The billionaire claimed that the agency was running a “total scam” in plain sight.
A subsidiary of Reuters has received millions in US government funding for “large scale social deception” projects, Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has claimed.
In a post on Thursday, Musk weighed in on data from the website USAspending.gov stating that Thomson Reuters Special Services LLC, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters, had contracts with government agencies.
One of the publicly available documents stipulated that the US Department of Defense had committed more than $9 million on two projects called Active Social Engineering Defense (ASED) and Large Scale Social Deception (LSD).
Commenting on the document, Musk wrote: “Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception’. That is literally what it says on the purchase order! They’re a total scam. Just wow.”
According to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the ASEAD program aims to develop automated defenses against social engineering attacks, which could involve deceptive tactics to manipulate individuals into divulging confidential information. Neither the Pentagon nor USAspending.gov elaborates on the purpose of the program, but both LSD and ASEAD are listed as activities within the realm of engineering and research and development.
Reuters was awarded another Pentagon contract that provides the Department of Defense with unidentified advanced development services. The agency has also received around $500,000 from the State Department for access to news services.
Both Musk and US President Donald Trump have vowed to fight corruption and wasteful spending in the US government. In light of this, several federal agencies have terminated contracts totaling $8 million with Politico magazine following Musk’s criticism of these agreements as a “wasteful” use of taxpayer funds.
Trump has also suggested that billions of dollars have been misappropriated within agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Washington’s primary agency for funding political projects abroad, to pay for favorable media coverage of Democrats. The claim was rejected by several US media outlets, including Politico and the Associated Press.
