They recommended a review of leases and to tighten up their employee expense reporting requirements.
You have no reason to believe Elon is either competent, nor independent, nor well-intentioned on any of this.
No, no one is against “a more efficient government.” Obviously. No one is “pro-fraud.” Obviously.
Please post specific examples of fraud that DOGE has surfaced, not just “things that were congressionally approved but I don’t like.”
You say that like it’s a good thing…
This is what’s known as “compromise,” or otherwise “being a fucking adult.”
That's part of living in a society. As a child, you may have run into situations where you had to accept something you didn't think was perfect in order to get something you really wanted. This is like the big kid version of that! It's so complicated and so important to do at scale that we actually create these very elaborate systems called "governments" to manage the process. What we found over time was that these big systems could be captured by people who didn't want to compromise, so we invented "Constitutions" that constrain the system, regardless of who is currently operating it.
Right now, you're saying that your personal assessment of what's pork and what's not justifies weakening the system that keeps all of us safe from our government.
lol @ civilized people in 2025 falling for the “authoritarianism in exchange for quality of life promises” trick.
I imagine it will be thousands and thousands of examples of "small time corruption" with a few million here and a few tens of millions here that in no sane world should be spent. And for some reason, people prefer to hate billionaires that create wealth when instructed by multimillionaires who siphon wealth from taxpayers but happen to own newspapers.
> You have no reason to believe Elon is either competent, nor independent, nor well-intentioned on any of this.
You could say the last two about anyone, but to deny that Elon is competent, especially coming from an anonymous internet commenter... okay.
Ah, yes, there are. They're called auditors. They audited USAID 4 months ago.
The entire US government spent only $7.7MM on Politico over the last 12 months. Oooo spooky stuff, if only there was a way to see what for! Turns out there is. You can scroll down and see the shocking revelation that the US government paid a news publication for subscriptions to a news publication!
Similar to how if you work in the energy industry, for example, a smart employer would pay for energy trade publications so you can do your job better.
https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/fa0cefae-7cfb-881d-29c...
In fact you can drill down all the way to individual line items. Here's the 49 subscriptions to Politico Pro that HHS, an organization with 83,500 employees, purchased. Looks suuuuper abusive... /s
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75F40120P00453_75...
> to deny that Elon is competent
Please show evidence of Elon being a competent public sector financial auditor. Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?
> Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?
I would wager that even you are more competent than the average auditor, assuming you know how to program. I'm seeing a lot of appeals to authority and credentialism, and assumptions that people who are hired by bureaucrats and politicians to audit themselves have better aligned incentives than a wildcard entrepreneur. If we can't agree on the fundamental axioms, I don't see this conversation going anywhere.
Independent auditors employed by the independent inspector generals who conduct GAAP audits can’t be trusted…
But an audit by an openly ideological businessperson with dozens of matters before the US regulatory apparatus, stiffening international competition, and zero accounting expertise (public or otherwise)… all good?
Journalists bad, auditors bad, oligarch good.
> I would wager that even you are more competent than the average auditor, assuming you know how to program
Does it follow that someone who knows how to audit is more competent than your average software engineer or is this just typical SWE autofellatio on HN?
I think what’s actually happening here is that you saw hundreds or thousands of tweets of similar quality to the one you’ve conveniently linked here, you’ve accidentally brainwashed yourself, and now you’re stuck making claims like “auditors bad and biased at auditing despite publishing detailed reports using GAAP, oligarch good and fair at auditing despite publishing nothing of substance, dozens of direct financial conflicts, and exhibiting clear ideological motivation.”
You were asked to produce any evidence of a specific instance of fraud, and you instead posted a totally false tweet that (being generous) points to a 1/100th smaller fee paid for subscriptions to industry-specific reporting, and now you’re falling back to “well government should just never pay for reporting.”
Tough spot amigo.
US "defense" spending is so absurdly overflowing with bloat and waste, it would be like a kid in a candy store.
