Fiscal watch: Musk speaking at an indoor event in Washington. Trump says Musk will police himself if there are conflicts related to the six companies he runs. — AP
NEW YORK: The federal cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claims to have saved US$55bil in federal spending so far, but its website only accounts for US$16.6bil of that.
And that’s before factoring in an error in the data published on DOGE’s website that mislabels a contract as US$8bil, which was later corrected in the federal database to only be US$8mil.
That cuts nearly in half the total of DOGE’s itemised savings, including from contracts and leases, to about US$8.6bil.
Elon Musk – President Donald Trump’s close ally who has been the figurehead of DOGE – has pledged that the amorphous cost-cutting enterprise would provide “maximum transparency” and that “all of our actions are fully public”.
But DOGE’s accounting raises questions about the reliability of their self-reporting and their level of accountability.
Despite its name, it’s not a department, but rather an office within the White House that operates outside the gaze of traditional federal watchdogs, including inspectors general.
Musk’s role in the enterprise has also raised conflict-of-interest questions.
His company SpaceX has received billions of dollars in federal contracts.
Trump has said Musk will police himself if there are conflicts related to the six companies he runs.
The billionaire entrepreneur is required to file a federal financial disclosure, but it will not be made public.
Furthermore, the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
DOGE, on its website detailing the listed savings, says it’s working to upload all data “in a digestible and fully transparent manner with clear assumptions, consistent with applicable rules and regulations”.
Some contract final termination notices may also have as much as a one-month lag before being posted publicly, it said.
Musk, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office last week said that some of the things he says “will be incorrect and should be corrected”, adding that DOGE would act quickly to fix errors.
DOGE has swiftly moved through the federal government cancelling contracts and cutting thousands of employees across agencies – and at times moving to quickly re-hire employees who had just been terminated.
Their work has been largely shrouded in secrecy about who is involved and what they are doing.
In a court filing this week the Trump administration asserted that Musk doesn’t work for DOGE, but instead reports directly to Trump, a move that would shield him from some transparency laws.
After criticisms from Democrats, federal unions and others about the lack of specificity in DOGE’s actions, the entity’s website has recently begun providing more detail, including an itemised list of about 700 cancelled contracts with estimated savings as of Tuesday.
An additional nearly US$145mil in real estate-related savings were also listed.
The most expensive contract that DOGE claims to have slashed is US$8bil to D&G Support Services, LLC to provide services for the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights within the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), starting in late 2022.
Except the math doesn’t support an US$8bil contract value.
In recent years, ICE’s entire annual budget hovered around US$9bil.
The agency’s largest awarded contracts of the past three fiscal years, according to usaspending.gov, were US$800mil for charter flight services and US$787mil for transporting unaccompanied children and families.
A search of the Federal Procurement Data System for the contract ID number included on the DOGE website – 70CMSD22A00000008 – returns several documents.
The original contract filing from September 2022 does, in fact, list US$8bil as the total contract value.
Yet an update on Jan 28 adjusted the total contract value to US$8mil – the same day the DOGE site uploaded the contract as an US$8bil saving.
Two more filings show up, on Jan 29 and Jan 30, indicating first the partial and then full termination of the contract.
Both of those show the US$8mil total contract value.
D&G did not immediately respond to a phone call and email requesting comment after business hours.
D&G Support Services, based in a suburb near Washington, describes itself as a “people-focused company” with fewer than 200 employees on LinkedIn.
Additionally, its largest government contracts, according to usaspending.gov, were US$16mil from the Air Force for staffing support and about US$11mil from the US Coast Guard.
Its average contract since early 2017 is valued at roughly US$1mil.
The Trump administration has praised Musk’s effort, and indicated far more is on the way.
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent echoed claims that DOGE had found an estimated US$50bil savings so far, in an interview with Fox News Tuesday, and called it a “very good start”.
Trump, in a joint appearance alongside Musk with Fox News host Sean Hannity that aired Tuesday, said Musk’s effort is “finding billions – and it will be hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of fraud”.
Meanwhile, Musk reiterated his overall goal to reduce the deficit by US$1 trillion.
Yet it’s unclear how DOGE would get to those sums even with deep cuts, especially as Trump has pledged it won’t touch Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programmes.
US discretionary spending totals about US$1.8 trillion annually, nearly half of which is military spending.
DOGE is set to start looking at the Defence Department among its next targets for review. — Bloomberg
