Elon Musk’s DOGE Removes Or Modifies 40% Of Its Budget-Savings Claims On Its Website

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) aim to cut $1 trillion in federal spending by September 2025. DOGE claimed $105 billion in government savings in its third weekly update on Sunday night. Last week, they said it was $65 billion.

After canceling an IT contract for the Social Security Administration last month, the organization claimed to have saved the American taxpayer nearly $232 million. The Social Security Administration confirmed the discrepancy between the DOGE claims and the actual total, which was only $560,000.

Musk recently admitted that DOGE “accidentally” cut funding for Ebola research.

Decisions about trillions of dollars in spending are typically made by debating and authorizing appropriations bills in Congress. House Republicans recently approved a framework that would include $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and a goal of $2 trillion in spending cuts. 

Changes in spending and revenue collection would happen at a meaningful scale through congressional action, not DOGE.

On Sunday night, the group removed or modified over 1,000 contracts it had previously claimed to cancel, accounting for more than 40 percent of all the contracts listed on its site the prior week. Five of the seven largest savings it had credited to itself just a week earlier were among the deleted items. Simultaneously, the group added roughly 1,000 more canceled contracts, though these represented smaller overall savings.

It previously erased all five of the largest savings it had claimed when the “wall of receipts,” which is how the group refers to canceled contracts, was originally posted on Feb. 19. Since then, the total savings DOGE claimed to have made have declined. 

The savings “wall” posted on DOGE’s official site shows only some of the cuts that Musk imposed on the government. The lack of detail has made it difficult for anyone to assess the claim that his initiative has saved taxpayers more than $100 billion.

Among the errors was a $1.9 billion savings the group said it had achieved by canceling an Internal Revenue Service contract for tech help. Before Sunday night, this had been the biggest single savings on the site. However, The New York Times reported that the agreement was canceled in November when Joe Biden was president.