ResidentialBusiness Posted February 21 Report Posted February 21 The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has updated its website, and in theory, it’s a model of government transparency. The site lists savings the department claims to have made from cuts, along with bar charts and tables that purport to show the department’s work and the size and scope of the federal government. But there’s a big problem: You can’t trust the numbers. The website’s homepage is a feed of DOGE’s X posts, and there are pages that claim to show savings, list government spending, and number the size of the executive branch workforce, its total wages, and federal regulations. When the site was updated this week with new data, DOGE initially showed what it claimed was more than $16 billion saved from spending cuts. But the biggest line item in the department’s so-called wall of receipts incorrectly stated an $8 million contract canceled for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was for $8 billion. That error alone cuts the savings DOGE claims to have achieved roughly in half. Screenshots of various infographics on the doge.gov site, taken February 20, 2025 [Images: Doge.gov] Elon Musk, who President Donald Trump tapped to lead DOGE’s efforts, attempted to inoculate himself from errors while speaking last week in the Oval Office, acknowledging, “We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” Still, the site doesn’t make it easy to fact-check DOGE’s work. Though its “wall of receipts” co-opts the design of a spreadsheet and includes links to Federal Procurement Data System receipts, it isn’t sortable by column, and it front-loads cuts that are red meat to Trump’s base, like media subscriptions for Politico Pro and Bloomberg Terminal that government officials used to stay informed about their jobs. An NPR review of the more than 1,100 contracts DOGE initially listed found just $2 billion in savings from contracts that it could confirm were canceled, a number that grew to $6.5 billion in savings when accounting for contracts that hadn’t yet been canceled as of Wednesday but that DOGE included in its total nonetheless. NPR and current and former federal contracting officers it spoke to found other examples where DOGE data may be inaccurate, like line items that claim to be for a contract’s maximum-though-not-necessarily-actual value or that don’t take into account contracts that have been partially spent already. In the grand multitrillion scheme of government spending, $2 billion is actually quite minuscule. In fact, SpaceX, just one of Musk’s businesses, has contracts with the Defense Department worth roughly $22 billion. The DOGE website’s data visualization includes bar charts with a hover effect, so bars change colors when users move their mouse over data like federal employee salary or years of tenure, and tables for spending list columns like “agency,” “description,” and “value.” Visually, the effect is one of authority and accuracy. Beyond the flash, however, is a site that claims to show citizens what DOGE is doing but does more to obscure the facts and overwhelm with details than it does to inform. It’s a shrewd political play that creates the perception of methodology and empirical fact, but is really just data visualization as propaganda. View the full article Quote
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