Specific companies are already feeling the effects of cost cutting by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with the first wave of publicly available data showing a number of government consultants facing hundreds of millions of dollars in canceled or renegotiated contracts.
They include some prominent names, such as Deloitte. The ended contracts for that multinational London-based firm, DOGE claims, total more than $219 million in savings for taxpayers.
The effect on Deloitte’s bottom line isn’t clear but is a relatively small piece of Deloitte Worldwide’s reported 2024 revenue of $67.2 billion.
Other development and consulting firms — many such smaller businesses dot the Washington area and focus on US government contracts as their main source of revenue — could see much deeper relative cuts.
One recent lawsuit filed by a group of these companies — Global Health Council v. Donald J. Trump — charged that “they have suffered and will continue to suffer enormous and concrete harm to their businesses” because of the administration’s actions.
At least one plaintiff charged that actions by the White House and DOGE have also left open “months of unpaid invoices” for work already done.
An official at one firm told Yahoo Finance that 20 contracts had been terminated in recent weeks and added that “the immediate issue is the federal government’s failure to pay for work it commissioned and approved — that’s fundamentally unfair.”
Another — perhaps more prominent — group of companies also faces cuts but at a vastly smaller scale: media outlets. They are now selling fewer subscriptions to the government for their services after a wave of cancellations.
Those savings add up to a bit more than $13 million in possible lost revenue, a Yahoo Finance analysis found, representing only about 0.18% of the overall claimed DOGE savings so far.
The final impact for all of these companies — and actual savings to taxpayers — remains far from clear as the DOGE team has repeatedly revised its claimed savings downward in recent days in response to errors being pointed out. The exact terms of the contracts also aren’t known.
What is clear is that much of the early focus has been on consulting and development companies such as Deloitte, DAI Global, and International Development Group.
In one example — the largest cut claimed by Musk’s team — the group says taxpayers have been saved $654,990,000 due to ending a contract with International Development Group Advisory Services.
But the website of the firm in the middle of the contract touts just $25 million in current projects.
The terms of that specific contract aren’t known, but it’s listed in the DOGE data as an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract, which is commonly used by the government to set the upward parameters of future work — without committing to ever paying the full amount.
Elon Musk appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 20 in Maryland and brandished a chainsaw gifted to him by Argentinian President Javier Milei. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) ·Andrew Harnik via Getty Images
DOGE’s focus on development and consulting firms — often categorized in the government data as “professional support” — is also a reflection of Musk’s early focus on the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Many of the canceled contracts reflected work done for that agency in far-flung locales like the Middle East and Africa.
All told, Musk’s group is claiming almost $7.2 billion in total savings from canceled or renegotiated contracts, with USAID representing about $5.2 billion of that figure.
The court filing in Global Health Council v. Donald J. Trump also charges that the administration’s actions “have had and will continue to have a catastrophic effect on the humanitarian missions of several plaintiffs.”
Despite the cost-cutting focus on consultants and professional support companies, media organizations have gotten much public attention from the Trump White House.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt touted the administration’s efforts earlier this month to cancel those payments, with an emphasis on Washington-focused Politico, which offers services aimed at covering specialized wings of Washington, such as government agencies and energy policy.
The government has canceled at least 90 Politico subscriptions across different departments, according to the DOGE data, saving about $8.5 million.
Leavitt has also charged that these subscriptions — which appear to be standard — amount to “subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers’ dime” and noted that “will no longer be happening.”
Politico is likely to take a hit, but the government is far from subsidizing an outlet that was sold in 2021 for $1 billion. It was reported at the time that Politico brought in $200 million annually in revenue.
Another significant media recipient of government subscriptions is Bloomberg, which has lost over $2 million in subscriptions. That’s likely to be an even smaller hit to the company’s bottom line, which reportedly passed $10 billion in annual revenue in 2019.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt holds up a copy of government contract receipts during a press briefing on Feb. 12. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images) ·ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS via Getty Images
The impacted companies are sure to evolve in the weeks ahead as Musk and the DOGE team turn their attention to other areas, especially the $850 billion Department of Defense. Both DOGE and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are discussing plans for cuts.
William Blair industrials research analyst Louie DiPalma noted in a recent Yahoo Finance live appearance that many forces in Washington are looking to increase defense spending, so the effects there are far from certain.
“There seems to be strong support for continuing to increase the defense budget,” he noted.
DOGE is claiming a total of $55 billion in savings through a range of means, from fraud detection to workforce reductions, but hasn’t provided a detailed accounting of those changes yet.
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
