DOGE lies break Polymarket prediction market
Polymarket says it’s no longer taking bets on whether Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will cut $3 billion worth of DEI contracts by the end of February as its own data tracker is too unreliable.
The market asked, “Will DOGE cut $3B of DEI contracts before March?” and had a volume of $16,352. Its outcome was based on data collected by DOGE-tracker, Polymarket’s site launched this month.
However, Polymarket canceled the market “because the underlying data used for this market’s resolution source (doge-tracker.com) changed.” It said, “This market will resolve to 50-50. All losses will be refunded.”
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Polymarket’s DOGE-tracker can’t keep up with DOGE mistakes
DOGE is proving to be an unreliable source when it comes to reporting government savings. Indeed, the $55 billion figure the organization currently lists as its total savings has been called greatly exaggerated and even “fraudulent.”
X user @electricfutures exposed a number of errors made by DOGE and claims the agency is correcting its work in response to their findings. They say the total savings are closer to $32.5 billion and still represent “a huge overestimate.”
This week DOGE’s team reportedly mistook an $8 million contract for an $8 billion one while the Donald Trump administration and Musk greatly exaggerated the number of dead people it claims are improperly receiving benefits.
DOGE also reportedly triple-counted one contract to reach $2 billion in savings and recorded another IT contract as having saved $1 billion, despite the contract already spending 80% of the funds.
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DOGE has corrected these errors, but @electricfutures notes that it “did NOT change the underlying flaws in how they were estimating savings for any of the other contracts.”
They said, “They have made no obvious attempt to understand the nature of these errors or to update their methodology.”
“Given that they’ve repeatedly attempted to conceal mistakes without admitting the mistakes, it is clear as day that the $55 billion is fraudulent,” they added.
DOGE disputes the New York Times article on its $8 billion mistake, claiming it has “always used the correct $8 million in its calculations,” and that it corrected an error made by an agency contracting officer in 2022.
DEI contracts and policies aimed at encouraging “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” are being torn down by Trump’s new administration and Musk’s DOGE agency. Last Friday, DOGE threatened to pull further federal funding from the US Department of Education (DoE) unless DEI policies were removed.
It had already cut $1 billion from DoE contracts that gutted the federal agency’s research and statistics office.
US Senator Patty Murray said that Musk is “bulldozing the research arm of the Department of Education — taking a wrecking ball to high-quality research and basic data we need to improve our public schools.”
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