When describing his DOGE initiative, Elon Musk has repeatedly acknowledged the imperfections in the operation he helps oversee. “We will make mistakes,” Donald Trump’s top campaign contributor said at a White House Cabinet meeting last week. “We won’t be perfect.”
What the Republican megadonor has failed to note is just how frequently these “mistakes” will come to the floor, and how often his quasi-governmental “department” will have to scramble to correct those errors. The New York Times reported on the latest in a series of embarrassing setbacks.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has deleted hundreds more claims from its mistake-plagued “wall of receipts,” erasing $4 billion in additional savings that the group said it had made for U.S. taxpayers. Late Sunday night, the group erased or altered more than 1,000 contracts it had claimed to cancel, representing more than 40 percent of all the contracts listed on its site last week. The deleted items included five of the seven largest savings that it had claimed credit for just last week.
The report came just one day after the Times also uncovered the inconvenient fact that Musk and DOGE had claimed credit for killing government contracts that were already dead, adding to “a string of public errors.”
Days earlier, the Times also highlighted a series of DOGE boasts, published to a “wall of receipts,” that “contained mistakes that vastly inflated the amount of money saved.” (It included an instance in which the operation confused $8 billion and $8 million.) That coincided with an Associated Press report that found, “Nearly 40% of the federal contracts that the Trump administration claims to have canceled as part of its signature cost-cutting program aren’t expected to save the government any money.”
Politico recently reported that what Musk has disclosed so far “is a messy and inaccurate accounting of his group’s early work.”
That was two weeks ago. It’s vastly worse now. Indeed, it led my MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem to note that when it comes to “making the government efficient or saving lots of money for taxpayers,” the Department of Government Efficiency “has the makings of a scam.”
As we’ve discussed, we’re talking about people, and people make mistakes. What’s more, we’re talking about a DOGE operation filled with officials who have little background in auditing, federal expenditures and/or how government agencies actually function, making errors even more likely. But the White House has long billed the DOGE endeavor as a hyper-competent initiative, led by private-sector giants who’ll show rascally bureaucrats what mighty Silicon Valley executives can do. More than a month into this bizarre governing experiment, it seems painfully obvious that Musk and DOGE are rapidly earning a reputation for rampant incompetence. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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