Last week, Elon Musk’s government cost-slashing initiative, which he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, posted an online “wall of receipts,” celebrating how much it had saved by canceling federal contracts.
Now the organization, which is also known as the U.S. DOGE Service, has deleted all of the five biggest “savings” on that original list, after The New York Times and other media outlets pointed out they were riddled with errors.
The last of the original top five disappeared from the site in the early hours of Tuesday, even as the group claimed in its latest update that its savings to date had increased to $65 billion. The website offered no explanation for why it had removed some items or how it had arrived at the higher total. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, sent a written statement that did not address the deletions, but provided a broader defense of the cost-cutting initiative, saying it “has already identified billions of dollars in savings.”
The “wall of receipts” is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work. The scale of that ledger’s errors — and the misunderstandings and poor quality control that seemed to underlie them — has raised questions about the effort’s broader work, which has led to mass firings and cutbacks across the federal government.
These were the original five largest savings on its list:
-
An $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The actual contract in question was worth $8 million. The mistake seemed to stem from an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database. But contracting experts said that the service should have known better: ICE’s entire budget is about $8 billion, making it implausible that one contract could be so large. The U.S. DOGE Service adjusted the figure on the site after The Times wrote about it, and said in a post on Mr. Musk’s X platform that it had “always used the correct $8M in its calculations.”
-
Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was actually a single cut that was erroneously counted three times, as first reported by CBS News. That mistake also seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the way government contracts work; they sometimes have “ceiling values” far in excess of what will be spent. Experts said this cancellation was unlikely to produce anything close to $655 million in savings even once. Now, the site lists a much smaller savings for these three cancellations: $18 million in total.
-
A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. Here, Mr. Musk’s organization appeared to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as reported by The Intercept, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project to let users mark their gender as “X.” The DOGE site now shows that small cut instead.
Some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to make some of the same types of errors.
The largest savings on the latest version of its list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department. But The Times reported last week that this contract was canceled last fall, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president — and when DOGE did not yet exist.
