Comment by CyrsBel 3 days ago
Yes. Even if DOGE is operating without any ill intent, and I don't think they have ill intent, the possibility of errors alone is massive and they need to slow down.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/17/trum...
Elon has been operating in bad faith since the Twitter Files (so, the very start). Announce X, publish receipts that show ~X, but nobody reads receipts so checkmate.
The "140 year old people in social security DB" post is just the latest example of bad-faith. Either there is actually >>$100B of social security fraud and that's the story or he wants to pretend like that's the case when he knows full well that presence in the DB does not indicate eligibility or payouts.
Agreed. Show the check numbers, mailing dates, bank transfers, etc. If there's actually really tens of billions flowing out to dead people monthly... demonstrate that. Should NOT be hard at all.
I understand that these 140/150 year old recipients are actually the results of incomplete birthdate data.
To steelman the argument though, it seems reasonable to audit these recipients so that we can get their true birthdate entered. The number of recipients who lack a valid birthdate because they found a way to fraudulently claim benefits is likely non-zero, but probably low. But in any event, cleaning up the data can’t be a bad thing.
If something costs more to fix than it costs to leave sitting around, fixing it is less efficient. In this case it's already been investigated prior to DOGE, and deemed not worth the effort to clean up [1].
To quote patio11,
“The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero
He was talking about the banking system. But he was also hinting at something bigger. There is a game theory problem often referred to as the meter maid problem. What is the optimal amount of meter maids in a city, where optimal can be defined in at least a few different ways, but roughly means the cost to revenue optimal. You end up with a couple of obvious extremes, no parking enforcement means no cost, but no revenue (plus parking may end up out of control if charging for parking is more than just revenue generating). The other extreme is thay you have enough people policing parking that no one ever fail to comply, this is the highest cost, but not the highest revenue, because you don’t get revenue from ticketing. So the answer is that the optimal number lies somewhere where the number of meter maids allows some percentage of people get away with failing to comply with parking rules (whether deliberate or accidental can further complicate the problem since both will happen).
So back to your steelman. Cleaning data is most certainly a desirable thing, but it is likely not the optimal thing, especially if the cost is high. And unauditable access to systems is a very high cost. Seems to me much of this auditing could be done in a much more acciuntable way.
Why spend money chasing people who aren't collecting checks? That sounds like waste to me.
> these 140/150 year old recipients
What is the evidence these exist?
Show us the (public) Court Filings. The formal start of education to evaluate if there is truth, if there is a guilty party, and to legally render a verdict. The check numbers and other PII can be evaluated by the courts. We the People can know the numbers; the scale per case and in sum, of the 'fraud' identified.
Social Security receives payments as well as makes them. SSNs are keys for both.
The “super old person” SSN numbers are in the DB mostly because non-citizens are using them to pay into the system. If you delete those numbers, the next payroll run will inject them right back in.
And you would remove important accounting metadata for each payment. Metadata that is consumed by the systems that prevent fraudulent payments from going out.
The only way to stop the fake/bad SSNs is to go into the field and address each instance with employers. This is time-consuming and expensive, which is why no one has done it much.
The reason given that the SSA does not clean up the data is it would cost too much for little to no administrative benefit. They also don't want to add new inaccurate data to the system.
The no administrative benefit bit checks out with napkin math. Of the 18.9 million entries for people age 100 or older they are paying out benefits to 44,000. The total number of people in the US age 100 or older is around 90k to 100k, depending on time period for comparison.
There's an Inspector General audit report in a nearby comment for source.
> Presence in the DB allows for downstream fraud, even by accident.
That's like saying null columns in a particular database table must be filled in (or have the row entirely erased) because someone, somewhere, somehow, might infer the wrong thing about them, if they completely ignore all the other tables and business rules.
___
"Hello, I am Oldy McOldperson. Give me money."
"...Sorry sir, but that person would be almost 150 years old now, and that's well past our Impossibly Old threshold of 115 years. Furthermore, one our other databases says that person was reported as missing 90 years ago."
"But Oldy's--I mean, my precise confirmed date of death is still blank, therefore I'm alive, so give me money!"
"Sir, only a complete moron would believe that's how it works."
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
At what point does incompetence /become/ malice?
There is certainly a level of incompetence that requires active ignorance to one's naivety. I'd certainly consider a stubborn person who arrogantly ignores concerns of experts malicious. The active nature certainly matters.
