At least 44 of the government contracts canceled in the orders of the Cost reduction initiative of Elon Musk have resurrected by federal agencies, eliminating more than $ 220 million of the alleged savings of their group, according to data from the New York Times.
But Mr. Musk’s group continues on list 43 of those contracts as “terminations” on its website, which calls the “receipt wall.” The group even added some of them days or weeks after having resurrected the leg. The result was another in a series of data errors on the website that caused the group to seem more successful to reduce government costs than bone.
The White House says it is a paperwork that will be remedied.
The revived contracts varied from small dollars agreements on software licenses to large associations with suppliers that administered government data and records. Most of the contracts were canceled in February and March, when Mr. Musk’s group, the government’s efficiency department, demanded that the agencies make large cuts in spending and staff.
Then, the agencies restored them, sometimes just a few days later. In one case, the Environmental Protection Agency revived a contract after only 2 and a half hours. Mr. Musk’s group still listed that as Caneled for a week later, just after Bone revived and then extended, so that he will cost more now than before.
These reversions illustrated not only Mr. Musk’s team to produce precise data on their results, but also the inconveniences of their rapid and secret approach to reduce spending as part of a radical effort to reduce $ 1 billion of the federal budget of $ 7 billion of $ 7 in a few months.
The contractors said that, in their haste, Mr. Musk’s group had recruited killing contracts that it was unlikely to remain dead. Some were required by law. Others required skills that the government needed but did not have.
Their reversions raise broader questions about many of the deep but hurried budget cuts of the musk group, they will go back over time, eroding their long -term effect on bureaucracy and government in Washington.
In northern Virginia, the government contractor Larry Aldrich was notified in February that the company, Brennsys, lost its contract to make web design and produce videos for a website of the Department of Veterans Affairs for veterans with post -traumatic stress disorder.
“The VA cannot do this job on its own,” Aldrich said. “They don’t have the labor or skills set.”
It did not last.
“Two weeks later, we received an email saying that it was going to be reinstalled,” Aldrich said. “I thought, Wow, someone must have returned and said:” We can’t do this. “
A White House spokesman Harrison Fields said the reversions showed that the agencies had re -evaluated the cuts they made in the initial impulse to comply with the instructions of Mr. Musk.
“The wall of the duxts provides the most recent and most precise information after an exhaustive evaluation, which has been,” Fields said. “The updates to the Doge Savings page will continue to be carried out promptly, and the departments and agencies will continue to highlight the mass savings that Doge is achieving.”
Mr. Musk’s group has more than 9,400 contracts that claim that credit for cancellation, for a total of $ 32 billion in savings. In total, Mr. Musk’s group says he has saved taxpayers $ 165 billion.
Compared to that result, said Mr. Fields, the reversions identified by the New York Times were “very small potatoes.”
He declined to say if the contracts in the group list beyond them that the Times found that he had also revived his leg.
The times discovered those reversions seeking in the federal acquisition data system, a government system that tracks the changes in the contracts. The Times sought cases in which the contracts listed as canceled on the website of Mr. Musk had shown signs of new life, such as having added funds, an extended timeline or an update that included the word “terminate” or “restore”.
That search increased 44 of the zombies of the cost reduction group, the murdered contracts but then restored to life.
That total can still be a lower content, because changes in contracts can take time to appear in the acquisition data system and because there is no standard way to identify a contract restored in this system. The search for Times may have lost something.
The resurrections blessed in the middle February.
Raquel Romero and her husband had a contract to sacrifice leadership training to lawyers in the Agriculture Department. They lost it on February 14 and recovered it four days later.
That was a God for Mrs. Romero and her husband, providing $ 45,000 in income at a time when all their other federal businesses had disappeared.
“We had lost all the income we were planning for the year 2025. We have had to sell our house. We are in the process of moving to a condominium,” he said. “We feel very lucky to have had this resource to buy some time.”
The Agriculture Department said in a statement that this contract had restored after discovering that it was “required by the statute.” He refused to say which statute. Mrs. Romero said she felt that the restoration was the product of personal intervention, accrediting an agriculture lawyer who had been a great defender of her and her husband’s work.
“All I know is that he retired two weeks later,” Romero said.
Other investments beg to continue.
The Department of Veterans Affairs restored 16 contracts, most of any agency in the analysis of the Times.
That department declined to comment on why. But veterans groups indicated that some of the canceled contracts involved functions required by law, as a contractor that helped veterans look for military records to use as evidence to obtain benefits.
That contract was restored after eight days.
In the Department of Education, Mr. Musk’s group said he had saved approximately several years by canceling a contract to administer a data deposit on schools throughout the country. But legislators and defense groups opposed, saying that the law required that the data were collected and that the government needed it to determine which schools described for certain subsidies, such as some adapted for rural areas.
“They should have used a scalpel,” said Rachel Dinkes of the Knowledge Alliance, an association of educational companies, including the one that lost this contract. “But instead they get used to an ax and cut everything.”
That subsidy was restored after 18 days, but with $ 17 million of its possible eliminated funds.
The cancellation of the short life involved an EPA contract, signed in 2023, to pay a company based in Maryland for help to raise awareness about asthma. The EPA canceled that contract at 4:31 PM of March 7, according to the contracting data. Then he restored the contract, in effect, canceling the canelation, at 6:58 pm the same night.
Because?
“Any acquisition that is restored reflects that the agency determined that the financing action supported the priorities of the administration,” the EPA said. The agency refused to give details about this case. Last month, the EPA extended this contract for another year, agreeing to pay $ 171000 more than before cancellation. The contractor did not answer the questions.
From the beginning of his group’s work, Musk said the government would probably have to undo some expense cuts.
“We need to act quickly to stop losing billions of dollars or taxpayers’ money,” Musk said in the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” in February. “But if we make a mistake, we will reverse it quickly.”
But Mr. Musk also made a second promise, crucial to carry out the first. He said the group would publish the details of their online work to allow the public to have a precise and updated image of what had been cut.
“We can name the details, line per line,” Musk said in the same interview. “We have the receipts. We publish the receipts.”
The Times has found numerous errors on the group’s website from the beginning. Often, these errors inflated the value of the savings that Mr. Musk’s team had achieved. Mr. Musk promised that the group could win $ 1 billion in budget cuts this year, but so far it has been well below that goal. And even those cuts have been inflated due to the inclusion of errors and conjectures.
Mr. Musk’s group, for example, previously claimed credit for canceling programs that actually ended years or decades ago. He also had the same cancellations, and once published a claim that confused “one billion” and “millions.”
This month, The Times sent a list of revived contracts that were still on the list to the White House. Two days later, Mr. Musk’s group eliminated one: the EPA contract that had been canceled for less than a day.
But at the same time, he added five other contracts already revived to his “terminations” list, claiming credit for $ 57 million more in savings that had already been retreated.
