Nearly $1 billion in claimed savings suddenly disappeared from a government website created by Elon Musk — and no one is giving a clear answer why.
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, launched after Donald Trump returned to office, has been bragging about massive cost cuts across the federal government. Back in February, DOGE claimed it had saved $65 billion by slashing spending, cutting waste, and ending unnecessary programs.
But this week, nearly $1 billion of those so-called “savings” vanished overnight.
According to a report by NOTUS, “DOGE removed around $962 million in previously claimed cuts and altered hundreds of others to boost individual items’ purported ‘savings’ values” on April 15. The website hadn’t been updated for weeks before this sudden change.
The DOGE website now claims $155 billion in total savings — or about $900 for every American taxpayer. But watchdogs and media outlets are raising red flags about how real these numbers actually are.
“The DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars,” The New York Post reported in February, “but its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.”
Others have said it’s basically impossible to verify any of it. ABC News described the numbers as unverifiable and questioned the accuracy of DOGE’s self-reported data.
DOGE says it made its savings from things like selling assets, canceling grants, reducing the workforce, and rooting out fraud. But even that explanation has left experts scratching their heads.
Now, the site’s own savings tally has taken a mysterious hit — and the timing is suspicious. NOTUS reports that nearly 650 grants and dozens of contracts and leases have been scrubbed from the site in recent weeks.
Despite promising transparency, DOGE hasn’t explained the changes or where the missing $962 million went. The last visible update to the website was April 14.
DOGE also features an “Agency Efficiency Leaderboard,” ranking which departments are doing the most cutting. The Department of Health and Human Services tops the list. The Department of Commerce is at the bottom.
Critics have questioned DOGE’s honesty, but the White House is standing firm. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to criticism by saying, “Rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people.”
For now, the numbers keep changing — but the questions aren’t going away.
