Since President Trump took office, Elon Musk and DOGE have wielded an unprecedented level of power to help the administration cut the U.S. government, and they claim to have stopped tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending.David A. Fahrenthold, an investigative reporter for The Times, explains why those claims are not what they seem — and what that tells us about Mr. Musk’s project to shrink the federal bureaucracy.Guest: David A. Fahrenthold, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: DOGE’s only public ledger has been riddled with mistakes.The group has now deleted hundreds of claimed savings, worth billions of dollars, from that ledger.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is DOGE and why is it significant?
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams. This is The Daily. Today. Since the moment President Trump took office, Elon Musk and Doge have wielded an unprecedented level of power to help the new administration slash the U.S. government. And so far, they've claimed to have cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending.
Today, my colleague David Fahrenthold explains why those claims are not what they seem and what that tells us about Musk's project to shrink the federal bureaucracy. It's Tuesday, March 4th. David, we've been hearing a lot about what Doge, the Elon Musk group tasked with saving $2 trillion, has been up to in recent weeks. They've done massive layoffs. They've done job purity tests.
And they actually have made billions of dollars in cuts. But you've been looking into exactly what they say they've done, which is kind of like an audit, if you will, of Doge. And I'd love it if you could explain how you went about doing that.
Well, so I should start by saying that it's really hard to know most of what Doge is doing. Doge is really opaque. It's operating in a lot of different places at once, operating almost in total secrecy. So we've been looking for a window, any sort of window, to see the kind of analysis they're using to justify all the things they're cutting and the things they want to cut.
And a couple of weeks ago, they actually gave us one window into their work. They set up a website. Hmm. Basically, it's a kind of a primitive looking website. It looks a little bit like something off the dark web. That's the vibe.
You know, I looked at it and it actually, the look of the website sort of looks like this HTML meets crypto trading platform meets Twitter.
It does. It looks like something where you're about to trade some kind of coin named after a cat or something. But the main feature of it, if you scroll down a little bit, is what they call the wall of receipts. It is about 2,200 different federal contracts and lists details about what agency held the contract, what vendor held the contract, and how much was saved by canceling it.
It is also an effort to gamify it. There's a leaderboard of the agencies that have cut the most and agencies that have cut the least. And at the top of the page, highlighted in yellow, is sort of the main dollar figure, the top line number. It says that overall, Doge has saved, as of Friday morning, $65 billion.
And $65 billion, just to point out, that is not chump change.
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Chapter 2: How does DOGE claim to save billions for the government?
Well, I'll take you through it. Each one of those, two, three, and four, were all U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, contracts with vendors who did basically quality control. They would go around and make sure that USAIDs work in Africa and other places, but just achieving the goals that they wanted. And they all shared the same contract.
But then when the Doge people looked at it, they thought that every one of them had a separate contract and then every one of them was entitled to the whole money set aside for that effort. So when three of those vendors had their contracts canceled, they counted that as three different cancellations. Each were $655 million.
So that sounds very extreme. Did anything else stand out to you as you were going through this accounting process?
Yeah, there was another kind of mistake we found all over the wall of receipts, which was that Doge was claiming credit for quote-unquote canceling contracts that had actually been canceled before President Trump took office. Hmm. The biggest dollar amount for one of those is a $1.9 billion cut that the Department of Treasury made. And you can actually see this happening.
You can see how it gets on the wall of receipts, which is that Treasury, which oversees IRS, tweets at Doge and says, hey, Doge, look at this incredible contract. We canceled a $1.9 billion IT contract. Doge says, hey, that's fantastic.
They retweet it, post a screenshot from the federal procurement data system that shows a terminated contract, and then put that savings, $1.9 billion, onto the wall of receipts. The problem is that when you call the vendor that was listed as having its contract canceled, that contract was canceled under President Joe Biden. It was canceled last fall for reasons that had nothing to do with Doge.
Oh. And that's not the only example of that. One of the bigger contracts for more than $50 million in savings is a Department of Homeland Security contract that Doge says was canceled. It was an IT contract that the Coast Guard had entered into. But all you got to do is click on the link to see the page from the federal procurement system and you'll see that contract ended in 2005.
It almost sounds like these agencies are intentionally deceiving these guys from Doge because, as you described, they're saying, hey, look over here, look at this cut we made. But actually, that cut was made years prior. And you would think that whoever's flagging that to Doge would have known that from inside of the Treasury or wherever else.
So is this a deliberate attempt at deception or what did you make of this?
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Chapter 3: What issues are found in DOGE's financial reports?
That's the fundamental difference here, right? You can delete your Twitter account, you can stop reading Twitter, and life goes on. But now, if you apply that same sort of, like, cut first, measure later approach to government... Then you're talking about people don't get their Medicare. People don't, you know, the IRS doesn't answer your phone call when you have a question about your taxes.
The park that you're going to visit doesn't open. I don't think that the public and Trump's voters were prepared for this kind of change and to make it risks huge political pullback for Trump and pretty big disruptions for regular people.
Right, because even for Trump voters who might have wanted smaller government, more transparency in what the government spends its money on, there's definitely a tension, it would seem, between those priorities and what we're seeing with Doge, which is only a tiny fraction of what they claim they're up to, which makes you just sort of wonder what else is going on that we really don't have a window into right now.
Look, to me, this is a question about trust. An enormous amount, historic amount of trust has been placed in Doge.
This tiny little group of people, many of them with no government experience, has been given an unprecedented amount of data about government, an unprecedented amount of data about us, about Americans, and an unprecedented amount of power to change the way the government's going to look for years, for decades. And the question is, do they deserve that trust?
And the one way we have to start to answer that question is to look at this little slice of data that they've made available about how they see the world, about the work that they're doing. And so sloppy mistakes, obvious mistakes in the first thing they show to the public raises questions about whether they deserve the huge amount of trust they've been given.
David, thank you so much.
Thank you so much for having me on.
On Monday morning, Doge deleted hundreds of additional mistakes found on its website, erasing $4 billion in savings that the group claimed to have found in government spending. It was the second time in a week that some of the biggest alleged savings were removed.
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