same approach at issue in this case: Claim that drone developments mean that radar interference by wind turbines creates a national security risk. The courts were not sympathetic to this claim, including in cases where judges examined a classified report that the DoD was using to justify blocking offshore wind construction. As a result, the administration has turned to paying companies not to pursue wind development.

In parallel, the government was pursuing a similar approach for onshore wind. Here, a law lays out a process for the DoD to evaluate any problems posed by wind turbines and negotiate changes to planned wind farms with the developers. As laid out in the new decision, the government simply stopped participating in this process in August 2025, first by refusing to sign off on previously negotiated agreements, and later by refusing to draft agreements entirely. Eventually, it simply refused to participate in negotiations at all. This has brought a halt to all wind development in the US.

So, individual developers and industry groups sued. The government made a variety of defenses, including that the suit was filed in the wrong court system, that it hadn't made any final decisions that were subject to judicial review yet, and that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue. The court found none of these arguments persuasive. And it found that the hold was a very clear violation of the law. "DoD’s review is not a black box," Judge Karin Immergut ruled. "Rather, Congress created a statutory framework that guides DoD’s review of whether a construction project 'would result in an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States.'"

Nothing in that framework allows the DoD to simply stop participating in the process. "If DoD wishes to alter the statutory scheme, it can ask Congress to do so," Immergut wrote. In the absence of congressional action, the DoD can't simply ignore the law.

The ruling orders the DoD to resume the process of approving wind projects using the congressionally mandated schedule and to report back every 30 days on its progress.

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YouTube currently requires that content creators let viewers know "when they use AI to meaningfully alter or generate photorealistic content."

The policy draws some strange boundaries. It applies to "AI-generated music" (not photorealistic) but not to "riding a unicorn through a fantastical world" (this could be photorealistic, though it is not plausible). YouTube then summarizes the policy in a different way: "Realistic AI content and meaningful changes require disclosure, while non-realistic or minor edits don’t."

But AI uses that require no disclosure can include everything from "idea generation" up through "production assistance, like using generative AI tools to create or improve a video outline, script, thumbnail, title, or infographic." Creators are free to clone their own voices for voiceovers. They can also use "AI-generated or altered animation of a missile in a fully animated video."

This results in some odd scenarios. A thrilling 10-second video that shows me riding my AI-generated steed through the horse-killing-fart swamps of Soylentius IV? No disclosure, even though the entire thing is AI-generated. But when I add an AI-crafted lute ballad about the grave dangers I faced in those swamps? Mandatory disclosure.

The policy gap becomes more consequential when you imagine a 30-minute video attempting to sway people's views on geopolitics. AI could generate the premise, do the research, and write the outline. My own AI-cloned voice model could read the AI-drafted script. I could even use AI-generated missile animations. Must I disclose the rampant AI use that drove this entire project? Apparently not.

But having an AI help in these ways imparts a certain feel and logic to projects, even if the final result is not fully "AI-generated." Humans approaching topics without AI might find sources through quite different paths, and they might have to read and process more material to get there, giving them a different kind of understanding. They might also note very different things as important, thus creating different outlines of the same material. They might pepper a script with jokes or digressions not usually suggested by an AI. And they might read a script aloud in a more natural way.

This doesn't make the AI wrong, but it does mean that the AI-assisted work will feel different.

Meet my research assistant

I was thinking about this because noted science YouTuber Hank Green recently apologized to fans for his overreliance on AI. Green has made clear that "my words are mine" and that he writes his own scripts. But after fans complained about perceived AI influence on his work, Green looked at his process and concluded they might be right.

"I have been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid," Green wrote in a Reddit post on July 31. "It can be very useful for this task, giving me access to a lot of papers I didn't know existed really fast, but I think that has been to the detriment of my work because it has not given me the freedom to find all of my own ways into and around a topic."

The problem, in Green's case, seems to have been the pressure to produce felt by so many content creators. He used that pressure as a fruitful spur to creation, but he also dealt with it by "using AI to locate papers and other resources for learning about topics." This quest for efficiency eventually had him moving "so fast that my own process isn't actually clear to me."

Green concluded that "making more things does not make me make better things." And he said that he still needs to come to terms "with the fact that the level of dopamine I've been getting from interacting with LLMs... with doing more and more and more and more... is not healthy for me or good for the world."

The result is likely to be fewer videos.

Beneath the surface

YouTube's AI disclosure policy and Green's own wrestling with the technology illuminate different sides of the same question: When does AI support human effort—and when does it replace it in ways that matter?

YouTube's concern is primarily about outright deception. Its policy requires disclosure when a video shows "a real person appear to say or do something they didn’t do" or "realistic scene that didn’t actually occur." Noting AI use in these cases can be a hedge against the cruder forms of disinformation.

But Green's self-critique is subtler. Far below this "photorealistic" layer of deception, extensive AI use can shape the very basis of creation: ideation, research, and outlining. That is not the same thing as saying that AI use is bad or that its results are inaccurate. It is to say that, even if all AI outputs are correct and well-crafted, they might still possess a style and geometry inherited from the machine now guiding the process.

Turning too early—or too easily—to an AI may crowd out offbeat ideas. AI-assisted research may supply answers but not domain mastery. And an AI-generated outline, whether for an essay or a YouTube video, may lock the mind into a predetermined track before it has the chance to wander—and perhaps arrive somewhere more personal.

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