The Daily - DOGE Has a Math Problem

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Since President Trump took office, Elon Musk and DOGE have wielded an unprecedented level of power to help the administration cut the U.S. government, and they claim to have stopped tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending.David A. Fahrenthold, an investigative reporter for The Times, explains why those claims are not what they seem — and what that tells us about Mr. Musk’s project to shrink the federal bureaucracy.Guest: David A. Fahrenthold, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: DOGE’s only public ledger has been riddled with mistakes.The group has now deleted hundreds of claimed savings, worth billions of dollars, from that ledger.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams. This is The Daily. Today Since the moment President Trump took office, Elon Musk and Doge have wielded an unprecedented level of power to help the new administration slash the U.S. government. And so far, they've claimed to have cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. Today, my colleague David Farenthold explains why those claims are not what they seem, and what that tells us about Musk's project to shrink the federal bureaucracy.

It's Tuesday, March 4th. David, we've been hearing a lot about what DOGE, the Elon Musk Group tasked with saving $2 trillion, has been up to in recent weeks. They've done massive layoffs, they've done job purity tests, and they actually have made billions of dollars in cuts. But you've been looking into exactly what they say they've done, which is kind of like an audit, if you will, of Doge. And I'd love it if you could explain how you went about doing that. Well, so I should start by saying that it's really hard to know most of what Doge is doing. Doge is really opaque.

It's operating in a lot of different places at once, operating almost in total secrecy. So we've been looking for a window, any sort of window to see the kind of analysis they're using to justify all the things they're cutting and the things they want to cut. And a couple of weeks ago, they actually gave us one window into their work. They set up a website. Basically, it's a kind of a primitive looking website. It looks a little bit like something off the dark web. That's the vibe. You know, I looked at it and it actually, the look of the

website sort of looks like this HTML meets crypto trading platform meets Twitter. It does. It looks like something where you're about to trade some kind of coin named after a cat or something. But the sort of main feature of it, if you scroll down a little bit, is what they call the wall of receipts. It is about 2,200 different federal contracts and lists details about what agency held the contract, what vendor held the contract, and how much was saved by canceling it. It is also sort of an effort to gamify it. There's a leaderboard of the agencies that have cut the most and agencies that have cut the least. And at the top of the page highlighted in yellow

is sort of the main dollar figure, the top line number. It says that overall Doge has saved, as of Friday morning, $65 billion. And $65 billion, just to point out, that is not chump change. No, it's a lot of money. It's about 1% of the overall federal budget, but it's a pretty small fraction of the $2 trillion that Musk said during the campaign that Doge could save. But what's valuable for us is not just the top line number, more valuable is this wall

of receipts because that's the only part of Doge's cuts that it has itemized, that it's backed up, that it sort of explained how it got to those numbers. And that's the only part of Doge's cuts that it has itemized, that it's backed up, that it sort of explained how it got to those numbers. And that's the one place where you can see step-by-step Doge showing its work. So how did you actually start to analyze all of this and start sifting through all those receipts? Well, I worked with the Times Upshot Desk, a team of incredibly good data analysts and reporters.

We downloaded all the contracts that were on that wall of receipts and started looking through them. And the first thing you realize really quickly is that there are not $65 billion worth of cuts on this wall of receipts. The original list, which was posted in the middle of February, had about $16 billion worth of receipts.

So this public accounting of what they did only accounts for a small portion of this much bigger number they're claiming. So then we start to look at the individual line items, the individual contracts are saying they canceled. And you notice one thing, which is that many of them, even by Doge's own accounting, accounted for zero savings. The original list had about a thousand entries, more than 400 of them.

They said the contracts hadn't actually saved taxpayers a dollar. Wait, so these line items were just like zero? It would actually say that we made this cut and there's nothing? Interesting. Yeah, and again, that was on a small percentage. It was almost half of the original contracts. So once you move on from the surprising fact that so many of these contracts have zero savings, you start to notice some really sloppy accounting, some really sloppy mistakes. And in many cases, those mistakes make the savings seem much, much bigger on the wall of receipts

than it was in reality. Like what? Right off the bat, number one, the first biggest contract listed on the wall of savings when they first put it out, was something that had an obvious problem in it. So they had claimed that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is a part of the Department of Homeland Security, had cut an $8 billion contract.

And what's curious about that cut right off the bat, it tells you that maybe there's something wrong there, is that the entire budget of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is about $8 billion. Okay, so cutting $8 billion would have been like shuddering that agency basically. Yeah, it's implausible that one contract with one vendor would account for their entire budget and also implausible that if that contract did exist that you would cut it

because it would mean their entire budget would be gone. So what happened there? Why was that listed as $8 billion? What my colleagues at the Upshot figured out was that it actually was $8 million, which is again a lot of money, but it's one one,000th of what they had claimed.

