The task force says that claims about the cost-cutting agency’s demise are ‘fake news.’
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) directly refuted a report that suggested that the Trump administration-established task force does not exist any longer, hours after senior White House officials pushed back on the claims.
Over the weekend, Reuters published an article with a headline that included a quote from Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor saying that DOGE “doesn’t exist,” with months to go before it’s officially scheduled to sunset. On Nov. 23, Kupor said the article contained selective editing to create an attention-grabbing narrative.
In a post on X on the evening of Nov. 24, DOGE wrote that the Reuters story is “fake news” and that the Trump administration “was given a mandate by the American people to modernize the federal government and reduce waste, fraud, and abuse.”
“Just last week, DOGE terminated 78 wasteful contracts and saved taxpayers [$335 million],” the organization said, referring to a post it sent out on social media over the weekend that gave an update on contracts that federal agencies have terminated. “We’ll be back in a few days with our regularly scheduled Friday update.”
The contracts were terminated by agencies over the previous nine days and had a top value of $1.9 billion, DOGE also said, providing examples of the types of contracts and services that were eliminated.
They included $616,000 in IT services for the Department of Health and Human Services’ monitoring of its social media platform subscriptions, a $191,000 contract that included broadcasting operations in Ethiopia, and a $4.3 million IRS IT contract for project management related to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
In the Reuters report, Kupor told the newswire service that when he was asked earlier this month about DOGE, he said “that doesn’t exist,” although the article did not provide more context about what he said.
Kupor, however, took issue with Reuters’s reporting in a post on Nov. 23 and said that the newswire service had spliced his full comments across paragraphs to “create a grabbing headline.”
“The truth is: DOGE may not have centralized leadership under [the United States Digital Service],” he wrote in the post on X.
“But, the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.”
