Whatever the truth about the levels of waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending -- and I have no doubt that there's a lot of it -- Elon Musk's public statements on the subject have not shown themselves worthy of trust. The New York Times just compiled a few examples (gift link): /1 - ThreadSky

walterolson.bsky.social • 4 days ago

Whatever the truth about the levels of waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending -- and I have no doubt that there's a lot of it -- Elon Musk's public statements on the subject have not shown themselves worthy of trust. The New York Times just compiled a few examples (gift link): /1

Comments

dashingmd.bsky.social•4 days ago

Why are you so sure there is a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse? Waste according to whom? And the government books are the most audited around. No need to give credit where none is due.

walterolson.bsky.social•4 days ago

Here's a 2023 GAO report on the small business COVID relief programs, which > $1 trillion. "Our analysis... identified over 3.7 million out of 13.4 million total unique recipients with discrepancies associated with potential fraud." Much of the stolen money here will never be recovered.

dashingmd.bsky.social•4 days ago

Ok PPP is like the one example of an emergency program (by the Trump I administration) where there was effectively no auditing at all. But that’s people scamming the government, not the government scamming the people, which is the DOGE mission.

tenseven.bsky.social•4 days ago

Musk is the ultimate con man. That’s why Trump is in awe.

walterolson.bsky.social•4 days ago

In a Fox News interview Thursday, recounted in the NYT story, Musk claimed the National Park Service had spent nearly $1 billion on a ten-question park visitor "simple online survey" that "you could do with SurveyMonkey." Does that sound even vaguely plausible? It isn't. /2

walterolson.bsky.social•4 days ago

Apparently Musk derived that claim from a finding that the entire Department of the Interior (of which NPS is a part) spent $830 million on a wide range of in-house consultancy services. DOGE's own account says that it saved about $400,000 by eliminating surveys across the entire Interior Dep't. /3

walterolson.bsky.social•4 days ago

The largest Interior Department contract for a survey cost $2 million and was meant "to help the Agriculture Department conduct surveys about food stamps," a topic presumably unrelated to national park visitors. Whole gift link here: /4, end

walterolson.bsky.social•4 days ago

Several comments dispute the idea that there's much waste in federal spending. Here's a 2023 GAO report on the small business COVID relief programs, which topped $1 trillion. GAO found over a quarter of 13.4 million total unique recipients had discrepancies "associated with potential fraud." /5

coreyryung.bsky.social•4 days ago

The COVID small business program was pretty unique, though, in that it didn't have any of the normal supervision or auditing of such a program. Trump infamously said that he would personally oversee the program when asked about fraud and abuse.

notlikewe.bsky.social•4 days ago

Came here for exactly this point.

The COVID programs are a terrible example because they were enacted incredibly quickly intentionally to favor getting money into people’s hands ASAP over any other purpose.

Also that we know of that fraud prior to DOGE proves oversight largely works (excl. DoD).

coreyryung.bsky.social•4 days ago

The only other area of expenditures with such poor oversight is defense spending. In contrast, social safety net programs are scrutinized to such a high degree that we likely spend more on limiting access to such programs than we save in stopping any fraud through such efforts.

walterolson.bsky.social•4 days ago

Ironically, the program area that Musk chose to make the centerpiece of his complaints -- the Social Security old-age program -- is widely agreed by policy buffs to be among the most robust against false payouts of all social programs. Details here, from AEI: /6, end https://bsky.app/profile/walterolson.bsky.social/post/3lljgyuwb2s2m

haveyouanywool.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yes, precisely. Similar results are obtained across the board, as evidenced by the difficulty DGE is facing in coming up with any credible examples of waste, fraud, and abuse that can stand up to the least bit of scrutiny.

mbachand.bsky.social•4 days ago

Isn’t this the same program that Trump refused to use any means testing or enforcement mechanisms when he signed it, perhaps including a signing statement?

ccandd.bsky.social•4 days ago

You are stuck on PPE.

haveyouanywool.bsky.social•4 days ago

Why do you assume “there’s a lot of it”? Federal budgets have been pared to the bone for quite some time. The errors in Social Security payments are very, very low. And one of the first things the Trump regime did was to fire the Inspectors General, whose jobs were to root out fraud, waste, abuse.

walterolson.bsky.social•4 days ago

andreaeagle.bsky.social•4 days ago

it was mostly conservative jerks, including members of Congress, who did covid fraud.

haveyouanywool.bsky.social•4 days ago

And were caught, as designed.

haveyouanywool.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yes, but that’s the COVID relief program, which was universally acknowledged to have been pushed through in a hurry, with a high risk of fraud, in order to serve the higher good of getting relief payments into recipients’ hands. That legislation also came with a special inspector general to . . .

haveyouanywool.bsky.social•4 days ago

. . . mitigate the fraud that Congress knew was coming. That’s a one-off set of programs, the exception that proves the rule, as it were. Also, you could cherry pick any number of instances of fraud, waste, abuse — that’s why IGs exist. This DGE effort has not been shown to be a better substitute.

haveyouanywool.bsky.social•4 days ago

The sweeping statement presumes that there is “a lot” of waste fraud and abuse, but that is not necessarily true. When one analyzes what appears to be wasteful to the inexperienced and untrained eye (as you have done, i.e., DGE employees), a more complex truth emerges. The “a lot” is the problem.

walterolson.bsky.social•4 days ago

I could cite a further tall stack of GAO & IG reports indicating mispayment problems, but we'd obviously be talking past each other. You'd interpret them as showing the system works exactly as it should, while I'd interpret them as showing that despite the efforts of good people, much w/f/a remains.

pocono.bsky.social•4 days ago

You'd be surprised to find out that there's very little fraud in the government. They have found nothing. And probably will find nothing because the system he destroyed was working

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