And it was just a typo in the system. Somebody in the federal contracting tracking system had listed this at 8 billion at some point and really not the number was 8 million. So Doge's response to that was, well, yeah, this was a typo. And we knew all along it was a typo. But they put $8 billion on this wall of receipts. That was about half of the initial total savings they were claiming in the wall of receipts. And again, if you knew anything about ICE or the federal budget, that's a mistake you wouldn't make.

Right. Somebody who actually had experience with this agency or maybe with these kinds of contracts would have been like, hey, wait a second, that does not make any sense. Right. And that was the start of a pattern. Just going on the list of the largest contracts they were claiming credit for canceling, we found other sloppy mistakes that often seem to indicate a real lack of familiarity with the government contracting system,

with how government contracting works. Basically, they had taken on this job to be experts in federal contracting, and they didn't seem to have learned the basics about how it worked. Can you give me an example of that? Well, for the next example of the kind of mistake we found, all we have to do is go from number one to number two on the list. It turns out that number two on the list, a $655 million contract, was an example of

another kind of error we saw throughout the list of receipts, which was it was the same contract in number two, number three, and number four counted three different times. How would that even happen? Well, I'll take you through it. Each one of those, two, three, and four, were all US Agency for International Development, USAID contracts with vendors who did basically quality control. They would go around and make sure that USAIDs work in Africa and other places, but just achieving the goals that they wanted. And they all shared the same contract. But

then when the Doge people looked at it, they thought that every one of them had a separate contract and then every one of them was entitled to the whole money set aside for that effort. So when three of those vendors had their contracts canceled, they counted that as three different cancellations each were $655 million. So that sounds very extreme. Did anything else stand out to you as you were going through this accounting? Yeah, there was another kind of mistake we found all over the wall of receipts, which was that Doge was claiming credit for quote unquote canceling contracts that had actually

been canceled before President Trump took office. The biggest dollar amount for one of those is a $1.9 billion cut that the Department of Treasury made. And you can actually see this happen. You can see how it gets on the wall of receipts, which is that Treasury, which oversees IRS, tweets at Doge and says, hey, Doge, look at this incredible contract. We canceled a $1.9 billion IT contract. Doge says, hey, that's fantastic.

They retweet it, post a screenshot from the federal procurement data system that shows a terminated contract, and then put that savings, $1.9 billion, onto the wall of receipts. The problem is that when you call the vendor that was listed as having its contract canceled, that contract was canceled under President Joe Biden. It was canceled last fall for reasons that is that when you call the vendor that was listed as having its contract canceled, that contract was canceled under President Joe Biden. It was canceled last fall for reasons that had nothing to do with Doge. Oh. And that's not the only example of that. One of the bigger contracts for more than $50

million in savings is the Department of Homeland Security contract that Doge says was canceled. It was an IT contract that the Coast Guard had entered into. But all you got to do is click on the link to see the page from the federal procurement system and you'll see that contract ended in 2005. It almost sounds like these agencies are intentionally deceiving these guys from DOGE because as you described they're saying hey look over here look at this cut we made but actually that cut was made years prior and you would think that whoever's flagging that to Doge would have known that from inside of the Treasury or wherever else. So is this a deliberate attempt at deception or what did you make of this? Well, what we know is that the cuts that are on the wall are suggested by the agencies.

The agencies send them to Doge and then Doge posts them on the wall. I can't get into the head of the people at the agencies to know if this is their incompetence or if they are trying to maybe avoid having to make real cuts by, you know, sort of placating Doge with some bogus cuts that don't cost them anything. What we can tell though from looking at this is something about Doge's own quality control and interest in quality control. The amount of effort it takes to figure out that some of these claims are wrong is not huge.

Like, you don't need a master's degree in government contracting. All you'd have to do is click on the link and realize, oh, wait, this contract expired in June 2005. And if they're missing that kind of mistake, it doesn't really seem like anyone is looking at these things. They're just sort of posting them on the wall

and claiming credit for them. So at the end of the day, how much total savings does it actually seem like they made out of all these cuts they claim on the website? So I have not been through every single cut on the list. We're still working through them. But after we did some initial reporting, Doge deleted what had been the top five items on their original wall of receipts. They got rid of all of them and the savings they had claimed from that which had been over 10 billion dollars declined to a few million. That doesn't give me a huge amount of confidence for the accuracy of the rest of the data that we haven't gone through yet. So okay that is obviously

a huge discrepancy between what they claimed and what you actually were able to verify, which again just sort of speaks to the idea that this isn't a super well-oiled operation. Can you just tell us a little bit about the people who are actually in charge of making and accounting for these cuts within Doge? The Times had a great story about the people who work for Doge. They identified more than 40 people who are working either at the central Doge office, which is within the White House, or out in agencies sort of under the control of Doge.

