Phantom $1 Billion Government Survey
PLUS: Liberals Twist Trump’s Iacocca Comment; Kremlin Sources Cite Fake News to Exaggerate Ukrainian Casualties
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Today:
Bogus DOGE claim that the government paid $1 billion for a single survey gets millions of views
Liberal accounts misquote Trump to claim he said his tariffs plan was praised by a long-deceased auto executive
Russian sources fabricate newspaper front pages to claim 70,000 Ukrainians were killed in Kursk
Today’s newsletter was edited by Eric Effron and Sofia Rubinson.
1. 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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2. Trump Did Not Claim that the Late Auto Icon Lee Iacocca Praised His Tariff Plan, Despite Viral Claims on Liberal Social Media
By Macrina Wang
What happened: Left-leaning social media users are misrepresenting a comment made by President Donald Trump during an April 2, 2025, speech announcing sweeping tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners, falsely claiming that Trump said his recently announced plan was praised by the Chrysler CEO and Ford President Lee Iacocca — who died in 2019.
A closer look: Liberal and anti-Trump accounts are claiming that Trump was dishonest or “senile” in claiming that the deceased Iacocca supported Trump’s plan.
One of the earliest examples of the claim identified by NewsGuard is a since-deleted Bluesky post by anti-Trump economist Adam S. Hersh that stated: “Trump says he talked to Lee Iacocca about his tariff plan. Lee Iacocca has been deceased since 2019.” The post received 2,300 likes and 760 reposts in six hours.
Anti-Trump X user @ChrisO_wiki shared a screenshot of Hersh’s Bluesky post with the caption, “Well, this is not at all reassuring.” The post received 898,100 views and 22,000 likes in one day.
Anti-Trump X user @RiverGecko stated in an X post: “Trump finds strong backing from beyond the grave for today’s tariffs from car industry legend Lee Iacocca. … Lee Iacocca died on in Los Angeles on July 2, 2019 aged 94.” The post, which included the hashtag “#TrumpSenile,” garnered 108,100 views and 420 likes in one day.
Actually: Trump did not claim that Iacocca backed the plan, a NewsGuard review of his speech found.
Instead, Trump said that “a gentleman today on television who used to work with Lee Iacocca” praised his tariff plan. Trump did not attribute the praise to Iacocca.
Trump described the unidentified man as “an older guy, real pro, really top guy with Lee Iacocca” and claimed the man said that the tariffs would transform the U.S. “not only with the cars, but on every single other item that’s built.”
Trump did not identify the man, and NewsGuard was unable to determine his identity. The White House did not respond to NewsGuard’s request for comment on the matter.
More context: Trump has previously expressed admiration for Iacocca, who as a U.S. auto executive was a strong advocate for punitive tariffs on Asian car imports.
One of Trump’s biographers, Michael D’Antonio, who wrote “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,” told The New York Times (Trust Score: 87.5/100) in 2019 that Trump “imagined himself Iacocca’s equal as an icon of American business.”
Click here to find out more about NewsGuard Trust Scores and our process for rating websites. You can download NewsGuard’s browser extension, which displays NewsGuard Trust Score icons next to links on search engines, social media feeds, and other platforms by clicking here.
3. Citing Fabricated Front Pages, Russian Diplomats and Media Push Claim that 70,000 Ukrainians Died in Kursk, Russia
By Eva Maitland and Chine Labbe
What happened: Russian diplomats, state media, and pro-Kremlin news sites are citing fake newspaper covers to baselessly claim that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers died during Ukraine’s seven-month-long incursion into the Russian territory of Kursk.
A European diplomatic source who asked not to be named shared with NewsGuard the official Russian presentation at the March 19 closed-door session of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Security Forum in Vienna, Austria. The Russian diplomats’ OSCE presentation included fake page-one covers of newspapers including Britain’s Hull Daily Mail.
The presentation included a slide showing the purported Hull Daily Mail cover and other fabricated newspaper covers in a slide that stated, “The West is increasingly disappointed with AFU’s incursion into Kursk.”
The narrative apparently aims to paint Ukraine’s Kursk operation as a disaster and to undermine Ukrainian morale and Western support.
A closer look: In early March 2025, as the Russian army pushed Ukraine into a partial retreat in Kursk, pro-Kremlin social media sources baselessly claimed that 70,000 Ukrainian troops had died during the operation.
Later in the month, these sources shared an image purporting to show the front page of British local newspaper the Hull Daily Mail (Trust Score: 100/100), headlined, "70,000 Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region died in vain."
From March 7 to March 31, there were approximately 7,000 articles and social media posts jointly mentioning “Kursk” and “70,000,” according to a media monitoring tool.
The claim was amplified by the Russian Defense Ministry and Russian state news outlets RIA Novosti (Trust Score: 12.5/100) and TASS (Trust Score: 15/100) as well as pro-Kremlin sites, EADaily.com (Trust Score: 12.5/100), Lenta.ru, and the Pravda network (Trust Score: 7.5/100), which amplifies Russian disinformation in dozens of languages.
Actually: The newspaper covers are all fake, NewsGuard determined. And there is no evidence that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in Kursk.
While the number of Ukrainian fatalities in the Kursk incursion is not known, multiple estimates indicate that the total number of Ukrainian troops deployed in Kursk ranged from 5,000 to 12,000, according to The Associated Press (Trust Score: 100/100).
France’s delegation to the OSCE stated in a March 26 X post about the Russian presentation, “Such blatant manipulations have no room in diplomatic forums. We will not be distracted and will continue to stand by the facts.” A U.K. delegate at the OSCE meeting, Ankur Narayan, said in a March 27 statement that the presentation was “a deliberate attempt to manipulate the representatives in this Forum” and “represented an egregious departure from the norms of conduct in international organizations.”
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