Of the DOGE list's initial claim of $16 billion in savings, half came from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) listing that was entered into the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) in 2022 with a whopping $8 billion maximum possible value.
According to a DOGE post on X, that number was a typo that was corrected in the contract database to $8 million on Jan. 22 of this year before being terminated a week later, and DOGE "has always used the correct $8M in its calculations."
But for much of this week, DOGE listed the outdated $8 billion for its savings claims while linking to the termination notice with the smaller ceiling amount.
Some time Tuesday evening, the DOGE link was changed to point at the original $8 billion entry, and on Wednesday morning, the site was revised once again to show $8 million in savings — but still linked to the larger, outdated claim. The site also continues to list $55 billion in total estimated savings — the $8.5 billion in alleged contract savings and another $46.5 billion with no specifically documented source.
Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE did not respond to multiple requests for clarification about the DOGE data and savings claims shared online.
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Just over half of the contracts touted by DOGE, accounting for $6.5 billion in alleged savings, haven't actually been terminated or closed out as of Wednesday, according to an NPR analysis of a federal government procurement database, even though the site's "wall of receipts" listed these items.
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In all, estimated savings from the initial DOGE list of just over 500 contracts that NPR found to be cancelled runs closer to $2 billion, with roughly half coming from the gutting of the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/w8hLJ
TIL
EXCEPTION JOIN. I thought the SQL dialect I usually use at work for data warehouse queries (Presto) didn't have anything like this, but it does, and calls itEXCEPT: https://prestodb.io/docs/current/sql/select.html#union-intersect-except-clauseGood to know. Beats my usual approach of using
WHERE x NOT IN (SELECT ...). I'm mostly a front end developer so these things are outside my comfort zone sometimes.At my workplace, we'd have a data pipeline (think something like Apache Airflow) that pulls the master table once the daily partition lands, joins the exception tables, then produces a "clean" output table which is the one that people would actually query. At a previous employer, we would have used a materialized/indexed view (we used SQL Server for both OLTP and OLAP). Is that not common in government?