Does DOGE's Math Add Up?

Title: Does DOGE's Math Add Up?

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Hope you turned all the analog, non-automatic clocks you might still have ahead over the weekend. We once had a guest who wasn't here at ten o'clock when we were starting the show, and we called him at home. I think we woke him up. He said, "What? It's ten o'clock? I thought it was nine o'clock." For anybody who might be in that boat, yes, we sprung ahead on Saturday night. It is ten o'clock on Monday. Hope you had a good weekend. NPR's Stephen Fowler is with us.

He's a political reporter with NPR's Washington desk, where he currently reports on the restructuring of the federal government and the future of the Democratic and Republican parties after Donald Trump's return to office. For his reporting the last few weeks, I'll call him our lead DOGE receipts correspondent because he's revealed eye-poppingly big differences in what they claim to be saving the American public and what their published receipts actually show. Stephen, thanks for your reporting, and thanks for coming on WNYC with us today in addition to your network appearances that air on all the NPR stations. Welcome to our show.

Stephen Fowler: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: You first grabbed my attention, I want to say a few weeks ago now, when I heard you reporting on NPR that DOGE's savings page launched with a top line claim of $55 billion saved. Your review found estimated savings of only about $2 billion, a fraction of what the receipts even claimed, and of course, a very small fraction of the unverifiable claim of $55 billion overall, as you reported. Let's go through some of that. I'm sure our listeners would like to know, especially because of all the sound and fury and confusion around all this, so one line at a time, where did the $55 billion in savings claim come from?

Stephen Fowler: The top line number basically amounts to a Trust Me. The Department of Government Efficiency has this savings website, and they have this estimated savings that they say is a combination of everything from contract cancellations, lease terminations, asset sales fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings and workforce reductions. It's this top-line nebulous amount, but, in the interim, they have offered this wall of receipts that for a long time had contract cancellations or a subset of them.

Now it's got lease terminations, it's got grant terminations, all of these other sort of things. The top-line number already can't be verified. From there, there is a subset of some of the receipts of some of the things that were canceled. Actually going through and looking at the receipts and comparing them to other public government data sources, you see that that number gets smaller and smaller because some of the things were canceled that aren't actually canceled, some of them were canceled where there's no more money to be spent. The big trumpeted claims of, right now, it says $105 billion saved, is nowhere near what can actually be measured.

Brian Lehrer: On those contracting cancellations, you gave a number of examples in your original report. One that made some news was an apparent $8 billion, yes, I did say $8 billion typo. What was that?

Stephen Fowler: This information on the DOGE site is imported from contract data that government agencies put into this massive system. It's called FPDS, and it is this public data source. When somebody entered in something for the Department of Homeland Security several years ago, an $8 million contract had a couple extra zeros added, so it looked like it was worth up to $8 billion. Now, DOGE did not put that typo in several years ago, but they did import that data into their receipts' tracker. When somebody pointed it out, that was corrected down from $8 billion to $8 million, but there were no changes to these top line savings claims. There were typos, there were arrows that weren't actually corrected or addressed.

Brian Lehrer: Another really interesting one, since everyone is wondering if they're going to go after Social Security despite claiming they're not, claims of a $250 million saved from a Social Security contract that wasn't actually terminated. Now updated to reflect a more modest $560,000. You credit The Intercept for reporting on that one. How do they get from a $250 million claimed to barely $500,000, actually?

Stephen Fowler: The actual thing that was terminated was a gender X marker program within this larger IT-related contract. In the government's contracting system, there's a code that says termination full or partial. There's not a lot of explanation within this government system to say, oh, we terminated this dollar amount for this reason this time. It's actually something in talking to government contracting experts, they say, "Yes, there are things that need improving with our system to provide more transparency. This is a perfect example of it." They had the full value of the contract as something being terminated, even though it was just a tiny little piece.

Brian Lehrer: After your initial story came out, you reported they pared back the claims of contract termination savings from an original $16 billion out of the original $55 billion down to $9.6 billion. $16 billion down to $9.6 billion. You reported that for the second time in as many weeks that math doesn't add up. What's an example of what seemed to be so inaccurate even after the alleged revision?

Stephen Fowler: There are a lot of things. On my story, there's actually a cool graphic that I made. It's something called a Sankey chart where you can see the flow of the initial claims and how it got revised up and down, how the new claims were added, and everything, to just visualize these big numbers and the changes we're talking about. Brian, the most interesting thing to me in this second round of things was this proposal that was canceled for a cybersecurity and project management for the IRS. It was like this almost $2 billion multiyear agreement that they just canceled, but looking at the contract and looking at other sources on the internet, it was something that was already slated to be canceled. They were going to do it again down the road because there were people that protested how that bid was awarded. It was in federal claims court, and so other non-DOGE machinations were at work to explain why this contract wasn't existing anymore. They claimed as a big saving. There are just a number of things that even just simple things, such as here is an agency, here is a contract that we claimed, and you go to click on the link, and it went to something completely, completely different. It's just a level of sloppiness that shouldn't ordinarily come from something that is claimed to be an official government website.

