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Last week, the U.S. Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE) published a “receipt wall” on its website celebrating savings made by cutting federal contracts. However, it has now eliminated the five biggest “savers” from the original list.

In the time between the two publications, several US media outlets reported errors in the first list. However, the department did not give any justification for the elimination of items, nor for how the "savings" had already reached 65 billion dollars (61 billion euros), in the new publication made yesterday, Tuesday.

At issue was a cut in an $8 billion contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Service. But that’s nearly the entire budget of the agency, so it would be hard to make that kind of savings from a single contract. In this case, the glitch stemmed from an earlier error in the federal contracting database, but several experts said the agency should have figured it out.

In addition, three cuts totaling $655 million were announced at the Agency for International Development, which was actually just the same cut announced three times. This error also appears to have stemmed from a misunderstanding of how government contracts work, but many experts have said that it would be very difficult for a single cut to reach $655 million. In reality, the new list presents a much smaller savings figure for the Agency for International Development: €18 million.

Finally, a $232 million cut to the Social Security Administration had initially been announced, but it turns out that was for a large contract with Leidos, and what DOGE actually canceled was just a small part of that same contract: a $560,000 project that allowed users to select their gender with a cross.

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt sent a written statement to the media that did not address the case but stressed the importance of the cost-cutting initiative.

The "wall of receipts" is the way in which DOGE has been documenting its work and making it public, however the errors present in the document and the lack of control that appears to be at the base of it have raised questions about the work of the department that aims to achieve mass layoffs and cuts in the functioning of the central agencies of the United States.

The US media has already reported that some of the contracts cancelled this week, and announced on the DOGE website, also contain errors, such as one that allows for a cut of 1.9 billion in the Treasury Department, which The New York Times reports was cancelled during the Biden administration.

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