DOGE Has “Receipts”!
The efficiency is something to behold.
As I noted on Sunday, DOGE had promised “receipts” this weekend, but none had arrived. If one clicks the page now, one does get a list. While I am sure this list will impress some fanboys, just listing numbers is not, traditionally, what a receipt does (especially when deployed in the notion of “bringing receipts”). Some of the stuff is just a list. The fact that you can click through to some screenshots from the budget entries and see the amounts is contextless information.
Since someone will perhaps dispute my characterization, I would note that a receipt lists the costs, the expenditure, and the balance. A receipt tells you what has been paid and sometimes includes detailed payment information. What DOGE is providing is a list of costs and claiming that they have been canceled. That’s not proof of anything.
If I wanted a receipt to prove that my subscription to WaPo had been canceled showing someone the initial charge would not accomplish said feat.
A receipt in this context should let us see the savings. And, indeed, it is utterly unclear how canceling, say, a Politico Pro account leads to immediate savings. Is the government getting a refund? Or, like when a lot of people canceled their WaPo subscriptions a few months ago, does it simply mean that they won’t be renewed? If this is the case, and it almost certainly is (not that DOGE is explaining any of this), then these are actually future savings not a credit to the government’s accounts.
Further, there is no explanation as to why a given contract or expenditure was to be considered fraud, waste, or corruption. Really, just listing it doesn’t mean it has been canceled nor that money has actually been saved.
How much of this represents money already spent? How much does it represent money yet to be spent? These kinds of details are kind of important.
And then we have stuff like this via the NYT: DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million.
The Department of Government Efficiency, the federal cost-cutting initiative championed by Elon Musk, published on Monday a list of government contracts it has canceled, together amounting to about $16 billion in savings itemized on a new “wall of receipts” on its website.
Almost half of those line-item savings could be attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But it appears that the DOGE list vastly overstated the actual intended value of that contract. A closer scrutiny of a federal database shows that a recent version of the contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.
See, also the following.
- Via NBC News: USDA says it accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is trying to rehire them.
- Via Wired: Not Even DOGE Employees Know Who’s Legally Running DOGE.
- Via Politico: Elon Musk expresses interest in sending out DOGE checks.
On that last bullet, let me note that if the goal here is to balance the budget, sending out checks doesn’t make sense. Moreover, since it is unclear how much is actually being credited back to the Treasury versus being future savings, there may not be a fund to use for such a process. None of it makes sense if you think about it for a few minutes.
And there there is the math of it all.
I would note that the projected FY25 budget deficit is $1.9 trillion.
You know, with a T.
That would be $1,900,000,000,000.
A trillion is a thousand billion.
Saving almost two thousand billion takes a lot of saving.
Assuming the $55 billion number (i.e., $55,000,000,000) listed on the DOGE page is accurate, that would mean they have reached 2.89% of their goal. If we go with the $16 billion numbers that the NYT appears to take as a more confirmed number that puts the savings at 0.84%. If we then take the $8 billion mistake into account, they have achieved 0.42% of their goal. And that assumes that there aren’t other errors on their current Wall! Of! Receipts! (think Don Pardo voice in honor of SNL’s 50th).
Put it in other terms: if you owe a very violent bookie $2000 and you find $8 in your wallet, you aren’t going to feel a wave of relief. If your friend gives you $8 more, your anxiety will shift not one whit. Get that number up to $55 you aren’t going to have the first line on your website proclaim “Let’s pay off that gambling debt!” as if you are on your way to keeping those legs from being broken.
I understand the bromide that a billion here and a billion there and soon you are talking about real money, but the math is the math. I can’t decide if they are truly dumb enough to think they can balance the budget this way or if they know they are fooling a lot of people who don’t understand the enormity of the math. Given long-term GOP rhetoric on this topic, I am pretty persuaded by the dumb thesis, TBH.
I mean, it’s only two trillion. Two isn’t much. Look! I can count on my fingers! One. Two. Easy-peasy!
I will conclude with some minor snark (recognizing the major snark in the preceding paragraph).* These guys are supposed to be Tech geniuses and yet their web page looks like something you would have seen on GeoCities back in 1997.
All of this would be a lot more dismissable as farce if people weren’t losing their jobs and if important federal functions weren’t being damaged.
*The more I think about all of this, the ridiculousness comes more and more into focus, and my brain shifts from trying to lay out the facts to snark to contempt. And every edit is just an excuse to get more and more snarky. So time to stop.
Claiming “B” when it is actually “M” can be viewed either as “extravagance” in thinking, or in the opposite sense, very “economical” thinking …. “hey, we got to B on only M.” But really it’s just DOH-GE!
As a data scientist, I normally loathe pie charts. However, the pie chart of the federal budget should be a mandatory graphic in any posting about savings or cost reductions. Point to the invisible hairline that is the pot of money you are raiding, and tell how much was saved.
