THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY (sic) recently posted a “wall of receipts” claiming it had already saved the federal government $55 billion. What with a math Ph.D. and all, I am not unfamiliar with arithmetic. And I also know how to read.
The New York Times, February 21, 2025, reports “DOGE’s Only Public Ledger is Riddled With Mistakes.” The New York Times, February 25, 2025, reports “DOGE Quietly Deletes the 5 Biggest Spending Cuts It Celebrated Last Week.” The Independent, February 26, 2025, reports “DOGE Deletes Five Biggest Savings From Error-Ridden ‘Wall of Receipts.’” And Newsweek, February 23, 2025, reports “Jim Jordan Says Trump’s and Musk’s DOGE Has ‘Maybe’ Made ‘Some Mistakes.’ “
Geez. “Maybe”? “Some”? I say DOGE has cheated on and flunked arithmetic. Tidbits follow in this regard.
Musk’s Helter-Skelter Chainsaws Versus a Factual Press. The New York Times recounted on February 25, 2025, “Now the organization, which is also known as the U.S. DOGE Service, has deleted all of the five biggest ‘savings’ on that original list, after The New York Times and other media outlets pointed out they were riddled with errors. [Do follow up on these five separate links.] The last of the original top five disappeared from the site in the early hours of Tuesday, even as the group claimed in its latest update that its savings to date had increased to $65 billion. The website offered no explanation for why it had removed some items or how it had arrived at the higher total.”
Maybe the answers were cribbed on shirttails. (T-shirts don’t have cuffs.)
Billions? Or Millions? “An $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. [?] The actual contract in question was worth $8 million,” corrected The New York Times. “The mistake seemed to stem from an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database. But contracting experts said that the service should have known better: ICE’s entire budget is about $8 billion, making it implausible that one contract could be so large.”
“The U.S. DOGE Service adjusted the figure on the site after The Times wrote about it, and said in a post on Mr. Musk’s X platform that it had ‘always used the correct $8M in its calculations.’ ”
Now you tell one about this platform that was formerly known as….
Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Times notes, “This was actually a single cut that was erroneously counted three times, as first reported by CBS News…. Experts said this cancellation was unlikely to produce anything close to $655 million in savings even once. Now, the site lists a much smaller savings for these three cancellations: $18 million in total.”
Let’s read that again: Three times 655 (=1965) versus 18, less than 1 percent of the originally claimed savings. How many shirttails were involved here?
A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. “Here,” The New York Times writes, “Mr. Musk’s organization appeared to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as reported by The Intercept, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project to let users mark their gender as ‘X.’ The DOGE site now shows that small cut instead.”
The contrast is meaningful: 232 million versus 0.56 million (this digital equivalent for the arithmetically gifted). Exercise: Verify that 0.56/232 = 0.00241 = 0.2 percent.
The “Corrected” List. The New York Times’ team reported, “Some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to make some of the same types of errors. The largest savings on the latest version of its list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department. But The Times reported last week that this contract was canceled last fall, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president — and when DOGE did not yet exist.”
Thanks, David A. Fahrenthold, Aatish Bhatia, Margot Sanger-Katz, Emily Badger, Ethan Singer, and Josh Katz of The New York Times. I appreciate your work. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025