This is /s, right?

First- Many of the cuts haven't been legally conducted and, rather, represent waste themselves as they are going to disrupt activities and create litigation. So we, the people, will pay at least as much and have less productive results and have to pay for legal fees.

Second- Federal contracts are usually bid on the free market. There's an RFP, bidders, and the best fit wins. It's usually lowest cost while meeting requirements. I'm not sure why selling to the government is not a "real customer."

Third- It's reductive and inflammatory to say that not detailing out the contracts were for was because you would have seen it as wasteful corrupt spending. How would the prior commenter have even known what you see as wasteful and corrupt?

Can we at least agree that NGOs like Chelsea Clinton's Difficult to Verify Third World Orphan Feeding Service should be audited?

The argument from the right, which I have not seen anyone on the left address directly, is that a very large portion of government spending is laundered to well connected people by way of contracts to NGOs and other kinds of organizations where there is little or no verification that the money is actually being used as claimed. Often tax filings reveal that by its own admission, the organization in question is spending nearly all the money on overhead like travel and administration. Combine this with the fact that so many people go into government jobs with modest salaries but come out being worth 10s of millions of dollars and I have a hard time believing that anything but a wrecking ball is going to fix the system.

We are adding trillions to the national debt every year so we don't have money to waste.

Many politicians go into office promising reforms but until very recently it was always just slight nibbling around the edges, if anything.

Can you provide a basis in fact for the argument about a large portion of government spending? I'm asking because I think the argument is specious.

First- 49% of national spending goes to Social Security, Medicare and interest payments. The first is a direct payment, the second is very heavily regulated and has a bounty program for fraud waste and abuse, and the third is paid directly to bondholders.

Second- I'm almost certain that most, if not all, government contracts have auditing rights included. So we could audit them if we want, in fact almost every government agency has an inspector general to do just that.

I think that Chelsea Clinton's NGO is a nice interior bailey to fall back on to defend what Musk is actually doing.

Are you referring to the Clinton Health Access Initiative, to which USAID gave $7.5 million in 2019 during Trump's term, or is there another one?

Is it the one where you posted the dogegov.com website? Because that's the wrong website and not affiliated with the US government. That's probably why it got flagged. The real website is doge.gov, though that site isn't exactly great; it's basically a mirror of the @DOGE account on X. The "savings" section of the site says "receipts coming soon, no later than Valentine's Day," which is today.

Edit to add: doge.gov is exactly the site we're talking about here; it was offline a bit earlier, presumably while they cleared up the mess from their unsecured DB.

I think it's just time for you to stop digging. Every post is more inane than the last, and the last was you posting a link to a scam site and claiming it's an official government outlet. Just consider that if you can't tell the difference in that, you might be in over your head here.

> I posted a link to where DOGE is publishing their cuts in response to the comment you are replying to and it was flagged and removed instantly.

You posted a link to a non-official crypto meme website that contained no useful information about what is actually happening with DOGE the government agency.

> Without knowing what your friend's contacts were for, though, I can't tell if that's $100 million in waste that was cut, or not.

The reason we can't tell if what is being cut is waste or not is because the ones doing the cutting are not being transparent and have no accountability.

It isn't an audit if it's just Elon saying "Good" or "Bad" at each thing he looks at and then sometimes posting on the social media site he owns that he "Found a bad one!"

Maybe I'm looking at it wrong but where is the transparency on which spending they have decided to cut and what exactly that spending was being used for?

Edit: That also doesn't seem to be the official website, which is doge.gov

The title of the website you linked is "THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY COMMUNITY MEME PROJECT"

It has a section on buying/trading crypto, and the linked X account is @doge_eth_gov which has been suspended.

Dude, you just linked to an unofficial fake site designed to trick excited visitors into buying a cryptocoin without looking at the fine print [0], and its "data" is all stuff that has been public for years.

While I agree that the task of figuring out where the real site is (let alone good+real data from it) is much harder than it ought to be... isn't that itself just another data-point? It indicates the whole thing [1] is being managed in a kind of unprofessional chaotic stupidity.

__________

[0] "#DogeGov has no association with the official DOGE Organization. This token is a community-driven meme project designed to raise awareness of government spending and over-regulation. It has no intrinsic value or financial return expectations and operates without a formal team or roadmap. The token is intended solely for educational and entertainment purposes."

[1] "Department" is too misleading but "a private Presidential Commission undergoing a bizarre corporate-inversion to gut an real department and crawl inside its corpse" is too long to say.

Uh, that's not a government website, and even if it were, clicking around shows vague numbers associated with vague categories. There's no useful information here. There's no transparency here.

If it’s a $100,000,000 contract then it was appropriated by Congress. Whether or not it’s “waste” is entirely irrelevant.

Two things that frustrate me about this line of argument is a failure to recognize the scale being discussed and an implicit assumption that something that isn't trivially obvious doesn't exist.

On the scale- We're talking about millions of checks a year. You've effectively proposed to ask every congressperson to spend all day signing checks. By doing so, you've also eliminated the time they spend working with constituents on issues, understanding the facts or background of decisions they've made, or even working to find compromises.

