Elon Musk's DOGE claims $8 billion saved on contract. What govt data says?
After cancelling several government contracts, the Elon Musk-led DOGE has claimed that $55 billion were saved, though proof to support the estimate was missing.
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), on Monday, published a list which claimed that $8 billion had been saved after cancelling a government contract, although its revised value is $8 million, reported The New York Times.
The contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), claimed savings worth $8 billion, exactly half of the $16 billion saved in cancelled contracts according to a “wall of receipts” on the DOGE website.
According to the NYT report, a US federal database showed that the actual value of the contract was $8 million, indicating that DOGE had massively overshot their estimates on their cost-cutting initiative.
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The contract, with a company named D&G Support Services, was to provide “programme and technical support services” for the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights at ICE, which is being phased out as the Trump administration has cracked down on diversity programs in the federal government.
Further, the newly formed agency had also posted a total savings estimate of $55 billion on their site, without any documentation to support the claim.
The ICE contract, which was estimated at $8 billion, if correct, would have funded the size of the entire budget of the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Since it was signed two and a half years ago, only $2.5 million of the allocated funds were spent by the agency, with the contract due to expire by 2027, reported The New York Times.
Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who is leading DOGE, told reporters last week, that the agency was bound to make certain mistakes.
“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. Nobody’s going to bat a thousand. We will make mistakes. But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes,” Musk said.
