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On Jan. 20, his first day in office, President Donald Trump established by executive order the new Department of Government Efficiency “to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda,” which has included efforts led by billionaire Elon Musk to reduce government spending and cut the federal payroll.
But as we’ve written, some of the claims made by DOGE and the Trump administration about overpayments in the Social Security system have been exaggerated, and some claims about spending by the U.S. Agency for International Development have been inaccurate or unsupported.
In recent days, some social media posts have repeated a fabricated claim that DOGE had halted millions in supposed royalty payments to former President Barack Obama.
A Feb. 27 Threads post falsely claimed, “DOGE stopped an annual payment to Barack Obama for $2.6 million for ‘royalties associated with Obamacare.’ He’s been collecting it since 2010, for a total of $39 million in taxpayer dollars.”