After a string of delays, it was finally released. On Monday, the Department of Government Efficiency unveiled the “wall of receipts” – an accounting of the amount made through the drastic reductions in contracts and jobs promoted by Elon Musk’s staff at DOGE during the last several months.
According to the CBS News review, the original accounting was exaggerated in billions.
The most erroneous were the contracts that DOGE found to need cuts and said the cut would save taxpayers billions. They were, in fact, standard federal funding vehicles, referred to as “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” contracts. As experts explained to CBS News, the DOGE team misread these special contracts and overstated their claims for savings as high as $1.96 billion.
An examination of another considerable savings, a so-called cancelation of a deal DOGE declared worth $8 billion, turned out to be worth just 8 million. The one mistake cut the amount of savings DOGE claimed it identified by half, from $8.4 billion to $8.4 billion.
This error led to an award to Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement Equal Opportunity Employment Office. The award was for an Equal Opportunity Employment Office, described in the contract as “Program and Technical Support Services for Office of Diversity and Civil Rights.” Within his first few days as president, Trump issued executive orders that ended the federal government’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
The DOGE team headed by Musk has been a staple of. Trump’s first time in office. Team members set up shops at federal agencies to look for the need to cut employees’ salaries, grants, and contracts. The president has expressed his appreciation for the initiative and says it’s an overdue effort to cut down on unnecessary waste.
“They’re doing a hell of a job, it’s an amazing job they’re doing,” the president said in his remarks at the Oval Office on Feb. 11. “You know that force is building, I call it ‘the force of super-geniuses.'”
DOGE’s accounting oversight that involved indefinite delivery and indefinite quantity contracts, also known by the acronym IDIQ, occurred because the DOGE team was unaware of the process of government contracting, as per experts’ comments to CBS News. The contracts aim to provide a maximum amount of money that can be used for the more significant undertaking.
Many contractors have bid for work within this IDIQ. The Project’s ceiling, determined by DOGE, was $655 million. The contract was not funded. DOGE claims savings of $654,990,000. Three times. DOGE did not spend as much as the amount stated on the contract — about $400 million during the last four years to fund various sub-contracts, and the IDIQ could result in just a tiny amount of additional expenses.
This particular contract was referred to as USAID EVAL-ME II IDIQ. it offered “monitoring, evaluation and learning services to promote evidence-based decision making for adaptive management across USAID.” One of the contractors who participated told CBS News that this program ensured U.S. taxpayer money was allocated to U.S. goals and interests.
The White House did not respond to an inquiry for clarification regarding the difference, and DOGE also didn’t reply to requests to comment.
DOGE “may be more interested in inflating savings than accurately reporting them,” stated Scott Amey, the non-partisan Project on Government Oversight general counsel.
The New York Times, which first published DOGE’s accounting lapse of $8 billion, pointed out the 2022 version of the contract was listed as $8 billion. However, the following day, Jan. 22 this year, the number was altered by $8 million. The company contracting the contract, D&G Solutions, confirmed to CBS News that this was initially caused by an accounting mistake and that $3.8 million from the contract had already been used up.
The following morning, DOGE fixed the error. The website displays savings of $8 million in the contract. However, the URL they give to”reciprocity “receipt” is to the previous figure of $8 billion.
Musk has recently acknowledged that he is aware DOGE has its flaws. In defending DOGE in the Oval Office appearance on Feb. 11, Musk said, “I know that “some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected.”
“Nobody’s going to bat a thousand. We will make mistakes but act quickly to correct any mistakes,” said the official.
In addition to the ICE contract mistake, Amey described the numbers as not awe-inspiring. In addition to the effect of USAID’s removal, the receipts for contracts saved by other agencies could amount to $2 billion, less than the total federal budget of $6.75 trillion.
“If DOGE’s goal is to trim a trillion or two, it has a long way to go, and Congress has to do its job to cut spending, too,” Amey stated. Musk has indicated that he’d like to reduce the size of the figure to $2 trillion. This puts DOGE at 0.1 percent of his target.
The majority of these contracts canceled, including cuts to USAID cuts, seem to be by the language of contracts that refer to equity, diversity, or inclusion, CBS News’ review found.
At what price? The receipts posted on the DOGE wall were a grant for a Department of Education project that was scrapped. Contractors described the effects in an interview: “Thirteen school districts across 11 states were set to receive more than $13 million to support over 1,070 youth with disabilities participating in the program.”
In USAID, savings touted by DOGE on X on Saturday included $10 million to fund “Mozambique voluntary medical male circumcision” as well as $9.7M to UC Berkeley to develop “a cohort of Cambodian youth with enterprise-driven skills” in addition to other cuts. Circumcision is proven to cut down the spreading of HIV by up to 60 percent. Programs such as this could substantially reduce the cost of The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, called PEPFAR, which offers antiretroviral treatments for patients who have HIV as well as AIDS and was granted a restricted waiver that allowed it to run until the beginning of January. The program has been acknowledged as being able to save more than 26 million lives. A 2017 study suggested the widespread practice of circumcision could prevent 3.6 million new HIV cases and help make $16.5 billion.
DOGE has promised an account of the massive sweep that has swept through federal agencies, which seems to have left many people suddenly unemployed.
In the meantime, DOGE’s sudden firings have put government agencies in a state of panic. Government officials are now attempting to hire hundreds of people within their positions in the U.S. nuclear weapons program following the layoffs last week. Farmers all over the U.S. remain in limbo because federally funded healthier soil projects, which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for each farm, have not been realized. The life-saving initiatives across Africa are also in limbo while the service suppliers wait to find out the possibility of resuming court-ordered funding.
