DOGE's Misplaced War on Software Licenses

WIRED

28-02-2025

Feb 28, 2025 4:47 PM DOGE claims that a government agency has nearly three times as many software licenses as employees. Experts say there are plenty of good reasons for that. Photograph:Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency announced this week that it discovered large batches of unused software licenses as it continues to hunt for examples of waste in Washington. On Monday, DOGE alleged that the General Services Administration has 37,000 licenses for the file compression and encryption tool WinZip, even though the agency has only about 13,000 employees. 'Fixes are actively in work,' the team wrote on Musk's social media site X. It later alleged similar overspending at the Department of Labor.
But the purported discrepancies between licenses and employees may not be as problematic as Musk's government wrecking crew has made them out to be.
Liz Lezius, a spokesperson for the Canadian tech company Alludo, which develops WinZip and was once known as Corel, says licensing for the program is based on the number of devices on which it is installed, not the number of employees with access to the software, though she declined to comment on specific customers. 'It is typical that there are more devices than employees in an organization,' Lezius tells WIRED.
In other cases, suppliers may require agencies to buy a bundle of tools to get access to one they really need, according to Ryan Triplette, executive director of the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing, an advocacy group of software developers and private sector purchasers fighting what they view as restrictive terms.
Agencies may also have more licenses than employees to account for budgeting quirks and outside contractors, says a former federal official who worked on tech licensing across multiple presidential administrations. 'What you're seeing with the DOGE stuff is they are doing cursory work with limited knowledge,' says the ex-official, who is barred by their employer from speaking to the media. It 'has some salience but is done in a bombastic way to make it seem like they are having more impact.'
GSA acting press secretary Will Powell tells WIRED that in support of the Trump administration's priorities, the agency is reviewing contracts and resources 'to ensure our staff can perform their mission in support of American taxpayers.'
On Thursday, the DOGE account on X posted that the GSA had taken action this week 'by deleting 114,163 unused software licenses & 15 underutilized / redundant software products — for a total annual savings of $9.6M.'
Earlier this week, Musk reposted allegations of overspending at the Labor Department and wrote, 'Most of these items are mundane and may not seem like much individually, but there are millions of minor savings that add up to billions of dollars cumulatively. Ultimately, there will be a trillion+ dollars of waste and fraud eliminated.'
The Labor Department and White House, where DOGE is located, didn't respond to requests for comment.
Federal agencies sometimes sign long-term contracts with software vendors, which allows them to lock in discount rates and avoid the need to renegotiate contracts every year. As a result, the number of licenses they budget for may include projected staff increases. 'It's cheaper to buy them all at once than go back and add on 500 at a time,' the former federal official says.
Because agencies sometimes get bulk or government-specific discounts, it can also be more affordable to buy software licenses on behalf of their private contractors. 'It's a very clear way for agencies to manage costs,' the ex-official says.
Every government agency has its own unique structure, including many subagencies or units, each with their own software needs. That could help explain other alleged licensing issues DOGE called out this week, including that GSA has '3 different ticketing systems running in parallel' and multiple tools for running unspecified trainings.
In a separate post this week, DOGE called out the Department of Labor for allegedly licensing five cybersecurity programs, each for more than 20,000 users, despite having only about 15,000 employees. The post also cited the department holding 380 Microsoft 365 productivity software licenses with zero users, installing only 30 out of the 128 Microsoft Teams conference rooms it licensed, and using only 22 out of 129 Photoshop licenses. The post also referenced unused licenses for 'VSCode,' the shorthand name for an entirely free Microsoft tool for writing code; the company does sell a paid alternative known as Visual Studio.
Microsoft declined to comment. Adobe, which develops Photoshop, did not respond to a request to comment.
While DOGE may have failed to present a full picture of wasteful spending, it's true that the federal government has at times struggled to effectively manage its use of software licenses. Numerous watchdog groups inside the government have found instances of wasteful spending on software in the past.
Members of Congress have been trying for years to get agencies to address the issue, the former federal official says. The Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets Act, or SAMOSA Act, which passed the House last year with bipartisan support but stalled in the Senate, would have required agencies to do what DOGE is doing now: Assess existing software contracts, consolidate licenses where possible, and get better deals to keep costs down. The legislation aimed to give agencies more bargaining power over the handful of big tech firms that dominate government software contracting, according to the former official.
'If Elon [Musk] wanted to do this the right way, they would work with Congress to pass the SAMOSA Act,' the official says. 'So people who will be there even when DOGE leaves can enter into smarter, less expensive contracts. They should be setting a repeatable process whereby agencies will constantly reevaluate their software needs and get better performance for lower costs.'
Triplette, of the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing, credited DOGE for examining licensing issues. 'I know there is a lot of concern about what DOGE is doing, but this is one area that there is hope and possibility,' she says.
Other federal contracting experts and congressional offices have told WIRED that DOGE should not lose sight of bigger targets while scrounging for savings. There were 11 federal contracting programs for information technology that each accounted for over $1 billion in spending during the government's last fiscal year, which ran from October 2023 through September 2024, according to an analysis for WIRED by Deltek, whose GovWin IQ tool tracks procurement. Contracts are often broken up into smaller pieces, and among those task orders, over $1 billion has been spent on six individual task orders related to IT over the past few years. They are led by a Dell deal with the Department of Veterans Affairs and a Booz Allen Hamilton agreement with the Pentagon.
Booz Allen Hamilton declined to comment. Its CEO, Horacio Rozanski, told Wall Street last month that the company expected the savings created by DOGE to be reinvested in technology. Dell didn't respond to a request for comment. Earlier this month, CEO Michael Dell reshared a post by Musk on X. 'We need DOGE! 🇺🇸' he wrote.
The extent of DOGE's software purge is difficult to quantify. In searching for the word 'license' across the descriptions of 13,800 federal contracts in the government's central tracking database that have been updated to reflect terminations since Trump's inauguration, WIRED found that roughly 60 of the canceled agreements appear to be explicitly for software. A couple of those cancellations—data visualization tool Tableau and Microsoft's LinkedIn Recruiter—generated savings of about $4 million, according to DOGE's official Wall of Receipts, a 'transparent account' of findings and actions. The website has contained some errors, according to several media reports, and WIRED found earlier this week that Tableau and LinkedIn savings were listed as $0.
WinZip standard licenses run about $35 annually per user, though large organizations are offered "special pricing," according to the product's official website. Lezius, the spokesperson for WinZip developer Alludo, declined to address whether the company has heard from DOGE representatives, but she says the company is 'always happy to work with DOGE, GSA, and any customer' to meet their needs. And, she adds, WinZip, is 'a trusted and highly affordable way for agencies to adhere to data security requirements.'
Additional reporting by Dhruv Mehrotra.