Mega-billionaire Elon Musk has posted a “wall of receipts” online that he claims shows how much money he has saved taxpayers with his cost-slashing “Department of Government Efficiency” operation. But it turns out that ledger is riddled with massive amounts of misinformation and inaccuracies that dramatically exaggerate — or, to put it less charitably, deceive — the public about how much money Musk’s “efficiency” initiative is saving.
Musk said on his wall of receipts that DOGE saved $8 billion from a single canceled contract at the Department of Homeland Security. It turned out that contract was for just $8 million. A listed $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department actually took place under President Joe Biden. An Associated Press analysis found that 40% of contracts cut by DOGE aren’t expected to save the government any money, according to the administration’s own data.
Musk is being efficient, if one takes the view that he is more interested in destroying things than building things in the government.
Musk is also quietly scrapping some of the false information that he posts, but without any kind of acknowledgment of inaccuracy. The New York Times points out that the original top five items listed on the “wall of receipts” have been deleted after scrutiny from reporters revealed they were incorrect. Among other things, those items included three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development that was actually a single cut that was counted three times, and a $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration that turned out to actually be a much smaller $560,000 project. While these items have been removed from the list, the total listed savings have only grown — but without any clear explanation of how.
Musk’s wall of receipts also showcases yet another example of how farcical it is to say DOGE is about making the government run “efficiently.” As NBC News reports, the wall of receipts lists dozens of blanket purchase agreements, or BPAs, on its list of canceled spending. But BPAs aren’t actual orders; they’re “more like a catalog of things the government might buy,” as NBC News explains. Listing BPAs exaggerates canceled spending, because the money allocated for them wasn’t necessarily going to be spent.
And, just as important, listing BPAs obscures the fact that they exist for the precise purpose of keeping costs down. They involve negotiated rates from vetted vendors for likely purchases — they’re arrangements for saving money and moving procurement more quickly. NBC News found that Musk listed at least $1 billion value in canceled contracts from BPAs. The BPA cancellations are a perverse two-for-one deal: they allow Musk to exaggerate savings and demonize the kinds of deals that would allow the government to save money.
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Some of this might seem somewhat counterintuitive. Every day there’s news about how DOGE is wreaking havoc on the federal workforce and its ability to administer services through cutbacks and mass firings.
On some level DOGE is having an extraordinary effect on the government. That’s all true. At the same time, it’s also true that Musk regularly peddles misinformation about what he’s doing and how much money he’s saving. In fact, even Musk’s non-credible topline claim of having saved $65 billion so far through DOGE cuts amounts to only about 0.9% of the 2024 federal budget.
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In a way, Musk is being efficient, if one takes the view that he is more interested in destroying things than building things in the government. In a very short period of time with a very small team, he has done an extraordinary job of demoralizing and intimidating millions of federal workers and disabling the federal government’s ability to administer social services — particularly those seen as liberal. He's also very quickly shrouded some of the most basic elements of governance in a cloud of unreliable information, making it harder to hold him accountable.
But as far as making the government efficient or saving lots of money for taxpayers, this has the makings of a scam.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MSNBC Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.