DOGE Just Keeps Deleting Its ‘Savings’

You would think the Department of Government Efficiency, the agency that is supposedly auditing the entirety of the federal government for “waste,” would know to keep its receipts in order. And yet, for some reason, the agency has repeatedly had to pull examples of so-called savings down after it was revealed that it actually didn’t save taxpayers anything.

The latest instance of this savings bait and switch came over the weekend, when the agency led by Elon Musk—but not really, but like let’s be real, it is—changed or removed more than 40% of the more than 1,000 contracts it claimed to have canceled over the previous week, according to the New York Times. Included in that overnight alteration was the outright removal of five of the seven largest contracts it claimed to have cut.

To give the DOGE crew, which includes a bunch of edgelords who have to use a fake ID to get a beer, some credit, this actually represents an improvement over its previous record. The week prior, it had to remove all five of its largest claimed “savings” after the slightest bit of research revealed that the supposedly canceled contracts were being misrepresented.

The most recent examples of the agency’s revisions included a $1.9 billion contract for IRS tech support that, while DOGE took credit for it, had actually been canceled in November by the Biden administration. A $133 million contract from USAID work in Libya was also canceled the year prior and had nothing to do with DOGE. And a $149 million contract that was supposedly for administrative assistants at the Department of Health and Human Services but linked to a completely different contract with a completely different company and a completely different amount also got trashed from the savings list, per the Times.

You can go ahead and add those oopsies to the existing list of mistakes, including the major blunder of entering an $8 million contract as an $8 billion savings, a $655 million cut to USAID that DOGE counted three times for some reason, and a supposed $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration that actually only cut a $560,000 provision within the larger contract.

The hits just keep on coming for the agency that is supposed to be keeping track of government spending. Elon Musk did say that DOGE “will make mistakes,” but it’s starting to feel like that’s actually the main feature of its operation rather than a bug.

According to the New York Times reporting, DOGE’s initial claims of saving $16 billion last week have already shrunk to under $9 billion with the updates—and that’s taking the agency at its word that all the other contracts it cut are in fact correct. Pair that with NPR’s research that $46.5 billion of the agency’s first $55 billion of savings reported had no specifically documented source, and you start to wonder just how much of the whole operation is accomplishing anything.

Meanwhile, do we have any idea what the cost of running DOGE is? Not sure the math adds up here.