Comment by dzdt 3 days ago
Related to a comment on a now-flagged subthread: can anyone who believes that DOGE is uncovering fraud please post a reliable reference that gives a specific example of fraud uncovered by DOGE? To be clear, this should be a third-party analysis of some credibility, not DOGE's or Musk's twitter feed or "receipts" website which shows cancelled contracts with no clear link to fraudulent activity.
I think wired nailed it:
"This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable certainty that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things."
"And if you don’t believe in the public good? You sprint through the ruination. You metastasize from agency to agency, leveling the maximum allowable destruction under the law. DOGE’s costly, embarrassing mistakes are a byproduct of reckless nihilism; if artificial intelligence can sell you a pizza, of course it can future-proof the General Services Administration.
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-incompetence-mistakes-featu...
It’s marketed as “fraud, waste and abuse.”
The top-line summaries are definitely consistent with “waste.” Probably some of them have more nuance when you dig deeper, but does anyone disagree that there is not waste in the government?
Fraud and abuse are less clear. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the legitimacy of payments when they’re leaving treasury on checks with no memo or reference, and they’re compared to “do not pay” lists that lack frequent updates.
Here are some of my opinions, as someone who is mostly supportive of the effort but also realistic about its outcomes and risks:
1. The people voted for smaller government, and if the executive doesn’t have the power to reduce the size of its own bureaucracy, then there is no check on ever-expanding government. The executive must have full authority to examine all data produced by itself.
2. Federal spending on salary, agencies and operations is a drop in the bucket compared to entitlements and defense budget. Slashing jobs and even deleting entire agencies will not make a significant dent in the deficit. But if DOGE can really cut $1 trillion by end of year, it will have positive knock-on effects in the bond market.
3. Entitlements shouldn’t be treated with same bull-in-a-china shop approach as the current one towards agencies.
4. Social security probably has some fraud but I doubt it’s significant and is better resolved by identifying and punishing retroactively. Most of the “150 year old people” problems are exaggerated or outright wrong. However, it’s worrying that a system of age-based payouts has such uncertainty in its data.
5. It’s widely known there is significant fraud in Medicaid and Medicare. The true volume of this fraud is unknown and any effort to quantify it would be welcomed. But while fraudulent claims may be an issue, the real problem is unaccountable pricing of the healthcare system that allows for “legitimate” claims to cost more than any sane person would pay out of pocket.
6. In general, “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true. But it does not follow that “things breaking” is an acceptable cost to pay. The approach needs to come with a well-defined rubric for evaluating not only “what to cut,” but also “which cuts to rollback.”
> However, it’s worrying that a system of age-based payouts has such uncertainty in its data.
The data itself may have to be interpreted, which I would classify as 'suboptimal', but seemingly 'normal' for most projects I work with. I often have to join together various tables, remembering to include or exclude specific data via conditional logic. The conditional logic may be context-dependent, and documenting those cases is really key. Why include/exclude specific subsets of data to answer questions XYZ? Have those criteria changed over the years (and if so, why?)
Looking at raw data tables it's often quite easy to come up with ways to show the data to support whatever case you're trying to make.
> 1. The people voted for smaller government, and if the executive doesn’t have the power to reduce the size of its own bureaucracy, then there is no check on ever-expanding government.
Congress specifies the size of most government bodies through its Article 1 power of Appropriation. The Executive's job is to administer what the People's delegates have decided to do. Deciding how much to spend is not the President job, and never has been.
The Republican Congress that was also presumably just elected to reduce government can at any time send legislation to the Republican President that will reduce the size of government; in fact, they are working on a budget bill right now. They are free to restructure government as much as they want, because Congress has been explicitly vested with that power.
A lot of people don't like this, but the Constitution is very clear on this point. It's also quite readable; you can read it yourself and verify that I am not making this up!
If I may:
Their is a huge conflict of ingerest of giving this power to a major economical actor that vastly depends on public investment and under public scrutinity.
Executive should have the audit right and in some measure probably it should be widespread to all citizens up to sensitive data not being leaked. But what good is there to give this power solely to one of the richest and more powerful man in the world? This is crazy.
> 1. The people voted for smaller government […]
The people voted for President and the people voted for Congress. If Congress, who under the US Constitution controls the purse, votes for a level of "X" spending why does the President get to decide to spend <X?
> 6. In general, “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true.
