I do not want to spend a lot of time on this current administration and its goals, but I think it’s important to read articles about what’s happening. Over the weekend, an article appeared that outlines, with the receipts, what exactly is happening and not happening with Elon Musk’s quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

It’s important to note that Musk is not a government employee. He’s not even an American citizen. I know everyone is tired of politics, and I am, too, but this is not good.

Writing in The New York Times, Aatish Bhatia, Emily Badger, David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Katz, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Ethan Singer conducted a complete investigative report on DOGE and found it lacking.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency say they have saved the federal government $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and a long list of terminated contracts published online this week as a “wall of receipts.”

President Trump has been celebrating the published savings, even musing about a proposal to mail checks to all Americans to reimburse them with a “DOGE dividend.”

But the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes, according to a New York Times analysis of all the contracts listed. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.

Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted. In others, contracts the group said it had closed were actually ended under the Biden administration.

The canceled contracts listed on the website make up a small part of the $55 billion total that the group estimated it had found so far. It was not possible to independently verify that number or other totals on the site with the evidence provided. A senior White House official described how the office made its calculations on individual contracts, but did not respond to numerous questions about other aspects of the group’s accounting. But it is clear that every dollar the website claims credit for is not necessarily a dollar the federal government would have spent — or one that can now be returned to the public.

This whole process is illegal and unconstitutional. However, it’s easy to see that they are planning on just bulldozing, and then when they lose in court, the damage has already been done.