On August 6, 2026, the Government Accountability Office — Congress's own nonpartisan auditor — published what it found when it examined the Department of Government Efficiency's public list of savings.

The findings, as CBS News reported:

• DOGE "did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of DOGE-reported savings" for grants.
• For the majority of terminated contracts, DOGE also "did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate" the savings.
• 108 of the 264 leases DOGE claimed to have terminated were already in the process of being eliminated before DOGE existed.
• DOGE claimed $1.7 billion in savings from a Defense Health Agency IT contract that was never actually terminated or defunded.
• The public savings page "does not sufficiently disclose limitations affecting data quality."
• And DOGE "did not respond to GAO's request for information or interviews."

That last line matters most. Asked to explain its numbers to Congress's auditors, DOGE declined.

Now go back and read what North Texas's congresswoman wrote about all this.

"The Golden Age of DOGE"

In February 2025, Beth Van Duyne published an op-ed in the Washington Reporter titled "Embracing the Golden Age of DOGE."

Her claims about what DOGE had accomplished:

DOGE "has exposed monumentally corrupt spending" and "will soon reveal the kind of waste, fraud, and abuse that everyone in America knows exists."

She called it "our moment to achieve cathartic reforms." And she filled the piece with a list of foreign-aid line items — $1.5 million for diversity work in Serbia, $70,000 for a musical in Ireland, $47,000 for an opera in Colombia, $6 million for tourism in Egypt.

Eighteen months later, the accounting behind the enterprise she called a golden age turns out to be unverifiable by the government's own auditors, and the enterprise itself wouldn't sit for an interview.

And Van Duyne is not a bystander here. By her own official biography, she sits on the Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee, and her stated job there is to "hold Administration policies and management accountable." The same bio brags that when she chaired the House Small Business Oversight Subcommittee, she "conducted rigorous oversight of the Biden-Harris Administration, including its failure to recover tens of billions of dollars in stolen pandemic relief funds."

So she knows how to demand an accounting for federal dollars. She has a committee seat built for it, and a record of using it — on the previous administration.

The GAO has now reported that DOGE booked $1.7 billion on a contract nobody cancelled and wouldn't answer the auditors' questions. From the congresswoman who made unrecovered federal money her signature oversight issue: nothing.

She wanted to make it permanent

The op-ed wasn't only cheerleading. Van Duyne used it to promote her own bill — the Government Offices Realignment and Closure Act, or GORAC — which would have the Government Accountability Office hire independent auditors every ten years to identify federal functions worth eliminating, with the resulting recommendations fast-tracked through Congress.

Think about what "fast-tracked" means here. Congress's core constitutional job is deciding what the government spends money on, line by line, in public, with a vote. Van Duyne's proposal is to have outside contractors draw up the list and then have Congress vote it up or down on a rush schedule.

That's not oversight. That's a member of Congress designing a way for Congress to stop doing the hard part.

And she is not alone in clearing the road for DOGE. Arizona's Eli Crane moved to impeach the judge who blocked DOGE from Americans' Treasury records — and weeks later Elon Musk wrote him a maximum campaign check.

She voted for the real cuts, twice

The op-ed was words. The votes were not.

Van Duyne voted yes on H.R. 4, the Rescissions Act of 2025 on June 12, 2025 — the bill that cancelled $9.4 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting. When the Senate sent back a trimmed version, she voted yes again on July 18 to lock it in.

So the same foreign-aid spending she itemized in an op-ed, she then voted to claw back — and among the things clawed back was money for public broadcasting, which has nothing to do with an opera in Colombia.

What DOGE actually did to Texas

Here's what Van Duyne's "golden age" looks like in the state she represents.

Texas has more than 249,000 federal employees — about 8% of the entire federal workforce. That makes Texans among the most exposed in the country to DOGE's job cuts.

DOGE also terminated more than $118 million in EPA environmental grants that had already been awarded to Texas organizations — money that had been committed to work in Texas and then taken back.

None of those Texans got a hearing.

The pattern, in her own words

Van Duyne has never been shy about it. Her office has posted that "Every week, DOGE is uncovering more waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending." She went on Fox News to say there is "money to be saved" with DOGE identifying waste.

The GAO has now looked at the receipts behind those claims and could not verify most of them.

There is a version of this story where a member of Congress who genuinely cared about waste would be furious right now — furious that an operation she publicly vouched for padded its numbers, counted lease cancellations that predated it, booked $1.7 billion on a contract that was never cancelled, and then stiffed the auditors. That member would be demanding answers from her seat on the Oversight Subcommittee.

Instead, the record shows an op-ed, a bill to outsource Congress's judgment, and two votes to cut.

We deserve better.

Sources

"DOGE's 'wall of receipts' riddled with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims, congressional watchdog says" — Kathryn Watson, CBS News, August 6, 2026 (linked above). Photo: AP via CBS News. Van Duyne's own op-ed is linked above.