It's Weird that DOGE Runs a Fake Website Full of Lies for the Gullible

But it tells us something

***Hey! You might notice that the “podcast meter” — which gives the probability of me reading this piece on the next podcast — is not there. That’s because I changed the format of my Sunday podcast. Now, instead of reading this week’s pieces, I pick a relevant-to-today piece from the IMBW archive and see if it holds up, or if it sucks even more than I remember. And of course, I still do the riff on the copyright expired music and the news from 100 years ago, because the people demand withering critiques of the Coolidge administration!

DOGE runs a website that claims to show how much money their Sherman’s-march-to-the-sea approach to government spending has saved. Here’s the topline number, or — to use an accounting term — the “money shot”:

Not too shabby! And sure, $115 billion is less than two percent of last year’s budget, and just over six percent of last year’s deficit, but still: $115 billion is something. And I’d never turn my nose up at $714. In fact, I know just what I’d buy — check this sweet baby out:

Hells yeah: 3/16 inch galvanized steel construction wire! With the money DOGE is saving me, I could get 997 linear feet! That fucking rules — whine all you want about cuts to medical research and nuclear safety, those cuts have to be weighed against the benefits of more than three football fields of industrial grade wire. FOR EACH OF US!!!

Here’s the asterisk, though: DOGE hasn’t saved $115 billion. Or anywhere close to it, it seems. Their number is utter horseshit, and I think the fact that DOGE is running a joke website designed to scam the uninformed says something about this strange era of government that we’re in.

The first way you can tell that DOGE’s numbers are fishy is by…looking at them. The $115 billion number is backed up by a “wall of receipts” that divides savings into three categories: contracts, grants, and real estate. DOGE says that it has saved $20 billion in contracts, $17 billion in grants, and $500 million in real estate. And you don’t need a crack staff of aspiring Woodward and Bernsteins to uncover the fact that $20 billion + $17 billion + $500 million = not $115 billion. In this article, I lean heavily on reporting by the New York Times and others, but some of DOGE’s shadiness is so obvious that — prepare for an egregious insult — a fucking blogger can figure it out. I did not place any phone calls, leave my couch, or even put on pants to write this article; doing so would have violated blogger ethics. But I did quickly glimpse at the DOGE site, and that was enough to tell me: About two-thirds of DOGE’s “savings” are unaccounted for.

The DOGE site has been riddled with errors. They once claimed to save $8 billion from a contract, but the real number was $8 million. They have double-counted contracts and claimed credit for cancellations made under Biden, and said that they’ve cancelled contracts that they simply haven’t. They’ve overestimated savings due to a misunderstanding of the word “ceiling”, and “cancelled” contracts whose money has already been spent, a move that saves taxpayers 115 billion hot cups of jack squat. It’s darkly ironic that a team operating under the premise that government is run by bumbling morons are now themselves a government agency that makes two rednecks shooting each others’ thumbs off with BB guns look like Seal Team Six.

DOGE has reacted to these mistakes by redoubling their efforts to hide their mistakes. David Fahrenthold of the New York Times says that DOGE responded to the Times’ reporting by changing how they post information to not include information about what, exactly, has allegedly been cancelled. And when the Times dug into the site’s source code and found that information anyway, DOGE altered the source code. Remember: This is a website ostensibly meant to promote transparency. This is supposed to be sunshine policy, “your government working for you” open-book accountability. But when people try to figure out what DOGE is actually doing, DOGE does the tech equivalent of throwing a smoke bomb on the ground and jumping into a manhole.

Also: There’s a chance DOGE might actually increase deficits when you factor in things like a less-effective IRS. And we know that DOGE hasn’t dented government spending yet, because we’re actually spending slightly more this year than in recent years — the pink line is federal expenditures so far in 2025:

Souce: The Brookings Institution, via the Department of Treasury.

It’s just all so pathetic. This is the laziest, most transparent ruse since the Wizard of Oz didn’t even bother to put a fucking door between himself and his audience. If Elon had come in and found a couple tens of billions in cuts, demonstrated an understanding of what they are, and submitted them to Congress, that could have been something. But he’s just gone around firing people and causing havoc. And then he’s posted fake numbers on a website that might as well say “we’ve saved sleventy flibbity-jillion dollars”.

I can’t imagine any non-Trump administration doing something like this. Politicians have always lied, but usually about less consequential things, like what they did during the war or what wild shenanigans their penis has been up to. Publishing a bunch of unverifiable, almost-certainly-made-up numbers is just so brazen. It seems like in any previous administration, someone would have said “Wait, we can’t just pull numbers out of our ass and assume that no one will check.” Someone’s dignity would have demanded that they say that. The government used to be run by self-important people who — for all their flaws — didn’t like looking ridiculous in public. Now we’re run by shameless clowns who think that having any ethics or conscience means you’re a cuck.

And there’s a market for what they’re selling. Though DOGE’s claims can be unraveled with a few seconds of sleuthing, most people won’t devote that few seconds. They’ll just look at the topline number — or see someone (probably Elon) post it on social media — and think “cool!” Back in the day, that person would have learned about DOGE’s claims through a newspaper article titled “DOGE Cuts Unverified”, or from a news anchor exuding concerned skepticism with every cell in his body. But now, many people exist in media environments in which DOGE’s claims go unquestioned. It was more than a century ago that P.T. Barnum said “there’s a sucker born every minute”, and it seems that in modern times, every last sucker has been accessed through direct-to-sucker marketing techniques.

Unfortunately, DOGE is just savvy enough to make their website look real. The design is fine, even though in a just world, this would be a hot pink Geocities page with purple Jokerman text. There would be cheesy GIFs of dancing frogs and pop-up ads for herbal Viagra — the site would scream “NOT CREDIBLE” to anyone who sees it. As it stands, the “NOT CREDIBLE” message is only obvious if you do a little bit of digging. And many people won’t do that digging, which is why we’re in a golden age for bullshitters in government.

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