(TNND) — The Department of Government Efficiency said a roughly $380,000 monthly contract for "minor website modifications" at the Department of Veterans Affairs has been eliminated and replaced with about 10 hours of labor a week from a VA staffer.

DOGE says it has saved taxpayers $140 billion so far by canceling costly government contracts, selling assets, fighting fraud, stopping grants, making changes to programs, layoffs and more.

But VA, which has the fifth-highest spending among federal agencies, ranks near the bottom of an "agency efficiency leaderboard," according to DOGE.

VA announced in early March that it was terminating nearly 600 contracts that were duplicative or weren’t mission-critical, saving about $1.8 billion.

This week, DOGE announced contract cancellations across federal agencies that it said will save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, said Thursday that DOGE’s reported savings are vastly overstated.

Nowrasteh said details in some cases have been “fairly scant,” and he said there have been errors in the DOGE reporting.

His estimate for DOGE savings is only about $5 billion to $15 billion.

“Every dollar cut is a dollar saved and should be appreciated and celebrated,” Nowrasteh said. “However, the notion that there are $140 billion in savings from DOGE doesn't add up.”

Nowrasteh also said DOGE is "just scratching the surface" of the nation’s fiscal problems.

The U.S. government spent about $6.75 trillion last year and is projected to run a nearly $2 trillion deficit this year.

The country is in the hole by more than $36 trillion.

Nowrasteh said there’s a lot of fraud, waste and abuse in government spending.

But attacking fraud, waste and abuse alone won’t fix the nation’s budget problems, he said.

That requires systemic reforms of government spending, including of entitlement spending, he said.

Government spending is set on “a very dangerous autopilot,” Nowrasteh said.

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Major entitlements make up half of government spending.

Add in defense spending, and about two-thirds of the federal budget is accounted for.

And DOGE alone can only do so much to prune government spending, Nowrasteh said.

“Congress absolutely needs to be involved to make meaningful cuts and to make sure that the cuts DOGE is making, which I support, are permanent,” he said. “So, if DOGE is just going in making some cuts, and Congress doesn't ratify them, then the courts could overturn them, which they've done in several cases. Or the next president, or even this president, could restore a lot of that spending.”

Until 2010, workers paid more in Social Security taxes than what the federal government paid out in benefits, another Cato expert, Romina Boccia, recently told The National News Desk.

Since then, Social Security has borrowed over $1 trillion to bridge the gap.

And the government is expected to borrow another $4 trillion to make up the Social Security deficit between now and 2033.

Cato says the government spends about $1.35 trillion on Social Security.

Meanwhile, the government spends about $1.75 trillion on just Medicare, Medicaid and other health care programs. Those account for over a quarter of federal spending.

DOGE is “a wonderful Band-Aid, but it's a Band-Aid over a very long wound that is going to require stitches,” Nowrasteh said. “And only Congress can administer those stitches.”