On the assumption- There isn't a dollar figure, but there are quite thorough rules. (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46497) This spells out how the rules are established and what governs it. You can quite easily look up the authorizing legislation for USAID and see the allowed purposes for funds. Definitionally- that makes it not slush funding.

The only reason we're writing millions of checks is because MOST OF IT IS FRAUD!

You ade alleging that. What you do with an allegation, is you prove it, and then you make the cuts. You don't make the cuts in dark of night and then say, "trust me, receipts coming later." This isnt the shoot-fucking-first-ask-questions-never wild west, its a goddamn democracy.

Proof or you're lying. Yelling doesn't make something true.

It's the standard you've asked others to be held to in these comments. It's fair to be held to it yourself.

It is pointless to argue with you.

All the relevant documents I should be able to link to have been purged from various Federal sites due to “DOGE” shenanigans.

Congressional appropriations are how money is allocated, regardless of party in charge of Congress or the Executive. If the money is misspent there’s a range of tools available to Congress AND the Executive to correct the problem. But if we're just going to let a group of people decide on their own what is or isn't fraud then, regardless of your political belief system, we're simply fucked.

Literally not how anything in Civ agencies or CivTech works. Can't speak for defense.

I'd love to have those answers too but it seems like DOGE doesn't care about transparency as much as they claim to want that. Elon keeps touting open source and transparency but the transparency is only in the form of poorly researched, cherry picked tweets from him which are often false. I could actually get behind DOGE if they were properly publishing all the financials of the agencies that they're auditing and programs that they're cutting. Without that, it's completely unaccountable.

Did you know there's a website where they're documenting everything? https://doge.gov/

The receipts still aren't there, even though they had said they'd be up there before Valentine's Day (now they just say "coming over the weekend", I wonder if they'll make that deadline or have to update the text again...).

Transparency would have been most important before they started randomly cancelling contracts, but it seems they didn't bother.

Who is the "they" you're talking about? Assuming you mean "the establishment executive branch agencies", it's not like you're getting that answer from Trump and Musk either.

We have no idea what they're actually cutting, whether that $100M would have gone to something genuinely useful, or if it was going to some wasteful project.

Well, we do sorta find out, when we hear about a single mother being unable to provide food for her children because she's capriciously and arbitrarily lost her SNAP benefits.

DOGE is a train wreck, and like in any train wreck, a lot of innocent people get hurt, and no one knows what's going on in the midst of the chaos.

They could've done the advisory role investigating and proposing improvements with a normal review process as promised instead of just going in there and being a bull in every china shop smashing things up regardless of whether or not it's useful.

Instead, you're getting to debate whether or not something was a good idea after it was already destroyed.

If you believe the system is fundamentally broken, and has become an instrument graft to funnel taxpayer dollars to DC bureaucrats, NGOs, special interests, political allies, propagandistic media, etc., that would be a much less effective way to fix it.

I realize many people don’t believe this, and believe instead that government corruption and waste in the US is non-existent or acceptably low, and we shouldn’t rock the boat.

But if they don’t believe that, their actions make sense.

Oh, have Doge actually provided anything of substance of where the money is going?

The government does: https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/CFO/documents/2024-Budget-i...

I guess he got flagged as I was replying, but there's his transparency. The government isn't a private corporation.

As you mentioned DOGE is looping some holes to not disclose their budget nor staff. That's not how the government works.

I don't think this counts. The most detailed it gets is this:

Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS for $505 Million. What exactly is that? People with AIDS already have housing options. They have the same options as other people. There is literally nothing in that line item that explains why half a billion is needed for that. Where's the report, wheres the description of number of employees to administer, and an explanation of why thats needed.

Another thing: In the period between 2012 and 2019, the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) employees at HUD declined from 8,576 to 6,837, a reduction of 20 percent. This loss of staff presented serious risks to HUD’s ability to meet the needs of its customers, protect against cybersecurity threats, and deliver on the mission.

Where is the backup of that statement - "HUD’s ability to meet the needs of its customers, protect against cybersecurity threats, and deliver on the mission. "

Protecting against cybersecurity should literally be handled by a different org within fedgov!

Also why 2000 more employees? Are they also taking an elevator down the limestone mountain and riding around on bikes to file a loan?

The stories coming out of DOGE are like this, how do you expect me to read this PDF without a ton of cynicism?

It is totally inappropriate for a tax base to fund something over $1M that has nothing backing up what it is for. Let's get rid of FRAUD and ABUSE!

Orig comment: These are the things they don't want to answer. As a Tax Payer I want to know what that money was for.

There is literally nothing in that worth flagging. HN users are becoming less tolerant of opposing ideas.

I should note that I try to avoid flagging unless the entire comment is an outright attack and there is nothing of substance whatsoever in it. The "these are things they don't want to answer" is partially fitting that criteria, but I simply focused on the implicit question.

I figured a comment like that is better (and a bit funnier) to to simply disprove than hide. And I didn't need much work to disprove it. Any little nudges to help peope realize that "yes, a good 95%+ of government budgets is publicly viewable" is a good step forward.