As the old saying goes, there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Elon Musk has demonstrated mastery of all three, often simultaneously. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has made wild claims about the savings it has supposedly accrued during its blunt force takeover of government institutions, including the Office of Personnel Management, where Musk’s minions—some just recent high school grads—are wreaking havoc.
Before Trump took office, Musk promised to find $2 trillion in savings each year, despite the fact that discretionary spending totals only around $1.8 trillion. So far, no such savings—or anything close—has materialized, and no evidence of the massive waste and fraud Musk vowed to uncover has emerged. Instead, Musk and the Trump administration keep throwing out random figures that are misleading at best, and often downright lies.
Their goal is not merely to apply a veneer of truth and legitimacy to their wholesale wreckage of the federal government, or to make it even more difficult for the fact-checking media to keep up with the Trump administration’s relentless, dizzying moves. It’s also a sleight of hand to make it appear as if it’s not corporate titans like Musk himself who are receiving sweetheart deals and robbing the American people blind, but “deep state” bureaucrats, DEI recipients, and African children.
Though Musk alleges that the government is rife with incompetence, he and his DOGE team appear most incompetent of all, having created a website that was easily hacked last week. But that pales in comparison with the dubious statistics published on the site and spouted elsewhere by the administration. Some examples:
DOGE posted claims of $16 billion in savings on Monday, half of which it said came from the elimination of a single contract for a diversity program at ICE. They were only off by a factor of over 1400, since the real savings from the canceled contract was no more than $5.5 million. As The New York Times pointed out, the contract they cited was actually for $8 million, not $8 billion—and $2.5 million of it has already been spent, and thus is unrecoverable. Even after the mistake was pointed out, DOGE continued to assert the $8 billion figure. The Times also noted, “A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.”
Not only was that $8 billion complete bunk; turns out, so were the next three highest “savings” claimed on the site. DOGE professed to find another $1.9 billion in savings from terminating three contracts for USAID, each for $655 million. But these contracts were what are known as Indefinite Delivery Vehicles, or IDVs. Such contracts allow the government to set spending limits but do not require it to meet those limits, meaning that it can cancel the contract at will. So far, the government had spent only $55 million of that $1.9 billion.
It’s worth noting that spending on USAID—which Musk called “a criminal organization” and the Trump administration has unilaterally (and possibly illegally) shut down—is not wasted money, but brings tangible benefits, including providing HIV treatments in Africa, countering Russian propaganda, and aiding civilians devastated by war in Syria and Ukraine. It’s our best tool for soft power, burnishing America’s image around the world by providing material help where it’s need most. And despite Donald Trump’s claim that “billions of dollars have been stolen” by the organization, former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios told 60 Minutes that it is “the most accountable aid agency in the world,” with 40 percent of the staff, he estimated, made up of lawyers and accountants tasked with watching every dollar.
The administration has also made the suspect claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security benefits. Musk said it “might be the biggest fraud in history” even shared a graph on X purporting to show this, apparently believing that everyone at the Social Security Administration was so stupid as to not recognize that the agency was sending out more than 5 million checks to people past the age of 140. Yet the only fool in the equation was Musk. Neither he nor Trump, who repeated the claim, appear to understand that while there are millions of people still in the Social Security database because their deaths were never recorded, these people do not receive checks. A total of 89,000 people 99 years old and over receive checks, which, unsurprisingly, aligns remarkably well with the U.S. Census estimate that there are 85,000 people 100 and over in the country. Simply checking a list of Social Security check recipients would have cleared up the entire issue. Yet Musk was either too dumb or too lazy to do so. Or, perhaps more likely, he just didn’t care if it was true or not because it served his purposes.
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Far as I know, Musk has not apologized for a single incorrect fact that he has spouted over the past month; he’s hardly even acknowledged being wrong. The closest he came was after the media thoroughly debunked one of his more laughable claims—that the U.S. has spent $50 million for condoms for Hamas (which Trump later upped to $100 million). Confronted with the truth by a reporter during his Oval Office playdate with Trump, Musk said, “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected.”
