David A. Fahrenthold, Emily Badger and Jeremy Singer-Vine at NYT:
The reporters compared an archived version of the “wall of receipts” with the version posted late Sunday to identify which contracts had been deleted or changed.March 3, 2025
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has deleted hundreds more claims from its mistake-plagued “wall of receipts,” erasing $4 billion in additional savings that the group said it had made for U.S. taxpayers.
Late Sunday night, the group erased or altered more than 1,000 contracts it had claimed to cancel, representing more than 40 percent of all the contracts listed on its site last week. The deleted items included five of the seven largest savings that it had claimed credit for just last week. At the same time, the group added about 1,000 additional canceled contracts, worth smaller total savings.
It was the second time in a week that DOGE had deleted some of its greatest claims of success. Early last week, it erased all five of the largest savings it had claimed when the wall of receipts, which is what the group is calling its list of canceled contracts, was originally posted on Feb. 19.
Since that first posting, the total amount of savings that the initiative has claimed from cutting contracts has steadily declined, from $16 billion at first to less than $9 billion now.
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