From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams.

This is the Daily.

Today.

Since the moment President Trump took office, Elon Musk and Doge have wielded an unprecedented

level of power to help the new administration slash

the U.S. government. And so far, they've claimed to have cut tens of billions of dollars in

wasteful spending. Today, my colleague David Ferenthold explains why those claims are not

what they seem and what that tells us about Musk's project

to shrink the federal bureaucracy.

It's Tuesday, March 4th.

David, we've been hearing a lot about what Doge, the Elon Musk Group tasked with saving $2 trillion, has been up to in recent weeks.

They've done massive layoffs.

They've done job purity tests.

And they actually have made billions of dollars in cuts.

But you've been looking into exactly what they say they've done,

which is kind of like an audit, if you will, of Doge. And I'd love it if you could explain how

you went about doing that. Well, so I should start by saying that it's really hard to know most of what

Doge is doing. Doge is really opaque. It's operating in a lot of different places at once,

operating almost in total secrecy. So we've been looking for a window, any sort of window to see

the kind of analysis they're using to justify all the things they're cutting and the things

they want to cut. And a couple of weeks ago, they actually gave us one window into their work.

They set up a website. Basically, it's a kind of a primitive

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