Brian Lehrer: What's the total claim of savings versus the documented bottom line from your most recent accounting?

Stephen Fowler: The most recent one, and numbers have been updated and tweaked there, it's only about $2.3 billion from this larger claim of about $16 billion or so in receipts that I could match to the federal procurement database that showed that it was a contract, that it was canceled. There was potential money to be spent that is now no longer going to be spent. It's still something that you can't fully put a number and declare this is actually how much it's saved because there are so many moving parts and pieces and claims and updates and adjustments. Needless to say, it is just a fraction of what is on this website.

Brian Lehrer: Stephen Fowler is with us. If you're just joining us, NPR correspondent who's been comparing claims by DOGE of how much money they're saving the taxpayers to what the actual receipts show. I want to ask you about whether they're answering questions about these apparent disparities. You reported on March 1st that the White House has not responded to multiple requests over the prior two weeks to explain the DOGE savings process. I assume those were requests by you on this beat, or why changes have been made to the data, or if they're concerned about an official government data source sharing inaccurate information. Are they not being transparent or open to detailed follow-ups from journalists, or are they doing so in other ways? They do acknowledge some mistakes.

Stephen Fowler: I have not received a response back to any of the requests for comment, clarification, understanding of how things work from the White House and from the Department of Government Efficiency for several weeks. Other outlets have had more luck getting some background explanations and answers for why things have changed or not changed, but there hasn't really been much transparency around it, especially for an effort that has been touted by the President and by Elon Musk, who is in charge of this effort, that it is maximally transparent. A lot of it is just flying blind in figuring out and trying to ask other sources to help clarify.

Brian Lehrer: Can you file a Freedom of Information Law request, as reporters typically do, to get government information that's public information but not being disclosed voluntarily?

Stephen Fowler: For a lot of DOGE things? No. DOGE is a rebranding of the United States Digital Service, and that was moved into the Executive Office of the President, which means that they are exempt from a lot of the Freedom of Information laws. The other thing about transparency, Brian, is that a lot of the data for these things already exist online in other public government sources. This contracting, there's a federal procurement data system, whether it's lease terminations or building sales. There is inventory of owned and leased properties that are there. DOGE is actually taking public government accurate data and making it even less accessible and less transparent and less accurate than what's already out there in their accounting.

Brian Lehrer: Stephen, what's at stake in these errors that you're finding? Are you just documenting sloppy math or bad math, or are there consequences for human beings?

Stephen Fowler: There are consequences to all of these things. This is money that the government spent or promised to spend or planned to spend that it's no longer spending. There are a lot of debates that can be had and that have been had online about whether some of these things were priorities that should have been prioritized or not, but it's not really an example of waste, fraud, or abuse. There hasn't really been pointed to that. With these contract cancellations, there are different things that you have to take into account. Some of them were for consulting services, some of them were for things that never actually had money spent on them. When we're looking at a lot of these, especially with lease terminations and with the firing of government workers, it impacts the ability of the government to provide the public services that they say they're going to provide.

Brian Lehrer: Finally, you had a news story on Morning Edition today about them posting a list, as you reported, to say, "Hey, we've identified a bunch of buildings that we think are not core to government operations." Looking at that list, which has since been scaled back, you note it included things like the Justice Department building, the Department of Agriculture's headquarters, and a bunch of other huge government buildings in Washington, as well as across the country. The part that interested me the most was when you said the list of buildings they could close included a Taxpayer Assistance Center in West Virginia. You also mentioned Social Security offices and the disparate impact for certain parts of the country generally. Do people usually need to sign up in person for Social Security?

Stephen Fowler: Yes. What we found is there are a number of government building leases that DOGE has touted as being terminated or set to be terminated. The General Services Administration put up a list of buildings that they said were not core to government operations that could potentially be sold. Looking at the list of these buildings and matching them up to who occupies those buildings, it's a lot of in person services like Social Security offices, like IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers, Farm Service Agency buildings in hard hit hurricane areas in western North Carolina.

There are a lot of things that people need to do in person to go to an office. It's a lot of rural areas where a lot of these things are being proposed to be sold or closed, and so it's just going to make it harder for people to provide those services the same way. What we don't know, because they haven't answered the question, is, will these buildings be consolidated? Will there be different leases, cheaper leases? What happens to a Taxpayer Assistance Center where the lease ends at the end of this year? Will they replace it, or will you have to drive even further or try to go online, or try to answer the phone? That's something we don't know. It's not just abstract office space in Washington, DC for DC bureaucrats to have to find someplace to work.

Brian Lehrer: All these rural areas and smaller markets that you say are potentially going to suffer the disparate impact of this, has there been a lot of pushback from Republican members of Congress from those areas, or is that not your beat? You're just documenting the DOGE receipts?

Stephen Fowler: Actually, like a lot of DOGE things, it's move fast, break things. There's this initial wave of stuff that's coming out, and then the aftermath of, oh, maybe not this. Not this place, not that place, not that person, not those jobs. We have seen reports of, I think, the House Appropriations Chairman saying, "Good news, I've worked with DOGE, and they're not actually closing these three buildings in my area." Other local reporting of people saying, "Wait a minute, what do you mean you're closing, insert building here, in my district?"

