It's already been a thing for quite some time:

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.

We are 35 trillion dollars in debt - we are broke. We have go cut costs if we want to avoid catastrophe in the medium term.

Government debt is a result of government spending into the real economy. It is where we get the taxpayer dollars that we spend, some of which go back to the government itself. A government without debt is also an economy without money.

Governments with central banks can mismanage their currency, but they can't run out of it.

They won't run out of currency, but the people that use it will run out of faith.

When? At what specific (magic) number does everything come crumbling down? We're at ~36 Trillion today, would 37 Trillion the number that will cause people to run out of faith? I mean that's only one more than we have today, surely people won't run out of faith for one more. So maybe it's 40 Trillion? But come on, we're at 36, people can't possibly give up on the US dollar just an 8% increase. How about 100 Trillion? 500 Trillion? I'm not sure you know how this game is played.

Why wait to spend that (magic) money at all then? What is the point of setting an annual budget? Earmarking contracts out for all these organizations by little million increments every year seems illogical when you can literally just put a few trillion in their hands today.

Why not spend all 500 trillion today? What are we waiting for?

I am entirely certain you do not believe in your own position.

why not maintain proper accounting? the deficit and enormous debt is a symptom of spending more than we have here, so much more we have to get money from other countries. you can’t do this forever. so what, spend until when? this question has come up repeatedly in the past and i’ve never seen it answered. Where’s the line where those wanting more taxes and deficit switch? How much would taxes and the debt have to be for you to say “this is out of control”?

I'm not just talking about US citizens, by the way. Foreign alliances are forming to dethrone the dollar as we speak. It will not last forever. I didn't say it would come crumbling down overnight. It will be a gradually shift away from the dollar. To believe the dollar is invincible is incredibly naive.

> They won't run out of currency, but the people that use it will run out of faith.

Which is what happens when bond yields go so high that governments default. To my limited understanding, US Treasury bonds are used to determine the 'risk-free rate' of return because the US government reliably pays its bills.

There's a body of government explicitly built to do exactly that and given exactly that power in the constitution. It's called Congress.

The Executive can also do this.

If we are broke then why do people buy our debt? It's obviously more complex than you make it sound.

because for now there’s a reasonable chance it will get paid off. what happens when the house of cards comes down?

What happens when any house of cards comes down? Could be said about any system anywhere on Earth. Could be said even if the US had zero debt.

nobody would complain about the looming debt crisis if the US had no debt.

what does this comment even say?

They aren’t auditing or thoroughly reviewing shit. They're stealing the data and then waving their hands about non-existent crimes and nickel and dime levels of misappropriated or weird spending.

I understand you're frustrated because of who and what. Do you have any direct evidence they are stealing data? I see a lot of these responses that are emotional but at a factual basis it doesn't appear that way. Just as raw un restricted read/write access is constantly alleged, but we have in turn found out that isn't the case.

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?

I have common sense. They put the least serious people possible in charge of it, so of course I'm not going to take it seriously.

> 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.

Who do you propose be put in charge? Why when the Democrats were in power weren't they put in charge before?

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.

interesting to behold this inversion where the "conservative" side is taking dramatic and rapid action, changing things quickly, while the "progressive" side vociferously defends the status quo

It is, the right appears to be playing the same hand the left has for years and the people are supporting it. Naturally this makes someone that has strong left leaning convictions frustrated as they come the realization that they aren't the majority and the numbers of people that support one narrative on the internet aren't a reflection of society as a whole. The bigger picture is this isn't localized, that's how you know it's a larger problem. Countries around the world are having the same discourse and results. People are done with it. Identity politics is over. Spending excess money to support these groups is over.

That narrative is so boring and tired, and it's ultimately why Trumpism will be short lived and fade to the dustbin of history.

I'm not a leftist, and I mostly don't care about the groups, the right can have them. I care about things like medical research, nuclear energy and the food supply, which are all at risk because the regime's only tactic seems to be to unplug everything and see what breaks, and then decide if they even want it to work. They're not trying to run the country efficiently, they're trying to punish federal employees.

Most people are like me - they want real solutions for housing and health, not the impotence we get from the neoliberals or the kayfabe we get from Trumpism.