> The reason I still give them benefit of the doubt on their intentions is...because they did come out and say that 20% of the savings should go back to taxpayers as a refund and that 20% should go directly to reducing the debt. That being said, these are nice things that people would want to hear so I too am paying attention.
I'd rather the government keep the money and use it to pay for the many services that it provides. Like ensuring that I have clean water, unadulterated food, clean air, a functional banking system, healthcare, safe vehicles, making sure that unemployed people don't starve, researching infectious disease remediation, performing scientific research, maintaining national parks, making sure that kids have a baseline education, doing humanitarian work around the globe, and a thousand other things I don't have the time to enumerate.
I feel like people lose sight of exactly how ridiculously much money a trillion dollars is. You’re mentioning a bunch of desirable things you’d like the federal government to do, while ignoring the millions wasted on everything from a $90,000 bag of bushings to $1,300 coffee cups to $150,000 soap dispensers to billons on empty government buildings. You can simultaneously want the government to reduce waste and provide these services. Lately it feels like folks are getting too carried away and becoming “pro government waste” as some type of political flex. Really, the problem is _who_ is doing the reduction and _how_, not _that_ we’re doing it.
I think that addresses the root issue here- the money is not efficient in getting those things done. It's not even hidden and the freeloaders really seemed to feel no shame since covid (maybe social media is the cause?). It happens all over the world in every organization. Usually companies die off, but the budget just increases for the government.
Of course we don't want to toss the baby out with the bath water, but it's high time for a major course correction. In our government it is very hard to turn the ship around, and motivate people to serve.
I'd much prefer if we could magically motivate the 3/5 of govvies who are in cruise mode to try harder.
Should the government get a blank check? If there is waste and removing it won’t reduce efficacy, it should be purged.
You are not paying attention if you believe that a crack team consisting of the world's richest man and half a dozen tween interns physically invading government offices and dismantling entire departments fast enough to make your head spin is anything other than "ill intent".
People don’t understand scale. They will cut spending $800B, cut taxes by $4T and people will say that action is budget neutral.
You're giving them the benefit of the doubt because they made a vague promise to give you a bigger tax refund?
You give them the benefit of the doubt because they tell you exactly what you want to hear?
This is Clientelism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clientelism
It's what authoritarian populists do when they get control of governments. They "hack" the economy with short-term stimulus and giveaways to keep the rubes content and happy while they dismantle civil society and the rule of law and entrench themselves.
Economic stagnation and decline usually follow within a couple year, but if they've entrenched themselves well enough, they don't have to care about public opinion very much and can shift to repression.
I’m sorry but the naivety of your comment is absolutely hilarious. Good luck getting your refund when the IRS is being ran by a handful of angsty young adults
DOGE and POTUS are incentivized to follow through on this type of thing because it would increase good-faith in the masses big time. I don't think they'd renege on it. I'm certainly not naive! You can see that I've been contradicting DOGE on things since they became a thing. (@cyrsbel on X)
> I don't think they have ill intent
Perhaps you could read their statements? DOGE communications are filled with ill intent, and their publicly stated goal, and the goal for which their supports seem to support them, is the destruction of the bureaucracy. That's ill intent.
That's before we look at their actions.
You mean misunderstanding the data, coming to the wrong conclusions, etc? Data science always has an issue with bullshit KPIs, shallow depth of statistics, and mostly mangling stuff keeping the manager happy. Still it's much better than not having any data analysis.
Whether it benefits from being in a single datalake idk. We really don't know how the operations are being done, we're mostly just reacting to news reports and outside guessing.
I'm assuming it will be basically how Palantir works in government health care and intelligence agencies where they aggregate multiple data sources from a bunch of old and new databases and have complex analytical tools on top.
This time you're not dealing with a data scientist, you're dealing with someone who willingly spews lies, those situations aren't comparable
Furthermore, another comment went in depth about how boosting the irs and following other agencies guidelines would have had a positive return, but none of this happened. On the contrary, we're seeing agencies such as the irs being infiltrated by this thing that resembles a metastasis
I thank you for highlighting that the intent isn’t actually the problem. I do feel the opposite to you but I’m happy you can see the practice itself is not acceptable / is a bad practice.
So far, there's no evidence they're delivering either transparency or auditing in any sense that anybody is familiar with.
In fact, their operations -- in as little as they've been made public -- have been pretty opaque and sweeping (i.e. not detailed, as in transparency), and what little we have seen of their analysis techniques seem to be shallow and unconventional (i.e. not formal and measured, as in auditing).
