President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency said it has recently uncovered nearly $1 billion in savings by slashing federal contracts and grants as it continues its task of streamlining the government by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.
DOGE posted Thursday on X that over the past several days, federal agencies ended 269 "wasteful contracts" with a total value of $845 million and savings of $255 million, including a $50,000 Interior Department consulting contract to "provide facilitation and collaborative problem-solving services."
Agencies also terminated $90 million in "wasteful grants," DOGE wrote, including $995,000 for a "BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] culinary program" and $625,000 for a "Russian-Far East biodiversity partnership."
DOGE reported on its website that as of April 20, it has saved an estimated $160 billion through asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions. That is approximately $1.8 billion a day since it was created by a Trump executive order on Jan. 20.
The latest moves by DOGE follow an announcement last week that it had slashed 57 federal contracts – including $120,000 going to an "Indonesia environmental policy and law enforcement specialist" – resulting in total savings of $1.5 billion.
At least 19 Democrat-led states and the District of Columbia challenged DOGE's efforts to streamline the government, filing a federal lawsuit in March in Maryland to block the layoffs of federal probationary employees, and to reinstate those who had been dismissed.
U.S. District Judge James Bredar, a Barack Obama appointee, ordered the Trump administration on April 1 to rehire the employees, calling the firings unlawful because the affected workers were not provided advance written notice. But a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia overruled Bredar's order on April 9, a day after the Supreme Court overruled a similar decision by U.S. District Judge William Alsup, a Bill Clinton appointee, in a separate lawsuit in California.