DOGE is BS, a Brief Update

After I wrote a little technical takedown of DOGE, a group of people in the DOGE cabal happened to do a half hour interview on Fox News trying to convince you, dear reader, that what they are doing is Good and Noble and that the fraud is Very Big.

In this interview Elon said that nobody could point to specific instances where they were wrong, despite the fact that hundreds if not thousands of people have pointed to many specific instances when they were wrong. DOGE officials toted a bunch of dubious claims to this interview, many half truths (like the story about the retirement mine and why it exists), and many outright falsehoods. Their single, specific receipt, or so they claimed, was a supposed $830 million contract to conduct surveys. I do not think you'll be surprised to know that this is completely and utterly false. As the NYT writes:

But there is no single contract for one 10-question web survey worth $75 million, let alone $830 million or $1 billion listed in DOGE’s own list of terminated contracts as of Monday.

It turns out the $830 million is the total budget of a cross-agency federal consulting group within the Interior Department that provides a number of services to each agency, to train executives and, yes, to conduct some surveys.

Feel free to watch the uninformative but potentially entertaining interview. I'll leave it up to you to determine whether this latest set of claims are continued evidence of their sloppiness, or if there are more nefarious plans at work.