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Two days before voters elected Donald Trump for his second term, Elon Musk claimed on X that “all government data should be default public for maximum transparency.”
Now, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is obscuring the data of the programs and contracts they cut, leaving it impossible for independent organizations to fact-check their savings claims, The New York Times reports.
The DOGE website touts billions of dollars in savings and lists the individual contracts, grants and real estate that were cut. Originally, each individual item came with identifying information that allowed everyone to fact-check the savings, according to the Times.
But now, those identifying details are no longer being shared on the site, the Times reports, further obscuring the work of the already-secretive agency.
When DOGE was sharing the identifying details, it allowed journalists to discover several errors in their reporting. For instance, the agency once claimed to have canceled contracts that ended under President George W. Bush. The agency also wrongly reported they canceled an $8 billion contract when it was only worth $8 million.
The White House told the Times that DOGE cut back on the transparency due to security concerns — which have indeed cropped up. Just last week, the General Services Administration publicly shared a list of properties they were selling amid DOGE cutbacks. That list revealed the location of a secretive CIA facility, Wired reported, and has since been taken down.
Other reports have indicated Musk’s savings goals don’t make sense. Earlier this month, The New Yorker reported that DOGE would only save $245.8 billion a year if it fired every single federal worker outside the military or USPS — a number nowhere close to his promised goal of saving $1 trillion.
The Times’s report comes two days after a federal judge ruled DOGE must comply with public transparency laws because the agency has “unprecedented” authority and operates with “unusual secrecy.”
District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled DOGE “wields the requisite substantial independent authority” to be subject to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, a law which allows members of the public to request federal records.
“The authority exercised by [DOGE] across the federal government and the dramatic cuts it has apparently made with no congressional input appear to be unprecedented,” Cooper wrote.
Meanwhile, the White House has argued DOGE’s records should be protected until at least 2034 — despite Musk’s previous arguments in favor of “maximum transparency.”
