To its proponents, DOGE is supposed to be a crack team of high-IQ specialists assembled by über-successful billionaire Elon Musk to force tough-but-fair efficiency and cost cutting on the out-of-control federal bureaucracy. Musk and his associates are already working to gut the federal workforce as quickly and brutally as possible, including layoffs and lease cancellations, and he has said DOGE aims to somehow wipe out a whopping $2 trillion in federal spending. They even track their progress on an online wall of receipts, which lists the contracts they say they have successfully cut. One might assume that anyone working for something called the Department of Government Efficiency is some super-competent overachiever who is definitely good at working with numbers. Yet evidence continues to emerge that Team DOGE may actually suck at math and identifying savings.
That wall of receipts keeps being wrong, and the quasi agency keeps having to erase some of its biggest supposed wins from it, and the savings it has claimed have regularly been off by billions of dollars. It happened again on Sunday, when DOGE quietly removed more than 40 percent of the contracts it had listed on the wall last week, including five of the seven largest cost-saving items it had posted, according to an analysis by the New York Times.
A week ago, DOGE erased the five largest all-time savings from its wall of receipts, along with numerous other supposed victories that have been identified as exaggerated or erroneous by multiple news organizations. At a point in which DOGE was claiming it had already saved $55 billion, outside analyses indicated it had only provided accurate accounting of a small fraction of that amount. DOGE initially listed one $8 billion ICE contract that was actually a $8 million contract. It also tried to take credit for nixing a $1.9 billion contract that was already canceled by the Biden administration last year. DOGE triple-counted a $655 million contract, too. Other contracts DOGE has bragged about canceling, like a $53.7 million Coast Guard contract, ended decades ago. Another contract was counted four times on the DOGE list, as Politico notes:
In one example, DOGE repeated a single $25 million item under the Agriculture Department four times, reporting each vendor that was eligible to bid on the work and quadrupling purported savings to a total of $100 million. In reality, there are only two finalized contracts from the vendors listed that have been awarded less than $1 million, according to records on USA Spending. Other contracts have not actually been canceled, but instead modified to remove language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
DOGE has now repeatedly listed and later unlisted billions of dollars in supposed savings without explanation. Yet Musk and DOGE have also boasted that the overall amount of savings continues to rise — now to more than $100 billion — and it’s not all clear where they are getting any of the numbers from or that they fully understand what they mean. As NPR reported early last week:
“There’s no doubt that these young people [Musk] has working for him are very intelligent coders, genius coders, but they’re limited,” retired senior contracting officer Christopher Byrne said, referring to DOGE team members who have apparently been identifying cuts across government agencies. “They don’t understand the processes, they don’t understand how things work, they don’t understand contracts, they don’t understand grants,” Byrne said.
Six other current and former federal-contracting officers who spoke with NPR on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation say that the DOGE savings page is misleading the public with the data it includes — like overemphasizing the maximum possible value of contracts canceled — as well as with what it leaves out, they say, like how much has already been budgeted and spent to fulfill the contract.
And DOGE keeps adding additional inaccurate data to the list, but has now begun blaming the discrepancies on the federal agencies its working to gut, rather than taking responsibility for getting it right in the first place.
It’s certainly possible that Musk’s DOGE minions are the best and the brightest at something, but it’s not accurately calculating how much money they are actually saving taxpayers — which is the purported goal of their entire project. They may be just as bad at accounting as they are at being accountable.
