Tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has been hard at work in uncovering and exposing egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending, and some of what they found is beyond shocking and infuriating.

While digging around recently at the U.S. Treasury Department, DOGE discovered what appeared to be upwards of $4.7 trillion in federal spending payments that are essentially untraceable, according to Fox News.

Those payments were supposed to include a specific identification code that linked it to a relevant budget line item but often was left blank, making it substantially more difficult to figure out what those payments were actually spent on.

Untraceable Treasury payments

In an X post on Monday, the official DOGE account explained, "The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process)."

"In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible," the post continued.

DOGE added, "As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. Thanks to @USTreasury for the great work."

The post also included a link to the Treasury's Bureau of Fiscal Service's webpage for Treasury Access Symbols that similarly explained how the identification codes are used by the Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget to link certain payments made to "the owner agency, to an individual appropriation, receipt, or other fund account."

The webpage stated, "All financial transactions of the federal government are classified by TAS for reporting to Treasury and OMB," but as DOGE just revealed, that isn't always the case.

DOGE claims at least $55 billion saved for taxpayers so far

Fox News further reported that on the same day that DOGE revealed the apparent non-traceability of trillions of taxpayer dollars worth of federal payments, the department also fully launched and filled out the "Savings" page of its official website.

That page, updated as of Monday, claimed that DOGE had saved taxpayers at least an estimated $55 billion thus far through a "combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings."

The ultimate goal is to provide "all of this data in a digestible and fully transparent manner with clear assumptions, consistent with applicable rules and regulations."

For now, the DOGE website's "Savings" page will be updated around twice per week, but the plan is to eventually upload sufficient data for it to provide near-instantaneous and "real-time" updates on the team's findings and accomplishments in reducing wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive federal spending.

DOGE working on an 18-month timeline

According to Fox News, the DOGE team is working at a rapid pace to complete its assigned task of thoroughly reviewing federal spending because President Trump's executive order that repurposed a pre-existing government office into DOGE only authorized it for 18 months.

However, the possibility of an extension to that time frame must be considered as DOGE has faced tremendous criticism and pushback in the form of litigation that is intended to delay or halt its efforts to dig deep into federal spending in search of waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiencies.