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 Bier 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...
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