For all the hoopla, countable savings are slim pickings, so far.
Where’s the Savings?
Please consider DOGE Claims It Has Saved Billions. See Where.
That’s a free link to the WSJ. It has additional charts.
The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency touts cuts of $55 billion in federal spending, often citing canceled DEI and climate contracts. However, a Wall Street Journal analysis of government contract data showed a much different picture: “Woke” cuts were a tiny fraction of the total, and many claims of savings were overstated.
While DOGE hasn’t offered details about all of the stated savings, it has posted a list of more than 1,100 canceled contracts to its website. As of Friday, it said the savings from these contracts amounted to about $7 billion.
The Journal analysis projects the actual savings could be closer to $2.6 billion over the next year if spending levels remained constant—and about 2% of the funds would have gone to contracts related to DEI.
Research-focused agencies were among the top targets for cuts, including the Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, where DOGE terminated contracts costing the government more than $900 million last year.
DOGE terminated more than 60 Health and Human Services contracts including a clinical evaluation of an Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury drug and a study of smokers with chronic lung disease. DOGE described these as “administrative expenses.”
An administration official said many contracts were canceled for waste, fraud and abuse. They added that DOGE’s estimations of its savings are conservative and that no funds for Alzheimer’s were canceled.
Many of the Education Department’s canceled contracts funded research on college costs, student career paths and early childhood development. DOGE said one $1.4 million contract funded “mailing and clerical operations.” The contract was used to mail surveys to respondents participating in studies and was nearly complete when canceled, creating no savings for terminating it.
To assess the impact of the cuts, the Journal analyzed federal spending data from Deltek, a government contracting specialist and data provider. Deltek matched the canceled contracts listed by DOGE to their actual cost in fiscal year 2024. To categorize the contracts, the Journal used information about vendors, industry sectors and keywords like “diversity” and “climate change.”
In all, government contracts with more than 500 companies were posted to the DOGE website. Leidos, the company whose canceled contracts were worth the most in 2024, had part of its contract to modernize the Social Security Administration’s technology canceled. DOGE said this would save about $230 million. “Our work supporting the Social Security Administration, and the millions of Americans it serves, is on contract and ongoing,” Leidos said in a statement.
Two contracts also disappeared from the site Thursday because DOGE counted the same $665 million USAID contract three times, the Journal found.
Even as DOGE edited the numbers, the total savings listed on its site remained overstated, experts told the Journal. Agency contract amounts are often akin to credit card limits, said Deniece Peterson, senior director of federal market analysis at Deltek.
“If I have a credit card with a $30,000 limit and I have a $2,000 balance and I cancel the credit card, I’m not saving $28,000,” she said. “What I’m seeing in many of these transactions is not savings.”
But more than 50 of the contracts listed on DOGE’s website list virtually all of their maximum as savings, a number rarely hit, according to Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The totals [DOGE] put up as receipts on their website raise basic questions about how well these receipts were prepared and what they actually capture.”
More than a quarter of the contracts listed by DOGE were actually already paid, the Journal found, saving no money. For instance, DOGE listed $168,000 in savings for terminating a contract with HHS for an Anthony Fauci museum exhibit. It had already been fully paid.
I am sure this number will grow, But by how much?
One of the problems is finding and doing are two different things/
DOGE Finds Billions in Wasteful Spending but that Was a Known Problem
On February 20, I commented DOGE Finds Billions in Wasteful Spending but that Was a Known Problem
Agencies already self identify billions in improper payments. Doing something about it is the hard part.
The benefit to yelling is the stench is now so bad that perhaps we fix something.
My interpretation is that this is all good, but likely not as significant as it looks at first glance.
Much of it is one-time or at least diminishing savings given that pandemic-related fraud has already stopped.
On top of that, clawbacks recovered about a third of what did go out.
February 20, 2025: How Will 77,000 DOGE Terminations Impact Unemployment and Jobs?
As of Feb. 13, 77,000 employees accepted the offer, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Here’s some math, assuming $150,000 per job.
77,000 * $150,000 = $11,550,000,000.
These people will get paid for 8 months. If none of them are hired back then we will have a savings of $11.6 billion, assuming Congress comes up with matching cuts. Don’t count on it.
I am rooting for DOGE, but I would like to see the real numbers. I suspect the WSJ is low and DOGE very high.