It may well be that DOGE saved some money by canceling some contracts that won’t be missed. But time will tell if these penny pinchers haven’t created a slew of costs downline with their reckless assessments.
The likelihood is that remediation costs will be exponentially larger and shifted to a future administration and/or generation. Just like we’re doing to climate change.
These guys are supposed to be Tech geniuses and yet their web page looks like something you would have seen on GeoCities back in 1997.
I thought it had a 90s video game throwback appeal, like they wanted you to think they were gamifying “saving money”!
To add to the comments on this:
1. They’ve claimed “savings” from not picking up contract options. Which isn’t savings, it’s…just not picking up the option. This is like claiming savings by saying that next month you’re not going to eat out as much.
2. They’ve claimed “savings” by asserting – as you note – that they’ve cancelled contracts that are very likely an annual payment for something. Cancelling these may result in a prorated refund, or may have no effect. They do not distinguish.
3. They’ve claimed “savings” by closing down organizations and reducing the workforce. By my estimates, if 75k people took the “fork in the road”, we’re now on the hook for a minimum of $4B for 75,000 people to not do work. That’s a lot of not-savings for a group that’s allegedly saving money.
4. They did not include their own costs in this. When you’re totaling up pennies to say how much you’ve saved, surely the $7M of incurred expenses (going to where? for what?!? aren’t there like 20 people in this group? so we’re paying…$350k per person for the month?!?) must be included in your tally.
5. It’s unclear how many of these obligations they actually have the legal right to cancel, and how many of them will be challenged in court. In many cases the US has signed an agreement and is going to be on the hook for the costs regardless of whether a gang of 20-something financial buffoons thinks they can simply write “CANCEL” on the checks.
The GAO was already tasked with doing the work that this group of fools is doing. Trump easily could have demanded that the GAO do a careful audit of all contracts within X days, then he could have picked off the ones that he didn’t like. It would have been totally legal and on the up-and-up, and it would not have raised the Constitutional or security concerns that introducing this rogue squad has. It’s appalling that the Muskrats are being given an opportunity to show just how incompetent they are when the stakes are so high.
Oh, and paring back the IRS will make it that much more difficult to pursue tax cheats. Which means the books will be further screwed. To expand your bookie analogy, it’s like having a job that might help you pay off the bookie, but having a weird setup where they put the money in the account of your brother’s friend who’s high all the time and you ask him for it.
All of these sociopathy for self-improvement guys are completely incapable of firing anybody who screws up in public along the lines of 8 million for 8 billion. It’s not even a problem for them, I guess. They’re too busy being angry about things don’t understand and have no natural interest in.
Musk and co. aren’t Bill Gates and they aren’t Steve Jobs. Jobs would have fired everybody for making things look like DOGE. Gates would have fired everyone for the errors. These guys have always been second-rate in the oligarch world when it comes to what they put out. The real struggle seems–to me–to be about dragging the American economy into the place where they live, a sell-for-parts scheme of AI upgrades, PE, memecoins, and ugliness, which is the only way they have left to turn a profit.
There’s a complaint about budget cuts that goes like this:
Agency A’s budget for last year was $100 million. This year they want $110 million. Congress authorizes $105 million. Therefore their budget was cut 50%!
You know, $100 million / 2 = $105 million.
I don’t know if this is true, but it might be such creative accounting tricks that the nazi in chief is using to make up his savings.
I’m sure there’s waste in the US government, because there’s waste in all large, complex organizations. I’m also sure there aren’t $2 trillion worth of waste, not even if you add up all fraud.
I have feeling Trump, and Congress, will not only accept these supposed savings at face value but will direct the CBO to do so when Trump tax cut renewals come up.
These guys are supposed to be Tech geniuses and yet their web page looks like something you would have seen on GeoCities back in 1997.
There is a certain kind of programmer that can’t be bothered to make things look nice. They think it is a “waste of time”. They think “people who aren’t as smart as me should be doing that”. DOGE doesn’t have any of those people. DOGE has only the smartest people. And they are on a mission, but the mission does not include “making the website look nice”. I’m sure their coding style is shit, too.
I mean, making the website look nice is a good job for a woman, in their eyes. See, they are inclusive!
[I hope you guys caught all the sarcasm there. -j]
I’m just glad to learn Elon Musk determined and verified his baseline, set SMART goals, gathered stakeholders to hear their input, and formed an IPT including appropriate representation to ensure satisfaction while maintaining buy-in throughout this project of his.
Wait, the party of competent governance and rule of law did not do this?
I, for one, am shocked.
Another point to make is that this is just for a single year. Even if the budget stays the same, the deficit will be bigger next year from interest payments alone. Even if – unlikely – these appropriations are all cut in future years, the interest cost growth will swallow these “savings” like a single krill into a whale.
