OPINION:
You hear the numbers every day: Hundreds of millions of dollars here, billions of dollars there, but how much money has the Department of Government Efficiency actually saved?
“Total estimated savings are $65 billion, which is a combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings,” according to the DOGE.gov website.
The website says it is trying to “upload all of this data in a digestible and fully transparent manner with clear assumptions,” and nearly every entry includes a link to the savings in what the site calls a “wall of receipts.”
A couple of news agencies have reviewed the numbers and concluded that the savings listed on the website amount to just $16.6 billion — a substantial amount, to be sure, but nowhere near the claimed savings.
“And that’s before factoring in an error in the data published on DOGE’s website that mislabels a contract as $8 billion, which was later corrected in the federal database to only be $8 million,” Bloomberg reported. “That cuts nearly in half the total of DOGE’s itemized savings, including from contracts and leases, to about $8.6 billion.”
Meanwhile, an NPR review “of the more than 1,100 contracts in that initial release finds that DOGE’s ‘maximally transparent’ calculations still overstate its estimated savings totals by billions of dollars,” the site said in a piece headlined “DOGE released data about federal contract savings. It doesn’t add up.”
“Just over half of the contracts touted by DOGE, accounting for $6.5 billion in alleged savings, haven’t actually been terminated or closed out as of Wednesday, according to an NPR analysis of a federal government procurement database, even though the site’s ‘wall of receipts’ listed these items,” NPR reported.
The $8 million/$8 billion mix-up seems to be a simple clerical error.
“The original contract filing from September 2022 does list $8 billion as the total contract value,” Bloomberg reported, but an update last month “adjusted the total contract value to $8 million — the same day the DOGE site uploaded the contract as an $8 billion saving.”
DOGE was created by President Trump’s executive order on his first day in office. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is its public face, although the White House said this week that he is not its administrator and doesn’t even draw a federal salary.
Despite the discrepancies, Mr. Musk has been crowing about widespread cuts across the federal board. He also claims the cost-cutting body, which is not a Cabinet-level entity, has broad powers that stretch far beyond saving taxpayer money.
“One of the biggest functions of the DOGE team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out,” Mr. Musk said Monday in a joint appearance with Mr. Trump on Fox News. “This is a very important thing because the president is the elected representative of the people, so he’s representing the will of the people. And if the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people and preventing the president from implementing what the people want, then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy.”
Mr. Trump boasted that DOGE is “finding billions, and it will be hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fraud,” although DOGE’s savings page does not include any evidence of fraud, waste or abuse in contracts.
The de facto head of DOGE also said that all the agita created by its cuts means that “we’re doing something right. You know, if — like, they wouldn’t be complaining so much if they — we weren’t doing something useful, I think.”
He also acknowledged that there would be mistakes with the flurry of cuts. “I want to be clear: We are going to make some mistakes. We’re not going to be perfect. Nobody bats a thousand. But we’re going to fix the mistakes very quickly. That’s what matters: not that you don’t make mistakes but that you fix the mistakes very fast,” Mr. Musk said.
Although the cost-cutting body was supposed to save taxpayer money and close a massive $1.8 billion budget deficit, Mr. Trump said Wednesday that he was considering sending 20% of the money saved back to Americans.
“There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20% of the DOGE savings to American citizens and 20% goes to paying down debt,” Mr. Trump said during remarks at the FII Priority summit in Miami Beach, Florida.
DOGE aims to cut federal spending by $2 trillion, so 20% of that, or $400 billion, would amount to approximately $5,000 per household.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.