The Department of Government Efficiency announced another wave of terminations of contracts late on Saturday. They also noted that thousands of loans totaling more than $300,000,000 were given to children.
These announcements are made as DOGE, which is led by Elon Musk, continues its efforts to eliminate waste and fraud in the federal government.
DOGE said it identified that the Small Business Administration (SBA) granted nearly 5,600 loans for $312 million to borrowers whose only listed owner was 11 years old or younger at the time of the loan. The loans were issued in 2020 and 2021 – while the world struggled with the COVID-19 pandemic – and it is unclear what they were used for.
The agency stated that it was highly unlikely to find arrangements in which this type of loan is allowed since all 5,593 loans used the wrong SSN.
They added, “@DOGE & @SBAgov will be working with each other to resolve this problem by the end of this week.”
DOGE announced the news by sharing a Tuesday post from X, where it revealed that the SBA had issued 3,095 loans totaling $333 million to borrowers older than 115.
In the Social Security Database, they were still listed as living. The agency reported that a person aged 157 years received a loan of $36,000. These loans include PPP loans (Paycheck Protection Program) and EIDL loans (Economic Injury Disaster Loans).
In Donald Trump’s speech to Congress on Tuesday, the president criticized instances in which he claimed that millions of people over 100 years old were on Social Security, and one was as old as 350.
“I know some people who are rather elderly but not quite that elderly,” Trump said. “3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them, and we are searching right now.”
DOGE said it also canceled a Department of Agriculture contract valued at $10.3 million. It said the cancellation was “ironically”, initiated because “identifying unneeded contracts” had been identified.
A cost-saving agency stated that the termination of this contract was part of 162 non-essential contracts they canceled, with a ceiling of $200 million. This resulted in savings of about $90,000,000. The cost-saving agency didn’t specify which areas within the federal government were affected by the terminations.
Musk also met on Wednesday night with a group of House Republicans to discuss his quest to identify as much as one trillion dollars in wasteful government spending.
One lawmaker who attended the meeting said, “The DOGE team and executive are confident that they will be able to get $1 trillion.”
“Now, we’ll see, right? And the thing is, he acknowledged that we’re going to make mistakes, but we’re going to correct them very quickly.”
