The only general professor in Dog is full of mistakes

Elon Musk and the Ministry of Government Agency say they saved the federal government of $ 55 billion through employee discounts, cancellation of rent and a long list of outgoing contracts published on the Internet this week as. “Receipt“

President Trump celebrates the savings of publication, to contemplate a an offer To check the mail to all Americans to pay them by “distributing profits”.

But mathematics that can support these checks are marred by accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, old data and other errors, according to an analysis in the New York Times for all listed contracts. While the DOGE team has definitely reduced a number of billions of dollars, its Slapdash accounting adds to the pattern of recklessness by the group, which recently obtained access to sensitive government payment systems.

Some of the contracts that the group demands its credit Double or three. Another initially contained a mistake in amplifying totals by billions of dollars. At least One exampleThe group claimed that the entire contract was canceled when only part of the work was stopped. In other cases, the contracts that the group said were already closed under Biden’s management.

The canceled contracts on the website are a small part of a total of $ 55 billion, which the group has estimated to have found so far. It was not possible to independently verify this number or other groups on the site with the evidence provided. A senior White House official described how the office made his accounts on individual contracts, but he did not answer many questions about the other aspects of the group accountable. But it is clear that every dollar claimed by the website is necessarily a dollar that the federal government had spent – or one can now be returned to the public.

These errors touched a wide range of contracts – some of which are worth hundreds of millions of dollars and others with a value of only a few thousand.

David Reed, the environment scientist in Michigan, was surprised by learning his contract, which studies the gas species in Saint Lawrence of the sea in the list. “This contract has not been canceled by Dog or anyone else,” he said. He said that the contract ended on December 31 and decided to retire and not renew it. “If they get the credit for canceling the contract, they are lying.”

The group received $ 25,000 from savings from its project.

Although the group’s general correspondence focused on efficiency in its name, most canceled contracts are related to other administration priorities, such as the US Agency for International Development and the Elimination of Government Programs on Diversity, Equity and Integration. The listed cancellation comes in a way that is not commensurate with the companies run by women and people from minority groups.

The many mistakes, according to the people familiar with the complex government contracting world, indicate that the MUSK team is one of the strangers, which the president accused of cutting off, does not fully understand it.

The numbers committed by Mr. Musk followed online, who are eager to the new administration to reduce wasteful spending funded by taxpayers dollars. But even contracting with the informed who share this goal – and those who believe that government systems that track spending on bad reform – were increasingly skeptical this week.

Amber Hart, co -founder of a research and consultant company, PulseThis is a specialist in federal contract, he said that it is simply an actual time of contract savings with the data used by the team-as Dog’s promise on its website.

She said: “There is no way to make it possible unless it is completely fixed in the way in which the data is reported – which will be great.” “I love them completely to break it. They break the wrong things.”

Why is it difficult to determine how much it is really saved

The website said that the initiative site, which was included from Friday night, constitutes about 20 percent of the total total spending discounts for the project, although the Times analysis was unable to reconcile these numbers. The site says the remaining dollars come from efforts such as reducing federal workforce, but it does not provide any specific data or estimates.

The values ​​of the dollar published for each contract derived from the data in Central tracking system For government contracts with external sellers.

Below is an example of how Mr. Musk team performed one account, according to the description of the White House official for the process:

Several experts said that savings can be very high, for several reasons.

For one of them, the spending number may reduce what the government has already spent, because the data in the Federal Hiring System can be several old months.

Stephen Schoner, professor of government purchasing law at the Faculty of Law at George Washington University, said that the numbers shown above do not explain the costs of the additional termination that the government will have to pay to close these contracts, which makes them a “meaningless measure.”

Contractors will have to end the employees, closing offices, ending rental contracts and downloading equipment – a long process that will usually rush now and may receive. (The White House official did not address this issue, but he said that the estimate was conservative because it did not include any administrative savings from the administration of the canceled contracts.)

The group also claims unrealistic estimates of several special types of umbrella contracts. When the government expects many different offices to want on constant orders for the same product or public service-for example, it creates a comprehensive contracting mechanism with a specific ceiling whereby many sellers who have previously collected on individual requests compete. Each of these individual orders represents the money that the government has committed to spending. But the ceiling on the entire umbrella is not.

“It is not real money,” said Kelly Saldana, who spent nearly two decades at the United States Agency for International Development, including her director of health systems. If one of these largest contracts has a $ 100 million roof and there is only one request of $ 10 million, then the remaining $ 90 million is not savings or money that can be spent elsewhere.

“Nobody does this mathematics,” said Ms. Saldana.

A report issued by CBS News this week Find Another type of errors involved in this type of contract: The group has installed it three times, with a maximum of 655 million dollars for one contract for the US International Development Agency with many contracts of subcontractor.

In another case, Dog called 232 million dollars in savings on a contract Providing information technology support for social security management. but objection She mentioned that only a fragment was canceled from the contract – a program to allow users to mark their gender as “x” – which makes actual savings closer to $ 560,000.

Other abnormal cases on the site this week were clear, even without great knowledge of the government contracting device.

Do you have Secret news advice About canceled contracts? Send it here: USADailyTrends.com/tips

On Tuesday, the Times reported a contract worth $ 8 million for technical support services in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency that was accidentally entered into the database worth $ 8 billion, near the entire agency’s budget. This error alone consists of nearly half of the common value of all listed contract discounts.

The “receipt wall” also lists hundreds of cases that – even through the accounting accounting – does not provide taxpayer changes. In one decade, the Securities and Stock Exchange Committee agreed to spend $ 10 million for a five -year subscription to the Westlaw legal website. But savings are listed as $ 0. SEC a contract The authority ended in March 2024.

Away from “completely transparent”

The “receipt wall” page acknowledges that it may contain some errors. “With the passage of time, the site will improve and updates will be converging to the actual time,” she says. It also promises to share data in a “digestible and completely transparent manner with clear assumptions.”

To date, the site has not been completely transparent about the data it includes or about the changes it makes.

Almost at the same time, news institutions have published articles about the main inaccuracy, the “receipt wall” site was updated to correct errors without changing the date of the “last update”.

The list of contracts itself is only a small share of the total savings of the group. The site says that the effort has provided $ 55 billion in the total, but it has not provided any details about the “receipt wall” for you this money. The upper number also did not change this week, even after the site’s errors that swelled individual grant savings.

One of the places where the office communicates regularly with the public on the social media platform X, owned by Mr. Musk. But he repeated some types of mistakes there. In one mail About $ 8 billion in error, the group claimed that she “has always used 8 million dollars correct in its accounts,” despite its updates to its location.

On Wednesday, Doug account Recycled A message about X from the Treasury, saying that the Tax Authority “canceled a contract worth $ 1.9 billion previously” and did so “regarding the work of the group – describing the canceled contract that was not on Doge.gov after” the receipt wall. “

The account added a screenshot showing a $ 1.9 billion purchase agreement – another of those umbrellas – with an unveiled seller, who was now marked “ending for comfort.”

Determine the seller’s screenshot as the selection of technologies, a company in North Virginia. But that company said that its agreement was already canceled in the fall, during the Biden administration.

“Nothing has changed now,” said Mane Alo, CEO of the company, in an email. He said that the slow contract database has not been updated to show the cancellation until this month, which makes the change look new.