Here’s a “common sense” test: Do you think it’s likely that over 80% of the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement went to a single civil rights contractor?

No, it’s not. The number is more like 0.1%.

But that glaring accounting mistake still hasn’t been acknowledged by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — over a day after Musk’s staff unveiled the “savings” they’ve supposedly produced for American taxpayers by setting fire to the federal government.

The number was dead wrong: DOGE’s website stated — apparently based on a government website that contained an error — that a contract for “program and technical support services” for the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights at ICE was worth $8 billion in total.

The real figure was $8 million, or one thousand times less.

And as The New York Times and others pointed out Tuesday, $2.5 million of that had already been spent by the time DOGE arrived — so it by definition could not be “saved.” Nonetheless, DOGE initially listed $8 billion in savings, rather than a few million.

“That is the level of lack of care that they are putting into this,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress and a former Biden White House budget official, told HuffPost in an interview Wednesday.

After the negative press attention, the listed number on DOGE’s website changed to $8 million, without any other acknowledgement of the error or the change. (According to the Times, the erroneous federal database was corrected weeks ago, two days after Trump took office. The federal contractor responsible for the expense told CBS News the “billion” figure was a simple accounting error.)

And still, DOGE hasn’t changed its overall “estimated savings” figure of $55 billion to account for the $7,992,000,000 edit. Nor has it explained where the overall $55 billion figure comes from. The “savings” that are listed on its webpage only add up to about $16 billion — and that’s before correcting for the ICE accounting error, the Times and Bloomberg reported.

During his time at the White House, “every single thing that we did was more than quintuple-checked” because “we thought that it mattered whether you were right or wrong,” Kogan said.

“This is the kind of error that you shouldn’t be able to make, if you have any sense of anything at all,” he added. “You have to not know what you’re doing at a very fundamental level, and not give a shit about checking.”

The ICE line item wasn’t the only apparent mistake. CBS News pointed out another: DOGE claimed a savings of $654,990,000 three times over in their accounting of a single contract — known as an “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity,” or IDIQ. In reality, the contract has cost $400 million over the past four years, and “is likely to have only minimal additional spending,” according to the report.

In other words, DOGE may have overstated the “savings” in that instance by as much as $1.96 billion.

Why didn’t DOGE even acknowledge its accounting errors worth billions of imaginary dollars? What accounts for the tens of billions in generalized “savings” that aren’t itemized anywhere? And why didn’t a 99.9% decrease in the estimated “savings” from the ICE line item affect DOGE’s topline figures?

The White House, asked by HuffPost Wednesday about all the accounting errors — and asked, point-blank, “Is DOGE just making up numbers and hoping no one notices?” — did not respond.

It’s possible DOGE’s figures have always counted the ICE civil rights contract as $8 million, and merely initially displayed the incorrect $8 billion figure. Even if that were the case — and it seems unlikely — questions remain about where it’s getting its topline $55 billion figure — and why it didn’t publicly acknowledge the thousand-fold change to the listed contract amount.

“They’re not fixing this stuff,” Kogan reasoned, “because the propaganda of the numbers is important to them.”