Elon Musk has promised that his efforts to slash the government would be “maximally transparent”—but instead, the billionaire’s Department of Government Efficiency has only worked to obscure the facts of its operation to slash the federal government.
DOGE’s first batch of published savings were riddled with errors, with experts pointing out that the math wasn’t adding up in their accounting. By Wednesday, the group reported—without receipts—that they had saved the government $115 billion through a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”
Fact-checking DOGE’s details, however, revealed that the organization has confused billions with millions, tripled the savings from nixing one contract, claimed credit for cancelling programs that ended under the Bush administration, and said they spared $1.9 billion for ending an IRS contract that was actually axed under President Joe Biden. The group later deleted these details from their “savings” page.
But rather than push to improve accuracy in its reporting, DOGE decided to go the opposite route and make its new claims even harder to check.
On March 2, Musk’s group posted a note that it had saved taxpayers another $10 billion by terminating thousands of federal grants. But instead of pointing to specifics for the savings—as they had done before—DOGE opted not to include identifying details related to the slashed grants, The New York Times reported Thursday. The White House claimed the new policy was instituted for security reasons.
Regardless, the Times was able to identify the relevant receipts by examining DOGE’s publicly available source code, which momentarily retained the federal identification numbers of the grants, and discovered that DOGE’s latest batch of savings were just as dishonest and illegitimate as previous rounds. DOGE deleted the ID numbers from their source code shortly after the grant details became known—but not before the Times retained a copy.
“At least five of the 20 largest ‘savings’ appeared to be exaggerated, according to federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list,” the Times reported.
The largest item DOGE claimed to have produced savings from included a $1.75 billion grant distributed by USAID. But the recipient of the grant, a public-health nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, told the Times that not only had the grant not been terminated, but the funds had already been fully distributed. That means that slashing the program would have resulted in exactly $0.00 in federal savings.
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