I'd warn you not just take what public figures say at face value. Transparency and auditing are indeed virtues to strive for in governance (and we have many running systems for those already), and maybe they'll someday reveal that they're actually contributing to those virtues themselves. To date, they have not done so.
I'm all for cutting government waste, I think there is probably quite a lot. Here is why I do not like Doge:
Doge is using a sledgehammer when they need to be using a scalpel. There's already been so much chaos with things like federal disbursements being frozen then unfrozen, firing and rehiring employees, moves being blocked by courts due to being unlawful, etc. You can't "move fast and break things" with a trillion dollar bureaucracy, people's lives are at stake and something might break catastrophically.
I also don't trust Musk with so much power because (1) he's an ideologue and (2) there are numerous conflicts of interest. I am skeptical he would be held accountable for any potential wrongdoing in this political environment.
I don’t believe they actually think that transparency and auditing are bad. I think that many people are either excited for possible benefit or horrified by what they are watching and have understandably been unable to detach themselves enough from what is happening to recall their own expertise to guide them.
We all should know the way this is being done is wrong and it will either have to be removed or redone, which is equivalently costly and might as well be the same thing at the end of the day.
I would expect the same practices from all of you in your own day to day work. We expect it from each other.
The lack of transparency is enough for anyone here to worry. It bucks every best practice and is a red flag in itself. We do not accept this in our work - it is what we all value and that has to be the north star.
It’s an issue of who watches the watchers. If their intent is transparency and auditing, why are they not reflecting that intent?
This is why I do suspect their intent. They are not walking the talk.
How can they be described as transparent when they fired people who administer FOIA requests?
Different contexts. Regulated in my comment meaning observed, reviewed, audited in kind. They should not be operating on any site and in any system without someone watching over their shoulder, figuratively and literally too.
Whereas the regulation in your context pertains to regulations that are codified as laws or rules to follow.
If any of the income tax data they are touching at IRS is out in one of those AI tools that have been referenced, each disclosure is a federal felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison.
But remember, Elon doesn’t follow the rule of law, and has no doubt engineered things in such a way that his little minions are accountable.
The intent is completely ill. DOGE is RAGE. Move fast and break everything before the courts can step in.
And many, many reasons to think that in fact they do. See my favorites for flagged stories about the DOGE staff.
Even their stated reason - to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1% [0] - is heinous. Inequality is already breaking the economy. 4.5 trillion dollars ($13k for each and every American) being transferred to the yacht class will inflict generational harm.
0 - https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-01-10/trump-tax...
> it's pretty crazy seeing all those reasonable looking stories flagged and made dead.
It really is. There have always been 'third rail' topics that get rapidly flagged despite community interest, but I've never seen so many.
> what's with the blue non-link links? Never seen that before on HN.
No idea; all the links seem to work for me anyway.
What's interesting to me is how what constitutes a 'third rail' topic changes over time.
A quick search will show that it used to be fine to talk about Curtis Yarvin on here a decade ago but now that he's more relevant than ever it's suddenly taboo?
Did Curtis Yarvin and the ideas he espouses suddenly become less interesting or are a group of people working together to prevent critical discussion of his ideas?
> to fund trillions in tax cuts for the .1%
That isn't even what your link is saying. To begin with, it's citing a Treasury Department document requested by the Biden administration to do an analysis comparing the proposed tax cuts with a contrived alternative.
If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts, not targeting any particular income group, everyone's taxes are reduced in proportion to how much they were paying to begin with. Obviously then the people who make more money and pay more taxes have them reduced by the given percentage and that is a larger absolute number.
The same thing happens even if you target only the brackets for people who make less money. Suppose you lower the rates by 2% for every bracket below $400,000. That's not even enough to be in the 1% (for which you'd need to make ~$800,000), much less the 0.1%, but what happens in that case? Well, everyone's taxes go down by 2% of their income up to $400,000. If you make $40,000, they go down by $800. If you make $400,000, they go down by $8000. If you make $4,000,000, they also go down by $8000, from your first $400,000 in income. The absolute amount of the reduction is still highest for people who make more money, simply because it's a percentage of higher number.
