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Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency claim they have saved the federal government $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations, and a long list of terminated contracts published online this week as a “wall of receipts.”
President Trump has been celebrating the published savings, even musing about a proposal to mail checks to all Americans with a “DOGE dividend.”
But the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data, and other mistakes, according to a New York Times analysis of all the contracts listed.
The group’s claims of savings are based on a “wall of receipts” posted online, which lists hundreds of contracts canceled by the department. However, the analysis found numerous mistakes, including double-counting, errors, and incorrect assumptions.
Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted.
Other anomalies on the site suggest that Mr. Musk’s team, charged with cutting spending, don’t fully understand government contracting.
The numbers have been cheered by Mr. Musk’s online followers, who are eager for the new administration to reduce wasteful spending funded by taxpayer dollars. However, even contracting insiders who share that goal – and who believe that the government systems that track spending badly need repair – were increasingly skeptical of the effort this week.
Amber Hart, the co-founder of a research and advisory firm, the Pulse, said it’s simply not possible to create a real-time accounting of contract savings with the data the team has used – as DOGE has promised on its website.
The “wall of receipts” also lists hundreds of cases in which – even by the website’s own accounting – the changes saved taxpayers nothing. In one contract, the Securities and Exchange Commission had agreed to spend $10 million for a five-year subscription to the legal-research site Westlaw. But the savings are listed as $0. The S.E.C.’s contract expired in March 2024.
The website has not been fully transparent about the data it includes or about the changes it makes.
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