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Comment by aredox | Hacker News Reader

If they have the ability to change data, then absolutely none of their claims can be trusted. Neither Musk nor his A-team of hackers have demonstrated any integrity through their career - contrary to HN guidelines, the default position is to assume the worst from them.

Think about it once they begin putting the opposition on show trials.

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their claims can't be trusted because they fail at basic accounting and reading. Something something malice incompetence.

https://twitter.com/electricfutures/status/18918983362081056...

> The single biggest ticket item is a DHS contract listed as saving $8 billion. Wow, that's a huge contract! Actually no, it's $8 million. They must have tried to automate scraping the FPDS form and failed.

It is even worse, this $8M contract is alread partially executed, so only $5.5 millions are left.

And it does not say anything about what is being cut by cancelling the contract and whether it is useful or not.

This is inaccurate. In September 2022, the agency contracting officer mistakenly wrote $8B instead of $8M when logging in the FPDS database. DOGE discovered this error in January 2025, and the agency updated FPDS accordingly.

Except DOGE (at the time of this article) kept their claim of saving $8B and pointed at the old contract to make their stats look better.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...

The DOGE website initially included a screenshot from the federal contracting database showing that the contract’s value was $8 million, even as the DOGE site listed $8 billion in savings. On Tuesday night, around the time this article was published, DOGE removed the screenshot that showed the mismatch, but continued to claim $8 billion in savings. It added a link to the original, outdated version of the contract worth $8 billion.

Trustworthy and transparent. I guess fixing a typo is worth $8B?

"By examining past versions of the contract listed on the Federal Procurement Data System, The Upshot determined that the federal award, approved in September 2022, had initially listed a total value of $8 billion. But on Jan. 22 this year, that figure was updated to $8 million...

It's possible that DOGE or someone else in the Trump administration can claim credit for fixing the error in the contracting database, given that the value was downgraded to $8 million two days after President Trump took office. "

-NYT TFA

So Bureaucracy incompetence, mistake is around for >2 years, DOGE fixes it.

Screenshot and FPDS DB were out of sync, "PDS posting of the final termination notices can have up to a 1-month lag."

It was a typo. No one was paid that amount and wouldn't have been paid that amount. If fixing a typo in a reporting system is a huge win for you I guess...ok.

Oh, so you mean they weren’t incompetent, they knew the correct figure but deliberately lied about it?

No, the DOGE website scrapes from the FPDS DB. The DB wasn't updated immediately. Like I quoted in an adjacent comment "PDS posting of the final termination notices can have up to a 1-month lag."

Your bias is blinding you to what is the obvious explanation that I'm sure you'd recognize if you saw it on a non-political website.

I just want to point out one more thing: DOGE didn't advertise this 8M savings anywhere, there wasn't a speech about it etc. This was found on https://doge.gov/savings

Just incompetent, then.

This talking point keeps blowing my mind.

They occasionally make minor mistakes! If only voters had known that occasionally minor mistakes (in reporting of all places) might be made, they'd have insisted we stick with the bureaucracy they know and love!

But hey, I guess it at least did happen. It's better than the grasping-at-straws "they'll probably leak your SS number" talking point. And the "he'll redirect treasury payments to himself" talking point.

I think you're missing the point, which is not "they make mistakes" but "they have no idea what they're doing".

That's the case being made, yes. It's not supported by the mistakes reported, at least yet.

How is it not? If you report a saving of 100% of a contract that is 80% already executed, you either don't understand what you're doing or you are intentionally lying.

Or you're working, despite opposition, against the largest bureaucracy the world has ever known, on a very tight timeframe with limited resources, and staffed by humans that are not perfect.

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