The NYT reports: DOGE Quietly Deletes the 5 Biggest Spending Cuts It Celebrated Last Week.*
The main correction (the $8 billion that was, instead, $8 million), I already noted. Here are the other four.
- Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was actually a single cut that was erroneously counted three times, as first reported by CBS News. That mistake also seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the way government contracts work; they sometimes have “ceiling values” far in excess of what will be spent. Experts said this cancellation was unlikely to produce anything close to $655 million in savings even once. Now, the site lists a much smaller savings for these three cancellations: $18 million in total.
- A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. Here, Mr. Musk’s organization appeared to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as reported by The Intercept, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project to let users mark their gender as “X.” The DOGE site now shows that small cut instead.
Again, I will note that these are minuscule cuts in the context of the broader goal.
And then there is stuff like this:
The largest savings on the latest version of its list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department. But The Times reported last week that this contract was canceled last fall, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president — and when DOGE did not yet exist.
The cost-cutting stuff continues to demonstrate that these DOGE folks don’t know what they are doing, don’t understand what they are looking at, and aren’t saving anything consequential.
Further, the personnel stuff is doing the opposite of increasing efficiency.
It is a an utter mess.
*Sorry. I am out of gift links for the month.
