Elon Musk and his government’s efficiency ministry said they saved the federal government $55 billion by reducing staff, lease cancellations and a long list of termination contracts posted online this week as a “wall of receipts” .
President Trump has been celebrating published savings and is even addicted to the offer to mail checks to all Americans to repay them with a “dividend.”
However, based on the New York Times analysis of listed contracts, the mathematics that might back up these checks will be damaged by accounting errors, wrong assumptions, outdated data and other errors. While the Governor’s team certainly cut billions of dollars, its Slapdash accounting has added the reckless way of the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.
Some of the contracts claimed by the group are double or triple counts. Another initially included error exaggerated the total by billions of dollars. In at least one example, the group claims that only part of the work is stopped, the entire contract is cancelled. Among other contracts, the group said the closed contract was actually ended under the Biden administration.
The cancellation contracts listed on the website represent a small percentage of the total of $55 billion the group has estimated to have been discovered so far. It is impossible to independently verify numbers or other totals on the website using the evidence provided. A senior White House official described how the office calculated individual contracts but did not answer many questions about other aspects of the group’s accounting. But it is clear that the website claims that every dollar of credit is not necessarily a dollar the federal government will spend, or it can now be returned to the public.
These mistakes touched a wide range of contracts – worth hundreds of millions of dollars, while others were worth only a few thousand dollars.
David Reid, an environmental scientist in Michigan, was surprised to find his contract to learn invasive species at St. Lawrence Seaway, which was included on the list. “The contract was not cancelled by the Governor or anyone else,” he said, and he said the contract expired on December 31 and he decided to retire rather than renew. “If they gain credibility for canceling the contract, they are lying.”
The group seized $25,000 in savings from his project.
Although the group’s public news focused on the efficiency of its name, most cancelled contracts appear to be related to other government priorities, such as the USDA’s closure and the government’s plan to eliminate governments on diversity, equity and inclusion . The cancellations listed are from businesses run by women and minority people.
Many mistakes suggest that Mr. Musk’s team of outsiders has been accused by the president of cutting spending, according to people familiar with the complex world of government contracting, and that is not fully understood.
Mr. Musk’s online followers cheer on the numbers, eager for the new government to reduce wasteful spending from taxpayer funding. But even insiders who share this goal and who think tracking spending is in desperate need of repairs is increasingly skeptical of the efforts this week.
Amber Hart, co-founder of a research and consulting firm specializing in federal contracts, said it was impossible to use the data the team used to create real-time accounting of contract savings, as Doge promised. on its website.
“Unless they have a thorough overhaul of how data is reported, they can’t achieve that – it’s great,” she said. “I absolutely hope they break that. They break the wrong thing.”
Why is it hard to say how much you really need to save
The website said the 1,125 sites signed up for the program as of Friday night accounted for about 20% of the total spending cuts in the project, although the Times analysis could not reconcile those figures. The rest of the dollar comes from efforts such as reducing federal labor, but does not provide data or specific estimates.
The dollar value published by each contract comes from data in the central tracking system for contracts with external suppliers.
According to White House officials’ description of the process, how Mr. Musk’s team did such a calculation: Here is an example:
However, these savings may be too high for some reasons.
First, spending figures may reduce the money the government has already spent, as the data in the federal contracting system may be expired months.
Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University School of Law, said the figures shown above also do not take into account the additional termination fees the government must pay, making it a “meaningless indicator.”
The contractor will have to end employees, close offices, terminate rentals and uninstall equipment – a usually long process that will now be rushed and potentially litigated. (White House officials did not address the issue, but said the estimate was conservative because it did not include any administrative savings that govern contract cancellations.)
The group also claims to estimate impractical estimates from several special types of umbrella contracts. When the government expects that many different offices may require ongoing orders for the same general product or service (for example), it creates a holistic contracting mechanism with a fixed cap where some pre-reviewed suppliers can compete for a single order. Each of these individual orders represents the money the government promises to spend. But the ceiling on the entire umbrella did not.
“It’s not real money,” said Kelly Saldana, who has worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for nearly two decades, including director of its health system office. If one of these larger contracts has a cap of $100 million and only $10 million in orders, the remaining $90 million is not savings or money that can be spent elsewhere.
“No one can do math,” Ms. Saldana said, describing the kind of math that Mr. Musk’s group seemed to have done.
A report from CBS News this week found another mistake involving such a contract: the group triple calculated the highest value of $655 million in one of the USAID contracts and offered many subcontracts.
In another case, Doge claimed that a contract that provided information technology support to the Social Security Agency saved $232 million. But the interception report said only part of the contract was cancelled, a plan that allowed users to mark their gender as “X” – bringing actual savings close to $560,000.
Other anomalies on the website this week are also evident, even if there isn’t much knowledge about government contracted equipment.
Do you have one Confidential news tips About canceling the contract? Submit here: nytimes.com/tips
The Times reported Tuesday that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency’s technical support services contract was about $8 million, which was mistakenly entered into the database, worth $8 billion, close to the size of the entire agency’s budget. This error alone constitutes half of the total value of all listed contract cuts.
“Wall of Receipts” also lists hundreds of cases, and even through the website’s own accounting, no taxpayer changes were saved. In one contract, the SEC has agreed to spend $10 million for a five-year subscription to legal research site Westlaw. But savings are listed as $0. The SEC contract expires in March 2024.
Far from “completely transparent”
The Receipt Wall page acknowledges that it may contain some inaccuracy. “Over time, the website will improve and updates will blend into real-time,” it said. It also hopes to share data in a “digestible and completely transparent way with clear assumptions.”
So far, the site has not fully transparent about the data it contains or the changes it has made.
Around the same time, news organizations published articles about major errors, and the Receipt Wall website was updated to correct the error without changing the “last updated” date.
The contract list itself also represents only a small percentage of the overall savings claimed by the group. The website said the effort saved $55 billion in total, but did not provide details about the “receipt wall” of most of the money. Even after the error saved by a single grant for fixed errors on the website, the top line numbers for the week have not changed.
The place where the office communicates more regularly with the public is the social media platform X, owned by Mr. Musk. But it repeats some errors of the same type there. In a post about the $8 billion error, the group claimed that despite it updated the website, the group “always use the correct $8 million in the calculations.”
On Wednesday, the Doge account reposted a message on the Treasury Department X that said the IRS “canceled the 1.9B contract that was previously planned” and was “related” to the group’s work – describing uncancelled contracts, however, in Doge .gov on “Receipt Wall”.
The account added a screenshot showing a $1.9 billion purchase agreement (another of which the umbrella contract) with the unnamed supplier, now marked as “terminate for convenience.”
The code in the screenshot determines the vendor as Centennial Technologies, a company in Northern Virginia. But the company said it had actually cancelled in the fall during the Biden administration.
“Nothing has changed now,” the company’s CEO Mani Allu said in an email. He said the slow-moving contract database has not been updated to show cancellations, and until this month, the changes appear to be new.