But instead DOGE started with a tiny department controlling ~1% of spending, one which has routinely passed independent audits and also happened to have opened an investigation into one of Musk's companies.
And the action taken? Preventing the release of existing supplies of medicine and food to literal starving children in third world countries.
I imagine that's the goal, but we're literally just a few weeks in and a large amount of the DoD is extremely secretive and difficult to access by the elected government (which is concerning enough as it is). From what I understand they are already moving to downsize the FBI, and the more secretive three letter agencies will hopefully follow.
> Preventing the release of existing supplies of medicine and food to literal starving children in third world countries.
This is really your strongest point, but if you look at the US track record abroad, most of that aid is damage control for wars/coups/etc. started directly or indirectly by the US. Most of those people, and certainly US taxpayers, would be better off with no US influence in the long run. Whether that will actually happen under this administration remains to be seen.
Pretending like anything Elon Musk is doing is legitimate auditing is absurd. Do you recall when he/DOGE gutted NIH and research funding on a whim, and he didn't even know? (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1888575713629925769)
> super-competent outsider
I'd disagree about him being particularly competent at anything other than venture capital, and auditing ≠ venture capital. Regardless, why would I trust the richest man in the world to decide what the citizens of the country need and/or want from the government?
Honestly, I can keep going if you'd like, but I think this is enough to demonstrate that Elon Musk should not have illegal access to the government through his immense wealth and power (if that was not already self-evident.)
This is simply factually wrong. The twitter-engagement-bait driven nonsense like the OP in the tweet you linked is just so bad. I only got flagged about this when talking with an acquaintance working on medical research under NIH grants in the US. (I'm not from the US)
What has actually happened is adjustment of what they call the "indirect cost rate". This refers to the portion of funding you're allowed to chalk down to administrative overhead as opposed to direct research expenses.
For example in 2023, of the 35billion in NIH grants, 9billion went to administrative overhead (25%).
The new rule is them capping this to 15%. By the way this rate is around the standard in all private grant foundations.
Here is the primary source of information:
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...
Now, I'm not sure if all the DEI stuff the new government doesn't like comes under "administrative overhead". If it did, it would explain the timing of the announcement. But adjusting indirect cost rates is in general a very normal thing to do, and 25% is very high, even for a prosperous grant system like the NIH.
Here [2] is a university mentioning their negotiated indirect cost rate of 56%(!!!)
For comparison, the NSF from 2010 to 2016 varied their rate only between 16% and 24% [3]. The NIH rates are absurdly high.
News articles such as [1], that directly quote the above primary source and still misconstrue it, deserve jail time.
Also, it is really disingenous to say "cutting funds for cancer research" as if it's directly targeted at cancer research.
Engagement driven media like Twitter, news websites, etc, are truly the devil of the world. And the incentives are rotten, so no matter what Musk says X isn't fixing it in any way.
</rant>
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/02/08/nih-cuts-bi...
[2] https://research.umich.edu/update-on-nih-indirect-cost-rate-...
Why on earth would this be the case? Do you hear yourself? Here’s the answer: no, obviously.
These overhead rates are vigorously negotiated, line items by line item. This isn’t some slush fund for fun stuff. This is stuff like “the buildings in which the research occurs.”
If Elon thinks they’re too high, the new administration can negotiate them more vigorously next time around. They can take a position of across the board cuts if they want, but obviously the outcome is likely to be fewer orgs accepting the negotiated rates, I.e. they have just cut research. NIH funds all sorts of research, but is especially foundational to cancer research.
> Also, it is really disingenous to say "cutting funds for cancer research" as if it's directly targeted at cancer research.
Are we supposed to ignore the actual impacts of a decision and instead refer to it by its alleged intent? Sounds a bit virtue signally to me.
But yeah, don’t worry, it’s not just current and future cancer patients who are fucked by this. All of us are!