It is not obviously true. Because what you're cutting may be resiliency.
To use a tech analogy: if I have two firewalls in an HA configuration, then decommissioning one to save on support costs will not break things… until the first one goes belly-up and there's no failover.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that more government capacity is actually needed (at least in certain sectors):
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...
The IRS for example would probably do better with more resources:
> That’s one reason that five former commissioners of IRS, Republican and Democrat, have argued eloquently that additional IRS resources would create a fairer tax system. The logic is simple. Fewer resources for the IRS mean reduced enforcement of tax laws. Though the tax code has become more complex, prior to the IRA real resources of the IRS had been cut by about 23 percent from 2010 to 2021.
* https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/cutting-irs-resources-and...
> Congress asked the IRS to report on why it audits the poor more than the affluent. Its response is that it doesn’t have enough money and people to audit the wealthy properly. So it’s not going to.
* https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...
> But if DOGE can really cut $1 trillion by end of year, it will have positive knock-on effects in the bond market.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the US economy will be affected by $1 trillion less money circulating.
How and why would this produce positive knock-on effects in the bond market?
I presume the idea of $1 trillion less bonds being issues would decrease supply and decrease the price we need to charge. (More demand for the same supply decreases bond prices). This would have the impact of reducing the interest payments in the federal budget, which is becoming burdensome.
I personally am just as worried that reducing US gov spending will worsen a potential 2025 or 2026 recession (which might lower rates...)
> The top-line summaries are definitely consistent with “waste.”
Can you give a reference for an analysis of some cancelled contract or program that illustrates your point that it was wasteful spending? I'm looking for something that explains what the contract or program did beyond the 10-word title of the appropriations document saying something like "DEIA Training". (I work for a big private corporation and we also have such training, and I don't think from the corporate perspective its waste; I strongly suspect they attempt to balance the spend on that training to the cost reduction on lawsuit payouts. And especially from the government perspective, harm reduction should also be accounted separately from pure cost considerations.)
With regards to (4), it's been well known for a while that since Social Security doesn't check the payments being made into the program with any sort of scrutiny illegal immigrants can often get away with giving the social security numbers of dead people to their employers. Here's an article from 2024 that mentions the problem.
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/immigration-social-se...
From a policy perspective making it harder for illegal immigrants to be employed might make it worth cracking down on this. But doing so would cost the government money both by preventing these payments into Social Security that don't have to be paid out and also the cost of the crackdown itself.
That shouldn’t be necessary. Just literally any independent source corroborating the claims. I would also be immensely interested in that.
Yes. Exactly. It's checks and balances.
The 'right' are all about being open. If something is being cut, or fired, then publish those finding openly. Make the data public, for open review.
Funny how all of a sudden "we need to keep what we are doing secrete" is a fine argument.
Otherwise you are just putting in place a new 'Deep State'. Guess that is fine and dandy now.
It’d be cool if we still had the independent IGs in place to make sure everything’s on the up-and-up. That would definitely make me feel better about this.
But one of the first things Trump did was fire a bunch of them. Blatantly illegally, because of course that’s how he’d do it.
Every large organization needs reviews/audits to find waste. I think the problem with the 'right' is the idea that because there is waste, then government is evil and we should abolish it.
But, every organization accumulates waste, and then needs to have a review process to make corrections. The whole burn it all down is pretty immature take on leadership.
Every corporation has waste, and bloated salaries, entitlements (the bosses son doesn't do much but has fat salary). Should DOGE go in and cut them also?
>1. The people voted for smaller government, and if the executive doesn’t have the power to reduce the size of its own bureaucracy, then there is no check on ever-expanding government. The executive must have full authority to examine all data produced by itself.
The people should educate themselves then. The way to reduce the budget is to elect different congresspeople. We did this in the 90s. It sure is funny how insistent all these people are that we can't just do what we've done before. Are they children who didn't live through the deficit hawk era?
2. "Their claim is impossible, but if they did it, that would be great"
4. "However, it’s worrying that a system of age-based payouts has such uncertainty in its data."
