Musk’s cost-cutting drive quietly deletes billions in claimed savings from website

When Elon Musk’s cost-cutting drive, the so-called “department of government efficiency (Doge), posted its “wall of receipts” boasting of major savings to the federal budget, the list was billed as the proud public interface of a radical shake-up of the US government.

Instead, like much of Musk’s unprecedented engagement with the federal bureaucracy, the initiative has been mired in errors, confusion and obfuscation.

In the latest embarrassment to befall the site, Doge has stealthily expunged all of the five largest items on the “wall of receipts” after the much-vaunted “savings” were revealed to be so much hot air.

The deletions, first reported by the New York Times, were made on Tuesday without explanation. A White House spokesperson would only say that Musk’s slash-and-burn initiative had “identified billions of dollars in savings”.

Doge is currently claiming it has succeeded in lopping $65bn from federal spending, a sharp rise from its earlier figure of $55bn. Yet the itemized savings listed on the “wall of receipts” have plummeted since the deletions from $16.6bn to $9.6bn.

The “wall of receipts” is the only element of public accountability offered by Musk, the world’s richest man who has been given virtual carte blanche by Donald Trump to probe federal government departments. The web page is strap-lined: “The people voted for major reform.”

What the people have so far been delivered is a “saving” to the costs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) listed on the “wall of receipts” as being worth $8bn. As the New York Times points out, the entire budget of the immigration agency is about $8bn – in fact the cost savings should have correctly been recorded at $8m.

That slip of the accounting pen has now disappeared from Doge’s site. Among the other four big-figure “savings” also deleted are three cuts of $655m each to the budget of the beleaguered US Agency for International Development, USAid.

That sounded impressive, until it was uncovered by CBS News to be a single cut, counted erroneously three times.

The largest of the five vanishing “savings” was a $1.9bn item listed as a cut at the treasury department. That was based on a contract that was cancelled last year, at a time when Joe Biden was in the White House.