I’mma be honest:
If you have unconstitutional widespread access to the books of the US Government and DON’T find fraud and waste, you… are somehow even dumber than I ever expected.
The issue was never the lack of efficiency. The issue was that musk actively was not looking for it and was just tearing the government apart while making sure he got more handouts.
I doubt there is much fraud and waste. Probably because they already have programs in place to look at and investigate these things.
Source: Dealt with government contracts (admittedly, low-level, but still) for a couple of decades.
There’s plenty of fraud and waste.
I’ve seen plenty of people take advantage of government regulations because they know that the relevant overseers either are too inexperienced/overworked to notice, or simply don’t care. I dealt with school lunch programs. You’d be absolutely amazed at what food service vendors try to get away with, and you’d be even more amazed at how much of it gets through because of the ineptitude of the state officials they’re dealing with. (And on the flip side, you’d also be amazed at what inept state regulators who don’t understand the regulations they’re supposed to be enforcing try to push on school districts and vendors. Trust me, it goes both ways.)
And even when everybody is on the up-and-up, there are some government regulations that are simply out of date. Regulations that sometimes directly contradict each other. Procedures that shouldn’t be a thing in 2025 but still are because the bureaucracy hasn’t kept up with technology.
There is plenty of fraud and waste to go around. I saw it all over the place, and I’m about as close to the bottom of the totem pole as you were going to get. I can only imagine how bad it is higher up the food chain. But that’s not the kind of fraud and waste they’re looking for. To them “Fraud” is “anything that helps poor and brown people”, and “Waste” is “anything that doesn’t result in more tax breaks for the wealthy”.
That’s always the hard part of these “government fraud” narratives. It’s the insidious shit, the ineptitude, incompetence. Not something you can walk into the FDA and find a filing cabinet labeled “deliberate and known waste contracts”.
I work in aerospace and the worst engineers I’ve had the displeasure of working with were on cost+ contracts (the money keeps rolling in until the job is “done”).
The only real way to track down abuses like that is to stick an oversight committee on each and every contract, watch them like a hawk. But who watches the watchers? You run the risk at every stage, eventually you either need to trust or gamble
Just saying, military related contracts are some of the most wasteful contracts that overpay private companies by however much money they want
I’ve heard stories of a simple paper towel dispenser being billed as thousands of dollars. Imagine the billed costs of actual military equipment
There’s plenty of fraud, waste and abuse. It’s just conveniently called “contracting”, so money can be shoved out the door to private companies which do half the work at twice the price and end up delivering shoddy results. The reason DOGE didn’t find anything was that they weren’t looking at the contracting companies and instead were looking at the agencies themselves and the employees working for them. I won’t say that some of those agencies aren’t a complete waste of money (see: TSA, ICE, DOGE); but, DOGE was hyper-focused on agencies which actually do useful stuff (e.g.: SSA, NOAA).
but, DOGE was hyper-focused on agencies which actually do useful stuff (e.g.: SSA, NOAA).
And the IRS.
Literally, between the GAO and Inspectors General alone there is constant oversight of most of what the federal government does. Thats not even nearly every form of oversight, those are just agencies whose entire job is finding any waste or fraud. Of course before DOGE was even started Trump first kneecapped those parts of the government.
If we want to talk about waste and fraud we should be looking at the president who spends as much time as possible golfing on his own properties, spending government money on his team staying at his own properties…
As someone who used to work for an org: I got this bridge for sale. I’ll get it to you for a good price.
Generally speaking, those orgs are designed around punishing those who are so egregious that it can’t be covered up and going after peons committing time fraud.
But there is very much a reason that the dream of most workers is to negotiate a big purchase and they just so happen to buy new cars or leave for a private industry job with the contract winner shortly after. Same with how orgs outright structure their travel/reimbursement in ways that encourage misreporting and taking the most expensive options.
Again. If the goal were ACTUALLY to have “outsiders” identify fraud and waste, they would have found MASSIVE amounts. And most of it would actually make the average worker happier. Instead they just gutted the government and carved out more contracts for musk.
If you’re looking at the bottom, you’re not going to find fraud and waste in large amounts. To find fraud and waste, you’re going to have to look at the top.
In other words, the fraud and waste are in the administration leadership. That’s not what DOGE was looking at. They didn’t lay off the people at the top. They laid off the people who actually do the work.
As others have said, it wasn’t about fixing anything. It was about breaking everything.
There seemed to be a number of goals:
Fire employees so they can hire back ideologues.
Compile information to a central location so: It can be fed into LLMs It’s vulnerable to their foreign friends They can better target their political enemies They can avoid following individual agency data laws
Learn how to cover their tracks in the future
Justify their existence and empty gesture to “promises kept”
Um… yeah. We knew that already.
The point obviously never was eliminating supposed waste.
It was, blatantly, a purge, meant solely to get rid of anyone who wasn’t a Trump sycophant, anyone who was currently or ever had been involved in investigating the myriad lies, scams and crimes of Trump and his cronies and/or anyone who might stand in the way of their future lies, scams and crimes.
Did you really not know that? Where have you been the last few months?
I mean to be fair it was also to wholesale steal ALL of our personal data to feed into musks llm.
I’d argue that that was the main point of the entire charade.
I remember a woman running for school board in one state who was going to get rid of all the “woke” stuff. It might have been “crt” it was so long ago. It wasn’t so long ago that it was “pc” though. Anyway she won. When she got in office she noticed all the stuff she thought was happening wasn’t. When she told her voters, they wanted her blood.
For any too lazy to read the article, he’s a “former” DOGE engineer because he got fired for admitting this.
Relative. They looked where they were told. They did not look where they were told not to look.
Yeah cause that’s not what they were looking for… They were looking to get Elon off the hook for all his bullshit.
If they even so much as peaked under the cover of the Pentagon, they find literally all the corruption and graft.
The most NPR liberal thing in the world is too observe fascist thugs destroying government functions in order to purposefully break them, asking them why they are doing it, totally accepting the framing they present, and then being totally shocked and forlorn later lamenting something along the lines of “Wait, THEY DIDNT DO WHAT THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING TO DO!!! Where they lying this whole time!?!?!?!?”.
-_-
Like…again come on NPR you found the biggest idiot in the whole group who is apparently not pretending to believe there was a bunch of inefficiency that needed to be trimmed away in government.
The rest of us don’t need to waste breath talking to these people to understand, by focusing this article as a “See you are wrong MAGA about your claims!!” piece it frames the discussion in that particular way neoliberalism enables fascism. I feel like this article is the embodiment of the neoliberal strategy of fighting far right conservatives which always starts with hallucinating a potential person between their shitty republican lite beliefs and hardline rightwing batshit crazy beliefs and talking to them while ignoring all the actual, real life human beings around them suffering.
No, if these were real reporters they would have come in guns blazing with the framework that this was never about efficiency because it wasn’t and it is absurdly disengenous to either pretend it is or find the one idiot in a sea of disengenous evil bastards to talk to that didn’t realize they signed up for the evil thugs brigade.
They lie.
We know they are lying.
They know that they are lying.
They even know that we know they are lying.
We also know that they know we know they are lying.
They, of course, know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying.
Yet they still lie.
In Russia, the lie has become not just a moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
.
In the U.S. the lie has become not just a moral category, but the pillar industry of this country. shrugs Must be all that money.
SeeMarkFly (2025)
the cycle continues, we remain plausibly sentient beings condemned to a bad Beckett play
