The Elon Musk-led advisory body gives update on the federal government’s cost-cutting progress.
The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said that over two days this week, federal agencies canceled 239 “wasteful spending” contracts that saved more than $400 million.
“Over the last two days, agencies terminated 239 wasteful contracts with a total ceiling value of [roughly $1.7 billion] and total savings” of around $400 million, DOGE said in a March 13 post on the social media platform X.
It added that one of the contracts was for consulting. The contract, it said, was regarding “fiscal stewardship to improve management and program operations in order to drive innovation and improve efficiency and effectiveness of business services; rethink, realign and reskill the workforce; and enhance program delivery through a number of transformational initiatives.”
Later that day, DOGE wrote on X that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) canceled multiple grants and programs, including a $100,000 study for Vanderbilt University to evaluate “social networks” among “sexual and gender minorities,“ a $37,000 study for the University of Houston to investigate the “fear of deportation” in “Latinx young adults,” $681,000 for the University of Pennsylvania to study “anti-vaping messages” on social media among “sexual and gender minority teens,” and $225,000 for the University of Colorado to look into the “effects of hormones on headaches in transmasculine adolescents.”
The NIH, according to DOGE, also canceled several other grants and programs with similar topics of study earlier in the week, including “an LGB+ inclusive teen pregnancy prevention program for transgender boys” that cost $620,000, a $699,000 study that looked into marijuana usage among “sexual minority gender diverse individuals,” $740,000 to study social networks among “black and Latino sexual minority men in New Jersey,” a $75,000 study on “structural racism,” and a $50,000 program to look into “LGTBQ+ Latinx youth in an agricultural community” and their “sexual health.”
After President Donald Trump created DOGE via an executive order in January, it has gone from agency to agency to identify what the administration deems wasteful spending, fraud, or abuse. The organization has been met with numerous lawsuits filed by various groups, some questioning if Musk is in charge of DOGE and whether his group has the authority to enact changes across the federal government.
The U.S. Postal Service chief, Louis DeJoy, told Congress this week that he signed an agreement with DOGE to provide assistance to the money-losing agency as it works to address major problems.
The Postal Service, an independent government agency with 635,000 employees that lost $9.5 billion last year, was exempted from DOGE’s cost-cutting audits ordered by Trump.
DeJoy said the agreement with DOGE and the General Services Administration will allow the government reform team to “assist us in identifying and achieving further efficiencies …. the DOGE team was gracious enough to ask for big problems they can help us with.”
In one example, his letter said the Postal Regulatory Commission “is an unnecessary agency that has inflicted over $50 billion in damage to the Postal Service by administering defective pricing models and decades-old bureaucratic processes.”
Also this week, DOGE wrote on X, a platform Musk owns, that some 200,000 government credit cards were canceled after an audit showed they were not being used and that it discovered some $312 million in COVID-era loans that were allegedly given out to children aged 11 and under.
Reuters contributed to this report.