"We will make mistakes," Elon Musk said at a press conference a month ago. "Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected."
The billionaire entrepreneur, who is unofficially in charge of the federal cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), was certainly right about that. News outlets have repeatedly identified embarrassing and consequential mistakes in DOGE's data on purported spending cuts, including contracts that had not been awarded yet, contracts that were not actually canceled, contracts that were terminated before Trump took office, contracts that were counted multiple times, conflation of contract caps with actual spending, the inclusion of past spending in estimates of future savings, and overvaluation of contracts, such as the notorious data entry error that transformed an $8 million Immigration and Customs Enforcement contract into an $8 billion cut.
While conceding his fallibility, Musk promised to be "as transparent as possible." Toward that end, he said, "we post our actions" on the DOGE website and X account, striving to be "maximally transparent." That characterization of DOGE's activities has proven to be less accurate.
