DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
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.»
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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But the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes, according to a New York Times analysis of all the contracts listed.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