And they're, by and large, not people who have experience in government. They're coders, they're software engineers, they're sort of people who are close to Elon Musk and go from company to company. And to the degree that they have experience managing large organizations, it's something like Twitter or Tesla or SpaceX, very different organizations, and as big as they are, much smaller organizations than the one they're in charge of now. So David, you have laid out how Doge has intentionally or not exaggerated its effectiveness and in cutting government spending so far, either because of mistakes or because of the types

of contracts they're targeting. But my impression overall is that Elon Musk and DOJ are responsible in large part for eliminating entire agencies like USAID, for example, making massive cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, encouraging all these workers to take a buyout. It's felt like a real bloodletting within the federal government, within the federal workforce. And that would obviously account for savings across the government.

So I guess what I'm saying is that I understand the importance in holding this exercise that Doge is doing to account and doing this audit, but it kind of feels like when entire agencies are going away and being gutted, a little small potatoes to point out like some of the accounting errors on this list. Well, look, in the grand scheme of the federal government's budget and in the cuts that Doge is proposing to make, these mistakes are relatively small. But there's something bigger at stake here.

Doge is, of course, a team of people within the White House, but it's also an idea, a bigger idea about the shape of government, and it's an idea about how to cut government. That's why this look is so important, because this is our one chance, the one window we have to see the world as Doge sees it, to see what they know, what they don't know, to see what they understand and what they don't understand. And looking closely at that,

I think gives us a lot of clues about what actually motivates Doge, what actually motivates the cuts they're making, and some sense of where their effort is going to go from here. We'll be right back. So, David, besides all of the mistakes that you uncovered, when you step back and you look at this wall of receipts, what is the bigger picture here? What does all of this tell us about the larger project that is Doge? The most important lesson I think we can learn from the

mistakes we're seeing here is that we should throw out the idea that Doge is somehow able to process this huge amount of government data and find insights that no other people have had. What Doge has been sold to us as is like it's tech support, that's what Elon Musk calls it. You know, these are like the geek squad for the government. We're going to bring them in and they're going to find examples of waste and inefficiency that other people hadn't. That's not only what we're seeing here. You know, we're starting to see patterns in the choices they're making. So far, it seems like they're focused less on the really big federal contractors, the defense contractors, the health contractors that make up the huge portion of federal spending.

Instead of going after larger numbers of smaller contracts with smaller firms, often owned by women or minorities. Often when the cuts are real, and there are many cuts that are real on this list, they're motivated by ideology, their political decisions. They're cutting USAID, not because they've found some great fraud or waste or ineffectiveness at USAID doing the mission it was supposed to do. They just don't like USAID. They think that mission, foreign aid, is not worthy of taxpayer money. That's a political view some people have,

people in the government have. But to say that it is some sort of analysis that goes beyond or above politics, there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence of that kind of analysis in the data we've seen. So then this is a view also into the ideology of Doge or maybe the Trump administration, but it also appears to be a show of force actually. Shuttering an entire agency seemingly overnight sends quite a strong message about how power will be wielded in this administration. That's right.

They've sent a lot of messages to that end that if you disagree with them, you could be a target. You could have your funding, you could have your job taken away. It's a very aggressive view of the way that a president imprints his ideology, his political goals on the government, but also on society at large. And I think that's the real

impetus behind what Doge is doing, despite its name efficiency, despite Elon Musk's characterization of it as sort of the government's peak squad. It's a political project, a very aggressive political project to carry out a political ideology, not some sort of analysis that's outside of politics. But if this is about telegraphing and using DOGE as this kind of instrument of political pressure, as you're describing, and cultural change, I just sort of wonder how you reconcile that with what you told us earlier, where these agencies are kind of duping DOGE and doing just enough to appease them basically, but not really taking seriously this mandate to cancel a

bunch of government contracts or other types of work. Like, does that reveal that DOGE in some way is not going to necessarily be all that effective? I think we're in the middle of a period that will settle that question. I do not think that's a subtle question. If agencies send bogus cuts to Doge, will Doge accept them and does that allow them to avoid real cuts? It's part of the same open question as that email that Elon Musk sent out to all federal workers asking,

you know, what were the five things you did last week? The first time we tried it, about a million government workers responded, but also a lot of them didn't and a lot of agencies told their people don't respond. That was the first time that Elon Musk had tried to do something with his very large power within the government and it failed. And so this is a power struggle. I don't think we're seeing it in public and public everybody's getting along. What you're seeing there when Doge fails to catch a bogus cut that an agency sends it, you're seeing that kind of battle going out right at the trench level

between who will shape the future of these agencies, the people who run them or Elon Musk. And I don't think I see Elon Musk giving up anytime soon. And the fear of course is that if Elon Musk does not give up, he and Doge are basically gonna take a wrecking ball to the federal government. I mean, they already kind of have, right? We've already seen these massive cuts,

but as they continue, they might end up cutting unnecessary waste, but may also cut things that really create pain for not just employees, but the general public. Because as you explained, Doge doesn't really seem to know the ins and outs of government and they're already making all of these kind of very simple mistakes.

