How to Track the Flood of Bullshit Coming From Trump’s White House

During Donald Trump’s first term, Steve Bannon explicitly laid out what the administration’s strategy would be to get things done: “flood the zone with shit.” The theory is pretty simple: throw out as much bullshit as possible—knowing that there is only so much attention, outrage, and resistance that people can muster—and take wins while everyone else takes the bait.

It’s not hard to see that this approach has been kicked into hyperdrive during the first months of Trump’s second term, facilitated in no small part by Trump-backer and “first buddy” Elon Musk turning Twitter into a cesspool of distraction, disinformation, and disorientation. In what should be an extremely information-rich environment, it’s become near-impossible to separate signal from noise. Luckily, some fine folks are keeping their eyes on the ball so that we don’t all fall victim to the high-stakes shell game.

First up, there is the Project 2025 Tracker. Started as a spreadsheet maintained by two Redditors, the project has grown into a larger resource designed to keep tabs on the Trump administration’s progress in implementing the plans laid out in Project 2025—a 900-plus page blueprint for consolidating executive power and reshaping the government to serve a right-wing Christian Nationalist agenda.

Project 2025 Tracker has broken out the policy recommendations of the Heritage Foundation’s guiding document, identifying them as goals of the administration and tracking its progress in actually accomplishing those efforts. Those goals are attached to specific agencies and are searchable in the project’s database, or you can track the overall progress of the administration’s efforts. So far, it’s going pretty well for them: Project 2025 Tracker estimates that Trump and his team have already accomplished nearly 40% of the goals established by Project 2025.

As for Musk’s attempts to flood the zone, journalist Judd Legum of Popular Information and Musk Watch has launched a new project called DOGE Tracker—an audit for the pseudo-agency that claims to be auditing the federal government but somehow keeps having to revise its own numbers. DOGE Tracker has a simple premise: don’t take Elon Musk at his word. Instead, the project digs into DOGE’s claimed savings, the actual itemized cuts that DOGE has bothered to record, and actual verifiable canceled funding.

You’ll be shocked (well, no, you wouldn’t) to hear that these numbers don’t add up. According to DOGE Tracker, the department has claimed to achieve $105 billion in savings as of March 12, 2025, but has only documented $29.9 billion of it—and just $8.6 billion in savings can actually be verified. That means that Musk and his crew have overstated what they have saved the country by about 92%.

We’re barely two months into this iteration of the Trump presidency. Things are not going to slow down. The one will continue to be flooded. Use these tools to filter out the bullshit and pay attention to what matters.