The total amount of spending across “all agencies,” as recorded at usaspending.gov, appears to be 50 percent higher than most experts interviewed for this article think it actually was.
In fiscal year 2024, for instance, the website pegs total spending at $9.7 trillion, when several experts said it was probably about $6.5 trillion. No one could explain the much bigger figure. Officials with usaspending.gov conceded to RCI that their totals were wrong and said the error, which shows up in similar fashion for the past five fiscal years would be fixed soon. They offered neither an explanation for their higher total nor an estimate of what it should be. Two weeks later, the erroneous figures remain.
Budget experts say the website’s seeming multitrillion-dollar error illustrates a core challenge Musk and his colleagues at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) face as they try to reduce Washington’s spending. In a twist on the classic Washington line, the problem is not just following the money but finding it in the first place. The federal government has become so big and so expensive that even experts have trouble navigating the morass of contracts, awards, grants, loans, and other items that have transformed the U.S. spreadsheet into a labyrinth pitted with dead ends and rabbit holes.
“When you see the process has become so arcane even I don’t claim these are real, hard numbers, then you know the process is definitely and irreparably FUBAR,” said David Ditch, using the acronym for “fouled up beyond all repair.”
“There is no total view of the budget. Congress simply takes last year’s number and changes it, usually to a larger number,” she said. “So the unique thing about DOGE is that it is providing a top-to-bottom audit. It’s not just asking if the books balance, but what is the money actually spent on.”
While Musk initially promised to cut some $2 trillion from the federal budget—and news accounts have focused on his efforts to reduce the federal workforce—DOGE’s real accomplishment so far has been to bring attention to the federal government’s broken accounting systems.
On Jan. 16, four days before Biden vacated the White House, the Government Accounting Office stated that it was “unable to provide an opinion on the reliability of the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2024 and 2023.”
The Office of Management and Budget has also flunked six of the 24 departments and agencies it looked at, including Labor and Education. The Defense Department has failed seven consecutive audits, while the Department of Education hasn’t gotten a “clean” opinion for three years.
At the Treasury’s usaspending.gov, which experts use regularly and consider valid despite the big topline errors, nearly $150 billion is slotted every year into an “unreported data” box.
The government’s use of antiquated systems helps explain some of Musk’s team’s biggest mistakes so far. This month, they claimed that millions of deceased people—some listed as more than 300 years old—are receiving social security benefits. It turns out that DOGE probably misread the data sets, which includes millions of dead people not receiving benefits, in the antiquated, 1960s-era computer system that Social Security still used to disperse more than $1.3 trillion to some 68 million people last year.
Musk conceded errors that would be made, but experts told RCI some are impossible to avoid when trying to get a visible net around the surging ocean of federal government spending.
“That complexity isn’t just an inconvenience—it shields waste, fuels inefficiency, and makes reform harder,” she said. “A government that has grown too big and too far-reaching makes it difficult to track what’s spent, let alone rein it in.”
“All this seems ordinary to most Americans, but before Musk sent his teams in to get information, it was very time-consuming to get data,” she said. “In Washington, that’s just protocol: You ask for something, and it could take months to get. But DOGE, in partnership with OMB, is no longer allowing the stone-rolling that plagued the last Trump administration.”
That total is almost certainly a low-ball figure because the feds often rely on states, which also disburse money and often provide spotty accounting of their spending.
Yet that money has proven extremely difficult to claw back.
An analysis by the Associated Press, for example, “found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent.”
“Combined, the loss represents 10 percent of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid,” the AP reported.
All that DOGE has done so far has dominated headlines and infuriated an entrenched elite in Washington’s bureaucratic warrens. But Trump remains a steadfast supporter of Musk’s work thus far and, in typical fashion, promises more to come: “In less than a single month, the Department of Government Efficiency has already saved over 55—this is just a short period of time—$55 billion, and we’re just getting started.”
