That's not what I'm seeing happen. I'm not seeing cost benefit analysis, I'm not seeing the use of existing experts.
What I am seeing... well perhaps we'd have different perspectives. To pick an example, look Musk saying that people who are over 200 years old are marked as alive.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891557463377490431
If you assume the worst of Elon Musk, you might think he's an idiot who doesn't understand how COBOL represents dates in the SSA system, nor how large government databases deal with missing data.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/new-social-security-chie...
I've worked, not for the SSA, but with public health data. Real people and historical records and old databases are messy as fuck.
The SSA neither throw out data, nor do they add data they haven't received, except when there is funding appropriated for it.
So these old people are simply actually people they never got death info on.
Could they just add a date? Well you have to consider the data integrity issues around date of death. If you pick a nonsensical date, can you assume that the SSA, department of commerce, and other orgs, not to mention the internal SSA progroms that rely on processing SSA data can handle it? Nope, an engineer can't assume that, there's an implicit API.
Oh yeah, agencies for state governments deal with that data too. https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/documents/sves_solq_manual....
But the fact is, this has been looked at. Per this 2023 audit the SSA estimated it would cost 5.5 to 9.7 million to mark people as deceased in the database when they don't have death date information. They didn't do that, probably because no money was appropriated for it.
https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
Does that mean there's massive SSA fraud of dead people? Nope. back in 2015 they decided to automatically stop giving benefits to anyone over 115. The oldest living American is, in fact, Naomi Whitehead, who is 114.
In other word, Musk is acting like saving the government 5.5 million minimum is a "HUGE problem".
Now, I don't think Elon Musk is an idiot who doesn't understand COBOL or how messy data can be from real people. I also don't think he thinks that 200 year old benefits fraud is really an issue.
Which begs the question, why bring this up at all?
My interpretation is perhaps less charitable than yours, but I'd be interested in hearing what you think.
But they tend to say reality-based things like “no, your tax cuts won’t pay for themselves, in fact they’ll cost $1.2T over ten years” or “no, this war won’t pay for itself, lol, what the fuck even” or “no, you can’t make meaningful progress on cutting the deficit by attacking benefits fraud, because there’s not very much of that.”
All things Republicans would rather pretend aren’t true, and certainly don’t want to act on. So what do you do when you need to show progress but are constrained by operating based on fiction? You tout tiny wins and hope the numbers seem big to people who don’t know much; you make things up; and you cause harm or even incur long-term costs or cause waste and call that savings by doing bad accounting.
Where can I vote for these changes??
#1 status quo complacency which does things like congressional insider trading, identity politics, is completely ancient, and useless and ineffectual in identifying or implementing any actual changes that would improve people's lives.
#2 is a wing of the party ready to take a wrecking ball to things (bravo), but thinks taxes are the solution to everything.
We need more wrecking ball type options than just #2. We need a diversity of wrecking ball options that are energetic, smart, able to identify the places where the system (both private industry & governmental) isn't functioning properly and have the guts to actually push change through.