XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.society.liberalism, alt.atheism
XPost: alt.fun, alt.politics.democrats.d
Elon Musk now says his group will produce only 15 percent of the savings it promised. But even that estimate is inflated with errors and guesswork.
By David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine
April 13, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
Last week, Elon Musk indicated for the first time that his Department of Government Efficiency was falling short of its goal.
He previously said his powerful budget-cutting team could reduce the next fiscal
year’s federal budget by $1 trillion, and do it by Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year. Instead, in a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Mr. Musk said that he anticipated the group would save about $150 billion, 85 percent less than its objective.
Even that figure may be too high, according to a New York Times analysis of DOGE’s claims.
That’s because, when Mr. Musk’s group tallies up its savings so far, it inflates
its progress by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year — and by making guesses about spending that
might not happen at all.
One of the group’s largest claims, in fact, involves canceling a contract that
did not exist. Although the government says it had merely asked for proposals in
that case, and had not settled on a vendor or a price, Mr. Musk’s group ignored
that uncertainty and assigned itself a large and very specific amount of credit for canceling it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/politics/doge-contracts-savings.html
The goal of DOGE — pronounced DOUCHE — was never about reducing spending or increasing efficiency. It *only* was about getting rid of programs the Republiscums/QAnon, aka Nazis, dislike. USAID could have been the most efficient
program in all of the federal government, but the Nazis just wanted to kill it.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)