The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by billionaire Elon Musk, announced Thursday it has terminated 269 federal contracts worth $845 million in recent days — a savings of $255 million for American taxpayers.
“Over the last several days, agencies have terminated 269 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $845M and savings of $255M, including a $50k @Interior consulting contract to ‘provide facilitation and collaborative problem solving services,'” DOGE stated on its X account.
In addition to the contract terminations, DOGE reported that agencies have cut $90 million in grants, including $995,000 for a “BIPOC culinary program” and $625,000 for a “Russian-Far East biodiversity partnership.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi revealed that the Justice Department had eliminated additional grants, including $2 million for “national listening sessions of individuals with lived experience” and $625,000 for research assessing “the efficacy of police departments’ LGBTQ liaison services.”
These latest cuts follow DOGE’s announcement last week that it had eliminated 57 federal contracts, including $120,000 for an “Indonesia environmental policy and law enforcement specialist,” resulting in claimed savings of $1.5 billion.
The federal efficiency agency, created by President Donald Trump through executive order on his first day in office January 20, reported on its website that it has saved an estimated $160 billion to date through various measures, calculating to approximately $1.8 billion per day since its inception.
DOGE says these savings as coming from “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”
The agency’s aggressive approach to cutting federal spending has faced legal challenges from Trump’s political opponents, who want the federal spending to continue unchecked.
Nineteen Democrat-led states and the District of Columbia filed a federal lawsuit in Maryland in March seeking to block layoffs of federal probationary employees and reinstate those who had been dismissed.
U.S. District Judge James Bredar, appointed by former President Barack Obama, initially ordered the administration to rehire the employees, calling the firings unlawful because affected workers were not provided advance written notice.
However, this ruling was overturned on April 9 by a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, a day after the Supreme Court overruled a similar decision in a separate California lawsuit.
DOGE’s latest announcement comes days after it highlighted the National Science Foundation’s cancellation of 402 grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that cost taxpayers $233 million.
The Trump administration has made government efficiency and spending cuts a central focus of its first 100 days, with DOGE serving as the spearhead of these efforts.