This is an adapted excerpt from the March 5 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
During Karoline Leavitt’s first official on-camera briefing as White House press secretary, she alleged that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.”
It was supposed to be the first big “gotcha” from DOGE. But, as we know now, it was a lie. As Jeremy Konyndyk, the former director of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Foreign Disaster Assistance Office, told me recently, the U.S. government gets condoms for about 5 cents apiece. That means $50 million would buy a billion condoms, or roughly 467 for every Gaza resident. And according to a federal 2024 report, USAID didn’t provide or fund any condoms in the entire Middle East in the 2021, 2022 and 2023 fiscal years.
It was supposed to be the first big “gotcha” from DOGE. But, as we know now, it was a lie.
When asked about the false figure, Musk told reporters from the Oval Office “some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected … nobody’s gonna bat a thousand” and admitted his agency would make mistakes “but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”
On Tuesday, Reuters released an analysis of what DOGE says are its results. Reuters audited the claims of so-called savings and waste on DOGE’s website and found that in “its latest update this week, DOGE either modified or removed more than 1,000 entries on its list, nearly half of the spending arrangements it had listed the week before.”
Reuters reported that DOGE “triple counted a $655 million contract, claiming more than $1.8 billion in savings that did not exist.” DOGE also claimed that it saved $8 billion by canceling a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Diversity and Civil Rights. But that contract was actually worth just $8 million, according to a federal database.
Even contracts still up on DOGE’s website don’t make a ton of sense; some of them list savings of $0. And when there are savings, sometimes the task force appears to take credit for programs that ended under previous presidents, including at least one from George W. Bush’s administration.
But these aren’t the only blunders Musk and the Trump administration are stumbling into. On Tuesday, the General Services Administration published a list of more than 400 properties it wanted to either close or sell, deeming them “not core to government operations.” That list included the J. Edgar Hoover Building, aka the FBI headquarters, and the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, frequently referred to as Main Justice.
Now, maybe Trump and Musk are serious about selling off the FBI and DOJ offices — maybe they think Pennsylvania Avenue needs some new retail space — but this could be yet another mistake. On Wednesday, that entire list of properties for sale was gone and replaced with a page that read “coming soon.”
If you were a writer for a publication — or had a cable news show — and you made this many mistakes in such a short period of time, you would be fired. Of course, this comes after other widely reported blunders, like the Trump administration’s firing the nuclear strategy experts and the people trying to contain the bird flu outbreak and then scrambling to hire them back when they realized what they had done. Now, everyone makes mistakes. But if you were a writer for a publication — or had a cable news show — and you made this many mistakes in such a short period of time, you would be fired. It seems like the public is getting tired of all the errors, too. The head of the National Republican Congressional Committee told GOP lawmakers to stop holding town halls, because angry voters keep showing up to yell at them about DOGE. On Wednesday, Musk had to march over to Capitol Hill and answer to Republicans with angry constituents who are sick of the reckless chain saw routine. After meeting with Musk, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters the billionaire acknowledged “they’re moving fast” and “it’s not going to be perfect.” Johnson also said Musk is “setting up a process so he and his team can be contacted quickly to reverse mistakes.” But it appears that DOGE’s process to contact Musk and his team “quickly” was just the billionaire’s giving senators his personal cellphone number to report mistakes — like a “You Messed Up Again” hotline. And if I had to guess, Musk is going to be fielding a lot of calls.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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