The White House DOGE office linked to Elon Musk lowered its expected savings from canceled federal contracts by about $9.3 billion in a two-day period.
A Business Insider review of the "wall of receipts" on doge.gov found that Elon Musk's team had lowered its claimed savings from $16.5 billion on Tuesday to $7.2 billion as of Thursday.
A few changed entries seem to account for nearly all of the difference. Most notably, DOGE initially claimed to have canceled an $8 billion contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The contract was for $8 million. DOGE wrote in a post on X that "the agency contracting officer mistakenly" entered the wrong amount.
Additionally, DOGE initially claimed to save about $2 billion by canceling a trio of USAID deals worth $655 million each. Now, that contract appears only once — amounting to another $1.3 billion reduction.
According to a White House official, "DOGE reports both the 'ceiling value' and the 'savings value'" and calculates savings by subtracting already obligated funds from a contract's total award value. The official told BI this method was "actually conservative because DOGE does not take credit for recovered obligated funds" and "does not assume any administrative savings in its calculations."
Musk told reporters last week that sometimes he'd get things incorrect.
"Nobody's going to bat a thousand," Musk said during an appearance alongside President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. "We will make mistakes. But we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes."
DOGE estimates its total savings so far to be $55 billion, according to the summary on its site, which it called a combination of "fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings."
DOGE's website, however, doesn't list estimates for savings from anything except "contract/lease cancellations."
Musk told the Fox News host Sean Hannity during a joint interview with the president that DOGE sought to cut at least $1 trillion from the federal deficit.
