After repeated delays, the Department of Government Efficiency on Monday released a “wall of receipts” — what it characterized as documentation of the money saved by the slashing cuts to jobs and contracts pushed by Elon Musk’s team at DOGE over the past several weeks.
The initial accounting was overstated by billions of dollars, a review by CBS News found.
Among the errors were contracts that DOGE identified for cuts, saying the move could save billions for taxpayers. But they were actually standard government funding vehicles called “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” contracts. The DOGE team misread these specialized contracts, experts told CBS News, and as a result overstated their push for savings by as much as $1.96 billion.
A closer inspection of another big so-called savings: the cancellation of a contract DOGE identified as worth $8 billion was in fact worth only $8 million. This single mistake slashed the receipts of savings DOGE said it had identified in half — to $8.4 billion.
That error involved an award for Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement Equal Opportunity Employment Office, and the contract described the project as “Program and Technical Support Services for Office of Diversity and Civil Rights.” In his first days in office, President Trump signed executive orders to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal government.
The DOGE team led by Musk has become a hallmark of Mr. Trump’s early days in office, as members of the efficiency team set up shop in federal agencies to identify cuts of employees, grants and contracts. The president has praised the effort, which he says is a long overdue move to eliminate waste.
“They’re doing a hell of a job, it’s an amazing job they’re doing,” he said during remarks in the Oval Office on Feb. 11. “You know that force is building, I call it ‘the force of super geniuses.'”
DOGE’s accounting error involving indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts, known in government-speak as IDIQ, occurred because the team likely misunderstood how government contracting works, experts told CBS News. These contracts are designed to set a ceiling for the funding of a larger project.
Multiple contractors bid on tasks within that IDIQ. The ceiling for the project identified by DOGE was $655 million. But DOGE claimed savings of $654,990,000 three times. In actuality, the government spent less on the contract — around $400 million over the course of the past four years for 44 different sub-contracts — and the IDIQ is likely to have only minimal additional spending.
That specific contract was called USAID EVAL-ME II IDIQ and it provided “monitoring, evaluation and learning services to promote evidence-based decision making for adaptive management across USAID.” One of the contractors involved told CBS News that this program was directly responsible for ensuring that U.S. taxpayer money was spent in accordance with U.S. goals and interests.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the discrepancy, and DOGE also did not respond to a request for comment.
DOGE “may be more interested in inflating savings than in accurately reporting them,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight.
The New York Times, which first reported DOGE’s $8 billion accounting error, pointed out that a 2022 version of this contract was listed at $8 billion, and on Jan. 22 of this year, the figure was changed to $8 million. The contracting company, D&G Solutions, confirmed to CBS News that this was originally the result of an accounting error and that $3.8 million of the contract had already been expended.
On Wednesday morning, DOGE fixed the error, and the website now shows $8 million in savings for that contract, but the link they provide for the “receipt” is to the earlier $8 billion figure.
Musk recently admitted he knows DOGE isn’t perfect. Defending DOGE during an Oval Office appearance on Feb. 11, he said that “some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected.”
“Nobody’s going to bat a thousand. We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes,” he added.
Beyond the ICE contract blunder, Amey described the numbers as underwhelming. Excluding the impact of USAID’s elimination, receipts of contract savings from other agencies appear to total $2 billion — a fraction of the federal budget, which stands at $6.75 trillion.
“If DOGE’s goal is to trim a trillion or two, it has a long way to go, and Congress has to do its job to cut spending, too,” Amey said. Musk has said he’d like to trim $2 trillion, putting DOGE at 0.1% of his goal.
Many of these contract cancellations, outside of the USAID cuts, appear to have been selected based on language in the agreements referencing diversity, equity, or inclusion, CBS News’ review found.
And at what cost? Among the receipts on the DOGE wall was funding for a Department of Education project that’s now been scrapped. The contractor described the real-world consequences in an interview: “Thirteen school districts across 11 states were set to receive more than $13 million to support over 1,070 youth with disabilities participating in the program.”
At USAID, savings touted by DOGE on X on Saturday included $10 million for “Mozambique voluntary medical male circumcision” and $9.7M for UC Berkeley to develop “a cohort of Cambodian youth with enterprise driven skills” amongst other cuts. Circumcision has been proved to reduce the spread of HIV by as much as 60%. Programs like that have the potential to significantly lower costs for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, which provides antiretroviral treatment for people living with HIV and AIDS and had been given a limited waiver to continue to operate at the end of January. It has been credited with helping to save 26 million lives. One 2017 estimate suggested that widespread circumcision efforts could avert 3.6 million new HIV infections and save $16.5 billion.
DOGE has for weeks been promising an accounting of the unprecedented sweep through federal agencies that appears to have left hundreds of workers suddenly jobless.
Meanwhile, DOGE’s abrupt firings have set government agencies on edge. The government is now trying to rehire hundreds of workers in the U.S. nuclear weapons program after last week’s layoffs. Farmers across the U.S. remain in limbo after promised federal funds for healthy soil initiatives — amounting to thousands of dollars per farm — failed to materialize. Life-saving efforts across Africa have also been put on hold while service providers wait for clarity on whether court-ordered funds will resume.
Aaron Navarro
contributed to this report.
