By Naveen Athrappully
Various federal government agencies have terminated and descoped 94 wasteful contracts over the past five days, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said in an Oct. 4 post on X.
The terminated contracts had a ceiling value of $8.5 billion and saved $546 million, DOGE said.
This included a “533k Dept. of Commerce consulting contract for ‘editing support services to the Fisheries Resource Division’ and a $61M HHS research contract for ‘solutions to support innovation in pursuit of affordable and better healthcare,’” according to the post.
This follows an earlier X post on Sept. 27 in which DOGE reported terminating and descoping 55 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $3.8 billion, saving $622 million.
According to the DOGE website, the initiative has saved $214 billion worth of taxpayer funds as of Oct. 4. This comes to roughly $1,329 in savings per taxpayer.
The savings were achieved through actions such as grant cancellations, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, asset sales, workforce reductions, and the deletion of fraud and improper payments, DOGE said.
Agencies that have seen the most savings include the Department of Health and Human Services, General Services Administration, Social Security Administration, Office of Personnel Management, and the Small Business Administration.
Some of what DOGE describes as the “strangest, most baffling” uses of government funding uncovered by the agency include a $10 million grant for decolonizing the curriculum, a $2.8 million grant to address “historic and systemic racial inequities” in STEM education, and a $1.5 million grant to advance “reproductive justice” and behavioral health among blacks and “birthing people.”
In an Oct. 3 X post, DOGE criticized an Oct. 1 NPR article that claimed DOGE had failed to deliver on its promises of boosting efficiency and cutting costs.
The article is “full of inaccurate and misleading statements,” the agency said in its post.
NPR said that a contract termination showing $4.3 million in savings was not actually terminated, and almost all the money had already been spent.
DOGE published the receipt for $4.3 million of de-obligated funds under the contract, which it said was the “very definition of taxpayer savings.”
DOGE has faced criticism regarding privacy risks in its operations. In February, a group of unions and individuals sued the Trump administration over DOGE being granted access to the data of American citizens.
DOGE representatives have accessed social security numbers, bank account numbers, and other “extraordinarily sensitive” records of millions of people, the complaint said.
“Steamrolling into sensitive government record systems threatens to upend how these critical systems are maintained and compromises the safety and security of personal identifying information for Americans all across the country. It also violates federal law,” the plaintiffs argued.
The mass disclosure of people’s personal information “flies in the face of that legal framework and tramples on the individual privacy rights and interests protected by the Privacy Act,” the complaint stated.
In March, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Treasury Department, Office of Personnel Management, and the Department of Education from disclosing the plaintiffs’ information to DOGE affiliates.
However, on Aug. 12, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit lifted the block. Circuit Judge Julius Richardson said plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed in proving DOGE’s activities violated federal law.
“To insist that the DOGE affiliates explain in advance the exact information they need and why is to demand something just short of clairvoyance,” Richardson said.
“It does not stretch the imagination to think that an employee tasked with modernizing an agency’s software and IT systems would require administrator-level access to those systems, including any internal databases, especially when conducting the initial survey of the agency’s technological ailments.”
Meanwhile, DOGE commended the Department of Energy (DOE) in an Oct. 3 X post for terminating 321 wasteful contracts and saving taxpayers around $7.5 billion in the process. These projects were “mostly in uneconomic ‘green’ grants,” the agency said.
DOGE said that the department determined these projects “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”
