While George W. Bush was president, the U.S. Coast Guard signed a contract to get administrative help from a company in Northern Virginia. It paid $144,000, and the contract was completed by June 30, 2005.

Twenty years passed. Presidents came and went.

Last week, Elon Musk’s restructuring team, called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, said it had just canceled the long-dead Coast Guard contract — and in doing so, saved U.S. taxpayers $53.7 million.

That claim, posted on the group’s “wall of receipts,” bewildered experts on federal contracting. And there were others like it. Even after Mr. Musk’s group deleted several large erroneous claims from its website last week, The New York Times found that it had added new mistakes — claiming credit for “canceling” contracts that had actually ended under previous presidents.

“These are not savings,” said Lisa Shea Mundt, whose firm, The Pulse of GovCon, tracks federal spending. “The money’s been spent. Period. Point blank.”

These mistakes do not mean DOGE has not made cuts to the federal government. It has, deeply, by pushing widespread layoffs of employees and cancellations of active contracts, and by helping instigate the demise of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But the repeated errors have raised questions about the quality and veracity of the information that the Musk team is putting out, including whether it is being misled by other departments. The mistakes also seem to call into question the team members’ competence — whether they understand the government well enough to cut it while avoiding catastrophe.