Summary
DOGE released an updated “wall of receipts” claiming $65 billion in savings, but its itemized total dropped from $16.6 billion to $9.6 billion.
Errors persist, including duplicate listings and inflated figures. Some contracts were counted multiple times, while others misreported savings.
Critics argue DOGE lacks documentation for most claimed cuts. The discrepancies raise transparency concerns as job losses mount from canceled contracts.
DOGE’s figures remain under scrutiny, with media and experts questioning its accounting practices.
The bottom line on this is they could make it all up and we wouldn’t know the difference. There’s no real way to fact check this info.
The buck doesn’t start and stop inside the treasury. Most of this money was going somewhere, and people can fact check things like the actual terms of government contracts, past expenditures, congressional budgets, etc.
The real problem - as is always the case in this Age of Disinformation - is that the process of verifying facts takes time, while the process of producing lies is instant and constant.
Post-truth world. A lie goes around the world before the truth can get its shoes on. People have been killed because of a whatsapp or telegram message gone viral.
We should have recognized this shit for what it was as soon as viral became a good thing.
I mean for me personally yeah but it definitely seems like people/organizations are finding a way to fact check the crap out of this. The top five biggest contracts on their previous iteration of this have all been removed or heavily revised because they were called out for being inaccurate and they capitulated. I’ve already seen reports showing the same thing with a lot of the new ones.
It seems like their new strategy is just to not list the biggest savers and just talk about it because the wall of receipts no longer comes close to the value saved they were claiming.