In a video posted to social media Monday evening, a Pentagon spokesperson read from a list of $80 million in savings found by the Department of Government Efficiency, billionaire Elon Musk’s chainsaw effort to cut the federal government.
“$80 million in wasteful spending, just right here,” Press Secretary Sean Parnell said after reading a short list.
“Today’s actions are just the start,” Parnell added, promising more this week.
But after checking these numbers against the public ledger posted on DOGE’s website, the two don’t add up.
Online, Musk’s team lists about $11 million in Defense Department savings identified so far. Adding the various items Parnell mentioned in the video, which don’t appear on DOGE’s website, would bring the total to around $25 million.
The Defense Department declined to share the list Parnell read. It also refused to respond to questions about why there was a disparity between the two numbers and when the full receipts would be posted online.
President Donald Trump said in February that DOGE would find “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” in the military, tasking Musk to lead the effort.
The Biden administration’s last budget request for the Pentagon was just under $850 billion. The first round of DOGE’s Pentagon cuts represents about .009% of that budget.
DOGE says it updates its “wall of receipts” — which lists federal contracts, grants and building leases that the organization has terminated in recent months — on a weekly basis. The site was last updated March 2, a lag that could account for the discrepancy. It’s also possible that some of the contracts making up the $80 million touted by the department haven’t been canceled yet and are therefore not included on DOGE’s list.
Numerous media outlets have found errors in the organization’s accounting, including typos that skew contract values or the inclusion of agreements that ended before DOGE was created. The organization says the numbers it posts come directly from government contracting officials.
The website currently features nine Defense Department contracts worth approximately $4.8 million. Funding for many of them has been fully obligated, meaning there was no money to gain from canceling them early — like canceling a yearlong subscription six months in. The remaining three would yield about $2.5 million in savings.
Included among those is a $3.6 million contract the Air Force awarded in 2023 to Digitas Technologies for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility training. The service has already obligated $1.4 million in funding, so canceling the agreement a year early would net about $2.2 million in savings.
Musk’s department also lists 12 DOD-funded building leases that have been terminated, but doesn’t offer details about when they were canceled. The website claims it saved $8.5 million by consolidating organizations, moving employees to other federal workspaces and closing entire offices.
The projected savings for many of the leases assumes they would have continued another five years. For example, DOGE claims $2.7 million in savings from canceling a Defense Contract Management Agency building lease agreement in Buffalo, New York, that cost about $550,000 annually.
The DOGE-led cuts follow others promised in the Pentagon under the second Trump administration. In February, the Pentagon said it planned to fire 5,400 civilian employees, part of an early effort to reduce the workforce by 5% to 8%. And the acting Pentagon leadership has said it intends to redirect around $50 billion toward new priorities, offering little detail on what would be sacrificed.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate are calling for a massive defense buildup, potentially adding $200 billion to the defense budget over the next two years.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.
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