'Going Against Trump Policies Is Not Fraud': White House Panned Over Absurd Defense of DOGE

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made a show Wednesday of providing "receipts" to bolster the Trump administration's claim that an Elon Musk-led advisory commission known as DOGE has already uncovered massive fraud at federal agencies.

"There's a lot of paper we can show you," Leavitt declared.

But a closer look at the evidence Leavitt presented to members of the press underscores the ridiculous sleight of hand the Trump White House is using as it attempts to justify Musk and his lieutenants' lawless rampage through departments responsible for overseeing the nation's public education system, dispersing Social Security benefits, and supporting lifesaving medical research, among other critical functions.

The documents Leavitt waved during Wednesday's briefing were screenshots of contracts purportedly "found" by the Musk-led DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, which has dispatched staffers—many of them with close ties to Musk—across more than a dozen federal agencies.

One of the items Leavitt highlighted was a $36,000 contract for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Another was a roughly $57,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture for climate change mitigation efforts in Sri Lanka.

Neither of those examples, nor any of the others Leavitt cited, constitute evidence of fraud—a point that one reporter pushed the press secretary to address during the briefing Wednesday.

“Are all those things you just mentioned fraud?" asked CBS News reporter Jennifer Jacobs. "Or are they just contrary to the president's policies?"

Leavitt's reply indicated to critics that the Trump administration is defining as "fraudulent" programs which it opposes, a narrative that depicts the administration's attacks on federal agencies and spending as commonsense efforts to rein in abuse—rather than a far-right demolition project spearheaded by an unelected billionaire with glaring conflicts of interest.

"I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent, they are wasteful, and they are an abuse of the American taxpayer's dollar," Leavitt insisted. "This is not what the government should be spending money on. It's contrary to the president's priorities and agenda."

Journalist Aaron Rupar wrote in response to Leavitt that "going against Trump's policies is not fraud." (The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has estimated that the federal government could lose up to $521 billion to fraud per year, defines fraud as "the act of obtaining something of value through willful misrepresentation, which is determined through a court or other adjudicative system.")

Watch the press secretary's remarks:

Journalist and media critic Adam Johnson welcomed the growing push for concrete evidence regarding the large-scale fraud DOGE purports to have revealed during the first 30 days of Trump's second White House term.

"Musk's definition of 'fraud' is 'spending priorities duly approved by Congress and previous presidents (including Trump 1.0!) that the richest person on Earth randomly decided he doesn't like,'" Johnson wrote on social media. "This is obviously not a very honest or useful criteria for 'fraud' and thus reporters should frame Musk's attack on the liberal and administrative state as an ideological project, not one concerned with some type of value-neutral 'efficiency' or 'cost-cutting.'"

Reutersnoted Wednesday that "of the 15 agencies Musk's team have targeted so far, nine were singled out for elimination or downsizing in Project 2025."

A former Republican staffer acknowledged to Reuters that DOGE's playbook thus far "has not been for the dollar savings, but more for the philosophical and ideological differences conservatives have with the work these agencies do."

"It's clearly a bad-faith effort rooted in ignorance and a knee-jerk desire to shrink the federal government, both for ideological reasons and the creation of space to preserve the tax cuts for the rich."

Since the formal inception of DOGE at the start of Trump's new term, critics have expressed deep skepticism over the advisory body's stated mission of identifying and rooting out fraudulent federal spending and regulations, particularly given its leader's ideological and financial commitments and motivations.

"It's clearly a bad-faith effort rooted in ignorance and a knee-jerk desire to shrink the federal government, both for ideological reasons and the creation of space to preserve the tax cuts for the rich and corporations that will be locked-in later this year," Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote last month.

In testimony before the House Oversight Committee earlier this week, Donald Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that "if President Trump was serious about promoting government efficiency," he would have "prioritized strengthening... already-existing independent government watchdogs," such as inspectors general across federal departments.

Instead, Trump fired inspectors general en masse, a move that—according to Sherman—"substantially increases the risk that government waste and fraud will go undetected, and unremediated."

Even when its stated objectives are taken at face value, DOGE has not lived up to the lofty rhetoric of its leader and boosters inside and outside the Trump administration.

Speaking to reporters with Musk at his side earlier this week, Trump claimed without a shred of evidence that DOGE has already found "tens of billions of dollars" in improper government spending. The president added that "when you get down to it, it's going to be probably close to a trillion"—Musk's stated goal.

But The Washington Postnoted that Trump's figure doesn't "come anywhere close" to matching numbers DOGE has posted on its X account.

"We added up all the figures posted, taking most of them at face value, though virtually no documentation was presented," the Post observed. "The numbers add up to about $6 billion a year, though $4 billion comes from a proposed cap on National Institutes of Health research overhead payments to universities, medical centers, and other grant recipients. A judge has blocked that for now."

The Post's Aaron Blake wrote in a column Thursday that "Trump would indeed seem to believe that many things he simply doesn't like or agree with are fraudulent, which helps explain the White House's posture right now."

"But that doesn't mean they are fraudulent," he added. "And that's a problem when you're using that as your justification for dismantling large portions of the government."