I have no skin in the game. I just hypothesised as to why the timing might overlap with your new government's crusade
> If Elon thinks they’re too high, the new administration can negotiate them more vigorously next time around. They can take a position of across the board cuts if they want, but obviously the outcome is likely to be fewer orgs accepting the negotiated rates, I.e. they have just cut research
But the NSF, and every single private grant foundations, operates at ~15% rates. Why would the NIH converging to the same rate affect anything?
> Are we supposed to ignore the actual impacts of a decision and instead refer to it by its alleged intent?
No, you're just supposed to avoid lossy compression.
"NIH cuts research funding for administrative overhead. This could impact cancer research"
Is a better, factual statement. It separates the objective, factual, action taken by the NIH and your hypothesised effect of that action on two separate sentences and qualifies the hypothesis with "could".
Have you considered whether this was driven by the relative positions of Jupiter and Mercury? Or perhaps by the swirling of the tea leaves in Musk’s cup? It’s driven by a reckless attempt to reduce spending without having to think through the consequences because it’d take “too long.”
I’m not arguing that the overhead rates are correct or can’t be lower. I’m saying if you take a sports car to the shop and they start tearing parts out because “hey that looks different than the one in the Corolla,” you’d go to a different mechanic.
There is no reason to be jolting any of these systems this severely. The entire emergency is contrived in order to force through an ideological purification.
All language is lossy compression, obviously. Your version just overlays wishful thinking.
I meant to say that I don't have an opinion on the DEI angle, it doesn't affect me in any way in another country.
> There is no reason to be jolting any of these systems this severely. The entire emergency is contrived in order to force through an ideological purification.
Whether it is needed or not, and the motivation for it is completely unrelated to what I said.
> Your version just overlays wishful thinking.
No, it is more factual. There is no reason your hypothesis that it will affect medical research will be true, especially given the rates are just being brought to standard, so unless you can provide a concrete justification, you need to qualify it with "could" like I did, otherwise you are communicating misinformation, there is simply no two ways about it.
> All language is lossy compression, obviously.
This is pedantry. You can't claim that and proceed to throw away important information like what is fact and what is hypothesis when compressing, especially when said fact is a historical action taken by someone.
> Have you considered whether this was driven by the relative positions of Jupiter and Mercury? Or perhaps by the swirling of the tea leaves in Musk’s cup? It’s driven by a reckless attempt to reduce spending without having to think through the consequences because it’d take “too long.”
> Your version just overlays wishful thinking.
Sounds like your version is driven by inherent bias, rather than a coherent argument against what I said - why bringing the administrative overhead rates _equal_ to what is allowed by the NSF, _every_ other grant, and the NIH itself just a few years back, would magically affect research.
Does research happen in buildings? Yes.
Is that an indirect cost? Yes.
What happens when you can’t pay to use buildings? You can’t do research in them.
Private foundations and other grantors can pay lower overhead because universities are often losing money on those programs and footing the difference.
Again, I am not suggesting the rates need to be where they have wound up. I am saying that you cannot remove 50%+ of a program’s budget overnight and expect not to disrupt or potentially fatally damage its operations.
Thinking a research university can lose tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year in funding and not cut research is beyond naive.
I see a post on X with receipts showing millions of dollars of pretty obvious waste and/or corruption, many involving news outlet grants and subscriptions, including names, amounts, etc. Then I see some tearjerker story about families of USAID workers on one of the beneficiary news outlets. And in the comments, people lamenting that Elon Musk's success is only due to luck and his estranged father's defunct gem mine. Or worrying Elon will use their SSN (which is already available on the dark web) to open a credit card.
You're pretty smart people. Do we really think auditing government spending by a super-competent outsider is a bad thing? The last time it was done was by Clinton, btw, who managed to create a surplus (granted, the debt situation was nothing compared to today). And before that, Truman, back before hyper-partisan politics. I can't imagine the level of grift back then was anywhere close to today in our bloated budget. I'm optimistic, and I think y'all need to relax.