The savings that have come from cuts in government staff and funding were being tracked online, but there was a substantial change in the numbers overnight, a new report said.
Before President Donald Trump was sworn into office, he and tech billionaire Elon Musk promised Americans they would cut $2 trillion in government spending to reduce the deficit.
When he came into office, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency initiative by executive order and tasked Musk with finding government reductions. That initiative has been behind the upheaval and dismantling of government agencies. Websites, grants, programs, and employees have been cut or frozen under the promise that Trump will save taxpayers trillions.
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The DOGE website deleted about "$962 million in previously claimed cuts," reported NOTUS on Wednesday, characterizing the edit as "disappear[ing] overnight."
The website has been the only public accounting of what Musk and Trump say they're doing to save money. NOTUS said that the site "is in constant flux and riddled with errors. That includes revisions that suggest DOGE was previously overstating its savings by hundreds of millions of dollars."
Not only was $962 million in "savings" slashed, the site "altered hundreds of others to boost individual items’ purported 'savings' values," the report said.
Musk had initially promised that they would do weekly updates and share "contract cancellations on social media." However, the report said, nothing was updated from the end of March through Monday. Just after midnight on Tuesday, there were "scores of new cancellations" with "hundreds of others" removed. There were "hundreds more" altered.
The researchers found "nearly 650 grants and a few dozen contracts and leases that were scrubbed from the DOGE website over the past several weeks, almost all of them during a two-hour window between midnight and 2 a.m. on Tuesday."
There are a number of grants that are listed as "redacted" with no information at all.
NOTUS pointed out previous reports that DOGE was taking credit for cancellations that came before Trump was inaugurated.
The report said it helps "further overstate the scope of its cuts."
Before Trump was inaugurated, Musk cut in half the $2 trillion pledge made during the 2024 campaign.
"If we try for $2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting one," Musk said in an interview streamed in January. “And if we can drop the budget deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion and kind of free up the economy to have additional growth — such that the output of goods and services keeps pace with the increase in the money supply — then there will be no inflation. So that, I think, would be an epic outcome.”
Last week, that number changed again.
During a Cabinet meeting, Musk told the president that by fiscal year 2026, he will have cut $150 billion, Forbes reported.
