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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

Also worth highlighting that The Upshot found this error on the first item they reviewed. If already the first one you check is wrong, then the Bayesian in me has a hard time having much confidence in the rest of it.

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There are more oddities for sure. For example, when they cancel a multi-year contract they are considering the entire value of the contract as savings even if a significant chunk of the money has already been distributed.

On "Wall of Receipts" on the DOGE website there's a switch with "total contract value" and "savings" options. I guess that the purpose of the second option is to exclude money that has already been paid for that contract. It should be the default option, but of course they want to show a bigger number. But I see some strange cases where total contract value is lower than savings, but that's in real estate, I don't know how that works and what they're doing with that.

https://www.doge.gov/savings

I found and posted that here Monday before the NYT:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43084891

Apparently DOGE are the ones that did it first. DOGE were the ones to update the value to the $8M from $8B that was incorrectly in the system.

So they reported they saved $8 billion after discovering it was really $8 million?

I'm not sure that's better.

No, they were the ones who found that someone entered $8B in the system, asked them to change it to $8M. They never reported saving $8B in their own savings for this program. The numbers they used are tied into the systems so it only updates with the system.

DOGE did claim $8B in savings on their own system on Monday. That's the whole article is about. There's even a screenshot.

The $8B -> $8M change was made in Federal Procurement System on January 22nd.

So if DOGE is who found the issue in the procurement system originally, that means they lied about saving $8B weeks after they discovered it was only for $8M.

Now update your priors about who runs it :-)

"Contradictory statements about Musk make it unclear who runs DOGE" - https://abcnews.go.com/US/white-house-claims-elon-musk-doesn...

I'm not really sure how that's relevant? I'm not even American, I don't care who runs it. This seems like pointless flame bait.

I think the ubiquity of general disarray and confusion surrounding this agency is relevant to the discussion of whether or not we can trust their intentions and claims. So, further evidence of the extent of this general disarray and confusion is worth considering and not "pointless flame bait".

You don't need to be the titular head of an agency/department/service/whatever to be the defacto head.

It's unsurprising given this RAGE/DOGE is mass distraction and/or government obliteration with all of the care of a grizzly bear eating a salmon.

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