"We found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud," President Donald Trump claimed in his speech to Congress on Tuesday night, referring to the cost-cutting efforts of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). That figure is far bigger than the total "estimated savings" reported by DOGE itself, only part of which it describes as a result of "fraud and improper payment deletion." And DOGE's estimate is itself dubious in light of the many errors that journalists and analysts have discovered in its published data—so dubious that Manhattan Institute budget expert Jessica Riedl describes the project as "government spending-cut theater."
Last year, the Government Accountability Office estimated that "the federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud." So it is theoretically possible to do what Trump claims. But it would not be realistic to expect such results just a few months after getting started, and DOGE does not claim to have identified anything like "hundreds of billions of dollars" in fraud.
According to the DOGE website, the project so far has found $105 billion in "estimated savings," consisting of "asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions." DOGE does not say how much of that total is attributable to "fraud and improper payment deletion," but it is obviously much less than "hundreds of billions of dollars."
