See how Elon Musk’s team exaggerates, deletes and rewrites their savings claims

Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team debuted a website last month that categorized contracts the group said that the group has cancelled to save taxpayers’ money. Since then, the list has changed dramatically. New contracts were added, others were deleted. The value has changed and changed again.

These changes tell a story about how the Musk team, known as the Ministry of Government Efficiency, operates. These are all contracts listed by the group when it first released its “Wall of Receipts” on February 16.

“We will make mistakes, but we will act quickly to correct any mistakes,” Mr. Musk said early in the Oval Office.

But people are well-informed about federal contracts, grant programs, government workforce, data systems and federal spending say these seem to show less indifference than supervision errors than basic government operations.

In the private sector, errors can be a virtue – an inevitable byproduct of moving quickly and destroying things. But in its public data, the federal government often has little room to resolve such errors.

“The tolerance for errors is much higher in many parts of the private sector, including in the tech community, than in the variance in government,” said Jed Kolko, secretary of the Biden-Time Economic Affairs at the Department of Commerce, who leads the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Data released by the federal government – under banners such as the “Official Website of the U.S. Government,” countless choices that can be made for individual citizens and private businesses. The data proposes the government's own decision. The Fed has formulated monetary policy while evaluating data on employment, inflation and economic growth. Use the population generated by the census to pay billions of dollars in federal spending to states and territories.

Imagine if these datasets are often overwritten without explanation. Or, if the monthly work report gradually decreases by a few zeros, it looks like the economy has stopped.

“Next, you know, you've already caused a recession in the data,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who runs the Congressional Budget Office during George W. Bush's presidency.

“I can't even imagine the federal government attributes a lot of people to this hasty,” he said, who happened to have just looked at the Doge Group's data in the federal workforce of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The agency believes the agency has a head count of 45 people (the actual number is more like 9,000 before the recent layoffs). “It feels like a fan website, not a government website,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said.

It seems that the team has also taken repetitive steps to confuse the data he posted online even if Mr. Musk ensures transparency in his operations.

The team started with the application programming interface “receipt wall”, which allows external personnel to easily download and double-check their data. A week later, it changed from publishing its savings data on the Internet in this easily scratchable format to a new format that is difficult for outsiders to access.

Last week, the group released its canceled list of grants for the first time without outgoing information to identify each grant or assess the accuracy of claim savings. This information is contained in hidden metadata on its website. But the next day, that metadata was also deleted.

The group also changed the data repeatedly without changing the “Last Update” timestamp on the website. (Another error: The time stamp is currently on March 11th, although the latest update takes place later on the 12th.)

The White House has not commented on why the organization changed contract data or why it is now harder for the public to review contract data.

The government certainly makes mistakes and does it for a long time before Mr. Musk arrives. It even regularly modifys the entire dataset, such as monthly work numbers. But historically, it has been done on a predictable timeline with a consistent and documented approach. Usually, as new numbers are released, old data is retained.

Direct errors are usually admitted. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics even published all the mistakes in one place.

Jeremy Singert Contributed to the research.