DOGE Savings Top $200 Billion, Almost $1,300 Per Taxpayer

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has terminated 123 “wasteful contracts” over the past five days with a ceiling value of $5.3 billion and savings of $4.2 billion, DOGE said in an Aug. 16 X post.

The canceled contracts included an $857,000 contract from the Department of the Interior for a technical adviser in Lagos, Nigeria, it said.

Another canceled agreement was a $1.5 million Treasury Department contract for “Word Processing and Document Formatting Services Examination Training” for the Human Capital Office and the IRS, as well as its small business and self-employed division, according to DOGE.

A $785,000 State Department consulting contract for staffing was canceled as well, it added.

In an Aug. 17 post on X, DOGE dismissed media reports that the cost savings it reports use a faulty methodology since it is based on ceiling values of a contract—the maximum spending allowed—and not actual amounts saved.

DOGE called such reporting “a classic case of Fake News.”

“In federal contracting, ceilings matter because they are almost always maxed out,” DOGE said.

For instance, “of the 5.4M awards at contract end in FY24, 98.12 percent were spent to the ceiling,” it said.

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman backed DOGE in an Aug. 18 X post.

“@DOGE is doing great work. Thank you DOGE team!” he said.

As of Aug. 15, DOGE had saved an estimated $205 billion for the federal government, according to the initiative’s website, amounting to $1,273.29 saved per U.S. taxpayer, the department said.

The savings have been achieved through contract and lease cancellations and renegotiations, asset sales, and grant cancellations.

The departments and agencies that have contributed to saving the most include the Department of Health and Human Services, General Services Administration, Department of Defense, Social Security Administration, Small Business Administration, and the Office of Personnel Management.

The DOGE website’s Greatest Hits section said that among the “strangest, most baffling uses” of government funds canceled by DOGE include a $1.5 million grant to the Center to Advance Reproductive Justice and Behavioral Health for “black pregnant/postpartum women and birthing people.”

Other canceled contracts include a $6.9 million grant for mental health development from “an antiracist approach,” and a $10 million award for “decolonizing the curriculum.”

DOGE Data Access

Last month, a group of Democratic senators introduced the Pick Up After Your DOGE Act, which calls for a comprehensive audit of computer systems and networks of federal agencies that were accessed by DOGE staff, according to a July 30 statement from the office of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), one of the lawmakers who introduced the bill.

DOGE employees have accessed sensitive data of various federal agencies, including the IRS, Social Security Administration, Department of Transportation, and Veterans Administration, even though the staff had “little training and few qualifications,” it said.

Such access poses “substantial risks” to the data and well-being of Americans, it said. Bugs and vulnerabilities left due to DOGE staff accessing the systems put sensitive data at risk of being stolen, according to the senator’s statement.

“The DOGE-boys have weaseled their way into Americans’ most sensitive data systems, claiming to hunt ‘waste, fraud, and abuse,’ while actually creating waste, fraud, and abuse. They’re destroying Americans’ trust in once-reliable government systems and could be hawking your stolen data to their friends in Big Tech and AI,” Whitehouse said.

“The Pick Up After Your DOGE Act protects seniors and all Americans by fixing any bugs or backdoors that DOGE may have purposefully or negligently created in Social Security, Medicare, and other highly sensitive government data systems.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration netted a win on the issue of DOGE accessing data from federal departments, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit lifting a block imposed on such access on Aug. 12.

The lawsuit was filed in February by a group of individuals and unions arguing that DOGE was “steamrolling into sensitive government record systems” and compromising the security of Americans’ personal data.

A district judge then issued a preliminary injunction, barring certain federal agencies from disclosing data to DOGE.

But in a 2–1 decision, the appeals court lifted the prohibition, with Judge Julius Richardson suggesting it was impossible for DOGE employees to do their jobs without access to government data.

“To insist that the DOGE affiliates explain in advance the exact information they need and why is to demand something just short of clairvoyance,” Richardson said.

“So it does not stretch the imagination to think that an employee tasked with modernizing an agency’s software and IT systems would require administrator-level access to those systems, including any internal databases, especially when conducting the initial survey of the agency’s technological ailments.”