Some of that is too soon to tell because we just fully understand the depth and the breadth of all of these proposed terminations and buildings being sold. There is a lot of pushback, especially because it's not like they're closing government buildings in blue states and blue areas, and Republicans are totally fine and untouched. There is no Democratic IRS office or Republican IRS office. It's just for the American people. As the full scope of this becomes more clear, there's been more pushback across the board from local communities saying, "Wait a minute, we need this."

Brian Lehrer: Yes. A couple of almost funny details there, if any of this can be funny, is you said if the whole list was acted on, there would be federal courts in some places with no court buildings, or that they're closing federal workplaces while requiring federal employees who were working remotely to return to the office. Are you saying some who are not being laid off will now have no office to return to, and there's no specific plan to have a workplace for each worker not being fired?

Stephen Fowler: It's complicated. The GSA, which is this agency that is the large federal landlord, and they manage a lot of federal buildings, they themselves have laid off a ton of their workers. There are entire regions of the country right now where there's just a skeleton crew of people to operate government buildings, no matter how many of them there actually may end up being, but there's this push to return people into the office. There's this push to downsize office space, and now there's figuring out the plan after the fact of what do you do?

One thing GSA has proposed is like turning government buildings into WeWorks of sorts, shared co-working spaces. We've heard concerns about privacy concerns and national security concerns because a lot of people in government have a lot of sensitive data that they can't just put on a hot desk in the middle of a space where anybody can come in and sit down and use that. it's a little bit like shoot first, ask questions later with a lot of these changes, Brian. With the buildings being sold, they say they're exploring all options, such as consolidations, or leasebacks, or other ways.

It's not like, okay, now there's no federal courthouses in Georgia, so there's no federal court, but there aren't really clear answers on what it looks like if you sell a million-plus-square-foot complex in Indianapolis that's home to a lot of the payroll part of the federal government. A lot of people have questions, a lot of people are confused, and a lot of people are concerned that these things are being done too quickly and too indiscriminately to understand the full consequences of it, like a lot of the DOGE effort across the government.

Brian Lehrer: Right. You may have just answered that, answered this next question that I'm starting to ask, but you reported that the list of buildings to be closed after it was initially posted got pared down, and then the list got deleted altogether. Another example of sloppy overreach being followed by a reality check or pushback from people they care about. I guess you just already said yes to that. I'm thinking of the indiscriminate firing of whole categories of people for bad performance when they actually had no bad performance reviews, and they're clawing some of that back now. Is this another thing like that?

Stephen Fowler: I would say so. The people that are coming in and making these decisions or pushing for these decisions don't seem to have much understanding of how the government works, good, bad, or otherwise. It's been incredibly hard historically to hire government workers, to fire government workers, to make any government decision move with any sort of speed. There are a lot of reasons for that, that are things that could and should be improved upon. There's also other good reasons. One of the buildings on the list that's on one of the maps that we pointed out in Washington, DC, some of the buildings that were on the list to potentially be sold are the steam and power and heating and AC buildings that power most of the government buildings on the Washington Mall.

Brian Lehrer: Nice.

Stephen Fowler: That's probably not something you want to sell. The fact that there was nobody there checking that, being like, "Maybe we shouldn't sell that off," it doesn't point to this being done with the degree of accuracy or thoughtfulness that maybe could still be done. Buildings are consolidated all the time. Workers are let go all of the time. All of these things happen normally, but not to the degree of seeming sloppiness, and carelessness, and speed with which we're seeing now with DOGE.

Brian Lehrer: Going forward, Stephen, this is your current beat for NPR. I've remembered your work from when you were at Georgia Public Radio. You've done other kinds of reporting for the network before. What's this like for you, following DOGE receipts? Are you up all night with a magnifying glass looking at specific line items and receipts, or how do you do your job on this beat?

Stephen Fowler: It's a lot. No magnifying glass, but I am sitting in front of three screens right now with several spreadsheets and a caffeinated drink and tape holding my eyelids open because it's a lot. There's a lot of things happening quickly, and it is different from the other things I've covered before. Luckily, there is a big team of us at NPR working on these stories and sharing expertise and notes. Really, we've had a lot of feedback. We added our signal bios into our stories that we're doing for people to securely message us with tips and feedback. "Hey, you should look at this," or, "Hey, I'm in such and such agency, don't quote me on record, but I can explain to you how my agency works so you can see if that's normal or not." It really has been overwhelming in mostly a good way of just trying to keep track of all of this, but a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of data, a lot of caffeine, and not a lot of sleep.

Brian Lehrer: There's where some of your member dollars go, folks, to buy tape for Stephen Fowler's eyes to keep them open as he goes through the details of DOGE receipts compared to DOGE claims. Stephen, thanks for sharing some of this with us just for WNYC today. Thanks a lot.

Stephen Fowler: Of course. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

 

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