Agencies Terminated, Descoped 94 Wasteful Contracts With $8.5 Billion Ceiling Value, Says DOGE

The DOGE initiative has saved $214 billion in taxpayer funds, according to the agency’s website.

Various federal government agencies have terminated and descoped 94 wasteful contracts over the past five days, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) said in an Oct. 4 post on X.

The terminated contracts had a ceiling value of $8.5 billion and saved $546 million, DOGE said.

This included a “533k Dept. of Commerce consulting contract for ‘editing support services to the Fisheries Resource Division’ and a $61M HHS research contract for ‘solutions to support innovation in pursuit of affordable and better healthcare,’” according to the post.

This follows an earlier X post on Sept. 27 in which DOGE reported terminating and descoping 55 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $3.8 billion, saving $622 million.

According to the DOGE website, the initiative has saved $214 billion worth of taxpayer funds as of Oct. 4. This comes to roughly $1,329 in savings per taxpayer.

The savings were achieved through actions such as grant cancellations, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, asset sales, workforce reductions, and the deletion of fraud and improper payments, DOGE said.

Agencies that have seen the most savings include the Department of Health and Human Services, General Services Administration, Social Security Administration, Office of Personnel Management, and the Small Business Administration.

Some of what DOGE describes as the “strangest, most baffling” uses of government funding uncovered by the agency include a $10 million grant for decolonizing the curriculum, a $2.8 million grant to address “historic and systemic racial inequities” in STEM education, and a $1.5 million grant to advance “reproductive justice” and behavioral health among blacks and “birthing people.”

In an Oct. 3 X post, DOGE criticized an Oct. 1 NPR article that claimed DOGE had failed to deliver on its promises of boosting efficiency and cutting costs.

The article is “full of inaccurate and misleading statements,” the agency said in its post.

NPR said that a contract termination showing $4.3 million in savings was not actually terminated, and almost all the money had already been spent.

DOGE published the receipt for $4.3 million of de-obligated funds under the contract, which it said was the “very definition of taxpayer savings.”

By Naveen Athrappully

Read Full Article on TheEpochTimes.com