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.
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And even when everybody is on the up-and-up, there are some government regulations that are simply out of date.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
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).
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.
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”
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
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).
And the IRS.
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
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”