And who knows if they can actually fix things that they broke. But just to play devil's advocate, no one gave Elon Musk the benefit of the doubt when he bought Twitter and basically slashed his way through it. Everybody said, he doesn't know what he's doing, he's cutting too much, he's not leaving enough people behind

to leave this thing operational. And obviously, lo and behold, Twitter is still up and running. So I just wonder if there's some bigger lesson to take from that. I think there's two things to keep in mind. One is what we mean when we talk about Twitter surviving. Yes, Twitter exists.

There's still people, you know, posting posts there and reading it. It's not the same thing that it was. The audience has changed, the content has changed, the experience of being on Twitter has changed. And I think some people left because of that. So Musk sees that as a success. And it seems like he is trying to apply that,

like slash it, cut everything and then see what breaks and then rebuild the things that broke, that approach to federal government. The thing that stops me, and when I think about whether that approach can really be carried forward with the federal government, is it's so different from Donald Trump's view of the federal government.

He's not a cutter. He didn't run uncut in the federal government. He didn't govern this way the first time. His vision of government was one that basically continued to give people the benefits that they wanted, Medicare, Social Security. He doesn't ask people in his campaign to make sacrifices. He was saying, you know, I'm going to fight inflation. I'm going to fight illegal immigration. But for everything else, things are not going to change that much. We're not going to touch these big expenditures. We're not going to touch the Defense Department.

Donald Trump didn't say, hey, I'm going to run for president. I'm going to slash the government back so deeply that it'll just be barely alive. That's Musk's vision. And if it continues and it changes the experience for the worse of average folks, Trump is going to be faced with the question of, do I stop my most powerful ally? Or do I defend my own vision of what government ought to be and the vision that voters sort of elected me to carry out? Right, because like as you're pointing out, voters didn't necessarily want some of these cuts to affect them in the ways that potentially they could because Elon Musk is getting access to all kinds of payment information, data information, and nobody really knows what's going to be

affected by that. That's the fundamental difference here, right? You can delete your Twitter account, you can stop reading Twitter, and life goes on. But now, if you apply that same sort of like cut first, measure later approach to government, then you're talking about people don't get their Medicare. People don't, you know, the IRS doesn't answer your phone call when you have a question about your taxes.

The park that you're going to visit doesn't open. I don't think that the public and Trump's voters were prepared for this kind of change and to make it risks huge political pullback for Trump and pretty big disruptions for regular people. Right. Because even for Trump voters who might have wanted smaller government, more transparency in what the government spends its money on, there's definitely a tension, it would seem, between those priorities and what we're seeing with Doge, which is only a tiny fraction of what they claim

they're up to, which makes you just sort of wonder what else is going on that we really don't have a window into right now. Look, to me this is a question about trust. An enormous amount, historic amount of trust has been placed in Doge. This tiny little group of people, many of them with no government experience, has been given an unprecedented amount of data about government, an unprecedented amount of data about us, about Americans, and an unprecedented amount of power to change the way the government's gonna look for years, for decades.

And the question is, do they deserve that trust? And the one way we have to start to answer that question is to look at this little slice of data that they've made available about how they see the world, about the work that they're doing. And so sloppy mistakes, obvious mistakes in the first thing they show to the public raises questions about whether they deserve

the huge amount of trust they've been given. David, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on. David, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on. On Monday morning, Doge deleted hundreds of additional mistakes found on its website, erasing $4 billion in savings that the group claimed to have found in government spending. It was the second time in a week that some of the biggest alleged savings were removed. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, President Trump said that sweeping tariffs on Canada and Mexico would go into effect on Tuesday, shattering hope that the administration would make a last-minute deal to avoid a trade war. The president is adding a 25% fee on all Mexican and Canadian exports, as well as an additional 10% on Chinese goods, saying that these countries have not done enough to stem the flow of drugs and migrants into the United States. The tariffs are widely expected to disrupt regional supply chains

and raise prices for consumers. And in response to the news, the S&P 500 fell 1.8%, the biggest drop so far this year. And the Trump administration says it's suspending all military aid to Ukraine and will not resume shipment of arms and ammunition until Ukraine satisfies President Trump's demand to commit to peace talks with Russia. The move follows a heated exchange on Friday between Trump and Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office.

Today's episode was produced by Anna Foley and Olivia Gnat, with help from Mary Wilson and Carlos Prieto. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, with help from Patricia Willens, contains original music by Pat McCusker and Rowan Niemisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.