Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency say they have saved the federal government $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and a long list of terminated contracts published online this week as a “wall of receipts.”
President Donald Trump has been celebrating the published savings, even musing about a proposal to mail checks to all Americans to reimburse them with a “DOGE dividend.”
But the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes, according to a New York Times analysis of all the contracts listed. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.
Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted. In others, contracts the group said it had closed were actually ended under the Biden administration.
The canceled contracts listed on the website make up a small part of the $55 billion total that the group estimated it had found so far. It was not possible to independently verify that number or other totals on the site with the evidence provided. A senior White House official described how the office made its calculations on individual contracts, but did not respond to numerous questions about other aspects of the group’s accounting. But it is clear that every dollar the website claims credit for is not necessarily a dollar the federal government would have spent — or one that can now be returned to the public.
The mistakes touched a wide range of contracts — some worth hundreds of millions of dollars and others worth just a few thousand.
David Reid, an environmental scientist in Michigan, was surprised to learn his contract studying invasive species in the St. Lawrence Seaway was included on the list. “That contract wasn’t canceled by DOGE or anyone else,” he said. The contract expired Dec. 31 and he decided to retire and not renew it, he said. “If they took credit for canceling the contract, they’re lying.”
The group claimed $25,000 in savings from his project.
Though the group’s public messaging has focused on the efficiency in its name, most of the canceled contracts appear to relate to other administration priorities, such as the shuttering of USAID and the elimination of government programs on diversity, equity and inclusion. The cancellations listed come disproportionately from businesses run by women and people from minority groups.
The numerous mistakes, according to people familiar with the complex world of government contracting, suggest that Musk’s team of outsiders, charged by the president with cutting spending, don’t fully understand it.
Why it’s hard to say how much is really being saved
The 1,125 contracts the initiative’s website listed as of Friday night make up about 20% of the project’s overall spending cuts, the website said, although the Times’ analysis could not reconcile those numbers. The website says the remaining dollars come from efforts such as reducing the federal workforce, but provides no data or specific estimates.
The dollar values posted for each contract derive from data in a central tracking system for government contracts with outside vendors.
Here’s an example of how Musk’s team made one such calculation, according to the White House official’s description of the process:
DOGE says canceling a contract for DEI services for the Department of Homeland Security saved $5.4 million. To arrive at this figure, it started with the contract’s total potential value, then it subtracted the amount that appears to have already been spent.
At first glance, this seems straightforward. But such savings estimates can be too high, several experts said, for a few reasons.
For one, the spending figure may undercount what the government has already spent, because the data in the federal contracting system can be several months out of date.
The numbers also don’t account for additional termination costs the government will have to pay to close these contracts, making them a “meaningless metric,” said Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University Law School.
Contractors will have to wind down staff, close offices, terminate leases and offload equipment — a normally lengthy process that will now be rushed and potentially litigated. (The White House official did not address this issue but said that the estimate was conservative because it did not include any administrative savings from managing the canceled contracts.)
The group also claims unrealistic estimates from several special kinds of umbrella contracts. When the government expects many different offices may want ongoing orders of the same general product or service — say, IT — it creates an overall contracting mechanism with a set ceiling under which several pre-vetted vendors can compete for individual orders. Each of those individual orders represents money the government has committed to spend. But the ceiling on the whole umbrella doesn’t.
“It’s not real money,” said Kelly Saldana, who spent nearly two decades working at USAID, including as the director of its office of health systems. If one of these larger contracts has a ceiling of $100 million and there’s only one $10 million order under it, the remaining $90 million isn’t savings or money that could be spent elsewhere.
“Nobody ever does that math,” Saldana said, describing the kind of math Musk’s group appears to have done.
The New York Times News Service