Wired reports:

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has spent the first six weeks of the new Trump administration turning the federal government upside down. It has moved from agency to agency, accessing sensitive data and payment systems, all on a supposed crusade to audit the government and stop fraud, waste, and abuse. DOGE has posted some of its “findings” on its website, many of which have been revealed to be errors.

But two federal auditors with years of experience, who have both worked on financial and technical audits for the government, say that DOGE’s actions are the furthest thing from what an actual audit looks like. Both asked to speak on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.

“Honestly, comparing real auditing to what DOGE is doing, there’s no comparison,” says one of the auditors who spoke to WIRED. “None of them are auditors.”

In September, in a speech during the presidential campaign, then candidate Donald Trump said that he would create a government efficiency task force, headed by Musk, which would do a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.” Musk initially said that he wanted to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, more than the entire 2023 discretionary budget of $1.7 trillion. Musk has since tempered his ambitions, saying he’d aim to cut $1 trillion in government spending. Still, he has alleged that much of this money can be cut by identifying waste, fraud, and abuse, and has continued to claim DOGE’s cuts of agency staff and resources are all part of an audit.

While there are certainly instances of government money siphoned off to fraud—a Government Accountability Office study published in 2024 estimated that the government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud each year—even recovering all that spending wouldn’t amount to the $1 trillion Musk hopes to cut from the budget.

The auditors who spoke to WIRED allege that not only is Musk’s claim not true, but also that DOGE appears to have completely eschewed the existing processes for actually rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. [Continue reading…]