Elon Musk’s DOGE removed the five biggest spending cuts from its “wall of receipts.” Here’s what it … [+]
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DOGE Removes Biggest Spending Cuts; Here’s What It Could Mean For DOGE Dividend Checks
Elon Musk’s government cost-cutting initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency, has been on a mission to slash spending and has recently dangled an enticing value proposition by proposing to return a portion of the savings to taxpayers in the form of a DOGE Dividend check. At least, that’s the pitch. But as the numbers behind DOGE’s purported savings are not withstanding scrutiny, taxpayers might want to ask a different question: How much actual savings will there be to distribute?
Last week, DOGE proudly posted a “wall of receipts,” showcasing its biggest cost-cutting victories. Immediately, organizations including the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico and others started fact-checking and found that the list was riddled with errors. Earlier today, The New York Times reported that DOGE has deleted all of the five biggest savings on that original list, quietly. The errors range from simple miscalculations to outright misrepresentations of government contracts. And yet, despite backtracking on its initial figures, DOGE now claims it has saved $65 billion (up from $55 billion a few days ago) —without any clear explanation of how it reached that number.
“The ‘wall of receipts’ is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work,” The Times notes. “The scale of that ledger’s errors — and the misunderstandings and poor quality control that seemed to underlie them — has raised questions about the effort’s broader work, which has led to mass firings and cutbacks across the federal government.”
DOGE Deleted These Five Savings From Its Wall Of Receipts, Which Would Lower Potential DOGE Dividend Checks
Consider the $8 billion “savings” DOGE claimed from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contract. In reality, the contract in question was only worth $8 million—three orders of magnitude smaller than what DOGE reported, The New York Times found. Given that ICE’s entire annual budget is about $8 billion, a single contract of that size should have raised immediate red flags. When confronted, DOGE corrected the number but insisted that its overall calculations were still sound
The New York Times also flagged the triple-counting blunder at the U.S. Agency for International Development where DOGE initially claimed it had cut $655 million three times, only to later revise the total savings down to a mere $18 million. A similar discrepancy emerged with a supposed $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration, which turned out to be just $560,000—the cost of a small IT project allowing users to select “X” as their gender.
Despite these and other errors, DOGE’s official tally of savings somehow continues to climb. The largest item on its latest list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department—except this contract was actually canceled last fall, under the Biden administration, before DOGE even existed, The Times reported.
What Does This Mean For Potential DOGE Dividend Checks?
For taxpayers hoping for a hefty DOGE Dividend check, these miscalculations matter. The premise behind Musk’s initiative is that government waste is so rampant that eliminating it could fund direct payments to Americans. But if the savings aren’t real—or are exaggerated—then the potential size of these dividend checks shrinks dramatically.
DOGE must identify actual, verifiable savings that are large enough to make a meaningful impact. The reality, as these revisions show, is that many of DOGE’s biggest wins don’t appear to hold up under scrutiny. Without legitimate savings, the promise of a DOGE Dividend check diminishes.
The Upshot For DOGE Dividend Checks
While the idea of eliminating wasteful spending is appealing, taxpayers should demand transparency and accountability. If the government is going to make sweeping layoffs and cutbacks in the name of efficiency, the public deserves to know whether those cuts are real, sustainable, and beneficial. If not, the DOGE Dividend check could end up as nothing more than a mirage—one that disappears the moment you look too closely.