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How much has Elon Musk's Doge cut from US government spending? (April 2025)
www.bbc.com

... Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) - set up to cut US government spending - claims to have saved, on average, more than $10bn a week since President Trump entered office.

"We're talking about almost $200bn and rising fast," Trump told the BBC when talking about Mr Musk's cost-cutting drive on 23 April.

Doge's website says it is focusing on cancelling contracts, grants and leases put in place by previous administrations, as well as tackling fraud and reducing the government workforce.

BBC Verify has looked at the agency's biggest claimed savings, examining the figures and speaking to experts.

Our analysis found that behind some of the large numbers, there is a lack of evidence to back them up.
How does Doge report savings?

In October, Mr Musk pledged to cut "at least $2 trillion" from the federal government budget. He subsequently halved this target and on 10 April talked about making savings of $150bn from "cutting fraud and waste" by the end of the next financial year in 2026.

The US federal budget for the last financial year was $6.75tn.

Doge publishes a running total of its estimated savings on its website - which stood at $160bn the last time the site was updated on 20 April.

However, less than 40% of this figure is broken down into individual savings.

We downloaded the data from the Doge website on 23 April and added up the total claimed savings from contracts, grants and leases.

Our analysis found only about half of these itemised savings had a link to a document or other form of evidence.

US media has also highlighted some accounting errors, including Doge mistakenly claiming to have saved $8bn from cancelling an immigration contract which in fact had a total value of $8m. ...


[good graphic in the article]

In a nutshell:

......

So, thanks Joe Biden and USAG Merrick Garland for shielding these Mossad Sayanim from investigative and international public scrutiny for four years: 21 Jan 2021 to 19 Jan 2025, leaving the rest of us with unstable warmonger Dummkopf Trumpf, the "BBB," and oligarchic rule.

Israel first over America, right AIPAC?

GFY AIPAC Democrats and Republicans!

And "Genocide Joe!" -- please enjoy your $417,000 per year pension -- the largest taxpayer-funded pension of any former POTUS in intergalactic history.

Does Palestinian blood wash off your hands easier with all that pelf?

Hiroshima victim being treated:


~snip~

Of course, not mentioned in my OP are these two non-military, but important books that should be read as well:
Beethoven's Letters (translated by Dr A.C. Kalischer, 1972) and Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, 1962).

More from the article ...

... As a resident of a coastal region prone to hurricanes, one never wants to tempt fate. And in truth, since it is only early August, the bulk of seasonal activity definitely lies ahead of us. But all indications are we can look forward to a quiet season.

Why this season should be below normal

Why? First, there's the start. By the metric of "accumulated cyclone energy," a good measurement of overall intensity and duration of tropical systems, this year's value to date is less than 30 percent of where things normally are.

Historically, the Atlantic basin has usually seen three or four named storms by now, with one of those becoming a hurricane. ...

The leading seasonal hurricane forecaster, Phil Klotzbach at Colorado State University, has steadily been revising his outlook downward. In April, he and his team predicted 13 named storms and six hurricanes this season. In his latest, and final, outlook issued Wednesday, he is predicting nine named storms and four hurricanes. He expects the season's accumulated cyclone energy to only be about 40 percent of normal levels.

This would be a well-below-normal season, and certainly a welcome one for coastal residents in the United States from South Texas to Florida to Maine. ...

There's always a catch

Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist who writes at The Climate Brink newsletter, wrote a few weeks ago about emerging data that indicates it is possible this year's El Nio will be off the charts.

"The multi-model median for the event's peak currently stands at 3.6C, roughly 0.8C hotter than the prior record of 2.75C set in 2015-16," he said. "For context, the gap between the strongest and the fifth strongest El Nio of the past 150 years is only about 0.5C. The models are forecasting something outside the envelope of anything we have ever observed." ...


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