It took less than two months for DOGE to tout big wins on the real estate front.
The leases of hundreds of federal buildings — 748, to be exact — had been terminated, DOGE said, meaning their payments would no longer serve as a burden on the U.S. balance sheet. Had it been accurate, that figure would have represented 10 percent of the total leases managed by the General Services Administration.
By early March, DOGE ascribed a dollar amount to those savings: $660 million.
That sum, however, didn’t represent an early marker of progress from the nascent cost-cutting effort, NOTUS found. Instead, it was a high watermark that vastly overstated the amount DOGE had actually saved taxpayers.
DOGE has revised down its real estate savings figure in every update to its public accounting over the past 10 weeks — $660 million became $500 million, then $400 million, then $311 million.
Late Sunday, the total fell once more to “~$262M in savings” — less than half of what DOGE originally claimed and a sum that nonetheless continues to overstate its work.
The weeks of backtracking are emblematic of DOGE’s tendency to tout big savings that are cited by allies as proof of its progress, only to revise down its estimates later.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is chair of the DOGE subcommittee, and other subcommittee members cited the federal real estate figures during a hearing last month as evidence of DOGE’s unique effectiveness in an area where other administrations had failed to deliver.
“In just the few months since inauguration day, DOGE … worked with agencies to eliminate hundreds of unneeded taxpayer-funded office leases,” Greene said at the hearing. “More specifically, they’ve canceled nearly 700 federal leases of 7.9 million square feet of space, saving taxpayers around $400 million.”
Republican Rep. William Timmons repeated the figure as fact as he questioned a witness. DOGE “terminated close to 700 federal leases. What financial impact has that created for taxpayers?” he asked.
“What we’ve had with new leadership, with DOGE, is terminating 700 federal leases already,” Republican Rep. Pat Fallon said at the hearing. “Ten percent, that is a chunk, that is a good start.”
Only the lease terminations hadn’t — and still haven’t — reached that threshold.
On Trump’s 100th day in office, “President Trump’s GSA” touted a markedly different sum: “595 vacant or underutilized leases” had been terminated, it stated in a press release, saving “$298 million.” DOGE had listed 592 as terminated until late Sunday, when it cut that total down to 563 leases.
GSA did not respond to a request for comment, nor did it pass along a list of the leases it said it terminated despite a presidential memo directing such a release. But an examination of the current line-item listings on DOGE’s site shows that the specifics it touts as new “savings” were often for moves that long predate this presidency, NOTUS found.
The DOGE GSA account, one of the most active affiliates, did not respond to a request for comment.
Late last month, after DOGE had backtracked on most of its claimed savings and over 100 claimed leases, NOTUS began examining the 20 largest leases by square footage listed on its site.
Nearly half of the terminations saved $0, per DOGE’s own estimate. Several, including the largest building listed, were marked for termination under the Biden administration. And in just the past week, six of those 20 listings — representing over $77 million, or 75% of the total savings of that group — were scrubbed from DOGE’s site without explanation.
DOGE’s penchant for taking credit for terminations it had nothing to do with has created some political headaches for lawmakers.
In early March, New York Republican Rep. Mike Lawler objected to the planned closing of a Social Security office in the Hudson Valley. The swing-district Republican, who is eyeing a run for governor, called the closure “a laughable course of action” in a letter to Leland Dudek, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration.
The decision to close the office was made under the Biden administration. The actual closure, however, is set to happen under Trump. As such, DOGE touts it among the cuts on its savings page.
Lawler voiced his concerns about the closure on social media, calling the decision “a slap in the face to thousands of my constituents.” He was raked over the coals by people who pointed out his support for Trump’s cost-cutting efforts, and spent 17 follow-up posts trying to explain that the closure was not actually the work of DOGE.
The Hudson Valley location was one of dozens of Social Security Administration offices listed on DOGE’s catalog of terminated leases, although half were unlisted in the days before Lawler’s X debacle. One of those reversals came at the direct urging of House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole.
Another reversal followed NOTUS’ reporting that the administration was set to close a crucial nuclear waste storage site in New Mexico.
This month, DOGE removed far more leases (around 150) from its site than it added and revised the values of dozens of previously listed leases, calling into question the accuracy of DOGE’s claimed savings before its latest update.
Some Republican lawmakers have cited figures with even less of a basis in reality.
USDebtClock.org is a website that tracks approximate real-time debt, revenue and other government statistics, typically citing Treasury or census data. Earlier this year it added a “DOGE Clock” that displays an ever-increasing dollar amount that now stands at over $425 billion.
That figure, as the website says, does not purport to actually represent the amount of “savings” DOGE has produced, but rather the “objective” amount it would need to have cut at any given moment to stay on track and meet its goals.
The distinction was lost on some members of Congress.
“DOGE has already SAVED Americans over $100 Billion,” Rep. Wesley Hunt said in a February post, citing a video of the unofficial “DOGE Clock.”
Rep. Troy Nehls did the same a few days later, crediting DOGE for saving “hardworking American taxpayers over $109 billion,” and telling it to “Keep up the good work!”
At that time, DOGE itself did not even claim to have saved that much. Its newly-launched website said it had achieved $55 billion in savings, a figure repeated by Capitol Hill allies, like Fallon.
But not even that estimate was correct. $7.99 billion in savings was owed to a single error: the accidental overstating of an $8 million contract by 1,000 times its actual value.
DOGE’s effort to unload excess federal properties isn’t unique; past presidents and Congresses have sought to rein in the government’s real estate portfolio.
The GSA said late last year, under the Biden administration, that the sale of buildings in its disposal pipeline would save $2 billion over a decade in upkeep costs alone.
“The last administration disposed of property, saving nearly $2 billion for American taxpayers, and recently, Congress worked together to pass bills for additional tools to reform and consolidate the federal property inventory,” Democratic Rep. Melanie Stansbury said during the recent DOGE subcommittee hearing on real estate.
“Instead of building on these successes and continuing to do what could be characterized as the tedious analytical work on behalf of Americans, the Trump administration is currently taking a fire sale approach of looting the federal government and stripping it for parts,” Stansbury continued.
Greene was unconvinced.
“Recent presidents couldn’t overcome that bureaucratic inertia,” Greene said. “Yet President Trump and DOGE ended almost 700 leases in just a few months.”
“That’s unbelievable.”
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.