SS payouts ARE NOT based on age, but "eligibility", which age is an input to. The government purposely keeps very gentle records on it's citizens because once we saw a country keep really good records on it's people and then Bad Things happened, and also stuff about the mark of the beast. More importantly, the government takes a light touch to data integrity because the data doesn't matter. If you say you are eligible for benefits, the data says no, you can verify your eligibility a lot of ways and the data does not get updated, because we aren't supposed to be a surveillance state like that. If you want to update your records with the government, you can contact the Social Security admin and do it that way. One of the things Social Security pays out for is Ex Spouses, and that includes Abusive Ex Spouses. Your Abusive Ex I'm sure would love if the SS admin had accurate records about where they can find you. This is a legitimate concern that people working in government have had to address regularly.
5. Define significant. "Everyone thinks X" is a stupid heuristic when ONLY 47% of the country can even name the three branches of government. I don't care what Tim or Sasha think of medicare fraud, I care what GAO or an AG say about medicare fraud.
6. “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true. Nope. Sometimes you just cannot recognize the breaks right away. The stricken vessel can keep going for quite some time before fully sinking. Cutting until shit breaks means you have to figure out what else is broken but not obviously so
And all this nonsense is shattered anyway when the basic premise of "Reducing the debt" is horseshit, which you can see from the tax plan being pushed.
I am shocked, and overjoyed, that this post has not been downvoted; well said.
The government itself self-reports $149B in "improper payments"
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/doge-musk-government-was...
So it was not uncovered by doge? and it is also not simply fraud? „Every year, agency reports posted online document billions in improper payments, which include fraud but also underpayments, duplicate payments, payments to ineligible recipients or for ineligible goods or services.“ (from the article you linked)
They will twist the narrative and not provide any evidence. I appreciate your request but please don’t be naive. Have you heard of trolling?
I’m happy with a description of a higher standard than, say, a Reddit discussion.
There is widespread fraud in the government. It needs to be addressed. There is widespread inefficiency too.
I think the people in DOGE have the skills and access to address it.
I have no evidence that they are doing so, and some evidence of widespread loyalty tests which, while not identical, remind me of how Stalin came to power.
However, absence if evidence is not evidence of absence, and some evidence is not the same as proof.
I have dozens of explanations which fit the facts, and I don't have any way to determine which, if any, is correct.
> There is widespread fraud in the government.... There is widespread inefficiency too... I think the people in DOGE have the skills and access to address it.
Given that just getting the names of the people involved in this process incurred Musk's wrath and accusations of criminal behaviour... how can you have any justified belief in people having 'skills' to address 'fraud' and 'inefficiency'?
We'd need some common definition of 'fraud' in the first place. Many of the things that have been labelled 'corruption' seem to just be 'things Musk doesn't like'; I suspect 'fraud' would be similar.
"Inefficiencies" - we have the Chesterton's Fence idea to illustrate that what might be 'inefficient' is intentional with an overall positive purpose. Again, define 'inefficiency'. The rate at which firings have been happening may certainly be 'efficient' from an operational standpoint, but having to scramble to rehire key people who shouldn't have been fired in the first place is 'inefficient' at best.
> I have dozens of explanations which fit the facts, and I don't have any way to determine which, if any, is correct.
I'm not sure we have enough verifiable 'facts' that can support many conclusions at all, and I think that 'fact' itself is evidence of intentionality in keeping the public in the dark about what's going on and why.
I'm sure the 5 people investigating Musk's companies for wasteful spending were all fired because they were fraudulent.
There's a lot of just plain simple fraud too. I've seen embassies issue visas only with bribes, or employees simply collect salaries without doing their jobs. As in you're hired to review documents by some legally mandated criteria, and they simply toss them into piles without even glancing at them and go home early.
That benefits no one, except for the employee.
WSJ reports today that the gao Itself reported 140 billion in improper payments. https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/doge-musk-government-was...
This is based on their statistics so I imagine the next step is to find the actual waste and fraud and stop it or get the money back.
If they were actually trying to eliminate waste, they’d be working in tandem with these departments instead of just trashing them.
More broadly: People who care about improving things move carefully and deliberately and involve all stakeholders. They are open and transparent and they listen. Trump and Musk are exhibiting horrible leadership skills because they do not care about improving things. Trump wants to hurt his perceived enemies and feel like he’s a big smart boss man. Musk wants to be the first trillionaire. That’s the start and end of it.
The claims of fraud are a pretext for going into the agencies and making the partisan changes they wanted to make anyway. There's no point asking for a detailed discussion because the whole plan is to use the discussion of fraud as cover for the thing they're actually doing.