That’s the beauty of it all, we’re all along for the ride and will see. We should all hope for the best.

"Identity politics is over" says the guy supporting hyper-identity focused mysoginists.

I get it you’re upset, but that’s a you problem not a we problem. This is what was voted for. To bring it back to the main topic, the implied god mode access doesn’t exist.

Wasn't the previous administration voted for too?

Remind me how many people voted for someone else than the current president?

Doesn't matter, when the previous admin was in did they take in the considerations of the losing party? Nope. To the victor go the spoils.. of implementing the plan you ran on.

>when the previous admin was in did they take in the considerations of the losing party?

Yes. Many big bipartisan bills, immigration crackdown that Trump can't even match now.

The conservative side is not taking action, it is regressing things to pre-1968 norms.

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.

it is hard for me to think of a more status quo candidate than Harris

Funny you say that when she was cast again and again as a "crazy" "radical" "socialist" "lunatic".

Which one is it?

you do know different people say different things?

I am sharing my personal opinion

The opposition will always employ fear tactics like socialist, marxist, facsist, science denier etc

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

You are embracing those clear, simple answers. You are going to pay dearly for it.

We’ll have to disagree. I believe the mindless waste of the past administration and their programs and narratives on things like biology were clear simple and wrong.

"There are only two sexes and genre doesn't exist" is simple and wrong. "Genre is a social construct and is a spectrum" isn't.

Sorry you feel threatened by people not wanting to be pigeonholed into your tiny tidy restrictive categories.

What I think is irrelevant, what is codified as the stance of the US Government is. They are acting on that assertion. I'm sorry you feel threatened by it and pigeonholed into your beliefs. This is the exact status of definition for the HHS and USG.

    Sex: A person’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.

    Female: is a person of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs (ova).

    Male: is a person of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing sperm.

    Woman: an adult human female.

    Girl: a minor human female.

    Man: an adult human male.

    Boy: a minor human male.

    Mother: a female parent.

    Father: a male parent.

https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2025/02/19/hhs-takes-action-p...

You can argue what you want, but they are enacting actions against what they have defined as truth. That's the by product of winning an election, you get to make the changes you ran on.

> I have common sense.

So no you don't have any actual evidence.

> An actual audit would be great, but would take more than the 30 days that Trump has been in office.

Right, which is why it's still ongoing. They have a year to complete it.

Everyone is all parroting democrat talking points about Elon, I'm just enjoying seeing all the billions in crap get cut.

> Right, which is why it's still ongoing. They have a year to complete it.

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.

We don't have the data in front of us to actually prove your point one way or the other. Resulting to name calling and hyper emotional responses doesn't elicit the behavior of cooperation. Instead, engage on data and facts.

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.

A few replies up, when presented with a clear example of the DOGE team having carte blanche access to sensitive government data, you handwaved it away. Don't accuse other people of being hyper-emotional when your own reasoning is so plainly motivated by political sentiment.

I didn't. The report came out that it was an accident that was directly rectified. Show me where that's wrong and hand wavy.

You're telling us to trust the word of people who were caught either lying or being staggeringly incompetent. It's irrational. You're letting your political sentiments cloud your judgement. You're having an emotionally-driven reaction.

You’re telling us to trust the word of people being caught either lying or being staggeringly incompetent.

While I disagree with everything going on, the cobol date time thing is just some myth everyone came up with. Go find me a single source to that claim because I can’t.

The claims from Musk are complete garbage and I have the receipts to show it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43116844

Now that’s the type of report I like to see. Not “transparency” via tweets.

So, where is your evidence that fraud of such scale is happening in the federal budget that requires unprecedented (and likely extremely illegal) access by people who are not qualified to be running a gas station IT system, let alone the entire financial and IT backend of the federal government? This is such a dishonest discussion and I suspect you types know it.

The audit will continue, sorry. Fraud has already been posted everywhere ($55b and counting) so if you haven't seen it, you aren't looking.

Maybe Democrats won't lose every branch next time and you guys can have a say.

The people want this audit, despite what HN is parroting.

I bet you'll cash that $5k check you get from the savings.

