To commemorate Elon Musk’s last day as a special government employee, the White House assembled and published a list of “wins” credited to Musk and DOGE.
The list both overstates DOGE’s work and at times directly contradicts DOGE’s own accounting of its cuts by hundreds of millions of dollars, instead relying on data from an unofficial website tied to a betting company.
Many of the touted “wins” are about DOGE’s publicity, anticipated actions or efforts that federal judges have since overturned. One listed win at the Federal Trade Commission simply states, “No DOGE cuts found, but considered.”
While bidding Musk farewell Friday, President Donald Trump acknowledged that many DOGE efforts remain suggestions that require Congressional approval.
“Many contracts, Elon, are right now being looked at, and it may be six months, it may be almost a year in some cases,” he said. “We’re going through procedures, we’re going through courts and we’ll remember you as we announce billions of dollars of extra waste, fraud and abuse.”
The very first bullet point in the White House’s list of “wins” claims DOGE canceled “$170 billion” in spending. But that figure is not attributed to DOGE’s government web page (which lists a slightly higher sum) and instead links to “the DOGE Live Tracker” — an unofficial website tied to an X account related to the betting site Polymarket promoting a privately run store called the “Fed Store” that sells DOGE T-shirts.
At least seven of the “wins” including citations referring to the nongovernmental website; the official DOGE site was not cited once in Friday’s accounting of “wins.” (The official DOGE accounting is, itself, continually riddled with errors and overstatements, and does not account for the vast majority of the top-line claimed savings.)
In response to questions from NOTUS about the inconsistencies, the White House touted the DOGE website it did not cite a single time in Friday’s release.
“DOGE is working at record speed to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, producing historic savings for the American people. The DOGE Wall of Receipts provides the latest and most accurate information following a thorough assessment, which takes time,” White House deputy press secretary Harrison Fields wrote. “Updates to the DOGE savings page will continue to be made promptly, and departments and agencies will keep highlighting the massive savings DOGE is achieving.”
The White House on Friday said that DOGE’s work led to the direct termination of “679 office space leases across the country … saving $400 million,” two vastly inaccurate claims that not only fly in the face of data provided by DOGE on its official website but also by information put out recently by the General Services Administration.
DOGE itself has steadily walked back its lofty real estate claims for well over two months, from nearly 800 lease terminations total in March to now just 494 — although many of them long predate DOGE’s work, NOTUS found.
The new celebratory fact sheet bases its real estate claim neither on DOGE’s own accounting nor that of the GSA, but rather links to an archive of a two-month-old article in the Maryland Daily Record that cites DOGE claims at the time, which have since been walked back.
That’s one of several instances where the fact sheet relies on old news reports. Treasury Department officials “reportedly plan to fire a ‘substantial’ number of employees,” one bullet point read, citing a two-month-old Newsweek article.
The list of “wins” cites a Department of Education announcement from March that it would cut its workforce in half, but fails to mention the effort was recently blocked by a judge. Another “win,” the DOGE X account’s claim that it deactivated about half-a-million credit cards, is repeated twice in the list.
“This is not the end of DOGE, but really the beginning,” Musk told reporters Friday at the White House. “The DOGE team will only grow stronger over time. The DOGE influence will only grow stronger. I liken it to a sort of Buddhism, it’s like a way of life.”
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Mark Alfred and Claire Heddles are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.