Here’s a “common sense” test: Do you think it’s likely that over 80% of the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement went to a single civil rights contractor?
No, it’s not. The number is more like 0.1%.
But that glaring mistake has defined DOGE’s first public accounting of its own work. It lingered without explanation for more than a day after Elon Musk’s staff unveiled the “savings” they have supposedly produced for American taxpayers by setting fire to the federal government.
Advertisement
The number was dead wrong: DOGE’s website stated — apparently based on a government website that contained an error — that a contract for “program and technical support services” for the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights at ICE was worth $8 billion in total.
The real figure was $8 million, or one thousand times less.
And as The New York Times and others pointed out Tuesday, $2.5 million of that had already been spent by the time DOGE arrived — so it by definition could not be “saved.” Nonetheless, DOGE initially listed $8 billion in savings, rather than a few million.
“That is the level of lack of care that they are putting into this,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress and a former Biden White House budget official, told HuffPost in an interview Wednesday.
Advertisement
After the negative press attention, the listed number on DOGE’s website changed to $8 million. In a post Wednesday afternoon on X, formerly Twitter, DOGE’s account claimed it had “always used the correct $8M in its calculations.” It didn’t explain why it was counting as “savings” money that has already been spent.
According to the Times, and DOGE’s post, the erroneous federal database was corrected weeks ago. The federal contractor responsible for the expense told CBS News the “billion” figure was a simple accounting error.
Advertisement
But, still, DOGE has not explained where the overall $55 billion figure comes from. The “savings” that are listed on its webpage only added up to about $16 billion — and that’s before correcting for the ICE accounting error, the Times and Bloomberg reported.
During his time at the White House, “every single thing that we did was more than quintuple-checked” because “we thought that it mattered whether you were right or wrong,” Kogan said.
“This is the kind of error that you shouldn’t be able to make, if you have any sense of anything at all,” he added. “You have to not know what you’re doing at a very fundamental level, and not give a shit about checking.”
Advertisement
The ICE line item wasn’t the only apparent mistake. CBS News pointed out another: DOGE claimed a savings of $654,990,000 three times over in its accounting of a single contract — known as an “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity,” or IDIQ. In reality, the contract has cost $400 million over the past four years and “is likely to have only minimal additional spending,” according to the report.
In other words, DOGE may have overstated the “savings” in that instance by as much as $1.96 billion.
Why hasn’t DOGE acknowledged the ongoing, massive discrepancies in its accounting? What accounts for the tens of billions in generalized “savings” that aren’t itemized anywhere? And why didn’t a 99.9% decrease in the estimated “savings” from the ICE line item affect DOGE’s top-line figures?
Advertisement
The White House, asked by HuffPost on Wednesday about all of the accounting errors — and asked, point-blank, “Is DOGE just making up numbers and hoping no one notices?” — did not respond.
Even accepting DOGE’s explanation that it had always counted the ICE civil rights contract correctly, as $8 million, questions remain about where it’s getting its top-line $55 billion figure.
Go Ad-Free — And Protect The Free Press
Support HuffPost
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
“They’re not fixing this stuff,” Kogan reasoned, “because the propaganda of the numbers is important to them.”
Advertisement
This article has been updated to reflect a statement from DOGE’s X account.
