DOGE Initiatives

DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, had four lines of work from January 2025 to July 2026: canceling contracts, grants, and leases, shrinking the federal workforce, cutting regulations, and flagging federal payments that lacked tracking codes.

Contracts, Grants, and Leases

DOGE's ledger sorted its cancellations into three groups, and grants led the count. It listed 15,887 terminated grants, 13,440 canceled contracts, and 264 canceled leases, each with a savings figure, on doge.gov and in an open data feed at api.doge.gov.

Grants were the most numerous cuts, but contracts carried more of the savings. The largest grant on the list, a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) agreement with Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, dated March 1, 2025, was valued at $2.63 billion and booked at $1.75 billion in savings. The largest contract, a Department of War contract valued at $12.5 billion, was booked at $4.0 billion. Elon Musk had called for USAID's end a month before that grant was cut.

What the Savings Add Up To

By DOGE's own numbers, contracts carried about $61.0 billion in savings and grants about $49.2 billion, while the lease entries added up to about $54 million.

DOGE's savings page showed a larger headline total of $215 billion. It added categories beyond contracts, grants, and leases, such as asset sales and workforce savings, that the Wall of Receipts did not list line by line.

In August 2026 the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the auditor that reports to Congress, reviewed the ledger line by line, and the DOGE explainer covers its findings.

The Federal Workforce

Executive Order 14210, signed February 11, 2025, told agencies to hire no more than one person for every four who left, so headcount would shrink as people quit or retired. A deferred resignation offer kept workers on full pay through September 30, 2025 if they agreed to leave. On February 22, 2025, Elon Musk posted that every federal employee would get an email asking what they had done the week before.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government's human resources agency, counted about 317,000 departures in 2025, including about 154,000 deferred resignations and about 17,000 reductions in force, the formal term for layoffs. By share of staff, the deepest cuts fell on USAID and the Department of Education, while the Department of War lost the most people.

Regulations and Payments

DOGE kept a deregulation leaderboard on doge.gov and reported $28.7 billion in savings from repealed or rewritten rules. It also reported $4.7 trillion in federal payments that lacked a Treasury Account Symbol, the code that ties a payment to the budget account it comes from. Both figures are DOGE's own, and neither was part of the GAO review.

The Bottom Line

DOGE put its contract, grant, and lease cuts in a public ledger, and OPM's departure count documents the smaller federal workforce. The regulation and payment figures come from DOGE's own reporting.