Experts Question FCC Claims of $567 Million in DOGE Savings
The FCC said in a release Wednesday that it has saved more than $567 million via cuts to contracts in an internal effort coordinated with the Department of Government Efficiency, but experts said those numbers may be misleading.
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“From day one, we have been combing through every FCC contract to eliminate redundancies and wasteful spending,” said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in the release. “To date, we have reduced more than $567 million in authorized contract spending, including by ending bloated or unnecessary IT contracts.” Carr first announced this effort last month (see 2504280038).
The release said the figure represents “cumulative savings from eliminating spending authorization under numerous contracts over multiple years,” including a combination of scaled-down and terminated contracts. The release also said the $567 million is the total “contract ceiling value” of the cuts, meaning it is the FCC’s maximum possible payout under the contracts.
Contract ceiling value is “essentially meaningless” for determining the value of a federal contract, said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University.
In analyses of DOGE’s reported cuts at other federal agencies, researchers have compared a federal contract’s ceiling value to the spending limit on a credit card. Federal contract ceiling values represent “a spending limit, not disbursed funds or the intended total of disbursed funds,” wrote Deltek federal market analysts in February. "The actual dollars being paid over the life of a contract are very often lower than the ceiling," Ball State University finance professor Reza Houston said in an interview. The FCC didn't respond to a request for comment.
Tillipman said actual savings from the ended contracts likely isn’t yet clear, even to the FCC, because the process for winding down a federal contract early is very long and generally involves an extended back and forth over the contractor’s costs, sometimes including litigation. As such, one reason DOGE-style purges of ongoing contracts didn’t take place in prior administrations is that it's “incredibly expensive,” she said.
The FCC release said the changes to contracts have “generated more than $6.7 million in savings for the remainder of 2025 from the cancellation of obligated spending” and “more than $21.1 million in savings for 2026.” That amounts to reducing planned contract spending for 2026 by 20%, it said. The agency’s FY 2025 budget is $448 million.
The FCC hasn’t released a complete breakdown of the contract cuts and didn’t respond to requests for more comprehensive information. The release said the affected contracts included redundant or duplicative IT services, unused IT licenses, costs for trapping feral hogs at an agency public safety facility, and “lightly used periodicals and press.” It also included “tasks more efficiently done in-house" and “projects completed ahead of schedule or without exhausting the planned budget.”
On X, the FCC posted a graphic that broke out some numbers, putting IT cuts at roughly $37 million, savings from consultant contracts at $14 million and savings from canceled news subscriptions at $760,877. The hog-trapping contract was listed as being worth $58,783. NAB Vice President-Spectrum Policy Robert Weller said in a reply to the FCC that feral hogs sometimes pull down monitoring antennas. “Hopefully, [the contracts] were replaced with a sturdy fence,” he wrote.
The FCC graphic also included $77,835 in savings from ending the agency’s Task Force on Digital Discrimination, which Carr announced in January (see 2501210070).
The FCC's contract review effort "remains ongoing,” the release said.