DOGE released data about federal contract savings. It doesn't add up
February 19, 20258:40 PM ET
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Elon Musk speaks as President Trump looks on in the Oval Office of the White House on Feb. 11.
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A new online tracker on the
Department of Government Efficiency's website puts a dollar amount on the estimated savings from the DOGE effort to slash federal government spending at $55 billion.
But an NPR analysis finds the numbers don't add up.
The DOGE site's posts, reminiscent of a feed on the Musk-owned social media site X, say some savings come from sources like "fraud detection/deletion" and "workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings," and state that the full disclosure of the unit's actions will take time.
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"We are working to upload all of this data in a digestible and fully transparent manner with clear assumptions, consistent with applicable rules and regulations,"
the website reads. "To get started, listed below are a subset of contract and lease cancellations."
The
doge.gov/savings page then lists a "wall of receipts," DOGE's first major data release that initially claimed to show more than $16 billion in savings from ending contracts. After correcting an apparent clerical error, it now shows $8.5 billion.
An NPR review of the more than 1,100 contracts in that initial release finds that DOGE's
"maximally transparent" calculations still overstate its estimated savings totals by billions of dollars.
Discrepancies paint an incomplete picture
Of the DOGE list's initial claim of $16 billion in savings, half came from an
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) listing that was entered into the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) in 2022 with a whopping
$8 billion maximum possible value.
According to a
DOGE post on X, that number was a typo that was corrected in the contract database to $8 million on
Jan. 22 of this year before being
terminated a week later, and DOGE "has always used the correct $8M in its calculations."
But for much of this week, DOGE listed the outdated $8 billion for its savings claims while linking to the termination notice with the smaller ceiling amount.
Some time Tuesday evening, the DOGE link was changed to point at the original $8 billion entry, and on Wednesday morning, the site was revised once again to show $8 million in savings — but still linked to the larger, outdated claim. The site also continues to list $55 billion in total estimated savings — the $8.5 billion in alleged contract savings and another $46.5 billion with no specifically documented source.
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Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE did not respond to multiple requests for clarification about the DOGE data and savings claims shared online.
Others discrepancies in DOGE's representation of data are more technical: The ICE example is also one of many DOGE entries that is not actually a contract, but rather a different procurement method known as a
blanket purchase agreement where the high maximum value acts as a sort of large line of credit for orders to be "called" against.
Since the agreement began in late 2022, ICE used it three times for work that totaled $3.5 million, for possible savings of $4.5 million – just over half of what the corrected DOGE data claimed.
Government contracting and budget experts say including those terminations in their estimates is one of many ways DOGE isn't sharing the complete picture of government spending and saving.
What the DOGE data shows
Just over half of the contracts touted by DOGE, accounting for $6.5 billion in alleged savings, haven't actually been terminated or closed out as of Wednesday, according to an NPR analysis of a federal government procurement database, even though the site's "wall of receipts" listed these items.
That includes a billion dollar
IT support contract with the Social Security Administration that actually
added $1.8 million in obligated spending and
additional funding for a Forest Service project management contract worth
up to nearly $30 million.
More than a third of the listed contracts posted online would not actually save any money if canceled, according to DOGE.
In all, estimated savings from the initial DOGE list of just over 500 contracts that NPR found to be cancelled runs closer to $2 billion, with roughly half coming from the gutting of the
Department of Education, the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the
U.S. Agency for International Development.
The contracts DOGE has targeted at these agencies include ending research studies into early childhood education improvements, canceling access to financial market resources and the proposed halting of billions in international foreign aid work. To check DOGE's claims, NPR compared the unique award ID from each hyperlink DOGE published with a list of more than 130,000 contracts that have been modified since Jan. 20, downloaded from
USASpending.gov, another public data source to review government spending.
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Why does this matter?
"There's no doubt that these young people [Musk] has working for him are very intelligent coders, genius coders, but they're limited," retired senior contracting officer Christopher Byrne said, referring to DOGE team members who have apparently been identifying cuts across government agencies. "They don't understand the processes, they don't understand how things work, they don't understand contracts, they don't understand grants," Byrne said.
Six other current and former federal contracting officers who spoke with NPR on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation say that the DOGE savings page is misleading the public with the data it includes — like overemphasizing the maximum possible value of contracts cancelled — as well as with what it leaves out, they say, like how much has already been budgeted and spent to fulfill the contract.
Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the center-right Manhattan Institute who studies ways to cut extraneous government spending, says DOGE is doing more harm than good to the government in how it has cut costs and shared them with the public.
"A smarter way to reform contracting would actually cost money in the short term," Riedl said. "Because it requires audits, it requires analysis, building new systems, building new controls rather than just going through with a chainsaw and trying to cut contracts almost randomly."
Byrne, whose contracting career spanned more than 20 years and included work with the General Services Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Navy, says DOGE's website is also missing basic information needed to track and understand federal spending, like the ID number, what type of agreement or contract method was used and whether the cancellation was for some or all of the spending. Several publicly available data sources already track and confirm changes to federal contracts, including the
Federal Procurement Data System,
USASpending.gov and the
System for Award Management (SAM). Unlike DOGE, those sources list other relevant data like the current value of the contract, historical changes to the amount budgeted and spent for the contract and when the contracts begin and end.
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DOGE's savings page also does not include any evidence of fraud, waste or abuse in contracts, but does highlight ideological differences between the Trump administration and the previous priorities of former President Joe Biden.
As for contracts, Byrne said the discrepancy in DOGE data shows why information being entered into those systems by the government needs better validation and standardization to be more transparent.
He added that shortcomings with the current training, staffing levels and processes among contracting officers could be exacerbated by potential retirements and firings in coming months under the Trump administration's plan to downsize the federal workforce.
"There are not the people available to do the job, to do it well," he said, "which is going to lead to more wasteful spending."
How much will actually be saved?
Even government contracts that have been terminated before reaching their full value could end up costing taxpayers more to settle up. Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at The George Washington University Law School,
previously told NPR that the termination for convenience clause used for many of these cancellations is expensive.
"When the government terminates a contract for convenience, it's still obligated to pay for the work completed," she said. "This doesn't eliminate the government's responsibility for paying these sorts of costs."
Riedl with the Manhattan Institute also says that the only way for the federal government to cut spending and reduce the deficit is through meaningful — and difficult — changes enacted by Congress, and not DOGE creating a "false perception" that finding "waste, fraud and abuse" is enough to get there.
More than 60% of the $6.8 trillion the federal government spent last fiscal year was mandatory spending on popular programs like Medicare, Social Security and income security programs — spending that would require major legislative reforms to substantially reduce.
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NPR's analysis found that, of its verifiable work completed so far, DOGE has cut just $2 billion in spending — less than three hundredths of a percent of last fiscal year's federal spending.
"Think of Congress and its budget as the debt-ridden dad on the way to buy a $250,000 Ferrari on the credit card, and DOGE is the $2 off gas card he used along the way," Riedl said. "It's great that he saved $2 on gas, but I think his wife may be more concerned about the $250,000 car."
