It’s Easy To Save Billions In Taxpayer Funds When Everything Is Made Up

Overhype

from the it's-all-fun-and-games-until-they-crash-the-economy dept

Here’s a neat trick for saving taxpayers billions of dollars: just make stuff up!

I mean, sure, you could do all the hard work of actually finding government waste and fixing inefficient processes. But why bother when you can just… invent numbers? (This is not financial advice.)

The innovator of this approach — and I really should give credit where credit is due — is DOGE, the government agency that is totally, absolutely, definitely not run by Elon Musk (wink wink).

After there were complaints about the near total lack of transparency from the DOGE brats, Musk insisted that the website was super transparent, except at the time the website was empty. It has since been updated with what they claim are receipts, but if these are receipts, they’re complete nonsense. The topline claim is that DOGE has saved taxpayers $55 billion.

Let’s talk about math for a moment. (Not the complicated kind — just the basic ability to count zeros, which you’d hope the DOGE kids would be able to do.)

See, when DOGE claims they’ve saved $55 billion, you might expect that number to at least match the total of their own receipts. It doesn’t. Their own documents only add up to about $16 billion, which means they’ve somehow managed to inflate their headline number by more than 3x before we even start checking their work.

But oh, it gets better (or worse… yes, actually, worse). Let’s look at their crown jewel: an $8 billion contract that DOGE proudly claims to have canceled. Except… it wasn’t an $8 BILLION contract. It was an $8 MILLION contract.

That’s quite a difference! (About $7.992 billion, if you’re counting.)

Now, to be slightly fair to the DOGErati — and I do try to be fair — there was indeed an incorrect document floating around that listed the contract as $8 billion. That document was corrected weeks ago, because, you know, reality. The actual payments were set at $8 million total over multiple years, with $2.5 million already paid out. So even if we’re being incredibly generous, the maximum possible savings here would be $5.5 million.

That’s 0.069% of what they claimed (a number that I’m sure would still get a snicker out of Musk).

But why let reality get in the way of a good story?

When reporters called this out, the DOGE team made a fascinating choice. Instead of fixing their error, they actually removed the correct document from their website and replaced it with the old, incorrect one. They are now deliberately posting false information to support the narrative.

The DOGE website initially included a screenshot from the federal contracting database showing that the contract’s value was $8 million, even as the DOGE site listed $8 billion in savings. On Tuesday night, around the time this article was published, DOGE removed the screenshot that showed the mismatch, but continued to claim $8 billion in savings. It added a link to the original, outdated version of the contract worth $8 billion.

This is not the work of anyone actually interested in establishing truth. It is the actions of people who want to push false claims to puff up their own work.

But wait, there’s more! DOGE’s creative accounting isn’t just about misplacing a few zeros here and there. It turns out they’ve discovered an even more innovative way to save taxpayer money: take credit for things that happened before they existed.

You might think I’m joking. I am not joking. Many of the other receipts don’t support the savings claims at all, and some of them are actually cost-saving measures implemented by… the Biden administration:

The group boasted that its “estimated savings” for American taxpayers is $55 billion so far, but the total it gave Monday adds up to just a third of that figure—and appears to claim credit for the closure of two government offices that were shuttered under Joe Biden.

Those closures are the National Archives centers in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and in Fairfield, Ohio. DOGE’s site claims the latter location was a “True Termination – Agency Closed Office.” No other details are offered.

Those centers’ approximate closing dates were announced way back on Aug. 1, however, when Biden was still president.

This is a fascinating innovation in government efficiency. Step 1: Look at how the last administration (the one you claim was enabling all this waste, fraud, and abuse) was actually cutting costs and saving taxpayer money. Step 2: Claim you did it. Step 3: Add it to your total. (Not financial advice, though DOGE seems to be making it work.)

But even that’s not the best part. That same article notes that many of the contracts DOGE claims to have “cancelled and saved” were contracts that had already been fully paid out. This is like claiming you saved money on last year’s rent by deciding not to pay it today. The money’s already gone! But DOGE adds these amounts to their total anyway, because apparently that’s how math works now.

