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Momentum Chaser@electricfutures · Feb 18, 2025

After several delays, @DOGE has finally posted its purported savings. Why did it take so long to create a simple…

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Summary

A detailed analysis of DOGE's claimed $55B in government spending cuts reveals significant errors and misrepresentations, including a $8 billion item that's actually $8 million, triple-counted USAID contracts, and claims based on unobligated hypothetical spending rather than actual annual savings. The thread demonstrates the organization lacks understanding of how government contracts work and failed to verify even their largest savings claims.

Summarized by ThreadOut AI from the full thread. May miss nuance — read the thread below.

  1. #1

    After several delays, @DOGE has finally posted its purported savings. Why did it take so long to create a simple webpage with a 1000-row table? Who knows! Let's dig in. Headline number: $55B saved. They list the savings per nixed contract. This should be easy to verify then. 🧵

    Momentum Chaser@electricfutures · Feb 17, 2025

    It's Monday. @DOGE is the laziest, most overpaid bunch of incompetent, unelected bureaucrats we've ever seen.

  2. #2

    The first thing I did is add up the "saved" column for all canceled contracts and real estate. The numbers are $16.5B and $0.14B, respectively. Odd... Since almost all of the purported savings come from contracts, we'll focus on that. 2/

  3. #3

    The single biggest ticket item is a DHS contract listed as saving $8 billion. Wow, that's a huge contract! Actually no, it's $8 million. They must have tried to automate scraping the FPDS form and failed. That means we're down to $8.5B in savings. 3/

  4. #4

    The next 3 biggest ticket items are all USAID contracts listed as $655M each, so $2B total. Wow, pretty big. Wait, these are IDVs, not contracts. $655M is the entire set-aside, being triple counted. In the first 5 years, only $73M was awarded, and only 2 years remain. 4/

  5. #5

    So we're down to $6.5B in savings, and an alarming trend emerges: @DOGE does not seem to understand how the government contracts they are canceling work. The savings they are claiming are not annual savings, but rather hypothetical savings if we spent every unobligated penny. 5/

  6. #6

    And more importantly, they are just getting it *wrong*, with alarming consistency. These numbers are erroneous. This "select group of geniuses" has not double checked even the LARGEST items accounting for the bulk of their claimed savings. This is a sad, pathetic farce @elonmusk

  7. #7

    @elonmusk Here's the next biggest item: an IT services contract for the Social Security Administration worth $1B. That's a lot of savings! Well, again, this contract spanned 6 years. 80% has already been spent. Ah well, more like $240M in savings spread over the next 3 years. $80M/year.

  8. #8

    @elonmusk In 2023, this contract funded 1000 FTEs working $100/hr. Did we need 1000 SWEs working on SSA infrastructure? Probably not - these could be valid savings (disclaimer: no idea what they actually did). But worth noting that these cuts will impact many private sector jobs as well.

  9. #9

    @elonmusk And if anyone is curious, there are currently 17 lines that say "SEE FPDS" rather than the savings amount, I guess because their automated scraping failed. I did it manually and it took roughly ~10 minutes. But that's too much to ask of super geniuses working 120 hours/week!

  10. #10

    @elonmusk An important update for those just now reading this. This is not what transparency looks like!

    Momentum Chaser@electricfutures · Feb 20, 2025

    SCOOP: @DOGE does damage control A diff of "savings" estimates from doge.gov between today and yesterday shows that 4 rows have been edited - all corresponding to errors I called out in my thread yesterday. Let's see what they changed! 🧵