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.

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.

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.

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...

Addendum: This may also all be illegal - each year, the omnibus bill has a clause forbidding spending on "publicity or propaganda". While historically this has been difficult to enforce, Noem's launch video plainly involves puffery and partisan politicking.

www.law.cornell.edu/wex/publicit...

Meanwhile, Republican representatives have introduced the "Defund Government Sponsored Propaganda Act"

which will defund NPR and PBS. Awesome.

Here's the story that's coming together: a federal government agency is funneling tens of millions of dollars into microtargeted fearmongering propaganda, lining the pockets of Republican political operatives who helped Trump get elected & Trump-friendly media companies (Fox News, X) in the process.

Sara Taylor is an interesting one: she was an aide to George W. Bush, having worked on both of his campaigns, where she helped "refine the political art of microtargeting".

Recall that the DHS announcement states "ads will be hypertargeted, including through social media, text, and digital"...

Designated Market Media (DMM) was formed by several former NRCC & NRSC directors and senior aides. It's not a stretch to assume that "Safe America Media LLC" is either the same or an extremely closely related entity.

Some archived partner bios can be found here:

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti...

So how did they choose this newborn vendor?

I found that the address listed on FPDS belongs to Michael McElwain - the former deputy political director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. He is also the President of DMM, a Republican media firm.

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti...

Safe America Media LLC has no internet presence because it appears to be a shell company that was created only a few days before the contract solicitation date.

Rather than an open and competitive request for proposal, DHS solicited hand-selected vendors citing "unusual and compelling urgency".

Semafor previously reported on a $200M IDIQ with contracts awarded to two vendors so far: People Who Think LLC, and Safe America Media LLC.

We can see $35.5M has already been awarded to Safe America Media LLC for a 6 month performance period.

www.semafor.com/article/02/1...

A thread on Kristi Noem's "multimillion-dollar ad campaign" aimed at... telling undocumented immigrants to deport themselves?

If it wasn't clear from the launch video (which could have been a Trump campaign TV spot) and the sheer absurdity of the concept, this is a giant grift. I dug deeper today: