DOGE touts billions in canceled government contracts. Where are the numbers coming from?

In an ongoing effort to highlight what he says is waste, fraud and abuse, President Donald Trump recently reeled off a list of government funded initiatives: $19 million for biodiversity in Nepal; $10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique; $14 million for social cohesion in Mali. 

"Forty-two million for Johns Hopkins, great place, to research and drive social and behavior change in Uganda, $42 million," Trump said in a Feb. 18 news conference. "What about us? What about social change in our country?"

Trump and billionaire Elon Musk frequently list these kinds of government contracts without details about how they originated or what their purpose was. And supporters of the Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-cutting efforts frequently claim the contracts had been shrouded in secrecy. 

DOGE has a website listing federal contracts it says it has canceled with some details on their purpose and purported savings. The list includes a $1 billion Social Security technology support contract; international development contracts worth millions of dollars for climate action, medical support and diversity efforts; and Education Department consulting and data reporting. 

DOGE has not provided evidence that the contracts are fraudulent. But Trump frequently refers to them as fraud.

The contracts weren’t secret. And Congress approved the spending. The DOGE website says the department’s estimated savings are $55 billion, but its "wall of receipts" reports savings of about $8.6 billion, which is 0.1% of the federal government’s $6.8 trillion budget in the last fiscal year.

The number of competing claims about the contracts can be dizzying and difficult to understand. PolitiFact dug in to help you understand where the numbers are coming from and how to understand their scope. 

Many Trump and Musk supporters have claimed the receipts DOGE is combing through were previously secret or hidden from the public before Musk’s team made them public. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a Feb. 15 X post that the spending has "been hidden from Congress for decades."

That’s inaccurate. The vast majority of the contracts Trump has singled out and DOGE has listed on its website have been publicly available on federal government databases since those databases launched. USASpending.gov, launched in 2007, tracks all contracts, grants and awards worth more than $25,000 that each government agency gives out. 

For example, the database shows a grant related to male circumcision in Mozambique, which Trump singled out. It’s a contract with Associacao Elos, a nonprofit, to fund voluntary medical male circumcision, a practice the World Health Organization has recognized as an HIV and AIDS prevention tool. 

PolitiFact did not find all of the grants Trump mentioned in the Feb. 18 press conference on USASpending.gov or on DOGE’s website. It’s possible the contracts had not begun before DOGE canceled them. We contacted the White House but received no details about whether information about the grants is publicly accessible. 

Typically, government contracts are not handed out behind closed doors. They go through an open bid process, in which the government agency publicly requests proposals and determines the lowest price and best value, said Brandon Daniels, chief executive officer at Exiger, a supply chain management company that works with federal contractors. The exception is when there’s only one company that can fulfill the required work.

For the $14 million contract to promote social cohesion in Mali that Trump noted, the U.S. Agency for International Development received four bids and chose Chemonics International.

Multiple departments review contracts to ensure they’re being awarded properly, Michael Embrich, a former policy adviser in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, said. Contracts have to be approved by multiple officials before money is delivered, he said.

"Federal spending is one of the most regulated things I’ve ever seen in my life," Embrich said. "The federal government gives you a harder time about spending money than any government at any level that I’ve ever worked with." 

Federal agencies do not spend money without guardrails or direction. Government spending is set by acts of Congress that obligate money for specific programs to further agencies’ missions and Congress’ priorities. 

"It’s not a free-for-all; it’s a negotiated, approved budget, with strings attached," Daniels said.

Agencies generally have discretion on how to spend the money within the law’s guidelines. They give regular reports to Congress on how money is spent and provide justifications for how they will spend money in their annual budget requests. 

The DOGE website’s estimated savings includes workforce reductions and other changes that aren’t detailed. The webpage listed about 1,100 contracts the department says it has terminated, as of Feb. 20, along with about 100 real estate lease cancellations. 

Although the website claims the department’s estimated savings is $55 billion, the reported savings from the "wall of receipts" on the page total about $8.6 billion. The website says the list is a subset of canceled contracts and it will be updated twice weekly.

More than one-third of the contracts DOGE lists as canceled report $0 in savings, because the money had already been spent before DOGE terminated the contracts.

We asked the White House for details about how DOGE reached the $55 billion estimate, but received no additional details. 

Daniels said canceling contracts alone does not prove large savings. 

"Transparency matters, and making sure these savings are realized — not just projected — is the key to proving DOGE’s impact," he said.

Many of the contracts listed are agreements that set a ceiling for how much the government will purchase from a vendor. The government may spend less than the maximum.

For example, DOGE’s site lists $10 million in savings from canceling a diversity, equity and inclusion training contract with CulturePoint LLC in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The contract had a potential total of $10 million, but nothing had been agreed to or spent before DOGE terminated it.

Fraud is a real challenge for the federal government, though neither Trump nor DOGE have shown proof that the contracts it highlighted were fraudulent. The Government Accountability Office in 2024 estimated the federal government could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud. 

There are already several federal government entities that identify and investigate fraudulent or inefficient spending. The Government Accountability Office, inspectors general, and the Justice Department are all involved in ensuring government funds are spent properly. Trump fired more than a dozen inspectors general during his first week in office. Embrich said the systems in place work well to prevent major fraud. 

But the sprawling size of the federal budget means fraud does sometimes happen, Daniels said. 

"Without aggressive oversight, the government can be an easy target," he said.