Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, commonly referred to as DOGE, has quietly removed $1 billion worth of claimed savings from its official website.
Since its inception when Donald Trump assumed office again, DOGE has consistently drawn attention.
In February, DOGE, initiated by Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Musk, announced that it had managed to save an astonishing $65 billion through various cuts.
According to the website, DOGE asserts that its savings have been achieved through a mix of asset sales, contract and lease cancellations, renegotiations, fraud elimination, improper payment deletions, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.
However, verifying the enormous figures DOGE has been advertising on its website has proven challenging, particularly as the site is reportedly ‘riddled with mistakes’.
“While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems,” The New York Post commented on DOGE in February.
Some have labeled it ‘impossible’ to authenticate the true savings of DOGE, as noted by ABC News.
Amid growing skepticism regarding the figures shared online, DOGE has discreetly deducted nearly $1 billion from its advertised savings total, according to NOTUS.
NOTUS reports that this amount seemingly vanished overnight. It indicates that on Tuesday (April 15), DOGE ‘removed around $962 million in previously claimed cuts and altered hundreds of others to increase individual items’ reported “savings” values’.
Additionally, the publication highlighted that despite DOGE’s promise to be transparent about its savings and their sources, the website was not updated from the end of March until April 14.
April 14 remains the most recent update to the site at the time of writing, with the website indicating DOGE has now saved $155 billion — equating to over $900 per American taxpayer.
NOTUS further reports that nearly 650 grants and numerous contracts and leases have been removed from the DOGE website over the past few weeks.
Besides listing its savings, DOGE features an ‘Agency Efficiency Leaderboard’.
On this leaderboard, the Department of Health and Human Services leads with the most savings, whereas the Department of Commerce has achieved the least.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has previously addressed criticism of DOGE, stating that ‘rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people’.