Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team debuted a website last month cataloging the contracts the group says it has canceled to save taxpayers money. Since then, the list has undergone dizzying changes. New contracts have been added, others deleted. Values have been altered, and altered again.
The changes tell a story of how the Musk team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, operates. Here are all the contracts that were listed with a claimed dollar savings when the group first posted its “wall of receipts” on Feb. 16:
There were mistakes right away. One contract, listed as saving $8 billion, was actually worth $8 million. Another was inflated and triple-counted.
The $8 billion error was corrected, and two of the duplicates were removed. But then other mistakes followed. …
On Feb. 25, DOGE added hundreds of new contracts. One, with a claimed savings of $1.9 billion, was actually canceled last year.
A week later, more contracts were added — but hundreds were also removed, including that erroneous $1.9 billion item.
Then a few days later, nearly all of those deleted contracts reappeared. Even the $1.9 billion one.
Amid the latest changes on March 12, the values on 123 contracts were altered — primarily to claim larger savings.
Here, we’ve simply shown the savings on individual contracts as DOGE claims them. But in many cases the money the government has realistically saved by ending these contracts is far smaller. Our illustration also leaves out another oddity of the DOGE wall: As of March 13, more than 2,200 contacts listed — or 40 percent of the total — show a savings value of $0. In other words, no savings at all.
The picture of these shifting contracts reflects what has become the erratic hallmark of much of the team’s work over the past month, seen in federal employees fired and then called back to work; in programs halted and then nominally restored; in federal buildings put up for sale and then retracted; in sweeping claims that are then refuted.
“We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes,” Mr. Musk said early on in the Oval Office, a message he has recently repeated to Republicans in Congress.
But these appear to be less errors of oversight than signs of indifference to the fundamental workings of government, say people knowledgeable about federal contracts, grant programs, the government work force, data systems and federal spending.