> Fraud has already been posted everywhere ($55b and counting) so if you haven't seen it, you aren't looking.

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...

Further proof that this is not an “audit,” but a show trial.

And NPR could only confirm 2 billion of those contracts were actually canceled. It's an endless fountain of bullshit.

Cool, then why are you so upset?

He doesn't seem upset to me.

Why can't you follow comment guidelines?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why do you keep posting this in every discussion?

Frivolous spending != fraud.

Please read commenting guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is there a difference when it comes to the taxpayer?

It's all waste. Fraud if there were kickbacks, we'll see about that.

Maybe there is no difference, but I think honest framing matters.

> "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!

> just $55 billion in waste

"Just" lol. After a month.

Replace the fraud w/ waste if that makes you feel better about the audit.

I'm sure investigations will reveal fraud, it takes awhile to build a case.

But even if there is zero fraud (fat chance), gotta love the savings from waste cuts!

Dang, I was really excited to read about the $55 billion in fraud after you claimed that it has been "posted everywhere". :(

Please let me know when you find the evidence!

Also, I never said I dislike the audit. I do, however, dislike dishonest framing.

Again, we'll just say it's "waste" until investigations complete.

Glad I could frame it better for you so you can feel good about the savings.

Also glad to hear you like or are at least content with the audit, since you don't "dislike" it.

Yup. We'll see how it goes.

> Just as raw un restricted read/write access is constantly alleged, but we have in turn found out that isn't the case.

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...

He was mistakenly given write access by the treasury department employees in charge of managing DOGE permissions. He resigned a day later, likely before he even realized he had write access. In that short window, he accessed the system "exclusively under the supervision of Bureau database administrators", and the initial treasury department investigation did not find any misuse of said write permissions.

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...

and they immediately course corrected as they should

let me ask you a question. Richard Nixon had a special team under his direct control, they're popularly known as the white house plumbers. He asked this team to engage in activities not directly authorized by congress including various wiretaps and break-ins. Eventually these activities were discovered, it became a scandal and ended his Presidency.

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?

Were the "white house plumbers" operating in the clear? On a defined task that was campaigned on? Working with legal as well as existing employees within each organization (yes I get they were simply stealing info)?

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.

Trump is not directing "wiretaps" or "break-ins" into entities outside the executive branch of the federal government.

Nixon had a 25% approval after he left office. I think there's a baseline of about 20-30% of people who are pro-authoritarian, and they don't really want to admit it yet, but they're fine with their team doing whatever they want, as long as they get their way.

Interestingly I feel the same way about the left, where things like pronouns were forced onto people, taxpayers were forced to pay off others student loans, the first and second amendments regularly attacked and if you spoke out against any of this it could lead to you losing your job.

You can’t with a straight face call the party of small government pro authoritarian. Unless you’re purposely skewing reality.

They are not the party of small government; every time they have been in power, they have used it to increase the size of the government. Show me a Republican President in the last 40 years who has decreased the power of the federal government.

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.

How about I flip this on you since you’re living in an alternative reality and explain to me how they’ve increased the size of the federal government?

Let's get to the same reality then. Do these facts exist in your reality?

Ronald Reagan (1981–1989): Fiscal Year 1981: Federal spending was approximately $678 billion. Fiscal Year 1989: Federal spending increased to about $1.14 trillion.

George H. W. Bush (1989–1993): Fiscal Year 1989: Inherited a federal budget of $1.14 trillion. Fiscal Year 1993: Federal spending rose to approximately $1.41 trillion.

George W. Bush (2001–2009): Fiscal Year 2001: Federal spending stood at about $1.86 trillion. Fiscal Year 2009: Federal spending increased significantly to approximately $3.52 trillion.

Donald Trump (2017–2021): Fiscal Year 2017: Federal spending was around $4.1 trillion. Fiscal Year 2021: Federal spending rose to about $6.8 trillion.

Can you explain how the Republican Party is the party of small government, if Republican Presidents in my lifetime have always increased federal spending?

facts and reality… you are asking for too much :)

By re-hiring him?

