Updated February 13, 2025 at 05:02 AM ET
A central tenet of the Elon Musk-led "Department of Government Efficiency" effort is cutting government spending, but there's little transparency and some exaggeration surrounding the claims of the billions of dollars saved in less than a month.
When Musk spoke in the Oval Office on Tuesday about DOGE-led actions to terminate federal contracts, he said the work was "maximally transparent."
"Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible," Musk said. "We post our actions to the DOGE handle on X and to the DOGE website. So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been ... I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization."
Until Wednesday, the DOGE website was blank, save a tagline that said "the people voted for major reform." Now, a "savings" page promises "receipts coming soon" and the site also includes the DOGE X feed and roughly three dozen posts that have varying degrees of specificity about actions taken to terminate contracts.
An NPR analysis of several public data sources, including USASpending.gov and the Federal Procurement Data System, finds errors, omissions and lingering questions about the accuracy and scale of the massive savings claimed by DOGE in recent days.
What's been canceled?
The federal government is a sprawling financial entity that conducts transactions large and small every day. In the 2024 fiscal year, it spent $6.8 trillion.
Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at The George Washington University Law School, said that the latitude federal agencies have with handling contracts — including canceling them — is much more expansive than a typical business.
"To understand how the government spends money and enters into its contracts, you have to appreciate at the outset that the government is completely different from your typical commercial partner," Tillipman said. "The government is a superpower, and it's like this because of the amount of money that it spends and what it spends money on. It has different goals, different constraints and different priorities."
One of those priorities since President Trump took office is canceling contracts related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility to comply with an executive order Trump signed. A Jan. 31 DOGE post on X included a table that claims $1 billion in savings from more than 100 DEIA-related terminations.
Updated data on DEI related contract cancellations with full detail: https://t.co/hEBk62KQvN pic.twitter.com/kcPATigb3x
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) January 31, 2025
Half of the purported savings comes from three contracts canceled by the Office of Personnel Management with a maximum possible value of $516 million.
NPR could not verify that number. An OPM contract worth $7 million to implement former President Joe Biden's 2021 executive order around diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility was canceled Jan. 28.
In total, NPR identified 79 contracts that could potentially match the 104 terminations claimed by DOGE. Together, they account for just a quarter of the hypothetical savings mentioned in the X post. These contracts had a current value of about $102 million, including $72 million already budgeted by federal agencies, and a maximum value of more than $325 million over the life of the agreement before they were canceled.
A spokesperson for the DOGE office did not respond to NPR's request for a list of contracts canceled, the dollar amount of terminated spending identified by DOGE or how they calculate the savings amounts.
NPR searched through public Treasury Department payment data, hundreds of thousands of contract modifications and other agency sources for the terms diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility and related acronyms to find possible matches.
Other purported savings in the DOGE spreadsheet include ending several blanket purchase agreements, contracts with high maximum potential values that agencies use for anticipated recurring needs, for diversity-related consulting and training. Those agreements with agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency were never used, but had a theoretical maximum that could have reached more than $150 million.
Cutting contracts that have already been spent
Some of the contracts highlighted by DOGE were already budgeted, spent and at their maximum possible value before the termination, like a $7 million DEI training contract with the Department of Health and Human Services and $192,500 spent for a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employee diversity training.
Still others listed in the billion dollars of supposed savings do not appear to have been canceled, like $1.25 million for DEIA initiatives through the National Science Foundation, $419,000 from the Social Security Administration for "a contractor to convene and moderate focus groups to help identify structural barriers to women's financial advancement" and $157,500 with the Railroad Retirement Board's "DEIA Data Analytics and Reporting Solution."
Tillipman, the contract law expert, said some of the high-level numbers about canceling contracts can be misleading — and that it doesn't automatically save the government money to end the contract.
"When the government terminates a contract for convenience, it's still obligated to pay for the work completed," she said. "This doesn't eliminate the government's responsibility for paying these sorts of costs. … The termination for convenience clause is expensive for the government to do."
The DOGE table also includes some errors, like mixing up one canceled Federal Aviation Administration $3.2 million contract with the EPA's three unused blanket purchase agreements and a $180,000 EPA DEIA consulting contract.
On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted printouts of some canceled contracts while calling criticism of the DOGE effort's lack of transparency around cuts a "fallacy."
"There is an X account with the DOGE handle," she said. "They are tweeting out what they are doing on a daily basis. They have a website where they are posting the receipts of the contracts that they are reviewing and the payments that they have stopped from going out the door."
As of Thursday morning, there are no available receipts on the DOGE site, but Leavitt did send copies of some contract terminations following the briefing — including a new notice to terminate a Department of Defense contract for a virtual reality DEIA training that the DOGE account claimed was already canceled two weeks ago.
Are these savings a result of stopping fraud?
Musk, Trump and other Republicans have highlighted the DOGE spending cuts as evidence of "BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF WASTE, FRAUD AND ABUSE," as the president said on his social media site.
There's no evidence that these contracts that are being terminated are the result of fraud, corruption or wrongdoing. But there has long been bipartisan concern about improper payments that come out of the government's largest spending programs.
A recent Government Accountability Office report estimates anywhere between $233 billion and $521 billion a year in recent losses to fraud, though that estimate is primarily driven by health care and unemployment assistance programs that account for a far larger portion of the federal budget.
Tillipman the law professor expressed concern that DOGE and those touting its findings are using words like "fraud" and "corruption" to describe contracts and payments that are ultimately different political priorities from prior administrations.
"You may disagree with spending on political fights, we can have a discussion whether that's a good use of government money or not, and frankly, it's well within any administration's authority to change their mind and say, 'Look, we don't want to do this anymore,'" she said. "It doesn't make it corrupt, it doesn't make it fraudulent."
What impact is DOGE having on the federal budget?
Even if you take DOGE at its word that billions of dollars a day are being saved through cutting contracts, hiring freezes and eventual reductions in the federal workforce, this effort is akin to scrounging around in couch cushions for loose change.
The largest share of federal government spending comes from things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the defense budget — all areas that have been politically untouchable by lawmakers looking to trim the deficit.
A DOGE subcommittee in the U.S. House, chaired by Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, kicked off Wednesday with a hearing titled "The War on Waste: Stamping Out The Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud" as an effort that could address a larger piece of the spending puzzle: hundreds of billions in potential fraudulent payments made through Medicare and Medicaid.
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