The top story on WaPo right now deserves its spot: "Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding."
"Government infusions at key moments helped Tesla and SpaceX flourish, boosting Musk’s wealth"
That's more than half of what the DOGE website says it has "saved" through layoffs, firings, contract terminations and funding freezes.
BTW the NYT had a story yesterday that talked about how DOGE quietly removed many billions from its "wall of receipts" after a slew of media outlets called total BS on their math.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/upshot/doge-spending-cuts-changed.html
"These were the original five largest savings on its list:
An $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The actual contract in question was worth $8 million. The mistake seemed to stem from an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database. But contracting experts said that the service should have known better: ICE’s entire budget is about $8 billion, making it implausible that one contract could be so large. The U.S. DOGE Service adjusted the figure on the site after The Times wrote about it, and said in a post on Mr. Musk’s X platform that it had “always used the correct $8M in its calculations.”
Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was actually a single cut that was erroneously counted three times, as first reported by CBS News. That mistake also seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the way government contracts work; they sometimes have “ceiling values” far in excess of what will be spent. Experts said this cancellation was unlikely to produce anything close to $655 million in savings even once. Now, the site lists a much smaller savings for these three cancellations: $18 million in total.
A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. Here, Mr. Musk’s organization appeared to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as reported by The Intercept, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project to let users mark their gender as “X.” The DOGE site now shows that small cut instead.
Some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to make some of the same types of errors.
The largest savings on the latest version of its list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department. But The Times reported last week that this contract was canceled last fall, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president — and when DOGE did not yet exist."