- The Washington Times - Wednesday, July 8, 2026

President Trump’s cost-cutting initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency, officially closed its doors on Independence Day, and the administration does not plan to issue a final report on the effort.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought told a congressional panel Tuesday that a formal DOGE review wasn’t necessary.

“We’re always happy to give you our assessment of that work,” he said. “I think it made some really important strides.”



On its website, the department said it is working to upload its receipts in a “digestible and transparent manner consistent with applicable rules and regulations.”

Currently listed is a subset of contract, grant and lease cancellations, which it said represented roughly 30% of total savings. Displayed are 13,440 contract terminations totaling roughly $61 billion in savings, 15,887 grant terminations saving about $49 billion and 264 lease terminations saving $113 million.

While it said the list would initially be updated weekly, and real-time developments would be included over time, the list was last updated Jan 1.

DOGE estimated it saved $215 billion, translating to $1,335 per taxpayer — a figure equivalent to about 0.55% of the current $39 trillion national debt, according to a national debt tracking site. The national debt did not shrink during DOGE’s run, however, rising by several trillion dollars over the same period.

DOGE’s savings claims are unverified. Independent reviews and financial analysts have found DOGE’s figures relied on contract ceiling values rather than realized spending, contained duplicate and erroneous entries and could not be independently confirmed in many cases.

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The initiative cut tens of thousands of federal jobs.

The federal workforce shrank by over 272,000 employees due to a hiring freeze, early retirement incentives, reductions in force and a “deferred resignation” program.

In January 2025, over 2 million federal employees received an email from the Office of Personnel Management with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” introducing the Deferred Resignation Program that offered workers full pay and benefits to leave their jobs by the end of the fiscal year.

Almost 140,000 of them signed up for the program, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

But paying the buyout to employees who stopped working on Sept. 30, 2025, cost taxpayers between $11.1 billion and $15.1 billion, according to a report from the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen.

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Donald Trump has often spoken about cutting waste and making the government more efficient,” the report reads. “Yet his massive federal layoffs and resignation programs have been the epitome of inefficiency and have resulted in billions of dollars in wasted federal funds.”

The federal government later rehired hundreds of employees to fix critical staffing shortages and operational breakdowns across multiple federal agencies.

On his first day back in the White House, Mr. Trump established DOGE, with a sunset clause on America’s semiquincentennial.

The White House’s budget proposal also requested $35 million in “reimbursable program activity” from Congress for DOGE — a tiny fraction of the $7 trillion federal budget.

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Amy Gleason served as acting administrator of DOGE from February 2025 until Saturday. She is now the chief product officer at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is spearheading a crackdown on fraud.

On July 4, the department said that “while the formal mission of DOGE has come to an end, the mission to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse will continue.”

“Good stewardship of taxpayer dollars and accountable government are not temporary initiatives,” it said in a statement. “We hope those principles endure long into America’s next 250 years.”

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said that the president was given “a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government.

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“He has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer,” he said in a statement.

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