And if appropriations are not cut, then the money will simply be spent on something else and there will be no savings at all.
Missing from this equation are the compliance costs. Many of my friends working in the federal government are spending the bulk of their time not doing their actual jobs, but attempting to comply with all the various poorly written, short-notice taskers that come down. Those in offices with recently fired probationary employees now also have additional tasks to cover.
Some of these taskers have been stupid or impossible. For example, yesterday, the Secretary of the Air Force sent a mass email to all the MAJCOMs asking for the impacts of probationary employee firings, with suspense at the end of the day. For some organizations that exist overseas, this meant they had an hour or two to respond to this tasker.
The really dumb thing is that DoD is exempt from the hiring freeze. So any probationary employee fired can get rehired, or the billet can be filled with another new hire. With those new probationary employees be fired? It’s all so stupid.
In another case (also Air Force), an organization I won’t name (but it’s probably not the only one) was directed to not only get rid of DEI, but also to remove/delete all reference to DEI in emails sent or received in the last four years. It’s an especially dumb kind of damnatio memoriae that has taken a huge amount of time to try to comply with – time that isn’t spent on doing the actual mission.
My best friend is a probationary employee with the Army – his two-year probationary period ends three weeks from now. He hasn’t been fired yet, but the other issue he faces is a RTO order. He’s in Colorado and was hired as a full-time remote employee for an Army agency which is in DC. The agency is attempting to coordinate with a local military base for workspace. If that falls through and he’s not granted an exception, then he will have to move to DC or quit. He is already planning to quit. He has a science PhD, and frankly, the Army needs him more than he needs this job, so he is already contingency planning.
The whole thing is such a shit-show. Most of the public has no idea about this stuff, and a lot of these actions won’t directly affect them or be visible. The Trump admin will reverse on the worst cases, as it already has with NNSA and bird flu. The sad reality is that it will probably “work” for what Trump wants, which is the optics of winning.
@ptfe:
What fun would come from careful GAO work? This is the circuses part of classic “bread & circuses” distraction.
Are you not entertained?
@Andy: Missing from this equation are the compliance costs. Many of my friends working in the federal government are spending the bulk of their time not doing their actual jobs, but attempting to comply with all the various poorly written, short-notice taskers that come down. Those in offices with recently fired probationary employees now also have additional tasks to cover.
Can I upvote this a few thousand more times? There’s little to no incentive to do quality work, little motivation to do work at all, low morale overall, lots of wasted time spent sorting out crappy orders and demands, extremely high stress, and … extra work to do.
Of course, being inappropriately staffed makes you easy to defraud with zero consequence. That’s where all this is going.
@ptfe:
There is anecdotal evidence that a chunk of the contracts cancelled has been for work already performed, delivered and accepted, basically stiffing the contractee. Cancelling Dept of Agriculture contracts where the farmer was awaiting reimbursement or contracts let under Biden’s IRA legislation that have been fulfilled. Much of this will end up in court with the gov being ordered to pay.
We saved money by cutting a million dollar task force (that annually nets two million).
@Jay L Gischer: To me, it isn’t even that it doesn’t look nice, is that someone had to work to make it look bad! (And yes, all sarcasm caught!).
@Andy:
To put it mildly.
@Sleeping Dog: Don’t worry, there will only be like 3 DOJ lawyers left to handle those cases so they’ll all be settled by the US govt paying out a huge sum in restitution.
The American people should be outraged over what has been an absolutely incompetent and destructive decimation of our, the people’s, government.
But that also gives the people doing it too much credit. These aren’t well-intentioned people that are just screwing up. In addition to being stupid, they are evil. Behind it all are the Project 2025 people, the greedy billionaires, the Russians, and useful (and likely compromised) fools like Trump and most of the GOP. The outrage from 90% of Americans should already be endless about what’s happening. At some point, the destruction will be too great to undo.
The cold war never really ended and Russia is close to winning.
One appoints a government commission to investigate things when one wants to bury the issue and have no voter think about it ever again.
Trump wants the opposite. He wants everyone to know that WE ARE CUTTING COSTS TO THE BONE! He’s Crazy Eddie. HOW DO I DO IT? I’M CRAZY!
And all the misery and pushback and headlines actually feed that narrative. He’s doing what nobody else could because he’s that much of a badass and also a little crazy.
So when he’s done, we won’t even need a debt ceiling any more, right? I wonder if that is where this is going, but it only counts as wishful thinking.
Also notably, of that $8 million–that’s the cost of the entire contract. They were already a couple of years into it, so canceling it now would be a savings of ~$5 million at the most.
Even if it were $8 billion, that’s peanuts. 8 billy is what — day and a few hours of federal borrowing? Lol great savings. Pfft.
An $8 million contract? Chile, please.
