Elon Musk’s DOGE has quietly deleted the five biggest “savings” it had touted on its “wall of receipts” after a number of media outlets pointed out that they were strewn with errors.
The page is the only public-facing record of Musk and his team’s effort to slash government spending by canceling federal contracts, as authorized by President Donald Trump.
The last of the top five was removed on Tuesday, even as DOGE raised the total it claimed to have saved to $65 billion, according to a report in The New York Times.
The changes, which amount to more than $10 billion, were not accompanied by an explanation of why they were made or how the new total was calculated. The White House and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment from either the Times or the Daily Beast.
DOGE’s biggest purported saving so far—$8 billion at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement—was also its biggest error. It turned out that the number was actually $8 million.
The original erroneous figure perhaps should have caught Musk’s eye, given that ICE’s entire budget amounts to around $8 billion.
DOGE claimed on social media that it had always been using $8 million in calculating the savings, even though the website displayed the error.
Another correction took away DOGE’s next three largest purported savings—three mistakes for the price of one.
The site originally displayed a trifecta of separate cuts of $655 million at Musk’s much-reviled U.S. Agency for International Aid, which adds up to nearly $2 billion.
For starters, the cut was being triple-counted. However, even a single $655 million cut would not have been accurate.
Government funding often uses “ceiling values” far beyond what will actually be spent, and experts told the Times that this cut was unlikely to save anywhere near the listed figure.
The DOGE site has now revised all three cuts down to a vastly reduced single number: $18 million.
The final of DOGE’s biggest cuts to fall is a $232 million figure it claimed to have slashed at the Social Security Administration. The group appeared to believe it had cut its contract with the defense company Leidos.
In reality, it had only cut a small part of that contract—a $560,000 initiative to let users mark their gender as “X.”
Now, the top saving on the page is $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury. The Times, however, reported last week that that cut was actually made last fall, when Joe Biden was president.
