Is it really possible to root out governmental fraud using this approach? Fraud and theft exist at every level of government, but if not through a drastic measure like this, what else can be done? Relying on the status quo, the courts, and current processes hasn’t yielded substantial results—if it had, corruption wouldn’t persist.
Still, I can appreciate the creativity here. Sometimes it takes an outsider to think differently.
That said, I’m not naive enough to assume this is done entirely in good faith. The prevailing opinion—both in this community and the media—seems largely negative; I’ve yet to see a single positive headline. Even so, I find it intriguing.
So here’s my question: if you were in charge of addressing this problem, how would you tackle it differently?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(U...
They are independent of the things they review, they find inefficiency, overspending, fraud, and embezzlement. They make their reports public and work with transparency. There are also other similar departments like CIGIE. There have been very substantial results.
What DOGE is doing is not finding inefficiency. They are doing two basic things. 1) Completely eliminating programs they don't think the US should be spending money on. And 2) Reducing headcount. Both of these actions may reduce costs, but may end up costing the US more money in the long term.
1) How long do you think it takes to perform a comprehensive audit of an agency in order to accurately determine waste, corruption and fraud. If you've ever audited a large corporation, you know what that takes -- it is not something you whip up in a week or two.
2) Who do you think is qualified to audit government entities? Some "young Turk" DOGE engineers? We're not talking about determining whether computer systems are well architected or should be refactored (though that also takes time to do correctly). We're talking about financial transactions and whether they were legitimate and legal (because if not, that would be "corruption" or "fraud").
Which Fortune500 company would hire a team of (relatively inexperienced) software engineers to audit its books?
I really think we're getting to a point where people are too hyper emotional and sensational about most topics which further limits real discussion and response.
As for the idea of nickle and dimming, everything adds up and they're no where near done yet. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and we need a lot of it. Nearly every person that has run for president in modern years has stated they would go after excess spending and fraud, yet none follow through. This time someone is. If years of doing nothing gets us further down the debt rabbit hole, what harm is being done?
Marko "normalize Indian hate" Elez did have read/write access, as DOGE lawyers admitted in court after first claiming that he did not[0].
[0] https://thehill.com/business/5141149-former-doge-employee-ed...
I don't see how this can be blamed on DOGE. If anything it shows that DOGE employees are closely monitored, and their access is minimized and audited.
https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/court-documents-shed-new-ligh...
Do you think Nixon did something wrong by creating this team?
If not, then we have an answer for why most people see this whole thing differently from you — most people see the Nixon presidency as clear overreach and abuse of power.
If so, what is the significant difference between Nixon's plumbers and the DOGE team, in your view?
This was campaigned on, The election was won. In this instance the outcome is what the majority elected. You don't have to like it, some may change their mind, but this was made clear as a goal from day 1.
I've also not been cagey in my support. I fully support what is going on. If you see overreach follow the processes in place and litigate. That's how the country works. There's two distinct issues people have here, the "WHO" and the "WHAT" no one questions the "WHY", because no one can stand here and say we don't need to have cuts across the board. Ignoring the "WHO", the "WHAT" so far has been pretty clear. It's things that socially are supported by one party and not the other. This is the outcome of an election and it's going to keep going until someone proves they are outside of their authorities and the courts agree.
It sucks to have a narrative perspective for years and then see everything supported under that narrative cut back. I get the emotions, but ultimately none of that matters if we can't afford to keep the proverbial lights on.
You can’t with a straight face call the party of small government pro authoritarian. Unless you’re purposely skewing reality.
And don't say Trump because he is currently asserting federal authority over NY for the laws they passed, and claiming he is a king. In his last term he spent more money than all other presidents combined. He argued in court he had the right as President to use the military to assassinate his political opponents. The Biden administration argued against that idea. I forget, is murdering your political opponents an expression of authoritarian or democratic values?
As far as Democrats, they didn't storm the Capitol and beat police when they lost this year, so that's a false equivalence. One side is happy to burn down the Capitol if they don't win, the other grumbles but accepts the results of the election. One response is authoritarian, the other is democratic.
The left had their turn to "fix things" they didn't. The right are trying now, and maybe their methods are wrong, but they're trying. What you're seeing is a power struggle playing out, the people who've been king of the hill are being throw to the side and don't like it.
It’s not their fucking luxury. It’s our fucking government being dismantled before our eyes by a handful of complete amateurs.
Mind you, my reply was to your statement that they “course corrected”. They didn’t course correct. They reaffirmed that that they’re happy for the insane and wildly destructive course they’re on to be piloted by open and avowed racists.
The average American is surprised to learn that Obamacare and the ACA are the same piece of legislation. It says nothing that they’re equally surprised by the existence of a 60+-year old government agency, and that those same uninformed bozos are outraged by aid programs of which their entire understanding stems from a single maliciously-crafted Fox News headline.
Do better.
There are numerous projects that should not be funded. There is bloat, waste, and fraud through out the government. If you don't see that or know that, you've clearly never worked within it.
Your projection against fox news viewers could be turned back on you and argued you're doing the same thing. The difference is, that those fox news viewers for better or worse, voted for this and they get what they voted for. You can be mad, you can be sad, you can vote, and you can try and bring it up with the courts, but bottom line is it's happening.
They're firing people's, seeing the repercussion and the publishing a list of program names. Not evaluations, not analysis. Nothing substantial, just gotcha out of context strings.
Do you think the entirety of USAID was "fraud" and waste? What about the US park service?