The analysis the Biden administration requested was to do the tax cuts for people making less than $400,000 and then raise the tax rates on people above $400,000 to make sure they didn't get any net reduction, and their contrived example would have people making $400,000 paying a higher tax rate than people making $500,000+. Basically the purpose of the analysis was to generate a large number to put in a headline rather than compare it to a real proposal to lower taxes in general. This is also why they announced the cumulative total over a decade rather than listing the annual number as you would when comparing it against an ordinary government budget. Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".
> that isn't even what your link is saying.
You can find any number of links talking about how unequal the tax cuts are. No one in the bottom 60% is going to be better off. The .1% are benefiting the most. That's an insane thing to do in an economy that's already breaking records for inequality.
> If you do generic across-the-board tax cuts
That's not what these are. The reaction of every billionaire to Trump's admin ought to tell you that on it's own.
> Because "~3.5% of the budget" sure sounds a lot less than "trillions of dollars".
Trillions of dollars are trillions of dollars.
A million seconds = ~11.5 days A billion seconds = ~31.7 years A trillion seconds - 31,710 years.
We're not talking about play money, or monopoly money. Musk bought the election for a fraction of a billion dollars, ffs.
And again, America is already on record inequality, about the same or more as right before the French Revolution.
Money IS a zero sum game, and when too much of it is going to the 0.1% it inflicts massive harm to millions of people. If you want to learn more about this, and what's about to happen to the US economy, you can listen to one of the world's best traders talk about it here [0].
> You can find any number of links talking about how unequal the tax cuts are.
All of those links are comparing dollars rather than percentages. It's obvious that a given percentage of $400,000 is more than the same percentage of $40,000.
> That's an insane thing to do in an economy that's already breaking records for inequality.
The cause of inequality isn't taxes, it's market consolidation. Rich people are rich because they own a large fraction of a megacorp. Under the existing system, higher corporate taxes, if anything, increase market consolidation because massive international corporations can use cross-border avoidance mechanisms whereas smaller purely domestic corporations can't, so they're effectively a tax on businesses too small to get out of them.
> That's not what these are.
It's essentially what they are, and the rate reduction in the lower brackets was slightly more. The highest bracket was lowered by 2.6% whereas the brackets from ~$12k to ~$100k were each lowered by 3%. And as a percentage of taxes paid, 39.6% was only 7% more than 37% at the top, whereas for the working poor 15% had been 25% more than the current 12%.
> Trillions of dollars are trillions of dollars.
You can turn any annual amount into trillions of dollars by multiplying it by an arbitrary number of years. And the only reason it can get so big so fast is that the US government spends a stupefying amount of money, so if you reduce it by even a small percentage it's a big number.
> Money IS a zero sum game
This is definitely false and is one of the major fallacies in the taxes vs. inequality problem.
In general people don't actually store wealth as money. Rich people store it as stocks and things. So if you tax them, you're not causing them to have less cash, or even causing them to sell their car or mansion. You're causing them to sell stocks.
If the person you transfer the money to is doing anything with it other than buying the same exact stocks, you're reconfiguring the economy, which is very much not zero sum and could be negative or positive sum depending on who gets it and what they do with it.
But Wall St. and Main St. are somewhat isolated pools of money. Making a transfer from one to the other has effects not entirely unlike printing new money and handing it out, because it gets spent very differently than it would have otherwise. And this is the nasty part: The sources of inequality are money sinks.
If you're paying high rents because there is a housing shortage as a result of captured zoning boards inhibiting new construction, and all the tenants suddenly have more money, the rent is going up. That's one of the reasons you can't solve it with taxes. You have to address the actual causes of inequality -- market consolidation and regulatory capture. Otherwise the incumbents just take the money right back out of your pocket.
The Mump playbook relies on wild exaggeration.
In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks.
In fact, it's cover to let him destroy/neuter agencies they don't like and get endless material to pressurise any opponents.
One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.
> In this case Musk reckons he can save $2tn which some (better informed) analysts are saying is bollocks.
A lot of this depends on how you measure. For example, there are a lot of social assistance programs that provide in-kind benefits (e.g. you get subsidized housing) and those programs both require a bureaucracy to administer them and are less efficient than cash transfer payments, so they could be converted into refundable tax credits. Then the program costs somewhat less (you eliminate the administrative bureaucracy) and is more efficient and with better outcomes, but you can count the entire cost of the program as a reduction because it's now a tax credit (i.e. a tax cut) instead of a government budget item.
Do that with the entire social assistance system and you could get a sizable budget reduction before you even get into overpriced government contracts etc.
