Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team debuted a website last month cataloging the contracts the group says it has canceled to save taxpayers money. Since then, the list has undergone dizzying changes. New contracts have been added, others deleted. Values have been altered, and altered again.
The changes tell a story of how the Musk team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, operates. Here are all the contracts that were listed with a claimed dollar savings when the group first posted its “wall of receipts” on Feb. 16:
“We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes,” Mr. Musk said early on in the Oval Office, a message he has recently repeated to Republicans in Congress.
But these appear to be less errors of oversight than signs of indifference to the fundamental workings of government, say people knowledgeable about federal contracts, grant programs, the government work force, data systems and federal spending.
In the private sector, error can be a virtue — the inevitable byproduct of moving fast and breaking things. But in its public data, the federal government normally has little room for such mistakes.
“Error tolerance is so much higher in many parts of the private sector, including many parts of the tech world, than it is in the government,” said Jed Kolko, a Biden-era under secretary for economic affairs at the Commerce Department, where he oversaw the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Data published by the federal government — under banners like “an official website of the United States government” — informs countless choices made by individual citizens and private businesses. And the data feeds decisions by the government itself. The Federal Reserve sets monetary policy while assessing data about employment, inflation and economic growth. Billions of dollars in federal spending to states and localities are doled out using population counts produced by the census.
Imagine if those data sets were regularly overwritten without explanation. Or if the monthly jobs report lopped off several zeros, making it appear as if the economy had ground to a halt.
“Next thing you know, you’ve created a recession out of a mistake in a piece of data,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who ran the Congressional Budget Office during part of the George W. Bush presidency.
“I can’t even imagine the federal government writ large being this sloppy,” he said. He happened to have just been looking at the DOGE group’s data for the federal work force at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The agency, according to the group, has a head count of 45 people (before recent cuts, the real number was more like 9,000). “It feels like a hobbyist website instead of a government website,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said.
It appears the group has also taken repeated steps that obfuscate data it has posted online, even as Mr. Musk has pledged transparency in the operation.
The group started the “wall of receipts” with an application programming interface, a system that enables outsiders to easily download and scrutinize its data. A week later, it shifted from publishing its savings data on the internet in this easily scraped format to a new format that was harder for outsiders to access.
Last week, the group posted for the first time a list of grants it says it has canceled, with no outward-facing information that could identify each grant or assess the accuracy of the claimed savings. Such information was contained in the hidden metadata on its website. But the next day, that metadata was removed, too.
The group has also repeatedly altered data without changing the “last updated” time stamp on the site. (Another error: That time stamp currently says March 11, although the most recent update occurred late on the 12th.)
The White House did not comment on why the group had altered the contracts data or why it’s now harder for the public to scrutinize it.
The government certainly makes mistakes, and did so long before Mr. Musk’s arrival. It even regularly revises whole data sets, like the monthly jobs numbers. But it has historically done so on a predictable timeline, with consistent and documented methodology. Typically, old data is preserved as new numbers are released.
And straight-up mistakes are usually acknowledged, too. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics even publishes a handy table of all of its mistakes in one place.
Jeremy Singer-Vine contributed research.
