The Department of Government Efficiency has removed its so-called "wall of receipts" detailing its cuts to the federal budget after its purported savings were found to be riddled with errors.
Elon Musk's budget-cutting initiative has deleted all of the five biggest “savings” that had been posted on its website. It followed fact checks from mediaoutlets, although the group still claims it has saved the government $65 billion. The website provided no explanation for the removals or its methodology for determining how much had been slashed from the budget, reported the New York Times.
"The 'wall of receipts' is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work," the newspaper reported. "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."
The last of the top five disappeared early Tuesday morning from DOGE's website, and the Times reported that some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to contain the same types of errors that plagued the original top five, which included a reported $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $655 million cut at the U.S. Agency for International Development and $232 million at the Social Security Administration.
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ICE's entire budget is about $8 billion, and the contract in question was worth $8 million, but DOGE seemed to rely on an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database as its metric for savings.
DOGE employees also erroneously counted a single cut three times in an apparent misunderstanding of how government contracts sometimes have "ceiling values" that are much higher than what is actually spent.
Musk's organization also seems to have mistakenly believed that SSA had canceled a massive information technology contract, but it had only ended a $560,000 portion of that project.