The first amendment is under direct attack.

An angry thread in which I explore allegations from the NYP and Trump's EPA that climate funds under Biden were being funneled into organizations "created out of thin air for the purpose of receiving these funds".

Spoiler - every accusation is a confession:

threadreaderapp.com/thread/18980...

EPA Press Office Fact Checks the Washington Post’s Coverage of Waste & Abuse of Taxpayer Dollars | US EPA EPA News Release: EPA Press Office Fact Checks the Washington Post’s Coverage of Waste & Abuse of Taxpayer Dollars

From my DMs, check out this official press release from EPA.

It reads like it was written by an angry teenager. The pettiness of the Administration is filtering down. I am embarrassed about where we are.

To all the career EPA civil servants, you deserve better.

I have a feeling that the desperate demands to cut 10, 30, 50% of headcount across agencies for absolutely no reason is in part due to pressure from Elon trying to materialize numbers he pulled out of thin air. Despite all the bad accounting & exaggerations, they still lack evidence for 70%.

I am genuinely curious where the other $75B of cuts they claim could come from. Official accounts so far are 33k layoffs, which doesn't come close, + 77k deferred resignations which is more like negative $4B (what we are paying those employees not to work for the next 8 months).

To elaborate on methodology: I scraped FPDS for start & end dates & contract values, identified any discrepancies between FPDS & DOGE "savings", replaced BPA ceiling values with a simple forecast based on prior spending, and divided each by years remaining prior to cancellation.

Biggest line item is still this BPA for modernizing IRS IT services. I've previously explained why $1.9B is a massive overestimate, but in light of plans to halve IRS headcount, this cut is especially egregious. It's a handout to billionaire tax cheats.

bsky.app/profile/elec...

My commentary: why did we spend $40M on a slipshod flock of twits to turn off USAID? By all accounts, they made no effort to understand the importance of programs they axed, condemned people to sickness & hunger around the world and stranded US workers in dangerous situations abroad in the process.

(Grants can't be independently audited as DOGE currently provides no metadata)

Of note, 80% of cuts came from dismantling USAID. Today, Supreme Court ruled that Trump admin must release $2B to contractors for work rendered, so this # should come down.

archive.ph/yTITR

The DOGE website currently lists $30B of cuts consisting of $15.2B to contracts, $14.5B to grants, & $470M to leases.

After fixing accounting errors, this amounts to $4B/year of contracts and $170M/year of lease cancellations. If we assume similar term for grants, total is roughly $8B/year?

America’s Park and Forest Rangers Are Being Fired, and Oil and Gas Bosses Are Now in Charge Early impacts of Elon Musk and his team’s purge of the federal workforce are already hitting America’s parks and public lands, while oil and gas industry loyalists shift remaining government resources...

🚨Elon Musk and his team’s purge of the federal workforce is already hurting America’s parks and public lands, while oil and gas industry loyalists shift remaining government resources to prioritize corporate profits. www.americanprogress.org/article/amer...

New EO to promote timber production on FS and BLM-with FWS implications related to the Endangered Species Act and NEPA..

(b) Within 60 days…the FWS…shall complete a strategy on USFS and BLM forest management projects under section 7 of the ESA to improve the speed of approving forestry projects.

Today, DOGE bragged about canceling what appears to be a program monitoring endangered fish populations in the Colorado Basin.

They call it "consulting"; in reality it's scientific research that costs a whopping $500k/year and protects an ecosystem supporting a multibillion dollar fishing industry.

*Note: not endorsing any DOGE estimates as their methodology is fundamentally flawed - merely starting with the lowest hanging fruit.

For the record, in 4 days since the site update, none of these have been fixed. Changes only seem to be made when mistakes go viral on Twitter & get media attention.

So, after discounting these obvious errors, the sum of "savings" of unreviewed* contracts is no higher than it was prior to this site update. Yet their estimate of total "savings" has increased by $10B. Seems legit! 🙄

Another IDV with $52.7M "savings" that appear to be pulled out of thin air. In this case, the ceiling was only $3M, but was exceeded (underlining how meaningless the ceiling value is) due to an $8M award in 2023 for a national sex abuse hotline (again, important?!) Altogether, spend averaged <$2M/yr

Here is $37M in "savings" for canceling an ESPC.

ESPCs are financed via third party and paid back using annual energy savings. Unless the buildings are going to be abandoned, this was essentially guaranteed to *save* taxpayer money in the longterm. Canceling it is net negative.

Next up: They take credit for $146M of "savings" for nothing more than cleaning up contracts that ended between 10 and 20 years ago. This one is pretty self-explanatory.

Of note: DOGE's actual mission, per Trump's Executive Order, is "modernizing Federal software to maximize governmental efficiency".

Instead they are *killing* modernization efforts (including cybersecurity upgrades to prevent fraud and Direct File to save taxpayers money).

Finally, there's additional important context here. This BPA was actually quite costly for the IRS to set up. To ensure fair competition, they had to litigate and recompete multiple times throughout 2024: archive.ph/UrtcM

Thus, by canceling, DOGE has likely *added* future administrative costs.

Here are multiple lies that DOGE continues to tell:

- taking credit for saving money that would never be spent
- showing lump sums over unspecified time frames (in this case 6 years) rather than annualized "savings"
- calling everything "waste" even when it's perfectly justified

As you can see above, the ceiling was set to $1.1B - however, only $311M was spent over 5 years. That's an average of $62M per year!

To summarize so far: DOGE is claiming to save $1.9B by cutting only ~$62M/year, on services that are not wasteful but actually pretty important!

To get an idea of how much would actually be spent, we can look at how much was spent on the same services in the recent past.

This contract is the successor to another 5-year BPA that ended in 2024 called IT-EPMSS. It's part of an ongoing effort for the IRS to modernize its IT services:

The largest item is this $1.9B multiple-award BPA. It's an agreement between the government and some qualified vendors that simplifies the process of repetitively ordering supplies and services as they're needed over time.

It's NOT a commitment to spend a specific amount of money.

In addition to increasing their estimate of "total savings", DOGE uploaded another batch of contract cancellations totaling $3.4B in "savings" (by DOGE's count... not by mine). A quick scan through the 10 largest line item shows that at least 62% of those "savings" are imaginary. Details below...

As a reminder, after silently fixing errors that reduced the sum of itemized "savings" by nearly half, they continued to claim total savings of $55B. This indicated fraud - this number was evidently not derived from the actual contract values, but pegged to a specific number to fit a narrative.

Previously they claimed what's listed on the website accounted for 20% of $55B, meaning it should have summed to $11B - but it never did. Now they've completely removed that language from the website so that any mistakes we find can be passed off as inconsequential bugs in their code.

I guess I owe an update here. Thanks for the shoutout @thetnholler.bsky.social!

Since my original posts, as NYT notes, DOGE has adjusted the "savings" amount for all 5 biggest line items down to nearly 0. At the same time, they've increased the "total estimated savings" by $10B.

archive.ph/fCO84

I am not optimistic about the odds of anyone stopping this, though. Here's the current IG of DHS... a Trump appointee previously found to have wasted taxpayer funds & misled Congress, and who coincidentally survived Trump's Great Purge.

www.pogo.org/investigatio...

Things get even more precarious when one considers the implications of hypertargeting - how can a government watchdog track all ads being shown and ensure they comply? Nobody will know besides the contractor, who in this case also happens to be comprised solely of partisan Republicans.