Elon Musk makes false claim about billion-dollar National Park survey
Elon Musk claimed in a Fox News interview Thursday night that the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, frequently uncovers "billions" in government waste, citing a supposed $1 billion survey about National Parks as an example.
CBS News found no evidence that the Department of the Interior spent or planned to spend that much on a survey or on any single contract.
"We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more, casually." Musk said in the interview. "For example, [a] simple survey that was literally a 10-question survey [that] you could do with SurveyMonkey, costs about $10,000, the government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that."
Bret Baier followed up, "For just the survey?"
Musk responded, "A billion dollars for a simple online survey: 'Do you like the National Park?'"
Later in the Fox News interview, Steve Davis, who works closely with Musk at DOGE, said that the online survey was part of an $830 million contract by the Department of the Interior that DOGE stopped.
That appeared to be a reference to a March 19 post on X, where the DOGE account wrote that the Federal Consulting Group, an arm of the Department of the Interior, "brokered a $75M contract to design website customer satisfaction surveys, and then attempted to award $830M to conduct similar surveys." The post added that the contract was canceled before it was signed, and that the Federal Consulting Group would be dissolved that week.
CBS News has reached out repeatedly to the White House for more information. The Department of the Interior declined to comment.
No $830 million contract is visible on DOGE's online "wall of receipts," the list of contracts the group said it has terminated. According to data published on the site, only five canceled contracts have a total estimated value of over $800 million, and none are from the Department of the Interior.
In the interview Davis also said "[DOGE] publishes these things on our web site for maximum transparency. So, now, the general public — it would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now, anyone can just log into doge.gov anytime and see these payments as they are not yet in real time."
But CBS News and other news organizations have been reporting for weeks on the errors and overstatements of savings that have been posted there.
DOGE recently re-formatted their website making it more difficult for the general public to confirm savings and cancellations. Anyone accessing the "wall of receipts" page needs to manually navigate through 711 webpages to see the entire list of contracts, 923 webpages for grants and another 68 pages for cancelled or expired leases.
Available federal contracting data does not show any individual contract valued at over $800 million awarded by the Department of the Interior over the last 17 years.The DOGE "wall of receipts" currently lists 366 cancelled contracts for the Department of the Interior; 199 of those are listed as $0 in savings. The total savings DOGE claims for the remainder adds up to only $144 million.
The three largest alleged savings for canceled contracts associated with the Department of the Interior on the "wall of receipts" are for $37 million, $23.5 million and $10.75 million. The latter two appear to be mislabelled and are actually USAID contracts.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made the same misleading claim about the survey in President Trump's Cabinet meeting on Monday.
"One of those contracts was to do surveys of individuals. $830 million for surveys," Burgum said. "The surveys came back, and a survey was an 8-and-a-half-by-11 sheet of paper with 10 questions that anyone's child in junior high could've put together, or AI could have done for free."
"It's a fraud," Trump responded.
The entire Department of Interior budget for 2024 was nearly $19 billion, which provided funding for 14 agencies, offices and groups within the department including the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
