Trump and Musk so far provide scant evidence for their claims of fraud

President Donald Trump said he will provide details Thursday of what he and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claim are billions of dollars of wasteful and fraudulent government spending.

“I’m going to read to you some of the names that hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars have been given to,” the president said in a news conference Wednesday.

In the weeks since Trump’s inauguration, he and Musk have made claims from the Oval Office and on social media about specific programs such as disaster relief for states, lodging for migrants in cities and that 150-year-olds are receiving Social Security payments. However, what few details were provided were vague, unsupported and sometimes false.

In fact, Musk admitted Tuesday that some of its claims might be “incorrect.”

During his first news conference since starting DOGE, Musk backtracked on a claim that $50 million was spent by the federal government to give condoms to Gaza and Hamas. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt first made that claim at a White House briefing last month and was spread wide by Trump, Musk and Republican lawmakers.

In fact, the condoms were sent to a province in Mozambique named Gaza as part of an HIV prevention measure.

“Some of the things I say may be incorrect and should be corrected. Nobody’s batting 1.000,” Musk told reporters in the Oval Office. “We all make mistakes, but we’ll act to quickly correct any mistakes.”

Musk claimed that he and DOGE have been “fully public” with “all of our actions,” but much of DOGE’s activity across numerous federal agencies has been learned through reporting, reaction from government employees affected by DOGE’s actions, or when DOGE and agency heads shut down government offices and sent employees home.

The updates that DOGE and Musk provide on his X social media platform are often vague and often don’t contain documentation.

On Thursday, the billionaire reposted to his 217.5 million followers on X a claim that Reuters was awarded $9 million by the Department of Defense for a “social engineering” program and called it a “scam.” Trump passed the claim along on his Truth Social platform, posting “GIVE BACK THE MONEY NOW!”

However, public records show the contract was awarded in 2018, during Trump’s first term, to Thompson Reuters Special Services division, not its news organization, following a request from the previous year from a Department of Defense agency for research on “automated defense social engineering attacks.”

Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell was one of the first to point out the specifics of the Reuters contracts Thursday morning in Bluesky posts.

Musk promised DOGE would use “maximum transparency” in its actions, even before Trump was elected in November. He said it would do weekly “DOGE casts” on X and update its Doge.gov website with its activity.

At the time of Tuesday’s Oval Office news conference when Musk was asked about transparency, the site showed only a logo and a slogan, but a day later, it was populated with posts from the DOGE X account, a regulations page that featured a bar graph of “agency rules created by unelected” and a “workforce” page that listed headcount for federal workers.

The website cites its “sources” as largely publicly available OPM data.

The bottom of the page features the following notice by DOGE acknowledging “there are likely some errors or omissions. We will continue to strive for maximum accuracy over time.”

When asked Tuesday to talk about the specifics of the fraud he found, Musk alleged there were people receiving Social Security benefits who were 150 years old. Musk did not provide any more details or specifics on how he found these people’s Social Security information.

Despite Musk’s companies SpaceX and Tesla being awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts over the past decade and SpaceX winning more than $17 million worth of contracts since 2015. Musk did not squarely address his potential conflicts of interest with the government on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, a procurement forecast document released by the State Department said Musk’s Telsa is forecast to win a $400 million contract to provide “armored Teslas” to the State Department later this year.

The contract, which was modified in December and scheduled to be awarded in September, is expected to last for five years, according to the procurement forecast document. However, the agency the next day updated its procurement forecast document, simply describing the procurement requirement as “armored electric vehicles” instead.

Asked by ABC News’ Rachel Scott if there were checks and balances in place to ensure that Musk’s companies aren’t benefitting from his access, he said that all of DOGE’s actions are “fully public.”

“So, if you see anything you say like, ‘Wait a second. Hey, you know what that does? That seems like maybe that’s, you know, that there’s a conflict there,'” he said. It’s not like people are going to be shy about saying that. They’ll say it immediately.”

Musk did not elaborate on where such a complaint would be publicized or whether he would publicly acknowledge it.

He said that DOGE’s transparency will build trust.

“And then you can see, am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not? It’s totally obvious,” he said.