Government Furiously Trying to Undo Elon Musk's Damage

Yahoo

13-05-2025

Federal agencies scrambled to bring back over $220 million worth of contracts after Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency cancelled them, The New York Times reports.
However, of those 44 contracts that were cancelled and eventually reinstated, DOGE is still citing all but one of them as examples of the government spending the group supposedly saved on its website's error-plagued "Wall of Receipts." The White House told the NYT that this is "paperwork lag" that will be fixed.
Clerical errors or not, the "zombie contracts" are a damning sign of the chaos sowed by the billionaire's hasty and sweeping cost-cutting that would seem antithetical to its stated goals of efficiency.
"They should have used a scalpel," Rachel Dinkes of the Knowledge Alliance, an association of education companies that includes one that lost a contract, told the NYT. "But instead they went in with an axe and chopped it all down."
Musk brought the Silicon Valley ethos of "move fast and break things" he uses at his business ventures, like SpaceX, to his cleaning house of the federal government. And this, it seems, resulted in a lot of wasted time and effort.
Some of the contracts DOGE cancelled were required by law, according to the NYT, and some were for skills that the government needed but didn't have. The whiplash was most felt at the Department of Veterans Affairs, which reversed 16 cancelled contracts — the highest of any agency in the NYT's analysis.
Many of the contracts that DOGE cancelled were reinstated almost immediately. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, revived a contract just two and a half hours after Musk's team cancelled it, the paper found. Others were brought back within days.
After losing a contract with the US Department of Agriculture in February, Raquel Romero and her husband gained it back four days later. The USDA told the NYT that it reinstated the contract after discovering that it was "required by statute," but declined to specify which one. Romero believes that a senior lawyer at the agency, who was a supporter of the couple's work, intervened on their behalf.
"All I know is, she retired two weeks later," Romero told the NYT.
The waste doesn't end there. Since the contracts are necessary, it puts the fired contractors in a stronger bargaining position when the government comes crawling back. In the case of the EPA contract, the agency agreed to pay $171,000 more than before the cancellation. In other words, these cuts are costing, not saving, the government money.
A White House spokesperson, however, tried to spin the flurry of reversals as a positive sign that the agencies are complying with Musk's chaotic directions, while also playing down the misleading savings claims on DOGE's website.
"The DOGE Wall of Receipts provides the latest and most accurate information following a thorough assessment, which takes time," White House spokesman Harrison Fields told the NYT. "Updates to the DOGE savings page will continue to be made promptly, and departments and agencies will keep highlighting the massive savings DOGE is achieving."
Harrison also called the over $220 million of zombie contracts "very, very small potatoes" compared to the supposed $165 billion Musk has saved American taxpayers.
If this latest analysis is any indication, however, that multibillion-dollar sum warrants significant skepticism. We're only beginning to see a glimmer of the true fallout from Musk tornadoing through the federal government.
More on DOGE: This DOGE Operative Got a Huge Surprise Once He Was Actually Inside the Government