Spaceman Spiff wrote: Sun Mar 02, 2025 5:08 pm
Jumbo wrote: Sun Mar 02, 2025 12:00 pm
Ya gotta sign up and pay to read it all, but ny times has a piece on all the erroneous claims DOGE has made, and continues to make, on savings and cancelled contracts and how their website is full of errors and misinformation. Maybe Elon is Nazi-lite with a dash of rooskie flavoring.
One example was a list of dozens of government contracts in various fields of research, inc. military, medical, weather, agriculture etc., all based on relevance to national security and economic stability (and I believe it's necessary to always debate each case in real value for money spent).
But the vast majority of these examples given as DOGE cuts and savings were really just the programs expiring at their arranged dated. Every year that happens with dozens of programs. DOGE had nothing to do with it. They weren't cuts, not were they up for renewal that DOGE "rejected." They just expired at their predetermined time.
Another bunch were actually programs that had ended YEARS earlier.
The trump admin and cabinet: liars, crooks, traitors fascists, and sociopaths.
What's the link? Maybe can get past the paywall with webpage archive or something similar.
Not sure if this is the article
@Jumbo was referring to:
DOGE Claims Credit for Killing Contracts That Were Already Dead
While George W. Bush was president, the U.S. Coast Guard signed a contract to get administrative help from a company in Northern Virginia. It paid $144,000, and the contract was completed by June 30, 2005.
Twenty years passed. Presidents came and went.
Last week, Elon Musk’s restructuring team, called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, said it had just canceled the long-dead Coast Guard contract — and in doing so, saved U.S. taxpayers $53.7 million.
That claim, posted on the group’s “wall of receipts,” bewildered experts on federal contracting. And there were others like it. Even after Mr. Musk’s group deleted several large erroneous claims from its website last week, The New York Times found that it had added new mistakes — claiming credit for “canceling” contracts that had actually ended under previous presidents.
“These are not savings,” said Lisa Shea Mundt, whose firm, The Pulse of GovCon, tracks federal spending. “The money’s been spent. Period. Point blank.”
These mistakes do not mean DOGE has not made cuts to the federal government. It has, deeply, by pushing widespread layoffs of employees and cancellations of active contracts, and by helping instigate the demise of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
But the repeated errors have raised questions about the quality and veracity of the information that the Musk team is putting out, including whether it is being misled by other departments. The mistakes also seem to call into question the team members’ competence — whether they understand the government well enough to cut it while avoiding catastrophe.
“It’s obvious that they don’t understand,” said Eric Franklin, the chief executive of the firm Erimax, who advises the government on contracting procedures. His own firm was the subject of one of the errors on DOGE’s “wall of receipts.” Mr. Musk’s group claimed it had saved $14 million by canceling one of its contracts — which had ended in 2021.
“It’s really akin to a bull in a china shop,” Mr. Franklin said. “And what do you end up with? It’s just a big mess.”
At the White House, a senior administration official offered a partial explanation, saying the information on the wall of receipts had been provided by individual federal agencies — many of which have embedded staff members from Mr. Musk’s group. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to describe DOGE’s methods, said Mr. Musk’s group then checked the accuracy of the agency’s claims.
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Why were there still so many errors? The official said individual agencies should answer that question. On its website, DOGE says it is trying to improve its data, and asks readers to notify it of potential errors.
Missing Identifiers
Agencies are under tremendous pressure to find budget cuts for Mr. Musk’s group to promote. The group has even created a “leaderboard” to measure which ones have eliminated the most.
But in databases of federal contracts, there are clues that this rush is not being well managed or adequately tracked.
In the past, the government has designated specific codes to track large batches of contracts across different agencies that relate to a common initiative, like the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic. That makes it easier to find all the contracts involved.
But the contracts in the “wall of receipts” have no such signature. That omission may mean there are errors in both directions — not only with expired contracts that don’t actually save money, but also potentially with contracts that were canceled by the group’s effort but are not being counted.
Mr. Musk’s group has said that it has saved taxpayers $65 billion, by cutting contracts, leases, federal employees and other items in the federal budget. But it has itemized only two of those categories: cancellations of contracts and leases. When adding up DOGE’s claimed savings for each item, those categories collectively account for about $10 billion, less than one-sixth of the total.
When DOGE first published its list of canceled contracts, there were about 1,100 examples.
The five largest were wrong.
In one case, DOGE listed a contract worth $8 million as actually being worth $8 billion. In another, it mistakenly counted the same $655 million contract three times. In yet another, it erroneously said that a huge contract at the Social Security Administration had been fully canceled, saving $232 million. In reality, only a small project within that contract had been canceled. Actual savings: $560,000.
By last week, all of those claims were gone. DOGE revised the total savings from these five cuts from $10 billion down to about $19 million.
Click on the link for the full article
