Many of the receipts published by Elon Musk’s DOGE aren’t receipts at all — they’re negotiated deals with vetted vendors who might do future government work.
Take a quick look at the Department of Government Efficiency’s list of canceled contracts and you’d think the Agriculture Department spent $25 million on diversity trainings four separate times, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau spent $600 million on management consultants.
DOGE’s “wall of savings” and list of canceled contracts include many eye-popping “receipts” like those. There’s just one problem: Many of the so-called receipts aren’t receipts at all. They’re negotiated agreements with known government contractors, who might provide future services.
“This is a way to make it easier for the government to order, if it does order, and to set up good prices that they can order. It doesn’t mean they buy it,” Steve Kelman, who ran the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the Office of Management and Budget in the 1990s, said of the contracts.
The agreements are known as blanket purchase agreements (BPAs), working more like a catalog of things the government might buy than a placed order. But listed alongside actual orders for goods and services on DOGE’s “wall of savings,” they create a wildly exaggerated and false impression of government spending.
The wall of savings includes more than 60 listed “contracts” that are clearly labeled as BPAs on the DOGE site, while many others are identified as BPAs in federal records — often easily spotted because of their high, round numbers. NBC News counted more than $1 billion value in DOGE’s list of canceled contracts from BPAs.
When asked for comment, Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in an email: “The continued attempts to sow doubt in the massive accomplishments of this never-before-seen effort to make government more efficient speaks more about the illegitimacy of those peddling these falsehoods than good work of DOGE. The American public are in lockstep with the President’s mission and will not be swayed by more lies coming from the legacy media.”
DOGE’s records are clear that canceling BPAs doesn’t result in any immediate savings, but the records do not make clear that the government may not have spent any money on the BPAs at all.
Somewhat ironically, the contracts are meant to improve government efficiency. BPAs are negotiated deals that allow agencies to purchase frequently needed goods and services from contractors who have been previously vetted and approved for a multiyear period. These deals have negotiated rates and regulations to improve purchasing for the period of the deal, and speed up the process significantly.
The findings add to a growing list of issues that have been found with DOGE’s claims of cutting government waste. The agency has struggled to back up lofty claims of fraud and appeared to have misinterpreted data from the Social Security Administration and a Department of Homeland Security contract. An Associated Press analysis found 40% of contracts cut by DOGE aren’t expected to save the government any money. The New York Times reported Tuesday that DOGE had quietly removed five of its biggest listed savings from its website.
As of Wednesday, DOGE’s website claimed $65 billion in savings, equal to about 0.9% of the 2024 federal budget.
Meanwhile, DOGE is embroiled in a wide variety of lawsuits questioning its legality, and questions remain about how the agency is operating and who is in charge. On Wednesday, the White House said Amy Gleason had been named acting administrator, though President Donald Trump has consistently said that Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is in charge.
The BPA process was introduced in the ‘90s as a way of speeding up government ordering, Kelman said, and multiple BPAs for the same work are often arranged so the government can use competition to drive down prices.
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“It took a long time to build all that stuff up and mere minutes or hours for all of that to come burning to the ground,” one current senior employee working in procurement for the federal government said of the Trump and DOGE mandated cuts.
The federal database for government spending lists a contract value for BPAs that is referred to as the “ceiling,” which DOGE appears to be using as the “value” on its wall of receipts.
That “ceiling” can vastly exceed agencies’ actual spending. DOGE lists six $100 million contracts from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on management consultants.The agency wasn’t planning to spend $600 million, however: all are BPAs for the same work, according to federal records, giving the bureau a list of vendors to choose from when it needs to outsource consulting services.
The CFPB spends significantly less on all of its contracts every year; for fiscal year 2025, the contract budget was $230 million, according to an agency financial report dated February 2024. The year prior, it was $224 million.
DOGE’s wall of savings also includes four $25 million contracts for diversity trainings at the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Service; federal records show they are all BPAs.
The agency used one of the BPAs in 2023 to order — or “call” on the BPA in government jargon — and approve $414,892 in diversity trainings. Much of the money has already been spent, but DOGE’s cancellation prevents $121,770 from being spent.
Terminating a “call” for the direct purchase for goods or services early does stop the government from spending money or at least the possibility of spending money, but Kelman said canceling a BPA doesn’t save money or even prevent future spending. Agencies could still spend money for these services, but it would possibly take longer and be more expensive to secure contracts outside the BPAs.
The federal employee working in procurement said what it does is undermine months of work by government workers. While the employee was aware of federal workers unwinding a cancellation, the employee said that becomes impossible after 30 days or so.
The federal employee expects that the spending needs won’t all disappear, and that their office will be forced to redo some of the work they’ve spent the last week canceling.
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