Doge website offers error-filled window into Musk’s government overhaul

WASHINGTON - A spartanly furnished web page with columns of numbers and bar charts on a dark background is the only official window into billionaire Elon Musk’s effort to slash US government spending and the size of the federal workforce. However, the view it offers of the cost-cutting enterprise is often muddied by major errors.

President Donald Trump and Mr Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) say that in just six weeks, they have already saved American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars through rapid-fire moves to cancel contracts, fire workers and root out fraud and waste in the government.

The only support for the assertions comes from data posted by Doge to a newly created website that went live last month. But in the last two weeks alone, Doge has deleted hundreds of claimed savings, including some of the largest items it had previously boasted about.

Mr Trump lauded the group’s work in his address to Congress on March 4, claiming Mr Musk’s group had identified “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud”, far more than what the administration had previously claimed.

Doge claims to have slashed US$105 billion (S$140 billion) so far, but it is impossible to verify that calculation because the unit has so far posted a detailed breakdown for only a fraction of those savings, and that accounting keeps changing, according to a Reuters analysis of the data.

Mr Musk has said he is operating transparently in his cost-cutting effort, but budget experts like Ms Martha Gimbel, director of the Budget Lab at Yale, a non-partisan budget analysis organisation at Yale University, disagree.

“Anyone can put numbers and words on a website,” Ms Gimbel said in an interview. “In order to be transparent, the numbers and words have to be accurate. They’ve already been shown not to be accurate, so why should I trust it?“

A Doge spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment. But Mr Musk has acknowledged that mistakes will be made and will be corrected when they are discovered.

The ‘wall of receipts’

Doge has provided the most details about the contracts it says it has terminated, listing them on what it calls a “wall of receipts” meant to show its work to the public.

Errors in that accounting appeared from the start. It took credit for eliminating contracts that had already ended, sometimes years ago, and inflated the value of other items that it had axed, the Reuters analysis found.

The first time Doge posted a list of cancelled contracts to its website, in mid-February, it added up to about US$16 billion. By March 3, the total had dropped to under US$8.9 billion.

A cancelled contract Doge claimed had saved taxpayers US$8 billion was only worth US$8 million. In another instance, it tripled counted a US$655 million contract, claiming more than US$1.8 billion in savings that did not exist.

Last week, it deleted from the website all five of the biggest savings it had claimed.

“I’m all for eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, but there’s no veracity in what they’re saying because you can’t quantify it in any way,” said Mr Bill Hoagland, a former Republican staff member and director of the Senate Budget Committee for more than 20 years.

Doge is not a government agency but a temporary advisory team that has been given enormous power by Mr Trump to drastically reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy.

To be sure, it has made major cuts to parts of the federal bureaucracy since Mr Trump created it six weeks ago. It has entered about 20 government agencies, hollowing out some of them, helped to fire at least 25,000 government workers, and persuaded another 75,000 to take buyouts, out of the 2.3 million-strong civilian federal workforce. It has also cancelled thousands of contracts.

Yet government spending is actually higher in Mr Trump’s first month in office than in the same period a year ago, when former President Joe Biden was in office.

In its latest update this week, Doge either modified or removed more than 1,000 entries on its list, nearly half of the spending arrangements it had listed the week before, the Reuters examination of its records found.

In some cases, it changed its estimate of how much taxpayers had saved; in other cases, it stopped listing the contracts altogether. As of March 3, Doge’s accounting shows that 941 of the 2,300 contracts it cut saved no money at all. REUTERS