DOGE: destroying the administrative state for trivial savings with Enron-caliber bookkeeping

Apparently ketamine doesn’t help your accounting skills:

Elon Musk promised to deliver a “maximally transparent” government efficiency program. What he’s disclosed so far is a messy and inaccurate accounting of his group’s early work.

The first comprehensive public listing of the billions of dollars in purported savings Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is making across federal contracts is filled with errors, according to a POLITICO review of the published data.

DOGE’s website reports a total estimated savings of $55 billion, coming from a combination of canceled and renegotiated contracts and leases, as well as fraud detection, grant cancellations, job cuts and more. The “wall of receipts” posted Monday represents only a subset of canceled contracts, the page claims, that amount to approximately 20 percent of “overall DOGE savings” so far.

But among the 1,100-plus contracts purportedly canceled, POLITICO found:

• Contracts that had not yet been awarded
• Instances where a single pot of money is listed multiple times — tripling or quadrupling the amount of savings claimed
• Purchase agreements that have no record of being canceled, but were instead stripped of language related to diversity, equity and inclusion
• Contract savings identified by DOGE that do not match with records they refer to in the Federal Procurement Data System
• Contracts where the underlying document is for an entirely different contract

For all its flaws democracy really is a better process than whatever this is.