It quickly went from $2tn to $1tn, and then recently to $150bn, of which only $60bn or so has receipts, and which is itself still full of mistakes, and counting of things actually done by Biden.
It's far worse than that.
A New York Times reporter went through DOGE's "wall of receipts" to try to verify the amounts. The wall of recepits didn't have much info; just the name of the agency and the amount of the "savings." But they looked at the raw HTML of the web page and found some more data, specifically the grant number, which allows you to check to see what the original amounts were. Then they called the people who actually got the money.
The biggest one on the list was $1.75 billion. But when they called the agency that received that grant, they said that they had already received and spent the money. So actual savings of zero, even if DOGE claimed they "cancelled" the grant.
They looked at several others in the top 20. And every time they could track down the amount saved it was wrong. One grant listed a "ceiling" of $83 million. But that's not what the grant was for; that was the highest amount the grant could possibly be. The actual amount authorized by the grant was $1.5 million and they had already received $800K. So the actual savings was $700K even if the grant was really cancelled.
From the list of grants they could track down, the real savings averaged 2.6% of the claimed savings. So the claimed savings of $155 billion is likely closer to $4 billion - a savings of $25 per taxpayer.
When the NYT reporter asked DOGE about this their response was swift - they removed all the HTML data from the site so nothing could be checked.
Now any savings is good, right? So even if they saved a tiny fraction of what they claimed, it is overall a good thing. Right?
The IRS estimates that the cuts DOGE made will reduce tax income by $500 billion, due primarily to cuts to tax cheat enforcement. There are a great many crooked CPA's that know exactly how to cheat in ways that are hard to detect, and that cheating is now risk-free since there is no review and/or enforcement of such scams. Internet discussions have indicated that there will be a lot of that this year, since the IRS now has barely enough staff to even process returns; there are no extra to actually check anything.
So overall we will be losing hundreds of billions.
But is even the $4 billion savings supported by actual spending numbers? Compared to this month last year, we are spending $120 billion more per month.
Remarkable level of dishonesty here.
https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/doge-is-not-cutting-spending
