Co-President Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has added a bunch of useless data to its website after being called out for not being transparent about the cuts the unelected billionaire is unilaterally trying to make to the federal government.
In an Oval Office news conference on Tuesday, Musk said that DOGE is "trying to be as transparent as possible” about what it is up to.
“In fact, our actions—we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X and to the DOGE website. So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don’t think there’s been—I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the DOGE organization," Musk said.
That statement was a flat-out lie. At the time Musk made that comment, the DOGE website had zero information about the cuts it had made. It was just a black background with the ridiculous DOGE logo that said "The people voted for major reform."
Musk has also refused to make his financial disclosures public, so Americans have no idea what kind of personal stake the richest man on the planet has in the decisions he’s making in the government.
What’s more, he’s even threatened to prosecute people who revealed who is working for Musk at DOGE, falsely claiming it was a crime to report on who government employees are. So much for Musk’s commitment to free speech.
Worst of all, many of the cuts Musk and DOGE wrote about on X—the disinformation site known as Twitter before Musk bought it and drove it into the ground—were based on lies.
For example, Musk falsely claimed that the United States Agency for International Development sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza.
“Tip of iceberg,” Musk wrote in a post on X of the alleged budget outlay, adding, “My guess is that a lot of that money ended up in the pockets [of] Hamas, not actually condoms.”
But no condoms were sent to Gaza. Instead, they were sent to the Gaza province in Mozambique, where USAID was trying to fight the spread of HIV.
At his Tuesday Oval Office news conference, Musk admitted he effed up after a reporter asked him about the lie.
“Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” Musk said. “Nobody is going to bat 1,000. We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”
“This is basically the whole DOGE scam: misread a spreadsheet, make no effort to understand the actual purpose of the program, and proceed to torch it on twitter. Rinse, wash, repeat,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, said in a post on X.
After Musk was ridiculed on X about his transparency claim, DOGE’s website was miraculously updated to include more info.
Still, the "savings" tab on the website now leads to a one-sentence note that says, "Receipts coming soon, no later than Valentine's day" along with an emoji heart. So the most important information—what the advisory commission is cutting—is nowhere to be found.
The rest of the information on the website contains absolutely no relevant or useful information.
The "Workforce" tab says how many federal employees there are and how much their total wages cost per year.
But that doesn't give any information about what kind of jobs they are doing, or how critical those jobs are to the function of the government. Bloomberg Law reported that across the board cuts would hobble certain critical government functions that are already facing staff shortages, such as food and drug safety inspectors, scientists to assess chemical levels in the air and water, and officials to approve patents.
DOGE also created a "Regulations" tab on the site, which includes an "Unconstitutionality Index" to show the "number of agency rules created by unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by Congress."
It’s ironic that DOGE uses the term "unelected bureaucrats," as that is exactly what Musk and his team of racist and unqualified DOGE bros are as they try to take an ax to federal spending.
In that same tab, the DOGE bros then list the number of words in all of the regulations per agency—as if that has any bearing into whether a regulation is good or bad.
For example, it says the American Battle Monuments Commission has more than 12,000 words in 50 sections of regulation. The American Battle Monuments Commission, created in 1923, is the "guardian of America’s overseas commemorative cemeteries and memorials"—such as the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery where WWI soldiers are buried and the Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial, both in France, where soldiers killed in WWII are buried. Apparently DOGE thinks the regulations regarding how those monuments and memorials are maintained are bad because they contain too many words.
The website also now links to the executive order Donald Trump signed that created the ridiculous DOGE commission. That executive order has 658 words.
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