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.”
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.
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!
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.
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...
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 personally am just as worried that reducing US gov spending will worsen a potential 2025 or 2026 recession (which might lower rates...)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/doge-musk-government-was...