Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.9 billion by canceling contracts, but the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings the POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.
Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.
DOGE’s latest figures on contract cuts ticked up to $54.2 billion in an update posted on Tuesday.
POLITICO’s findings come on top of months of scrutiny of DOGE’s accounting, but the magnitude of DOGE’s inflated savings claims has not been clear until now.
Reuters reported: Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and well over $800 million combined develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems.
The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
Trump took office vowing to get rid of the government of what he calls waste and abuse. The website of the Department of Government Efficiency, the agency created to spearhead those efforts, lists over $14 billion in Defense Department contracts it claims to have been canceled.
But seven months into his presidency, some of his own actions have complicated DOGE’s work, from firing the Pentagon’s inspector general to issuing an executive order prioritizing speed and risk-taking in defense acquisitions.
Daring Fireball reported: Donald Trump’s Navy and Air Force are poised to cancel two nearly complete software projects that took 12 years and week over $800 million combined to develop, work initially aimed at overhauling antiquated human resources systems, Alexandra Alper reported.
The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir, to have a chance with similar projects.
I don’t want to be a ninny about this, but why is Reuters flatly describing the Navy and Air Force as possessions of the president? Did they ever describe them as belonging to Joe Biden, or Barack Obama? I don’t think they did, and a cursory search suggests they did not, but even if they did, it was wrong then. Now is not the time for sloppy language around this.
The DOGE scam was never about saving money. It was about destroying honest government programs and projects to redirect the firehose of taxpayer money to American oligarchs like Thiel, one of Elon Musk’s “PayPal Mafia” cronies.