What’s a couple zeros between friends?
“The Department of Government Efficiency, the federal cost-cutting initiative championed by Elon Musk, published on Monday a list of government contracts it has canceled, together amounting to about $16 billion in savings itemized on a new “wall of receipts” on its website.
Almost half of those line-item savings could be attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But it appears that the DOGE list vastly overstated the actual intended value of that contract. A closer scrutiny of a federal database shows that a recent version of the contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.
The DOGE website initially included a screenshot from the federal contracting database showing that the contract’s value was $8 million, even as the DOGE site listed $8 billion in savings. On Tuesday night, around the time this article was published, DOGE removed the screenshot that showed the mismatch, but continued to claim $8 billion in savings. It added a link to the original, outdated version of the contract worth $8 billion.
By way of The New York Times