- The White House DOGE Office walked back $4 billion in claimed savings on its website.
- The group has made similar errors before, like when it lowered its savings by $9 billion in 2 days.
- Since the website doesn’t provide details for all claimed savings, other totals are hard to verify.
The White House DOGE Office has slashed another $4 billion — from its own list of savings, not the federal budget.
On Sunday evening, the group deleted or changed upwards of 1,000 contracts that it said it had canceled, according to the New York Times. Together, the alterations accounted for more than 40% of the contracts that the White House DOGE Office had listed on its website the week prior.
Business Insider previously reported that the group lowered its claimed savings by more than $9 billion in a two-day period last month. In February, it had claimed savings on its website of $16.5 billion, mainly in canceled contracts. By March 4, that number was down to around $8 billion, according to the site’s “Wall of Receipts,” which lists canceled contracts.
A few contracts account for a significant chunk of the changes — for example, the site had said that canceling an Internal Revenue Service contract saved $1.9 billion, per the Times. Really, the outlet found that contract had been canceled in November. The same was true of the White House DOGE Office’s earlier accounting snafus, when it claimed to save around $2 billion by cancelling three USAID deals, before deleting two of the entries and with them $1.3 billion in savings.
The website now says the group has saved $105 billion in total but does not list details for savings other than contracts, like the names of terminated grants or buildings with cancelled leases, making the total difficult to verify.
The White House DOGE office has repeatedly tempered expectations. Elon Musk, the group’s de facto leader, initially said he’d help cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, before scaling the expectation back to $1 trillion. And earlier today, an agency quietly edited a key memo related to Musk’s efforts to remake the federal workforce after a court ruling.
Representatives for the Trump administration and White House DOGE Office did not respond to BI’s request for comment.