I am not American and the only time I saw my country do this kind of action in this manner was during its military government.
> I really think we're getting to a point where people are too hyper emotional and sensational about most topics which further limits real discussion and response.
Maybe, but this has nothing to do with emotion. I'm not a moron. An actual audit would be great, but would take more than the 30 days that Trump has been in office. They are lying, so I am left to speculate as to what.
> This time someone is.
Do you have any direct evidence they are doing something about it? I see several people supporting these actions that are based on emotion, but at a factual basis, it appears you are just regurgitating party propaganda.
As for an actual audit, those have been done left and right. Audits only validate where the money is going not why.
Clearly they are doing something, budgeted spend is being cut and most notably if they weren't doing anything we wouldn't be having this discussion. We are also only a handful of weeks into the presidency. They're being very clear about what they are doing. Looking line by line at some of these cuts, I've yet to see anyone here actually debate the validity of all of the spend. Yes good programs will likely be impacted, things will be course corrected and brought back where appropriate.
It's a painful process no mater who is executing it. The only way to reduce the budgetary spend of the country is to do just that, cut spend. You start small and work your way up.
You are embracing those clear, simple answers. You are going to pay dearly for it.
Progressives weren't defending the status quo, they were trying to improve the lives of people who were at the bottom of social order for centuries.
So maybe the President's special boy shouldn't be tweeting that 150 year olds are receiving Social Security payments because he doesn't understand cobol's datetime system. That only way I take these people seriously is the way I would take a toddler with a lit torch seriously.
If you said "He's making statements without any data to back up his claims" I'd respond, at this point you're correct, we do not have the data to verify. Collectively we could ask for more transparency. The result is we agree more data is needed.
Not too surprising to find another propaganda victim…
Here, I did your research for you:
> After correcting an apparent clerical error, it now shows $8.5 billion.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates...
Please read commenting guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's all waste. Fraud if there were kickbacks, we'll see about that.
> "Fraud has already been posted everywhere ($55b and counting)"
I'm looking for some evidence to support your $55 billion fraud claim, not just $55 billion in waste. If it's been "posted everywhere", please link to it!
Reagan also had the Grace Commission [2].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/06/politics/doge-musk-gore-rego-...
[2] https://www.history.com/news/ronald-reagan-grace-commission-...
It's up to the owners and their management how they run it, right? So it's more about discrimination than government-style corruption.
While no doubt that brazen bribery occurs at all levels and in a large range of dollar amounts, I do not think this is such a serious problem that it requires the nuclear option he is employing. There is a bribery-adjacent phenomenon that is far worse. I don't know what to call it. Favor-trading? But there is no quid pro quo sufficient to prosecute in most cases, and any attempt to do so would look like (and probably actually become) a witch hunt.
If a civil servant is just being extra cozy to some private entity knowing (but without anything that would amount to evidence) that they'll be able to sail into some nice lobbyist gig in 3 years, where is the bribe? It was never promised. It's not guaranteed (circumstances could well change before that becomes possible). How much is that shit costing us? And while I'm sure that some would call that bribery too, it's juvenile to do so and counter-productive.
I would start by not firing people doing jobs I don't understand. They do that a lot, even for very, very important jobs.
So if I was in charge, I would start by making sure I did the math right and didn't blindly trust my database scraping scripts as they appear to be doing (and that's the most generous interpretation). I would also make sure that before recommending that I fire any group, I at least have a high level understanding of what that groups works on. So I don't, say, fire the people who oversee the nuclear arsenal, or a group of researchers working on the current bird flu outbreak (both of these have been done). Rehiring takes money and time because upon firing their contact information is apparently deleted, and you aren't going to get a 100% return rate.
I also have some experience working with giant bloated blobs of legacy code managing critical systems, where many variables are arcane acronyms because they were written in a time where compilers had character limits. Moving fast and breaking things in that environment is just a good way to break a lot of things and not even understand how you did it. Which is fine if it's twitter, and a little more important when you're managing aircraft, nuclear weapons, disease outbreaks, entitlement payments that people depend on, etc.
It's actually *worse* than blindfolded. It's extremely partisan [1]
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/adambonica.bsky.social/post/3lil7yl...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-02-14/elon-m...
It's possible it will, but not without a lot of false positives and innocent bystanders.
At the scale of the federal government, there are plenty of things that appear to be fraud but actually have a reasonable justification.
In the Dunning-Kruger world we unfortunately seem to live in now, I don't think having every single yokel personally analyzing every line item on a budget as large as the federal government's, especially when those yokels don't really understand any of it, is the best way to go about this.
This admin isn't trustworthy either. They'll sit here an cry about 0.01% of the federal budget being "wasted" on a bunch of National Park probies, and meanwhile the self-appointed king is out golfing on the taxpayer dime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43116844
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/25/trump-fires-inspectors-gene...
For one, with responsibility and care for the public. Not with reckless abandon. Not with malice. Not with a child-like perversion towards breaking things because it’s fun.
Politics aside, this has been an extremely unsettling disruption in the faith we have in our institutions. Trust and stability are the backbones to societal and economic growth. The unseen costs Trump/Musk/doge have wrought are massive, are spread equally among all people (globally, in US, minus the wealthy class), and is hard to see on a spreadsheet
I think the negatives could have been easily minimized to more-reasonable-level without affecting the positive ones, if it wasn't headed by hothead Elon.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates...
Twitter guy is going to do so much damage to America.