Elon Musk said last month that his Department of Government Efficiency was publishing cuts to federal spending online in an effort to be “maximally transparent.” So much for all that.
Just one month later, the New York Times reports, DOGE has overhauled the way it reports supposed savings to make those cuts a lot harder to track—and makes mistakes a lot harder to find.
And there are apparently many. In the weeks since the DOGE “wall of receipts” launched, it has been riddled with errors. The group has claimed credit for purging contracts that ended decades ago and confused an $8 million ICE contract for an $8 billion contract, among other flubs. DOGE previously responded to the Times‘ reporting by simply deleting the claims, including five of the biggest purported savings.
Now, DOGE is no longer reporting exactly which programs are getting the axe. Instead, the Times reported, earlier this month, the group claimed another $10 billion in savings from the elimination of 3,489 federal grants, without specifying which grants it was referring to. When the Times discovered federal identification numbers embedded in the website’s source code and used that to identify some grants, DOGE reportedly deleted those too.
The White House told the Times it was taking this approach due to security concerns, and there may be at least some truth to that; the Trump administration’s track record of privacy oopsie-daisies is already checkered. A recent list of government buildings that the General Services Administration is considering putting up for sale inadvertently exposed the location of a CIA facility. That list was also promptly taken down.
Of course, claiming credit for slashing spending without actually naming the spending you’re slashing is also a nifty way to avoid accountability, both for unpopular cuts and shoddy accounting. And this is hardly the only indicator that DOGE isn’t walking its transparency talk. On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered DOGE to begin a “rolling” production of records in response to Freedom of Information Requests, which the court wrote DOGE had previously refused to process “on the ground that [U.S. DOGE Service] is not an ‘agency’ subject to FOIA.”
The court noted that, in other court cases, “USDS has argued that it qualifies as an agency,” making it appear to be a “Goldilocks entity—not an agency when it is burdensome but an agency when it is convenient.”
