Tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force quietly tried to delete its so-called "wall of receipts" after reporters identified major mistakes and falsehoods in their claimed monetary savings to the government from canceling various federal contracts.
But in doing so, they actually "added new errors" in the process, according to a new video report published by The New York Times on Monday.
"Elon Musk's DOGE cost-cutting effort has published what it calls the "wall of receipts," basically a long list of government contracts, and then the savings it's achieved by canceling each of those," said investigative reporter David Fahrenthold. "When DOGE first posted its list, we found problems with all five of the five largest contracts" — the biggest being a supposed $8 billion savings from a Homeland Security contract on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was actually just $8 million, and the next three being a triple count of a single contract on foreign aid, most of which had been spent already.
The problem, Fahrenthold continued, is that even as DOGE scrambled to correct its errors and eliminate those five erroneous claimed savings it continued to introduce new ones.
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"The new largest savings was a $1.9 billion savings," said Fahrenthold, specifically for a contract with the Treasury Department. "But when we looked into that, we realized the contract they were talking about had actually been canceled last year under President Biden. And when you look further down the list, you see that DOGE is claiming credit for contracts that expired even before Joe Biden was president. In one case, the Department of Homeland Security is claiming it saved tens of millions of dollars by canceling a contract that actually ended in 2005, when George W. Bush was president."
DOGE acknowledges it has some inaccuracies and invites public fact-checking of its published work, Fahrenthold noted — however, "these errors are important because they give us an insight into the way DOGE works."
"Much of what DOGE is doing is secret," he continued. "It's in all these different agencies, making decisions, gathering data, and we can see so little of it. And if they are this wrong about the work that we can see, if they showed this much sloppiness, this much misunderstanding of the machinery of government, what does that mean about the work we can't see in all these other agencies with all this other data that's being done in secret?"
Watch the NYT video at the link here.