>One positive though: if there is any alien tech, Musky will find it. You can bet that's high on his list, as improbable as it may be.
That tech has been handed over to the private sector as a precaution and also as a method of keeping the politicians' hands off it. Gives them cover to honestly say "I know nothing, I was briefed on nothing, we have nothing". Plausible deniability.
Elon Musk is also quite possibly the last person I'd ever want to touch world-changing technology. let alone be the sole arbiter of who gets to get near it.
Yes. But it's not. That's the issue. They have unlocked access to systems to which they can control how they desire, unmonitored.
If this was the case at any point, or is still the case, DOGE should definitely be quarantined until CAT audits DOGE's accesses and changes. There should be two teams operating alongside each other on this. Not just DOGE. I do believe so far they were claimed to have received read-only access...but other reports were that they even had some admin access. Do we know for sure what access they had unmonitored?
My nature is to give the benefit of the doubt, but after seeing that they are rushing and it manifests in laying off even teams of highly skilled and critical nuclear safety staff...that means someone there doesn't know what they're doing or the chaos could be the point as well. I would hope it's not to that extent, but this is why I maintain that CAT should be auditing DOGE's changes.
I was shocked by the appearance of that aspect too but then a day or two later, the ADL and Netanyahu supported him on that.
https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1882392668497756279
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-mus...
Definitely good to keep a watch, though.
If they did have ill intent, towards what is that ill intent targeted, and why should I care? These aren't organizations or missions I much care about. This isn't my government, except by an accident of geography. I have little say in how it's managed or what it does, but I have a high burden for it. It's unclear that this government protects me in any substantial way (or even in indirect, insubstantial ways). Meaningful reform is impossible at the sociological level, it requires too much buy-in too slowly, and that will always be hijacked by those with influence or watered down to meaninglessness.
Otherwise said, you want to destroy government, because you never cared about learning what various agencies do. And you want reform it, but without knowing what it does and without knowing what you want to improve other then "let it go away".
If on DOGE, that is ill intent.
Elon wants to build the X everything app and nuked the CFPB to do it and now has access to the fed system… I think he’s just biding his time. Aaaaand now that he has every American’s info he can dox anyone on Twitter. Makes you think twice about telling Elonia to go fuck himself on X … which is why I do it on Mastodon and BlueSky ;-)
I have definitely contradicted Elon Musk on my X profile (@cyrsbel) quite a lot. I have never once lost my blue checkmark, though, so I believe he is well-intentioned and a good person who is trying to do the right thing. (I am also subscribed to him and having that sub and the blue checkmark means he has payment details already so I'm not worried about doxxing via CFPB data.) However, you raise a legitimate security risk and concern. It is not feasible to trust a single person with this much power and access. Furthermore, regardless of how much I or anyone else love Elon Musk...he has said things that didn't happen multiple times and too much is riding on his claims about what can or will happen.
So yeah, I don't trust him. Ever since he reneged on interns, I noticed that...he has a tendency to think about things as if they're entirely meat and to worship the false god Scarcity. He's been gargling Ron Paul's gold coins so much that he completely fails to comprehend basic nation state financing and why deficits are manageable and our debt is also manageable given our $160T+ net worth and climbing...
> I believe he is well-intentioned and a good person
You should read more about the things he says, does, and the way he treats people, especially from those who are close to him. The picture it paints is something I'd consider "cruel, bordering on inhuman" (and thats before the nazi salute.)
Alternatively, I have a lucrative investment opportunity I'd love to get you in on.
Are you talking about the man who does Nazi salutes from the bottom of his heart? A good person?
The complication here is that the ADL and Netanyahu and others at that level all said they do not believe it was a Nazi salute. I am relying on what they said.
https://x.com/netanyahu/status/1882392668497756279?lang=en
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5097676-elon-mus...
You don’t think they have ill intent? Really? They have made it abundantly clear how much joy they get out of slashing services for everyday citizens, cutting jobs, and outright harassing federal workers. They are full of malicious intent for the people they view as the enemy.
Intent to drop in, make major changes, and pretend like they won't break anything is ill intent
We criticize engineers who drop into a code base and try to make changes without understanding. You can be forgiven for doing it a few times, but after that you're doing it intentionally. And if they hired engineers that didn't know this, that's incompetence at both levels.
Not only is this different code bases and IT products, it's across organizations and done very rapidly.
I am also not convinced that they don't simply have malicious intent most of the time.