Sure. They made a decision and stand by it as is their luxury. Yelling at the vacuum of the internet about it may score emotional points but it won't sole the core frustrations people have. The common argument is "yes we need to do it, but do it another way" to which I say, it hasn't been done another way and plenty have had time to do it. Pushing things off and procrastinating in general, combined with a President that is largely supported and on a 2nd term, with no need to pander means you get exactly what was voted for.

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 been done another way. We literally have independent agencies within the government that perform this job openly, carefully, with actual transparency, and by teams of experienced personnel.

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.

No they aren’t, hence why so many Americans are surprised about USAID and their crazy projects. We’ll have to agree do disagree.

No, that’s not how this works. This isn’t a matter of fucking opinion. You can opt to be on the side of fantasy and belief or the side of fact.

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.

You can do better to connect with the Americans that in fact don't share your sentiment. Your staunch response and attitude lead me to believe you have a superiority perspective, intentional or not. That's the exact attitude and response the country is pushing back against.

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.

If your best argument is that people who’ve been lied to and misled for decades voted to let the wolf into their henhouse, so just lie back and let it happen, that says volumes.

Do. Fucking. Better.

Sorry but this is very clearly moving the goalposts; you asked, got a very seriously problematic example, and then brushed it off with "yeah but..."

Come on man, are we really at the level of just letting that slide and pretending this is a legit operation? That Musk has only the best intentions, as his track record clearly shows right?

I can't believe what I'm seeing, the world has gone fully crazy.

Yep it's legitimate and I see no issues with it. The track record of the last admin was crazy were you saying the same things then? The left screamed trust the science in one breath over covid, then said science is fluid in the other when it came to biology. The left went to far and 15 or so years of being propped up and supported has gone by the wayside. I get it, people are upset, but at the end of the day we're here because of the "crazy" spending on "crazy" ideas.

Sunlight is publish the findings and take action after.

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.

Idk about the US, but the 'government' fraud that I know of, does not show up in the tax office records or in the foreign aid accounts. The common thing is that civil servants/officials are bribed. At usually on the cheap too, so it'll take a lot of digging to find it, and worse, prove it. But, this kind of corruption is probably even more widespread among companies. If you want to exact justice, that's the place to look.

In private companies people probably consider the issue to be 'less wrong'.

It's up to the owners and their management how they run it, right? So it's more about discrimination than government-style corruption.

>The common thing is that civil servants/officials are bribed. At usually on the cheap too, so it'll take a lot of digging to find it, and worse, prove it.

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.

One of Trump's executive orders has shut down enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This government is absolutely not trying to root out corruption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act

conveniently sweeping aside the fact that those who depend the most on the 'inefficient' programs/agencies that are being 'optimized' are the poorest and weakest members of society. those who can afford private everything will be fine.

Before even debating the effectiveness of this audit, we have to address the fundamental problem: Elon Musk has no legal authority to be conducting this in the first place. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not a real government agency and Musk has not been confirmed by the Senate or given formal oversight. It's illegal and unconstitutional.

Beyond that, yes, large-scale government audits have been done before. In fact, we already have institutions designed to do exactly that. The GAO, the Office of the Inspector General, and even bipartisan commissions have uncovered fraud and inefficiencies without letting an extremely partisan private individual with massive conflicts of interest connected to his businesses arbitrarily rip apart government agencies.

Your claim that the continued existence of fraud means the system does not work is also specious, it's obviously not possible to eliminate all fraud, statements like that make me doubt that your comment is made in good faith.

The authority notion is repeated but bears no resemblance to fact. Trump is the one signing off on everything. Both DOGE and his appointment of Elon a a special employee, his team are mixed career govt and special employees. They put forth recommendations for the president. Trump ultimately makes all the decisions.

There have been a couple attempts to sue and stop it and each have failed in the courts already. Notably the 14 states that sued in Fed court were denied by an Obama Appointed Judge. She expressed concerns over the terminations, but ultimately found "no evidence of imminent irreparable harm to the plaintiffs"

So in good faith, i'd ask you, what is your solution to solve the fraud issue? One that almost every presidential candidate has run on for generations? I don't think fraud is under contention honestly, I think it's the methods. What would your proposal be to both Identify and fix the issues?

