Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on Tuesday reversed a change that had made some of its claims far more difficult to fact-check.
In early March, the group — which had been caught in a series of high-profile errors — began posting itemized claims about the savings it had achieved from canceling federal grants. Its website interface provided only minimal details about those grants but the site’s public source code included identification numbers, making it possible to glean more information from other official sources.
On March 5, however, the group removed those identifiers from the code, while also adding thousands more grants, making it very difficult to verify the figures provided. A White House official said the group had withheld identifying information “for security purposes.”
On Tuesday, the group added some of the missing details, providing links to many of the grants’ entries in a federal spending database, USAspending.gov. Now, fact-checkers will have the ability to match the claims with other sources.
The White House did not respond to a question about the change.
The new details provided by the group made clear that its claims about these canceled grants also contained the same kind of errors that had marred its previous work.
For instance, the group said that it had saved $1.75 billion by cutting a U.S. Agency for International Development grant to a nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
The New York Times reported last week that Gavi had said that the website’s claims were wrong. The nonprofit said that its grant had not been canceled and that, even if it was, all the money it was owed had already been paid. So canceling the grant would save nothing.
The Times had identified that grant using the details that Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded in the source code of its website.
On Tuesday, that erroneous claim about the $1.75 billion grant was still on DOGE’s website, which the group calls its “wall of receipts,” — its line by line accounting of the group’s purported cost savings.
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