C.R.E.A.M.

AP: “Nearly 40% of the federal contracts Trump’s administration claims to have canceled as part of its signature cost-cutting program aren’t expected to save the government any money, the administration’s own data shows.” https://t.co/teq8RoEUsN pic.twitter.com/aNyxBQAsZG

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) February 25, 2025

… Data published on DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” shows that more than one-third of the contract cancellations, 794 in all, are expected to yield no savings.

That’s usually because the total value of the contracts has already been fully obligated, which means the government has a legal requirement to spend the funds for the goods or services it purchased and in many cases has already done so.

“It’s like confiscating used ammunition after it’s been shot when there’s nothing left in it. It doesn’t accomplish any policy objective,” said Charles Tiefer, a retired University of Baltimore law professor and expert on government contracting law. “Their terminating so many contracts pointlessly obviously doesn’t accomplish anything for saving money.”…

Last week, DOGE posted an online “wall of receipts,” celebrating how much it had saved by canceling federal contracts. Now it has deleted all of the 5 biggest “savings” on that original list, after NYT and other outlets pointed out errors. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/u…

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— Jenna Fowler (@jennafowler.bsky.social) February 25, 2025 at 1:25 PM

Before the gift link expires:

… The last of the original top five disappeared from the site in the early hours of Tuesday, even as the group claimed in its latest update that its savings to date had increased to $65 billion. The website offered no explanation for why it removed some items or how it arrived at the higher total. Neither the U.S. DOGE Service nor the White House responded to questions Tuesday morning.

The “wall of receipts” is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work. The scale of that ledger’s errors — and the misunderstandings and poor quality control that seemed to underlie them — has raised questions about the effort’s broader work, which has led to mass firings and cutbacks across the federal government.

These were the original five largest savings on its list:

– An $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The actual contract in question was worth $8 million. The mistake seemed to stem from an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database. But contracting experts said that the service should have known better: ICE’s entire budget is about $8 billion, making it implausible that one contract could be so large. The U.S. DOGE Service adjusted the figure on the site after The Times wrote about it, and said in a post on Mr. Musk’s X platform that it had “always used the correct $8M in its calculations.”

– Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was actually a single cut that was erroneously counted three times, as first reported by CBS News. That mistake also seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the way government contracts work; they sometimes have “ceiling values” far in excess of what will be spent. Experts said this cancellation was unlikely to produce anything close to $655 million in savings even once. Now, the site lists a much smaller savings for these three cancellations: $18 million in total.

– A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. Here, Mr. Musk’s organization appeared to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as reported by The Intercept, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project to let users mark their gender as “X.” The DOGE site now shows that small cut instead.

Some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to make some of the same types of errors.

The largest savings on the latest version of its list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department. But The Times reported last week that this contract was canceled last fall, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president — and when DOGE did not yet exist.

Accidental truths: The Trump/Musk Crime Syndicate is bankrupting the US government and driving down its value and reputation the way Trump bankrupted casinos and Musk blew $44 bn on Twitter so he could destroy 80% of its value.

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— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha1.bsky.social) February 25, 2025 at 1:28 PM

Here’s a guy who sincerely hopes you’ll fall for the razzle-dazzle — just look at his smarmy little grin!

Here comes the phony numbers to sell the deal. The illusory smoke and mirrors of waste, fraud, abuse, and future tariffs. It’s 1981 and David Stockman redux.

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— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) February 24, 2025 at 10:23 PM

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Tuesday Afternoon Open Thread: DOGE, ‘Economical’ Only with the TruthPost + Comments (191)