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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is taking credit for cancelling contracts that have long been dead, according to a new report.
Musk’s team claimed they had canceled a Coast Guard contract between the maritime department and a company that provides entities administrative assistance. According to DOGE, killing the contract saved the US taxpayers $53.7 million, the New York Times reports.
However, the contract was worth only $144,000, was completed in 2005 and has not been active for two decades, the paper says.
The decades-old contract is reportedly not the only one DOGE has mistakenly taken credit for stopping either. Even after the pseudo-agency attempted to clean up its “wall of receipts” on its website, the New York Times found that DOGE had actually added new mistakes to the page.
Lisa Shea Mundt of the Pulse of GovCon, which tracks federal spending, told the Times that cancelled contracts do not represent savings as the money has already been spent.
Another blunder involved DOGE’s claim that it had saved $14 million by canceling the deal between government contracting firm Erimax and the federal government. In reality, Erimax’s contract ended in 2021. The money was paid out so DOGE will have saved nothing.
Eric Franklin, the CEO of Erimax, told the Times the mistakes made clear that Musk’s DOGE workers “don’t understand” how federal contracts work.
“It’s really akin to a bull in a china shop,” Franklin said. “And what do you end up with? It’s just a big mess.”
Despite these mistakes, DOGE has made significant cuts to federal spending, but it has been largely through mass layoffs of federal workers and suspension of various federal programs.
Musk admitted late last month that DOGE even “accidentally” killed a USAID Ebola prevention program. He insisted the program was restored immediately and without interruption to its operations, though a former USAID head expressed suspicion over that claim’s accuracy.
According to Musk, DOGE has saved taxpayers $65 billion, but itemized receipts for those savings exist only for the cancellation of contracts — the accuracy of which has been shown to be, at best, suspect — and the cancellation of leases.
Its receipts for its top five largest cancelled contracts all had inaccuracies. One, which made headlines, was a blunder claiming that a cancelled $8 million contract was actually worth $8 billion. In another instance DOGE listed one cancelled $655 million contract three times.
When adding up the savings of those two itemized categories, the savings only total an amount up to $10 billion, according to the Times. That’s less than a sixth of the total sum DOGE claims to have saved.
In a recent site revision, DOGE removed the errors, bringing the sum of its savings from cancelled contracts down from $10 billion to just $19 million.
