The Department of Government Efficiency, the federal cost-cutting initiative championed by Elon Musk, published on Monday a list of government contracts it has canceled, together amounting to about $16 billion in savings itemized on a new “wall of receipts” on its website.
Almost half of those line-item savings could be attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But it appears that the DOGE list vastly overstated the actual intended value of that contract. A closer scrutiny of a federal database shows that a recent version of the contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.
The contract, with a company called D&G Support Services, was to provide “program and technical support services” for the Office of Diversity and Civil Rights at ICE. The Trump administration has been purging diversity programs from the federal government.
By examining past versions of the contract listed on the Federal Procurement Data System, The Upshot determined that the federal award, approved in September 2022, had initially listed a total value of $8 billion. But on Jan. 22 this year, that figure was updated to $8 million. According to the database, the contract was terminated about a week later. (For context, $8 billion is nearly the size of the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)
It’s possible that DOGE or someone else in the Trump administration can claim credit for fixing the error in the contracting database, given that the value was downgraded to $8 million two days after President Trump took office. But it is also clear that the government was not spending $8 billion on the contract. In the two and a half years since it was signed, $2.5 million had been spent; the contract appeared set to expire in 2027.
The DOGE website initially included a screenshot from the federal contracting database showing that the contract’s value was $8 million, even as the DOGE site listed $8 billion in savings. On Tuesday night, around the time this article was published, DOGE removed the screenshot that showed the mismatch, but continued to claim $8 billion in savings. It added a link to the original, outdated version of the contract worth $8 billion.
By Wednesday morning, DOGE had updated its list to show $8 million in savings, though it did not acknowledge the error or explain how it might affect its calculation of total money saved, which remained unchanged. A loss of $8 billion in savings would represent nearly 15 percent of the total savings claimed by DOGE.
Even the $8 million is an upper bound on the amount saved by canceling the contract. Since $2.5 million had already been spent on the contract, according to data on USAspending.gov, that suggests that canceling it saved $5.5 million at most.
A spokeswoman for DOGE did not respond to a request to explain the department’s accounting.
The $7.992 billion mistake was discovered simply because it was the first item The Upshot reviewed, after sorting the list by the savings amount.
Mr. Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur at the helm of the DOGE effort, recently acknowledged the group may make errors.
“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” he said last week at a White House event. “Nobody’s going to bat a thousand. We will make mistakes. But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” (Mr. Musk was publicly appointed to lead DOGE by the president, and has described himself as having such a role repeatedly. But in a court filing on Tuesday, the Trump administration denied that Mr. Musk is a DOGE employee.)
The website of the contractor, now called D&G Solutions, says the company currently holds more than 40 contracts and has a combined annual revenue of around $50 million. It specializes in “effective global operations through the integration of unparalleled logistics expertise and comprehensive technology solutions,” the website says, with a focus on the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security. The federal site describes it as veteran-owned, and lists several other D&G contracts.
Mark Jones, the company’s founder and chief financial officer, declined to comment about the contract cancellation or any possible error.
Annie Daniel contributed reporting.