As tends to be the case, the ruling is nuanced.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-scores-win-suit-chall...

FTA: In her decision, Chutkan wrote that the states "legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight." But the judge said the states had not shown why they were entitled to an immediate restraining order.

That doesn't mean Elon was exonerated, it just means that an immediate restraining order won't be issued.

> So in good faith, i'd ask you, what is your solution to solve the fraud issue?

The question cannot be asked in good faith because it frames the discussion in a manner that suggests the concern here is one of fraud, however what we've witnessed by DOGE instead is arbitrary and partisan firings, as well as brazen falsehoods and mischaracterizations about the nature of what is being cut and the total numbers of what is being saved (by several orders of magnitude in some cases).

I don't feel the need to discuss an earnest plan about cutting fraud and waste because that is not what is on the table right now with DOGE. Further, I don't see any evidence presented to explain why the GAO and other bipartisan efforts to curtail fraud are regarded as ineffective. Simply stating "fraud still exists" is not an honest rebuttal, since fraud will always exist.

Ok so ignore fraud, they're finding waste that doesn't align with the Presidents vision for America. It's as simple as that. The president isn't in alignment with Gender Ideology or "wokeness" as is often put. The large majority of these programs support those ideas. That's his right through EO and his cabinet picks to change. HHS has now defined what a woman is, anything counter to that is counter to their opinion and is going to be removed. You don't have to agree, or like it, but it is what it is.

There is excess spending on what the admin sees as bullshit, they're going to remove it. Just as Biden pushed to forgive student loans and it played out in the courts, this will play out as well, though it seems to not be in favor of the "losing parties".

> they're finding waste that doesn't align with the Presidents vision for America. It's as simple as that

In other words, it is partisan but you, more or less, agree with it.

> The president isn't in alignment with Gender Ideology or "wokeness" as is often put. The large majority of these programs support those ideas

The VA is woke? The FAA is woke? Cancer research is woke? Nuclear weapons security is woke? Bird flu researchers are woke?

If it were just some DEI directors getting fired most people wouldn't care, but the haphazard blowing up of the government is not about "waste", it's an obvious political agenda.

I’ll bite since you mentioned VA. I 100% see bloat and waste that need to be purged every time I go in. The large portion of non DRs working there I interact with are lazy and barely work. It’s been a jobs program that has created issue after issue. Clear the bloat and hire the right people. So again, yes I’m fine with it.

> The president isn't in alignment with Gender Ideology or "wokeness" as is often put. The large majority of these programs support those ideas.

When you say "large majority", do you have any evidence or data to point to that isn't just Elon going "Look at all this fraud I found!!!" and then none of it turns out to at all be fraud?

DOGE is actually the USDS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service

This isn't an audit, it's a blindfolded hatchet job. They've already been caught either deliberately or accidentally misinterpreting data, to the tune of they called an 8 million dollar contract an 8 billion dollar contract, among many other glaring discrepancies. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/19/doge...

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.

> This isn't an audit, it's a blindfolded hatchet job

It's actually *worse* than blindfolded. It's extremely partisan [1]

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/adambonica.bsky.social/post/3lil7yl...

I think it's certain that there will be positive and negative consequences and both of those will be on a large scale. I too am curious about the positives.

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.

> if you were in charge of addressing this problem, how would you tackle it differently?

I would start by not firing people doing jobs I don't understand. They do that a lot, even for very, very important jobs.

>Is it really possible to root out governmental fraud using this approach?

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.

"Governmental fraud." This is like when people are being (made) upset about vanishingly small benefits fraud when wage theft and tax evasion are several magnitudes of order worse.

> So here’s my question: if you were in charge of addressing this problem, how would you tackle it differently?

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

It's shocking to me how many people think that auditing government agencies is some new thing being implemented by Trump/Musk.

These agencies all have Inspector Generals, who are outside of the agency and responsible for auditing their particular agency. And they do, there are reports on this sort of thing.

Most of the IGs, if not all, were fired by Trump first thing.

