DOGE's opaque transparency tool

Yahoo

2 days ago

OXON HILL, MARYLAND - FEBRUARY 20: CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk holds a chainsaw as he arrives on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel And Convention Center on February 20, 2025 in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Argentinian President Javier Milei gifted Musk the chainsaw that he used as a prop while campaigning. The annual four-day gathering brings together conservative U.S. lawmakers, international leaders, media personalities and businessmen to discuss and champion conservative ideas. (Photo by)
DOGE claims that it has saved the taxpayer nearly $16 million in grant funds to the University of Minnesota.
It hasn't.
Elon Musk, the world's richest man, created and then headed up the Department of Government Efficiency until his recent departure.
He once touted DOGE as 'the most transparent organization in government ever.'
He cited DOGE's website as evidence of this transparency, especially the 'Wall of Receipts' that claims to show exactly what the department has cut.
Among these cuts is a $15.8M grant to the U from the Department of Health and Human Services. The purpose of the grant is listed as 'currently unavailable,' and the date of the grant's cancellation was March 23.
The website neglects to mention that the grant was reinstated by April 7.
According to U officials, the grant helps fund the Midwest Antiviral Drug Discovery Center, which conducts research on antiviral drugs to treat SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19; Ebola; Lassa; and Zika.
DOGE targeted an array of COVID-19 related grants around the same time. Why these would be considered an example of government waste is unclear, but in any case, the money is still going to the U.
The $15.8 million purportedly cut — but not actually cut from the U — came on March 23. This was just one of 1,339 line items of savings reported that day, all from the Department of Health and Human Services, amounting to ​​$877,628,206.
It's unclear how much of that money has actually been cut because the incident with the U's reinstated grant has become all-too typical with DOGE's accounting. Positions and funding are cut with great fanfare, and then many of those cuts are reinstated. Federal workers are laid off, then re-hired.
Barely a month into President Trump's second term, a New York Times review of DOGE's receipts found they were riddled with errors:
'Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted. In others, contracts the group said it had closed were actually ended under the Biden administration.'
Early this year, Musk showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference convention in sunglasses, wielding a chainsaw, in an appearance that had many speculating on his drug use.
The chainsaw was an apt metaphor, just looking at a few days of data.
March 21-23 show cuts to HHS , bookended by days of cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency. The National Science Foundation and Department of Justice are frequent targets.
A chainsaw is not a precise instrument, and imprecision, when it comes to firing federal workers, is expensive. One group that studies the federal workforce estimated all the firing, severance, rehiring, legal bills, lost productivity and paid time off would cost the government $135 billion this year, wiping out most of the alleged savings.
The 'Wall of Receipts' webpage is headlined by the total reported savings. As of May 23, that was $170 billion. But the total savings listed in the Wall of Receipts adds up to just over $70 billion. Both of these numbers are far from the $2 trillion Musk promised to cut on the campaign trail, or even $1 trillion he claimed once he started DOGE.
Despite all the moving targets, Musk has repeatedly claimed transparency. 'Any action that we make, we post on the doge.gov website, and we post on our X account, so it's extreme transparency,' he said to Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini at a meeting of Italy's League Party in April.
Yet the $70 billion savings on the website is just 41% of what the DOGE claims in its headline number — on the very same website.
Belying Musk's claims about DOGE being the most transparent government entity in history, all of the data on the DOGE website was already publicly available, and has been since 2004 on the Federal Procurement Data System website.
(The claims of transparency are also belied by a key question about DOGE's actions in government: data security. There is little transparency about what data DOGE has access to, and what that data is being used for.
This is of special concern as the federal government expands its contract with software company Palantir to create an AI-powered data-sharing platform to aid the Trump administration's goal of merging Social Security, IRS, and immigration information into one central database.)
Even if the math added up, the Wall of Receipts website is difficult to use. The receipt charts are not searchable, and only show 10 line items at a time for sections with tens of thousands of lines.
If you look closely, you can download the data in chunks of 500 lines at a time, which must be combined and then translated into a readable format if it's to become meaningfully useful.
Here is that readable chart, with data ranging from the inception of the website through May 23.
DOGE has claimed historic levels of government fraud and waste, and provided this website as the smoking gun.
But the government has not indicted anyone for fraud, nor have investigations been announced or leaked.
Meanwhile, Musk's flagship transparency tool would better be described as opaque and is riddled with errors — to the point of uselessness, except as a scorecard of Musk's time in government.