DOGE has slashed government cyber contracts by $2.2 billion so far
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Although the public furor and press coverage of the government spending cuts made by the Elon Musk-founded Department of Government Efficiency have died down, DOGE workers themselves have not stopped slashing budgets, ending contracts, and eliminating government grants.
If anything, according to data published by DOGE on DOGE.gov, DOGE has accelerated its efforts to get rid of government contracts since May, claiming to have canceled $43.4 billion in government contracts in June and nearly $27 billion in contracts in July. Even August was a brisk month when DOGE workers claim they canceled almost $9 billion in contracts.
A good portion of the canceled contracts for which DOGE takes credit were for cybersecurity services. Since January 2025, DOGE says it has eliminated around $2.2 billion in contract cyber spending across 22 different government agencies.
As a caveat, DOGE isn’t always clear about what constitutes the value of contracts cancelled or how much savings the government will earn. In many cases, DOGE overstates the theoretical contract value of savings by including the uppermost spending ceilings that are never reached, a feature in some major contracts that allows for continuing service without the hassle of getting new contract approvals.
(As another caveat, it's possible that DOGE has eliminated far more cybersecurity-related contracts than the ones we have listed in the table below. The contracts we identified clearly used the word cybersecurity, but other contract descriptions that didn't use this word might also be primarily cybersecurity-related.)
Further compounding DOGE’s lack of clarity on its numbers is the so-called government agency’s statement that its work has saved taxpayers $205 billion. However, this figure, according to DOGE.gov, includes an expansive combination of “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.
As can be seen in the table below, which contains the individual cybersecurity-related contracts canceled or otherwise curtailed by DOGE since January, over half of the $2 billion cyber contract spending reduction came from one contract. This contract was issued by the Department of Defense to Mantech Advanced Systems International for “COMPUTER SYSTEMS DESIGN SERVICES: INTELLIGENCE AND CYBER OPERATIONS NETWORK,” and is considered a “funding only action,” meaning that DOGE didn’t cancel the contract. Instead, it reduced the dollar amount by $1.4 billion. Mantech is a top defense, intelligence, and federal civilian cybersecurity contractor.
