Baseless DOGE Claim About a $1 Billion, 10-Question National Park Service Survey Goes Viral
What happened: Conservative social media users and websites are spreading a baseless claim, first advanced by Elon Musk, that the U.S. government paid nearly $1 billion for a single 10-question online survey about the National Park Service.
A closer look: In a March 27 interview, Fox News (NewsGuard Trust Score: 69.5/100) anchor Bret Baier asked Musk, "What's the most astonishing thing you found out in this process [DOGE]?"
Musk responded: “The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government, a billion dollars or more, casually. For example, the simple survey that was literally a 10-question survey you can do with SurveyMonkey and cost you about $10,000, the government was being charged almost $1 billion for that.”
Baier interjected, “For just the survey?” Musk responded, “A billion dollars for a simple online survey, ‘Do you like the National Park?’”
Following the interview, the claim about the $1 billion survey spread widely among conservative social media users.
Conservative X account @BehizyTweets posted on March 27: “DOGE just revealed that the government spent $1 billion on a survey asking if people liked National Parks. MY BLOOD IS BOILING RIGHT NOW!” The post garnered 15 million views and 74,000 likes in four days.
Right-leaning site Tampa Free Press (Trust Score: 57/100) published an article on March 28 titled “Elon Musk Blasts $1 Billion Government Survey As ‘Mind-Blowing’ Waste In Federal Spending” that stated, “Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), revealed Thursday night that a simple 10-question survey cost American taxpayers nearly $1 billion, an amount he says could’ve been reduced to just thousands using basic tools like SurveyMonkey.”
Actually: There is no evidence that any government survey cost anywhere near that much. DOGE itself has not provided any backup.
The narrative may stem from another flimsy DOGE claim — that the agency canceled a $830 million contract apparently approved by the Federal Consulting Group, an Interior Department division, to fund multiple surveys. On March 19, the official DOGE X account stated that the Trump administration would be dissolving the Federal Consulting Group.
The New York Times (Trust Score: 87.5/100) reported in March 2025 that the Federal Consulting Group has only awarded a total of $87 million in government contracts since 2010, according to data from USASpending.gov.
CBS News (Trust Score: 90/100) reported that federal data going back 17 years show that the entire Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, has never awarded any contract valued at over $800 million.
Neither the supposed $1 billion parks survey contract nor the supposed $830 million Interior Department contract is on DOGE’s own list of canceled contracts posted to its website that summarizes the savings the agency says it has achieved. The largest known contract for a survey canceled by DOGE was a questionnaire to agricultural workers commissioned by the Labor Department for $32 million, according to a March 2025 New York Times analysis of the DOGE website.
NewsGuard sent a request for comment on Musk’s claim to the official DOGE X account but did not receive a response.
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