The chaos unleashed by Trump’s job destroying firings, freezes, and subsequent lawsuits will cost Americans exponentially more than the tuppence of “waste” found. The Musk admin’s reckless incompetence is the actual waste, fraud, and abuse.
@ptfe:
Guaranteed that Trump’s buddy’s are going to attempt to cash in on legal action against our government.
@Andy:
This is one of the key reasons they can do this.
The irony is that this is the basis for “republic, not a [direct] democracy.” The idea is to have competent elected officials enacting laws as well as competent administrators and bureaucrats executing those laws.
But one party insists on electing foxes to oversee the hen house. Then blame the other party for having to pay more for eggs from some other farm.
Reagan’s speechwriters may have given delivered the pithy line that continues to get repeated today, but the process of preparing the populace to internalize that quite started roughly a century before.
@Andy:
Wait, I was told by a Very Smart Investment Banker(TM) this is how a business turnaround is supposed to go and all of us with actual experience working in and around government are just whiners who don’t know how to do the tough work needed to save this country.
Don’t tell me that Drew-a-Conner-Jack-a-Rauldi doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I mean, he’s a brave heterodox truth-teller! It’s the rest of us who are idiots who need to give Musk and company time to show us haters.
@Andy:
Again, 1000% this. Also, for those who were fired, recalled, or, like your other friend, had the terms of their employment changed without working through the implementation details, how much trust do they have that this won’t happen to them all over again? Trump and Musk are destroying morale and traumatizing the employees we need to stay to tackle the types of challenges that Governments are meant to tackle.
Ten or 12 years ago, one of our competitors, who specialized in food distribution, bought out another competitor, who was a food preparation concern. There are lots of similarities, but distribution and preparation are very different things. I know because we do both (which is not uncommon).
The first thing the new owner did was fire all the heads of the operations area, those who prepared food, and then every last person in sales, which included those that did government sales. I don’t know what the reason was, and I heard about it from a newer employee of the combined company.
The bottom line is they began to get hit with penalties for bad performance, and may have had a contract or two rescinded. But on the sales front, they got massacred, losing all their big contracts that year to the competition (not only us).
One in particular was unbelievable. It was a very complex, very demanding proposal, and has to be done in very little time. We’d been after that one for years. This time, the other company simply didn’t show up.
I learned later the new personnel in government sales vastly underestimated the time required, and decreed they’d finish it on the day it was due. To appreciate this, it helps knowing it was due at 9 am in another city (about 50 km away, but you know what traffic is capable of). Apparently they gathered at te office at 6 am to finish it, and ran out of time. Worse yet, it was due on a Monday. meaning they could easily have finished it over the weekend without overstraining themselves (we did).
So, I just took the whole savings list and copied and summed it in Excel. Bottomline total savings is $8,497,568,305. Again, just a simple copy, paste, sum. Looking through the list, toward the bottom, there were three line items that were exactly saving $654,990,000. Looked into those contracts further, and just as an example, one of them is a 7-year contract with a total ceiling worth of $655M. Total actually paid out since the contract started in 2020 was $46.1M. There is some suspicious math being reported here.
@Andy:
This is downright Soviet.
@Andy: In a well-ordered society of thoughtful and wise people, what will happen over the next 4 years would be used as an object lesson, individually and collectively, to make changes to the system and the practices of individuals that would deter the nation from repeating the traumatic, pointless, and obvious errors that were made.
In the US, we will elect a “caretaker” administration in four years and angrily vote it out of office for another circus of the type we are witnessing four years later because the problems haven’t completely resolved.
@Andy:
Is this legal? I was under the impression that government business records are required to be stored.
@Sleeping Dog: @ptfe: Or in the alternative, continued until the plaintiffs all go banko or can no longer afford to continue the suit. (ETA: We ARE talking Trump, after all.)
Or maybe, for the ultimate in insult, all the plaintiffs will be encouraged/compelled to form classes, and legal fees and attorney costs will consume the entire settlement. “Yeah! That’s the ticket!”
@Jen:
Good question! I don’t know, I will have to ask the person dealing with this. I’m not sure how records retention is currently being done – when I left in 2016 there were plans to do automated email archiving so that individuals didn’t have deal with it, but I don’t know if it ever happened.
@Andy and @Jen:
That type of historical editing is almost certainly illegal under record retention acts. That said you need someone to enforce that law.
After reading MAGA & DOGE sycophants on Social Media, this thread warms my heart.
Thank you all for providing an oasis of logic.
I suspect that some new form of fact-checking must be developed to analyze the shear amount of false data being shoveled. I fear it cannot be developed fast enough.
@Daryl: I really cut back on xitter usage since the election, but I check in now and then and am horrified by the throngs of blue-check weirdos in the replies that parrot the party line about anything, no matter how ridiculous. Lately it’s been a bunch of pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine contortions. It just reminds me to not go back there.