The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) website has been updated showing estimated savings of $160 BILLION or $993.79 per taxpayer. The per taxpayer amount is calculated using an estimate of 161 million individual federal taxpayers.
The estimated savings comes from all areas of the federal government encompassing waste, fraud and abuse, and also taxpayer funded programs that have either grown outside of their chartered missions or are not in alignment with American values and interests.
Savings come from a combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.
Some highlights over the past week include:
Credit Card Update: DOGE continues to track down and cancel credit cards used by federal employees and tighten up control on who can spend the taxpayer money and where. The program to audit unused/unneeded credit cards has been expanded to 30 agencies. After 7 weeks, approximately 470,000 credit cards have been de-activated.
DOGE said on X, ”As a reminder, at the start of the audit, there were ~4.6M active cards/accounts, so still more work to do.”
DEI in the National Science Foundation (NSF): DOGE congratulated NSF on X, “Great work by @NSF canceling 402 wasteful DEI grants ($233M in savings), including $1M for “Antiracist Teacher Leadership for Statewide Transformation”.”
Going forward grant awards will be based on merit, competition, equal opportunity, and excellence. DEI ideology is inherently discriminatory and exclusionary and President Trump made it clear that DEI will have no place in the government or any government funded agency or program.
NSF announced it is terminating awards not aligned with agency priorities, ensuring current and new awards are consistent with the NSF mission. NSF said, “We are committed to creating opportunities for all Americans everywhere, without exclusion of any groups.”
US Department of Agriculture (USDA): USDA agencies terminated 57 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $1.6B and savings of $1.5B, including a $120K USDA contract for an “Indonesia environmental policy and law enforcement specialist”
Internal Revenue Service (IRS): Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant said on X, “The IRS has successfully saved $2 billion without any operational disruptions by eliminating wasteful contracts, such as auto-renewed licenses unused for years. The IRS has removed non-technical people from technical leadership roles in engineering and replaced them with experienced engineers.”
“Going forward, skilled engineers will drive technical decisions. The IRS has its fair share of software talent. The IRS is strengthening privacy by empowering technical cybersecurity experts and reducing system complexity,” Bessant wrote. “Fewer contractors and a leaner tech stack mean a smaller attack surface and stronger data protection.”