The cherry on top of this mathematical fantasy sundae? The Liar-in-Chief of DOGE, Elon Musk, has already amplified someone’s made-up claim that DOGE had saved $110 billion — a number that somehow manages to double their own already massively inflated figures.

It’s so easy when you just get to make it all up.

This is Musk’s standard operating procedure: despite having access to virtually unlimited expert resources and actual data, he consistently elevates random ExTwitter posts as gospel truth — as long as they align with his preferred narrative. The pattern would be almost comical if it weren’t now being applied to federal government operations.

It really feels like someone should ask him why he always falls for this shit.

Look, we should probably talk about fraud for a minute. (Not DOGE’s creative accounting — we’ve covered that. I mean the actual concept of government fraud that DOGE is supposedly investigating.)

It’s worth noting that the US government already has established, professional watchdogs with actual expertise in tracking down waste, fraud, and abuse: the Inspectors General (whom Trump illegally removed upon taking office) and the Government Accountability Office. These are people who know how to follow the money, understand federal contracting rules, and can tell the difference between waste and, you know, normal government operations. (A distinction that seems to elude the DOGE crew.)

DOGE seems determined to ignore these existing competent oversight bodies, perhaps because their methodical, fact-based approach doesn’t generate enough social media buzz with which to fluff Musk’s ego.

These existing mechanisms for addressing these issues are far from perfect, often hampered by bureaucratic constraints and political interference. And, who knows, at some point, perhaps the DOGE crew will actually come across some waste, fraud, or abuse and stop it. But when they do, that shouldn’t validate all the other nonsense they’re pulling in the meantime.

But the really dumb part is how Musk and DOGE keep using the word “fraud.” It’s a powerful word! It implies crimes and corruption and shadowy figures doing shadowy things. What DOGE has actually found, though, is… different spending priorities. When pressed on their fraud allegations, the only thing the White House can point to are programs that the Trump administration doesn’t like. Which, sure, you might not like every government program. But, that’s not fraud.

The White House also sent a list of dozens of Department of Government Efficiency “wins,” including canceled media outlet subscriptions and contracts for DEI initiatives, consulting and administrative expenses.

“Nothing they have identified is, to my knowledge, evidence of ‘fraud’ or ‘corruption.’ Fraud and corruption are crimes,” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law at George Washington University. “This administration simply has different spending priorities than the last administration. But to label all of it as fraud or corruption is extremely misleading.”

Also, none of this takes into account what kinds of benefits the “canceled” spending brings to the US. The downstream effects can be massive. You can’t just claim that you “saved” your family thousands of dollars by not paying last month’s rent. That has consequences, which can do more damage.

This is Government Finance 101, but apparently DOGE skipped that class to instead share dank memes in Telegram chat groups. If you cancel a contract that helps collect taxes more efficiently, you haven’t “saved” the contract cost — you’ve just made tax collection less efficient. If you eliminate training that helps prevent costly mistakes, you haven’t “saved” the training budget — you’ve just guaranteed more costly mistakes.

If this playbook feels familiar, it should. As we warned last month, DOGE is running the Twitter Files strategy at an even more dangerous scale: Musk gets a crew of gullible simpletons to publish documents they don’t understand, which they claim are evidence of some grand conspiracy or fraud. They then let the narrative spread faster than fact-checkers can keep up. By the time experts can explain why the claims are nonsense, the damage is already done.

Could DOGE eventually stumble across some actual waste, fraud, or abuse? Sure, I suppose. But if they wanted to actually do that, this is the dumbest possible way to do it, and one that has real consequences which the DOGE team doesn’t seem to care much about.

At last week’s White House briefing, Musk claimed DOGE would welcome corrections when they make mistakes. Yet when confronted with actual errors — like that pesky $8 billion vs. $8 million difference — their response wasn’t to fix the mistake, but to deliberately showcase the incorrect information. It’s a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with this approach: rather than leveraging actual expertise to address real government waste, DOGE is manufacturing outrage through mathematical sleight-of-hand. The real fraud isn’t in the government contracts they’re “investigating” — it’s in their own reporting.

Filed Under: abuse, doge, elon musk, fraud, waste