Jul 18, 2026 #DOGE#ThomTillis#RussVoughtDuring a fiery Senate Banking Committee hearing, Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina , a twenty-nine-year corporate veteran who built efficiency programs at PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM, unloaded on OMB Director Russell Vought in one of the most devastating exchanges of the year. Tillis demanded something simple: name one DOGE initiative where the savings were actually documented, verified, and booked into the federal budget baseline. Just one agency. Just one real number. What he got back was evasion, word salad, and a budget proposal, not a single confirmed example.
Vought’s inability to answer a basic accounting question exposes the entire DOGE operation for what it was: a political stunt dressed up as fiscal discipline. DOGE dissolved on July 4th, 2026, without a closing report, without an audit, and without a single verified before-and-after savings figure. Tillis made clear that in the real corporate world, the kind of amateur, chaotic execution DOGE delivered, firing scientists with the wrong email addresses, cutting the most experienced staff, then watching agencies quietly rehire, would have gotten anyone fired in their first week on the job.
This is the moment a Republican senator finally said out loud what the numbers have been screaming for months: DOGE failed by its own stated standards, and the people who ran it had no idea what they were doing.
