{"id":109104,"date":"2025-03-04T12:03:33","date_gmt":"2025-03-04T12:03:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/doge-says-its-saved-105-billion-though-its-backtracked-on-some-of-its-earlier-claims\/"},"modified":"2025-03-04T12:03:33","modified_gmt":"2025-03-04T12:03:33","slug":"doge-says-its-saved-105-billion-though-its-backtracked-on-some-of-its-earlier-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/doge-says-its-saved-105-billion-though-its-backtracked-on-some-of-its-earlier-claims\/","title":{"rendered":"DOGE says it’s saved $105 billion, though it’s backtracked on some of its earlier claims"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Francis Chung\/Politico\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(WASHINGTON) — The website of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency provided its third weekly update of federal government cost-cutting Sunday night, claiming total government savings of $105 billion, up from the $65 billion it claimed in last week’s update — but the figure remains unverifiable as the site still says it’s posted only a fraction of the receipts supporting this total.<\/p>\n

In its latest update to its “Savings” page, DOGE continued to update — and in some cases delete — contracts that it had previously listed as having saved up to billions of dollars in federal funds, after media outlets, experts and others publicly questioned details of the contracts.<\/p>\n

In all, DOGE listed a total of 2,334 canceled contracts on its latest “Wall of Receipts,” with the savings from those contracts amounting to $8.8 billion.<\/p>\n

The amount is actually lower than the $9.6 billion in claimed savings from 2,299 contracts posted on its “Wall of Receipts” last week, reflecting the difficulty in pinpointing exactly what DOGE is cutting and by how much.<\/p>\n

Similar to last week, DOGE claims in this week’s update that the $105 billion figure is based on a “combination of asset sales, contract\/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”<\/p>\n

The site, however, only provides receipts for a fraction of that number. In addition to the $8.8 billion alleged savings in canceled contracts, the new data on the site lists $660 million worth of real estate leases under the GSA that were canceled, and, for the first time, it lists federal government grants that have been terminated, totaling $10.3 billion.<\/p>\n

Among the contracts that have been deleted from DOGE’s latest “Wall of Receipts” is the biggest contract it had listed as having canceled last week: a seven-year blanket purchase agreement from the IRS with $1.9 billion cap for “IT strategy and modernization.”<\/p>\n

The website removed this contract from its “Wall of Receipts” after the vendor, financial management and IT company Centennial Technologies, told the New York Times last month that the contract was actually canceled last fall, under the Biden administration.<\/p>\n

The previous week, DOGE had to revise down its largest claimed savings contract from $8 billion to $8 million after the contract’s vendor explained that the $8 billion listed on it procurement record was likely a clerical error.<\/p>\n

Another contract that was removed from DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” in the latest updated was a five-year $150 million USAID contract under the Asia Futures Activity initiative, aimed at serving the USAID’s Asia Bureau to solve “interconnected challenges of economic growth, democratic governance, and resilience in the face of increasing health, climate, and food security threats.”<\/p>\n

Representatives for the Cadmus Group, which had received that contract, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.<\/p>\n

DOGE also deleted from its latest “Wall of Receipts” what appeared to be a $149 million National Institute of Health contract awarded to software company Advanced Automation Technologies.<\/p>\n

Last week, the DOGE website listing that contract linked to a different NIH contract for leasing and maintaining refrigerated gas tanks. An NIH contract with Advanced Automation Technologies that shares the same contract ID is capped at just $1.4 million — not the $149 million figure that had been listed by DOGE.<\/p>\n

Other terminated contracts listed in this week’s data include a USAID contract for the Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative with a $256 million ceiling, from which DOGE claims to have saved $170 million that has yet to be obligated to the contractor.<\/p>\n

Another newly listed canceled contract is the USAID’s Global Health Training, Advisory, and Support Contract program, a multi-year program that started in 2021 and was capped at $682 million through 2029. DOGE claims to have saved $284 million by terminating this program.<\/p>\n

The single biggest contract listed this week is a seven-year IT services contract from the USAID to the vendor Salient CRGT Inc., with a $597 million ceiling.<\/p>\n

Similar to last week’s data, DOGE now lists more than 940 contracts where contract obligations have already been fully delivered — meaning that 40% of the contracts they claim to have terminated will not actually result in saving any money.<\/p>\n

Asked about contracts that list $0 in savings last week, a White House official told ABC News that they’re using a conservative methodology of calculating savings because they subtract the contracts’ obligated dollars from the ceiling amounts. However, for many contracts the ceiling dollars are much higher than what is actually expected to be spent.<\/p>\n

For the $10.3 billion in federal grants the sites says it’s terminated, DOGE lists each of the 3,389 grants with the name of the awarding agency and the amount of each grant, but does not lists the grant’s name or purpose.<\/p>\n

So far, much of the claimed savings from these grants have come from the USAID — totaling $8.7 billion — followed by $1.1 billion from the State Department, $472 million from the Education Department and $61 million from the EPA.<\/p>\n

DOGE has also updated its list of real estate leases that have been terminated, totaling $660 million. But much of the data is now missing information regarding which agency the leases were under, whereas the site previously listed leases from across more than 40 agencies.<\/p>\n

The current data shows $143 million worth of real estate leases under the GSA that were terminated, and the rest of the terminated leases– totaling $516 million — do not list their agencies.<\/p>\n

DOGE said last week that it would begin updating its website twice a week, but the current update, like the first two, came after a week.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Francis Chung\/Politico\/Bloomberg via Getty Images (WASHINGTON) — The website of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency provided its third weekly update of federal government cost-cutting Sunday night, claiming total government savings of $105 billion, up from the $65 billion it claimed in last week’s update — but the figure remainsRead More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[156,31,2],"tags":[273,271,276,274,270,123,275,133,124,272,102,103],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109104"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lascrucestoday.com\/newstalklc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}