Musk's DOGE Exaggerated Savings Claims While Playing With American's Livelihoods

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claims that under Elon Musk it was able to save taxpayers billions of dollars. The program's stated goal is to cut what it calls "waste and fraud" in federal agencies. As a result, the livelihoods of thousands have been impacted, including over 59 thousand federal workers and the millions of Americans that depend on social programs that are being cut like SNAP, different educational grants, and USAID.

A "Wall of Receipts" with Major Flaws

DOGE has a "wall of receipts," which lists all of the contracts and programs it has supposedly cut to save money. An

analysis by CBS News found that DOGE overstated the savings of its largest cuts by as much as 97%. For example, DOGE claimed to have saved $6.4 billion by canceling three contracts from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). However, the CBS News report found the actual savings from those contracts was only about $165 million. 

For this small amount of money saved, DOGE has fired about 10 thousand people in the DHHS alone. DOGE also cut the funding of several critical programs that DHHS manages. The most notable are programs that prevent HIV and tobacco usage. Dr. Colleen Kelley, chair of the HIV Medicine Association, expressed how DOGE’s cuts to DHHS “is reckless and will harm Americans rather than make them healthy.” 

Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, called this practice "transparency theater" and said the savings per person that DOGE reported were "fiction." Malkus wrote that DOGE’s method of calculating savings is “incoherent.”. Typically, savings are calculated by the amount of funding that is unspent. Instead, Musk has been using the maximum potential value of contracts. This calculation deals only with hypothetical savings because these programs do not actually have the funds in hand, so there is no money that is reserved by cutting the contracts. 

Elon Musk, who has been leading the DOGE team, has defended the project's accounting, saying, "some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected." He also added, "Nobody's going to bat a thousand. We will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes." 

Questionable Accounting and Inflated Numbers

However, it seems like DOGE has been making an abnormal amount of mistakes on some of the most important national financial considerations. Journalists have found multiple examples of accounting errors and misleading claims on DOGE's website. In one case, a review found that a contract for the Department of Homeland Security was listed as an $8 billion savings when the actual value was only $8 million. The mistake was later corrected, but it was just one of many errors identified by different news outlets.

Furthermore, a POLITICO analysis of DOGE's data revealed that of the $32.7 billion in claimed contract savings that could be verified, the actual savings were closer to $1.4 billion. This means the organization saved less than 5% of what it claimed. Scott Amey, a general counsel for the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, told CBS News that DOGE "may be more interested in inflating savings than in accurately reporting them."

The Broader Impact of Cuts

Beyond the financial discrepancies, many of DOGE's cuts have a major human cost. A study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that cuts to USAID and foreign aid programs could lead to as many as 14 million deaths in children under the age of five by the year 2030. 

Additionally, cuts to programs such as SNAP are expected to impact nearly 1.2 million veterans that rely on food assistance. DOGE has also gone after the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that provides services to nearly 9 million veterans and employs thousands of veterans among its 500,000 strong staff. Cuts to the VA are expected to leave many veterans without work and strain medical service, including potentially life saving care.