Elon Musk boasted about how much money would be saved by DOGE’s actions but a new analysis finds that it achieved just a tiny fraction of the claimed savings.
Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.
Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.
…POLITICO’s findings come on top of months of scrutiny of DOGE’s accounting, but the magnitude of DOGE’s inflated savings claims has not been clear until now.
Even so, President Donald Trump claimed hundreds of billions of dollars had already been used to reduce the federal deficit. The former head of DOGE, Elon Musk, initially promised the organization would reduce the deficit by $2 trillion. Many in Trump’s Cabinet have also celebrated DOGE’s efforts, including his secretaries of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture.
DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.
Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.
“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.”
Lies, smoke, and mirrors. That is what the Trump gang is all about. When the next numbers for the deficit come out without any significant change, expect Trump to fire those who put out the report and put in some stooges who will give him the numbers that he wants, like he is trying to do with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But you can deny reality only for so long. It keeps requiring more and bigger lies to continue. What we are witnessing is a natural experiment to see how long a government built on lies and deception can function.
The “tiny fraction of the claimed savings” aren’t savings at all. Once you consider the downsides of everything they did, they cost us billions. It’s like they decided to heat the house during the winter by burning stacks of $20 bills in the fireplace.
plus in the process of doing this they gained enough access to all of our personal info to financially defraud every last person in the country, creating a point of failure for the mother of all breaches. assuming mvfk doesn’t just decide to go full bond villain and do that fraud himself.
@jimf:
I’d say it’s more like heating the house during the winter by ripping out chunks of wooden walls and burning those. It is utterly destroying any chance of maintaining anything useful for the mere pretense of a short-term gain.
@Bébé:
Given there were reports of Russian hacking sweeps during the DOGE takeover, other reported irregularities about who got access to what and who got to take laptops into secure locations, and we all know that Musk’s idea of a ‘background check’ is pretty much the same as Trump’s, i.e. ‘does this guy flatter me appropriately’… I suspect it’s pretty safe to say that the mother of all breaches has already happened.
fantastic
DOGE was “the mother of all breaches”. But of course, a massive security breach like that has lots of downstream repercussions, which will rattle on basically forever, or at least until none of the data is relevant any more. I am 100% confident that much of the data is already in the wild and actively being used by bad actors.
As for their alleged savings, it’s much, much worse than them merely not saving nearly as much as claimed: The $21.7 Billion Blunder: New PSI Report Reveals Billions in Taxpayer Dollars Squandered by DOGE
[My emphasis]
Isn’t the deficit set to blow up thanks to the bill with the very Trumpy name and the very Trumpy reality of screwing most of us over? If I understood what that will do correctly then deficit numbers staying the same won’t be a concern.