No evidence for Musk's $1 billion National Parks survey claim

"DOGE just revealed that the government spent $1 billion on a survey asking if people liked National Parks," says a March 27, 2025, X post.

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Screenshot from X taken April 7, 2025

The same post has circulated elsewhere on X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, YouTube and Gettr following a March 27 interview of Musk by Bret Baier on the Fox News Channel (archived here). In it, Musk purported that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative aimed at slashing federal spending, had uncovered a $1 billion contract with a company to conduct a single 10-question survey for the National Parks Service.

"We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more. Casually. You know, 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," Musk said after Baier asked him what was "the most astonishing thing" he had encountered at the helm of DOGE.

In the same interview, one of Musk's top aides, Steve Davis, said that the parks survey was part of an $830 million contract proposed by the Department of the Interior that DOGE had halted.

Musk and Davis appear to be referring to a March 19 X post from DOGE, which pointed out an $830 million contract approved by the Federal Consulting Group, a division of the Interior Department. The post said the contract was never signed and that DOGE was shutting down the Federal Consulting Group (archived here).

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also highlighted the cancellation of the purported survey contract during a March 24 cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump, calling the expense "pure fraud" (archived here).

However, data from USASpending.gov, a government website that tracks federal spending, has no records of the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, awarding a contract valued at over $800 million for such services (archived here).

The largest contract awarded by the agency for which the site has records was a 2022 agreement to provide legal aid to unaccompanied refugee children through the Health and Human Services Department. It had a potential value of $896.1 million (archived here).

The same database shows that the Federal Consulting Group has awarded $87 million in contracts since 2010. AFP searched past expenses made by the Federal Consulting Group and found the largest tender it awarded was for about $3 million, around 270 times smaller than the supposed $830 million contract (archived here and here).

CBS News and The New York Times previously reported on the same data.

The DOGE website, which lists contracts the group has terminated, has been criticized for sharing inaccurate or duplicate information and does not show any saved expense for either $1 billion or $830 million relating to the Department of the Interior and a customer survey (archived here).

In a document submitted as part of the 2023 federal approval process outlining how the National Parks Service would create and gather data from public surveys, the agency estimated that research aimed at improving park services would cost just over $2 million annually. This estimate included about $28,000 to employ a program manager, $600,000 to support contracted researchers and investigators and another $1.4 million for other expenses such as survey design and administration (archived here).

Although the document does not include the names of contractors for National Parks surveys, the agency appears to have historically worked with faculty at various universities, such as the University of Idaho and the University of Washington (archived here and here).

The 1993 Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) requires federal agencies to regularly assess their performance and services and form strategic plans to make improvements (archived here). The National Parks Service says its Visitor Survey Card program (archived here), which solicits responses from visitors across the park system, is how it complies with this part of the GPRA.

AFP has debunked other claims about US politics here.