> corruption wouldn’t persist

We still haven't seen any evidence of corruption, by the way. Yeah, I'm sure there's some gov employees here and there doing fraudulent stuff, skimming off the top or getting gov contracts to their buddies. But there has been zero evidence of any widespread or systemic corruption in a single agency. Nothing.

The agency that did get axed the most -- USAID -- was because of "woke ideology" that they were supposedly pushing (though there wasn't any evidence of that being widespread either), not corruption/fraud (breaking the law).

It's like the WMD excuse to invade Iraq.

Considering how atrociously bad they have been at estimated money saved, I don't think they have any positive results at all.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates...

Twitter guy is going to do so much damage to America.

DOGE is not necessarily about fraud. Their summary of cancelled projects for USAID for example is often vague. For example, "$14M for "social cohesion" in Mali." As a reader, I have no context for this program, its impact, or who ran it. I don't even have the ability to discern whether other things were lumped in. Can I guess this was aimed at preventing further in-roads of Al Qaeda? Who knows.

An actual cherry-picked example of DOGE's potential fraud finding is at the SSA where Musk showed his query of "DEAD" = "FALSE" (I am paraphrasing a bit) yielded a huge number of folks over ages 115. Context is what is scarce. Are they receiving payments, are there other reasons for why the query returned those results, what other context do I have to interpret these results? Again, I have no idea.

I think the safest way of couching what is going on, is a drastic curtailment of government programs and employees. Equivalents to this? Maybe Gorbachev. I am sure there are other historical parallels, but they are probably apples to peaches comparisons at a certain level.

And to your last question, I am not sure if anyone really knows the problem/s that are being addressed right now other than debt and the capability to pass a tax cut.

I am surprised people are comparing what Trump and Musk are doing now to Putin when in reality it's closer to Gorbachev (as you mentioned) and what the Chicago school did under Yeltsin. For those not aware, they cut government programs, reduced regulation, and privatized many government entities. The result was a catastrophic reduction in GDP and people's wealth. If what is about to come something as devastating, I really hope not. A recent example is what Milei is doing and he had similar results, resulting in a large increase of poverty.

I would not fire staff responsible for safeguarding nuclear material, and I wouldn't be trying to avoid transparency.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-02-14/elon-m...

Lets assume for a minute that what's going on is a good faith comprehensive audit of these agencies. (It's not, but lets just say it is.)

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?

Presumably Elon and hist staff were planning this and -maybe?- training for this for months, perhaps since before the election.

Planning without any access to or knowledge of all these difference agencies and their systems and processes (you do know there are many processes in place to prevent fraud and corruption, and Inspector Generals responsible for auditing)? Almost impossible. Again, these are not software problems.

Haha buddy they were still interviewing people in January.

The US has actual independent auditors at various agencies. They're called inspectors general. Trump is trying to fire all of them: https://apnews.com/article/trump-inspectors-general-fired-co...

The Clinton administration conducted a thorough audit, eventually laying off 351k people [1]. But they did so using a six-month review of all agencies performed by experienced federal workers. They ensured there were no national security ramifications and provided severance.

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-...

Only because you didn't inform yourself properly. Did you know about the position of inspection general? Did you read any of their reports? Do you know Trump fired all of them? In a totally illegal move?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43116844

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/25/trump-fires-inspectors-gene...

>published its findings for the public

Is doge actually doing this in a meaningful way? What is the website? Thus far I'm only aware of them celebrating partisan victories like chopping funding for trans theater etc.

Instead of firing all the auditors(Inspectors General) I'd bring them in and get their input on how to tackle something of this magnitude. Then see about getting them the resources necessary as I'm assuming they would need to staff up massively with experienced auditors(aka not DOGE) and other resources.

>Has there ever been a historical precedent where an external agency thoroughly reviewed all departments, published its findings for the public, and then based decisions on that analysis?

They are 't reviewing and publishing shit, it yes there is historical moments when those types of things happened, usually after coup, dictatorship, or just any authoritarian government everyday dismantling everything, that's why everyone looking outside of USA with a bit of history knowledge see as a very bad precedent

>So here’s my question: if you were in charge of addressing this problem, how would you tackle it differently?

I would not do it differently. Well, probably it's going to be worse (but most measures). DM and EM are being too nice in my opinion.