Democrats are disproportionately feeling the brunt of DOGE’s slashing of federally awarded contracts. Only around 12% of the U.S.-based contracts cut by DOGE are for work in Republican districts, NOTUS found.
And unlike their Republican counterparts, Democratic lawmakers don’t have a line to Elon Musk to get their districts’ work off the chopping block.
NOTUS analyzed the roughly 7,200 “terminated” contracts DOGE lists on its site. About half account for the effective shuttering of U.S. Agency for International Development and are primarily in or around D.C., but the cancellations spread all across the country, carrying a collective price tag of billions of dollars.
The overwhelming majority of those cuts are for contracts in blue districts, Federal Procurement Data System records show. Of over 1,500 contracts outside the D.C. area that DOGE counted as yielding savings, about 1,285 terminated contracts were for work primarily undertaken in districts represented by Democrats, while just 280 contracts were cut in districts represented by Republicans
To Democrats’ chagrin, the administration isn’t listening to their complaints like it does — at least sometimes — for Republicans.
“We’ve written a number of letters,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren said. “They never get answered.”
Though DOGE’s data is imperfect, it demonstrates how much harder Democratic-led districts are being hit by the Trump administration’s cuts. That includes canceled future and ongoing projects: DOGE claims roughly $3.7 billion in total savings from canceled contracts in blue districts outside D.C. and $1 billion in red ones. (NOTUS did not include $1.9 billion in claimed “savings” for a contract tied to a blue district in northern Virginia that, despite being listed as a DOGE saving, was actually canceled under the Biden administration, The New York Times found.)
DOGE this month also obscured its cuts to USAID, replacing details about what was terminated with the line, “Unavailable for legal reasons,” on its site.
DOGE’s method for calculating savings complicates the effort to determine exactly how much each district is saving. DOGE subtracts the amount already listed as spent from a contract’s total potential value. That potential value, however, is not a guaranteed spending amount and can lead to an overstating of claimed savings by DOGE.
“You can’t believe anything DOGE says,” Rep. Jamie Raskin told NOTUS.
Contracted work in D.C. itself makes up billions of dollars worth of DOGE cuts, and the surrounding metro area has also been hit hard. Districts in Maryland and Virginia are home to hundreds of thousands of federal workers and government contractors who are contending with local contract terminations.
Districts like the one Raskin represents in Maryland have been the most impacted given their proximity to D.C. and the sheer volume of federal work their districts’ economies rely on. DOGE lists over 140 contracts for work tied to Raskin’s district as canceled.
“The money that we have appropriated in Congress is all part of federal laws, and the president has the obligation to spend the money that we’ve appropriated for particular purposes,” Raskin said. “You can’t take money away from the State Department or the Defense Department or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or [US]AID as president because you don’t like it.”
Rep. Gerry Connolly said his Virginia district is already feeling the ramifications of DOGE’s cancellations. A quarter of his district’s economy is tied to defense spending, Connolly said.
“It’s created enormous angst and consternation and unemployment,” Connolly said. “It’s devastating for families, and it’s threatening to devastate a lot of industry that serves government. I have a large number of not only federal employees but federal contractors, so they’re affected as well.”
The rapid pace with which DOGE lists, then unlists, hugely expensive contracts also throws a wrench into lawmakers’ efforts to track what is canceled or not. DOGE adds and deletes federal contracts from its terminations list by the hundreds on a day-to-day basis.
Just this weekend, DOGE appeared to reverse course on the termination of a contract worth over a quarter-billion dollars tied to Connolly’s district, quietly removing it from its list. The Department of Energy contract with Guidehouse provided millions for the company to determine how energy efficiency standards will affect the costs of hundreds of everyday appliances.
Between Sunday and Monday alone, DOGE removed over 200 contracts with a combined claimed savings of over half a billion dollars from its site. A General Services Administration spokesperson said the agency “cannot comment on information provided by DOGE.”
“There’s all kinds of issues,” Virginia Democratic Rep. Eugene Vindman told NOTUS. “I spoke to Lutheran health services that have had their contracts canceled … contracts that are sort of frozen. Municipalities are not obligating funds because they don’t know if they’re going to get paid back.”
Republicans have touted instances where potentially devastating cuts in their districts have been avoided after raising their issues directly with Musk.
GOP Rep. David Valadao, who said he’s made phone calls to the Trump administration to address DOGE-related issues, said his colleagues across the aisle should do the same.
“They have a way to do it,” Valadao told NOTUS. “They should call the administration.”
But Democrats said they don’t have many options. Vindman told NOTUS he’s sent “numerous letters to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, USDA and numerous other departments and agencies” and hasn’t received any response.
“There’s nothing like that for Democrats,” Rep. Ro Khanna told NOTUS. “We don’t have any system like that, really.”
Democrats largely have their hands tied and are reliant on the courts and public opinion to get the White House to back off.
“We in Congress in the minority can do as much with legislation and investigation as possible,” Rep. Jimmy Panetta told NOTUS. “The problem is those bills won’t get up for a vote, and those letters demanding investigations or resolutions and inquiries won’t get answered.”
“We got to make sure that our constituents understand this, and that those constituents hold other constituents of members in those districts who are supporting these types of policies, hold them accountable,” Panetta said. “That’s basically the game plan.”
And Raskin offered an alternative to DOGE’s cuts in his district: “An easy way to save $39 billion would be for Elon Musk to give up all of his sweetheart contract government monies he’s taking.”
—
Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.