Elon Musk, Who Promised To Be ‘Maximally Transparent,’ Makes DOGE’s Numbers Even Harder To Check
“We will make mistakes,” Elon Musk said at a press conference a month ago. “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected.”
The billionaire entrepreneur, who is unofficially in charge of the federal cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), was certainly right about that. News outlets have repeatedly identified embarrassing and consequential mistakes in DOGE’s data on purported spending cuts, including contracts that had not been awarded yet, contracts that were not actually canceled, contracts that were terminated before Trump took office, contracts that were counted multiple times, conflation of contract caps with actual spending, the inclusion of past spending in estimates of future savings, and overvaluation of contracts, such as the notorious data entry error that transformed an $8 million Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract into an $8 billion cut.
While conceding his fallibility, Musk promised to be “as transparent as possible.” Toward that end, he said, “we post our actions” on the DOGE website and X account, striving to be “maximally transparent.” That characterization of DOGE’s activities has proven to be less accurate.
Contrary to Musk’s promise, Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella notes, the Trump administration tried to shield his project from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by moving the U.S. DOGE Service (USDS), formerly the U.S. Digital Service, from the Office of Management and Budget, which is bound by FOIA, to a separate slot within the Executive Office of the President. As Ciaramella reported, a federal judge rejected that dodge on Monday, saying “USDS is likely covered by FOIA” and therefore must comply with public requests for information about its work.
So far, DOGE has withheld most of that information. Although the website that Musk touted currently claims $115 billion in “estimated savings,” the details of that calculation remain mysterious.
The website says the total includes “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.” But the information posted on the site relates to just a couple of those categories, listing “contract terminations,” “lease terminations,” and “grant terminations.” Together, DOGE’s numbers indicate, these account for one-third of its total “estimated savings,” and there is ample reason to be skeptical even of that part.
In some cases, DOGE has revised or deleted erroneous line items after journalists pointed out its mistakes. But DOGE recently made that corrective process more difficult by omitting federal identification numbers from its latest batch of canceled grants, which was posted on March 2. Those numbers, The New York Times reports, could initially be found in the corresponding source code, but DOGE “deleted this identifying information from the code later i
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