Elon Musk’s DOGE Claims $1B Saved by Axing Grants, Contracts

The Department of Government Efficiency, under President Donald Trump, has revealed that it has saved nearly $1 billion by cutting federal grants and contracts. It is continuing its mission to streamline the government and eliminate waste and fraud.

DOGE announced on X Thursday that federal agencies had ended 269 “wasteful” contracts with a value of $845,000,000 and savings of $250,000,000, including a $50,000 Interior Department contract for “facilitation and collaborative problem solving services.”

DOGE also reported that agencies had terminated “wasteful” grants totaling $90 million, including $995,000 to a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) culinary program and $625,000 to a Russian-Far East Biodiversity Partnership.

DOGE stated on its website that it had saved approximately $160 billion as of April 20 through asset sales and contract/lease cancellations/renegotiations. Fraud and improper payments were deleted, grant cancellations occurred, interest was saved, programmatic changes took place, regulatory savings, and staff reductions. This is about $1.8 billion per day since the executive order was issued by Trump on Jan. 20, 2017.

DOGE’s latest actions follow an announcement made last week in which it announced that 57 federal contracts had been cut, including one worth $120,000 to an “Indonesia Environmental Policy and Law Enforcement Specialist” for a total of $1.5 billion.

At least 19 Democrat led states and the District of Columbia have challenged DOGE’s efforts to streamline the government. They filed a federal lawsuit in Maryland in March to stop the layoffs of probationary federal employees and to reinstate those dismissed.

U.S. District Judge James Bredar (a Barack Obama appointee) ordered the Trump Administration to rehire these employees on April 1, stating that the firings were unlawful as the workers affected had not been given advance written notice. A three-judge panel of Virginia’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Bredar’s order on the 9th of April, a day after a Bill Clinton appointee, U.S. district judge William Alsup, made a similar ruling in a California lawsuit.