Elon Musk’s Government Efficiency Scheme: Fixing Mistakes by Making New Ones
Fixing numbers on the fly while claiming billions in savings that don’t actually exist.
Elon Musk’s DOGE has once again graced us with its ever-evolving digital “wall of receipts,” a monument to the administration’s unique approach to numbers: when in doubt, make them up.
Following last week’s revelations that DOGE’s savings claims were as inflated as Musk’s own Twitter boasts, NPR has found that Tuesday’s update to the federal website corrected past errors—only to introduce a fresh batch of misleading figures.
The cycle of self-correction is so fast-paced that at this rate, we may need to consider DOGE a blockchain project rather than a government initiative.
The $55 Billion Mystery Becomes the $65 Billion Mystery
Originally, DOGE proudly touted $55 billion in savings. However, a closer look revealed that the actual documented savings were closer to $2 billion.
This week, rather than refining its approach, DOGE decided to go full send and now claims $65 billion saved, despite no clear explanation for the jump.
The update included 1,200 new receipts claiming another $4 billion in savings, but when cross-checked with federal contracting data, the verified savings barely budged—to a still underwhelming $2.3 billion. In other words, DOGE has mastered the fine art of government gaslighting, making American taxpayers believe in phantom efficiencies.
The Art of Quiet Deletions
To Musk’s credit, DOGE did delete over $2.5 billion in previous errors, including:
A USAID project originally triple-counted at $655 million is now down to $18 million, which is about as significant as finding a quarter under the couch cushion when your rent is due.
A Social Security contract that wasn’t actually terminated initially claimed $250 million in savings but was later “adjusted” to a modest $560,000, thanks to the end of the “Gender X” marker initiative.
There was a $8 billion typo on an ICE contract, listed initially as a mind-boggling “savings,” when, in reality, it was an $8 million expenditure that has since been revised down to… zero.
This is government efficiency at its finest—overshoot, get caught, delete, and repeat.
The Misleading Math Continues
The latest round of “savings” includes a $1.9 billion IRS contract cancellation. Despite being hyped up, this mainly consists of agreements that function as lines of credit rather than actual spending reductions. Experts say these should not be counted as savings, but DOGE, in its infinite wisdom, sees things differently.
To make matters worse, many of the cited contracts weren’t even canceled:
$4 billion from previously listed contracts reappeared in the savings tally.
A National Institutes of Health (NIH) contract cancellation of $99 million was linked to an entirely different, still-active bioinformatics contract.
A Department of Health and Human Services agreement was mistakenly reassigned a new savings amount of $150 million, even though the actual contract was only worth $1.4 million.
This level of financial wizardry makes FTX look like a bastion of sound accounting.
The Broader Picture: A Drop in the Ocean
Even if DOGE’s wildest claims were valid, its supposed savings amount to less than 1% of last year’s federal spending. Meanwhile, Congress is debating $2 trillion in spending cuts while considering a $4 trillion debt limit increase. In other words, Musk’s much-hyped government efficiency drive is the equivalent of saving a few bucks on office supplies while debating whether to max out the national credit card.
Perhaps the real lesson here isn’t about government waste but how easily people buy into a slick narrative without checking the numbers. Musk admits DOGE will “make mistakes and correct them,” but in the meantime, the administration gets to flood the airwaves with soundbites about “historic savings,” regardless of reality.
Make It Make Sense
DOGE isn’t about saving taxpayer money. Instead, it is manufacturing a story of efficiency while quietly correcting its fraudulent math.
When errors are exposed, the damage is already done, and the public perception is set.
In the end, if Elon Musk’s efficiency drive were a SpaceX launch, it’d be stuck on the launchpad, with engineers scrambling to fix a software glitch they created in the first place. But hey, at least DOGE knows how to delete its mistakes—if only we could do the same with bad policies.
That’s the point.
Zahead, Chaos Analyst.