White House officials seem to realize that there’s a serious controversy surrounding Elon Musk and his poorly named Department of Government Efficiency — the scope of their reach, the conflicts of interests, the controversial surrogates, etc. — but Donald Trump and his team want the public to know that the DOGE endeavor is already producing amazing results.

For example, the president and his top campaign donor spoke to reporters in the Oval Office for more than a half-hour this week and mentioned the words “waste,” “fraud” or “abuse” literally dozens of times. By way of his social media platform, Trump has been just as aggressive, publishing a series of items assuring Americans that Musk and his operation have already found a “massive amount of FRAUD, WASTE, INCOMPETENCE, AND ABUSE.”

How much money are we talking about? “Tens of billions of dollars” the president said Tuesday. True to form, Trump said the actual total might yet reach $500 billion. Moments later, he added: “It could be close to a trillion dollars that we’re going to find.”

To be sure, that certainly sounded impressive. Less than a month into the new Republican administration, a controversial billionaire and his surrogates, none of whom appear to have extensive experience in auditing or federal expenditures, have already uncovered “tens of billions of dollars” in spending that shouldn’t have happened? A total that might yet reached $1 trillion? If that’s true, who’d take issue with results like these?

The answer, of course, is that everyone should take issue — because the boasts aren’t true. A fact-check report in The Washington Post explained:

The president’s numbers do not come anywhere close to matching figures posted on the DOGE account on X, Musk’s social media site…. We added up all the figures posted, taking most of them at face value, though virtually no documentation was presented. The numbers add up to about $6 billion a year.

The Post gave the White House an opportunity to dispute the findings. It did not.

Around the same time that fact-check report was published, reporters asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to substantiate the president’s excessive claims about the DOGE operation’s successes. Trump’s chief spokesperson waved around pieces of paper showing federal expenditures that the White House believes are at odds with the president’s agenda.

The problem with that, of course, is that there’s a qualitative difference between stuff that Trump doesn’t like and actual waste. Indeed, pressed further on whether the spending items on her list constituted fraud or items “contrary to the president’s policies,” Leavitt replied, “I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent.”

But the phrase “I would argue that …” was doing a lot of work in that sentence. Fraudulent government spending is a serious issue. For the White House to give it a new definition for the sake of political convenience is to fundamentally deceive the public.

That said, if Trump and his team are serious about rooting out fraud and abuse, there’s nothing wrong with such a goal in the abstract. In fact, the president could start by rehiring the inspectors general that he fired without cause, while restoring the anti-corruption measures that his administration has kneecapped in recent weeks.

If that’s too much to ask, the Republican and his operation could also try coming up with a real list of fraudulent spending that Musk’s not-quite-real department has uncovered, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for one.