- DOGE says it’s saved $55 billion in total, documenting some of that on a “wall of receipts” on its website.
- On Tuesday, its website showed $16.5 billion in savings, much of that canceled contracts.
- By Thursday, it had lowered the contract savings amount saved to $7.2 billion, mainly due to an $8 billion error.
The White House Department of Government Efficiency office linked to Elon Musk has lowered its expected savings from canceled federal contracts by about $9.3 billion in the last two days.
A Business Insider review of the “wall of receipts” on doge.gov found that Elon Musk’s team has lowered its claimed savings from $16.5 billion on Tuesday to $7.2 billion as of Thursday.
A few changed entries seem to account for nearly all of the difference. Most notably, DOGE initially claimed to have canceled a $8 billion contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The contract was for $8 million. DOGE wrote in a post on X that “the agency contracting officer mistakenly” entered the wrong amount.
Additionally, DOGE initially claimed to save about $2 billion by canceling a trio of USAID deals worth $655 million each. Now, that contract only appears once — amounting to another $1.3 billion reduction.
According to a White House official, “DOGE reports both the ‘ceiling value’ and the ‘savings value'” and calculates savings by subtracting already obligated funds from a contract’s total award value. The official told BI this method is “actually conservative because DOGE does not take credit for recovered obligated funds” and “does not assume any administrative savings in its calculations.”
Musk told reporters last week that sometimes he’ll get things incorrect.
“Nobody’s going to bat a thousand,” Musk said during an appearance alongside Trump in the Oval Office. “We will make mistakes. But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”
DOGE’s total estimated savings are $55 billion, according to the summary on its site, which it called a combination of “fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.”
However, so far DOGE’s website doesn’t include any estimates for savings from anything except “contract/lease cancellations.”
Musk told Fox News host Sean Hannity during a joint interview with the president that DOGE aims to cut at least $1 trillion from the federal deficit.
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