Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has repeatedly posted error-filled data that inflated its success at saving taxpayer money. But after a series of news reports called out those mistakes, the group changed its tactics.
It began making its new mistakes harder to find, leaving its already secretive activities even less transparent than before.
Mr. Musk’s group posted a new set of claims to its website on March 2, saying it had saved taxpayers $10 billion by terminating 3,489 federal grants.
Previously when it posted new claims, DOGE, Mr. Musk’s government-restructuring effort, had included identifying details about the cuts it took credit for. That allowed the public to fact-check its work by comparing its figures with federal spending databases and talking to the groups whose funding had been cut.
This time, it did not include those details. A White House official said that was done for security purposes.
The result was that the group’s new claims appeared impossible to check.
The New York Times, at first, found a way around the group’s obfuscation. That is because Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded the federal identification numbers of these grants in the publicly available source code. The Times used those numbers to match DOGE’s claims with reality, and to discover that they contained the same kind of errors that it had made in the past.
Mr. Musk’s group later removed those identifiers from the code, and posted more batches of claims that could not be verified at all.
That shift was a major step back from one of Mr. Musk’s core promises about his group: that it would be “maximally transparent.”
The website is the only place where this very powerful group has given a public accounting of its work. That accounting is still incomplete: It itemizes only a fraction of the money that the group claims to have saved, $115 billion as of Wednesday. But it is extremely valuable, providing a window into the group’s priorities, and revealing its struggles with the machinery and terminology of government.
If the group is now going to fill its site with uncheckable claims, then it loses its value.
Noah Bookbinder, president of the left-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the removed information appeared to be a reaction to reports about DOGE’s errors.
“They responded by giving less information publicly, so that it’s harder to question them,” Mr. Bookbinder said, “without doing anything to suggest that they’re actually correcting the mistakes, or learning from them.”
Mr. Musk’s group began releasing its data on what it called its “wall of receipts” in mid-February, and started by detailing the savings it had achieved by canceling federal contracts. Those posts contained mistakes that seemed to indicate a lack of familiarity with the government that the group is trying to overhaul.
The group posted a claim that confused billions with millions, triple-counted the savings from a single contract and claimed credit for canceling contracts that had ended under President George W. Bush.
DOGE deleted some of its largest claims about the savings from canceled contracts after news reports pointed out that they were wrong.
Nonetheless, that list of canceled contracts still contains errors. On Wednesday, the group was still claiming credit for saving $1.9 billion by canceling an Internal Revenue Service contract for tech help. But that contract was canceled under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The website posted it, deleted it, then restored it. The group has not responded to questions about why either time.
The new, harder-to-trace set of claims deal with another kind of federal spending: not contracts, but grant payments. Those disbursements are often made for services performed by a nonprofit or nongovernmental organization, such as those affiliated with the United Nations.
The public-facing website displayed only a few details about each grant, including the name of the agency that gave out the grant and the dollar amount saved after cancellation. That is not enough to identify which grants it was referring to. However, the website’s source code listed identifiers for each of the terminated grants.
The group deleted this identifying information from the code later in the week. But The Times had previously downloaded the code before that change was made, and used the identifiers to match the group’s claims with real grants.
At least five of the 20 largest “savings” appeared to be exaggerated, according to federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list.
The largest item on the list was savings of $1.75 billion, which the group said it achieved by cutting a U.S. Agency for International Development grant. But the organization that got the grant — a public-health nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — said that information was wrong twice over.
For one, the grant had not been terminated. Second, the government had already paid out all the money it owed. So even if the grant had been terminated, the savings would have been $0.
In other cases, Mr. Musk’s group seemed to misunderstand a key figure in U.S.A.I.D. grants.
Nonprofits said these grants often contain a ceiling value — an upper limit on what the government might pay. But the groups said that this top amount is not always guaranteed. In some cases, the actual payments are worked out separately, they said, and often total far less.
“It’s not a promise, in any sense,” said Traci Baird, the chief executive of a nonprofit called EngenderHealth.
In her group’s case, DOGE said it had saved $83.6 million by terminating EngenderHealth’s grant to fund family-planning work in the developing world. Ms. Baird said that Mr. Musk’s group seemed to have wrongly treated the grant’s $89.8 million ceiling as an I.O.U.
In reality, she said, the government had promised her group $1.2 million in funding, of which her group had already been paid $500,000. So the real savings of terminating her group’s grant was about $700,000.
The White House official said that it was still important that Mr. Musk’s group terminated these contracts because they might have resulted in more spending beyond what had already been promised.
“It is important to highlight contracts are cancelled to save money in future fiscals,” the White House official wrote in an email, meaning fiscal years. The official asked not to be named, to discuss the details of DOGE’s work.
But Ms. Baird and other nonprofit executives said it was incorrect to say that DOGE had saved money that the government had not yet agreed to spend.
“It could have been savings, but only if it could have been spent,” she said. “We had no promise of it.
The wall of receipts’ list of canceled grants has now grown beyond the initial set that The Times was able to fact-check.
At the same time that the group removed the grant identifiers, it added another 2,800 entries.
“Descriptions are forthcoming,” the group’s website said.
On Wednesday, a week later, the descriptions were still not there, but the group published another update, which brought the total number of terminated grants listed to 7,488, totaling $17 billion in claimed savings.
“There is no reason that they should not be putting out the specifics and details behind what they’re cutting,” said Gary Kalman, executive director of the anti-corruption nonprofit Transparency International U.S. “They are saying that they are doing things that are long overdue and wildly supported by the public. If that’s true, then wouldn’t you want to make sure that you’re touting the cuts that you make?”