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... Take a quick look at the Department of Government Efficiency's list of canceled contracts and you'd think the Agriculture Department spent $25 million on diversity trainings four separate times, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau spent $600 million on management consultants.

DOGE's "wall of savings" and list of canceled contracts include many eye-popping "receipts" like those. There's just one problem: Many of the so-called receipts aren't receipts at all. They're negotiated agreements with known government contractors, who might provide future services.

"This is a way to make it easier for the government to order, if it does order, and to set up good prices that they can order. It doesn't mean they buy it," Steve Kelman, who ran the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in the Office of Management and Budget in the 1990s, said of the contracts.

The agreements are known as blanket purchase agreements (BPAs), working more like a catalog of things the government might buy than a placed order. But listed alongside actual orders for goods and services on DOGE's "wall of savings," they create a wildly exaggerated and false impression of government spending. ...