He showed zero humility, and the reason is clear: Neither Musk nor Trump care whether what they say is true. If it’s corrected later, it doesn’t matter. Did Egypt really receive $6 million for “tourism?” Of course not! Was $59 million really spent to put migrants living in New York City in luxury hotels? You bet your ear it wasn’t. But in a sense, the truth doesn’t matter—because by the time the debunking is done, the damage has been done as well. These “facts” have now been mistaken for real information by those whose narrative it already fits, or who otherwise are gullible enough to believe whatever the U.S. president or the world’s richest man says—which is an unfortunately high number of Americans.
Trump, Musk, and the rest of the administration’s fabulists are counting on a phenomenon known as the continued influence effect, which causes people to retain false information even after it’s been corrected. As Madeline Jalbert explained in an article for the Seattle Times, “When we receive a correction about something we already know, we don’t simply erase the old information from our minds. Rather, representations of both the old information and its correction coexist in our brain’s knowledge networks, playing a role in guiding our future judgments and beliefs.” We’re also more likely to rely on such information when it comes to mind easier, Jalbert noted.
The administration is “flooding the zone,” as Steve Bannon famously quipped. Trump and Musk know that the people cannot keep up. And so when EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed that he was “saving” $20 billion by canceling EPA contracts that were part of a “scheme” to fast-track grants to “far-left activist groups,” and compared it to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic,” the fact these contracts were a completely rational investment in green energy—and already approved by Congress—did not matter. What matters is that it sounds like a really big number!
Another big number the administration has been hawking is the supposed $233 billion to $521 billion the government loses every year to fraud. Even Bill Maher fell for this one, claiming that he could believe it because it originated with the Government Accountability Office. Yet a bare amount of research reveals that this figure is almost entirely bullshit for several reasons. First off, the figures came not from any actual findings of fraud, but from a simulation model. When repeating the figure, the Trump administration also conveniently leaves out the fact that the model analyzed data from 2018-2022—three of which years, in case you’ve forgotten, Trump was president. The time frame means that the data also could’ve been affected by the pandemic.
Still, even the larger figure, if true, would represent only 7 percent of total government spending in a given year—which would be bad, but not indicative of a system rotten with malfeasance. An equally important consideration is where the fraud comes from. Hint: It’s not believed to derive from USAID contracts. Much of it is thought to be a result of identity theft. The Democrats introduced a bill to try to combat this, but at the moment it’s sitting idle in Congress. You can be sure the Republicans will pick it up any day now.
Trump and Musk don’t actually care about rooting out fraud or saving taxpayer money. If they did, they wouldn’t be firing 6,000 IRS workers who were recently hired to help the agency root out wealthy tax cheats. What they really care about is using their exalted position in government to line their own pockets.
Here’s a true, meaningful number for you: Over the past five years, Musk’s companies have secured $13 billion in government contracts, and last year alone, 17 agencies committed $3 billion to his companies. Meanwhile, he and Trump are in the process of gutting other agencies, from Federal Aviation Administration to the Securities and Exchange Commission to the National Labor Relations Board, whose investigations into Musk’s companies put his profits at risk.
As for Trump, he has abandoned all pretense of following ethical guidelines and avoiding conflicts of interests. He used the Oval Office this month to host a business meeting between the respective heads of the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, to help usher through a proposed merger that directly benefits him (the Trump family is a LIV partner and often hosts LIV events at its golf courses). As one former federal prosecutor put it, “The entire force and power of the United States government is now part of the business support structure for the Trump family.”
Trump has also continued to pursue a multitude of real estate and branding deals in foreign countries, making him vulnerable to outside influences. And he’s maintained his stake in Truth Social, meaning that he stands to benefit by driving traffic to the site when he posts official messages under his account.
So the only way that DOGE could be “finding levels of fraud and waste and abuse like … nobody ever thought possible,” as the president claimed on Tuesday, is if the agency were investigating Trump and Musk themselves—because the two greatest culprits of graft in government are actually the ones guarding the bank.
