Elon Musk and DOGE Caught Lying About $105 Billion in Savings, Their ‘Wall of Receipts’ Shows $19.8 Billion

DOGE attempted to address this discrepancy with a new disclaimer. The $105 billion total, they claimed, was a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

But rather than itemize all $105 billion, they continued, their wall of receipts would instead be limited to “a subset … representing ~30%” of that total: “contract, grant and lease cancellations.”

Even that, however, was inaccurate. Thirty percent of $105 billion is $31.5 billion — and again, just $19.8 billion worth of “receipts” were listed on DOGE’s site…

On Feb. 18, the New York Times discovered that DOGE’s single-biggest line-item — a contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — was erroneously listed at $8 billion.
Its real value? $8 million, with an m.

On Feb. 19, CBS News reported that DOGE was purporting to save $2 billion by canceling a trio of USAID deals worth $655 million each — but in fact, Musk’s team was counting the same $655 million contract three times.

On Feb. 20, The Intercept found that while DOGE was claiming to have canceled a huge, $232 million information technology contract at the Social Security Administration, they had really only nixed a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project that let users mark their gender as “X.”

And in early March, The New York Times revealed that DOGE was taking credit for “canceling” contracts that had ended under previous presidents — including a $144,000 Coast Guard contract that had ended in 2005 but for which DOGE claimed $53.7 million in savings…

While the overall number of receipts continued to rise, as many as 40% of them reported zero savings — and a significant subset still “contain apparent errors and instances of double, triple and even quadruple counting,” according to CBS News.