DOGE Catch-All

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Tarheeljoe said:
Billionaire says his mother-in-law wouldn't complain if her SS check got skipped and if you complain you are probably committing fraud.

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That’s so backwards. Someone who isn’t a fraudster will complain and loudly. A fraudster wouldn’t complain due to concerns of likely being found to be a fraudster. Fraudsters don’t want people digging into the details.
 
From Heather Cox Richardson

Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post observed today that “the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ [is making] the federal government almost comically inefficient.” She wrote that Internal Revenue Service employees line up at shared computers on Mondays to submit their “five things I did last week” emails to DOGE while taxpayer service calls go unanswered. Federal surveyors at the Bureau of Land Management are no longer allowed to buy replacement equipment, so when a shovel breaks they can’t simply replace it; they have to locate a manager authorized to file an official procurement form and order one. Many have had to ignore their actual jobs in order to scrub words from official documents.

After interviewing frustrated civil servants for weeks, Rampell said, she has learned that “routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity,” while DOGE bogs workers down with “meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties.”

“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” one Pentagon staffer told Rampell. “Crazy town.”

open.substack.com

March 21, 2025

These days, I keep coming back to the quotation recorded by journalist Ron Suskind in a New York Times Magazine article in 2004.
open.substack.com open.substack.com
 

How Elon Musk’s DOGE Cuts Leave a Vacuum That China Can Fill​

The Department of Government Efficiency is shuttering organizations that Beijing worried about most, or actively sought to subvert.

www.nytimes.com

How Elon Musk’s DOGE Cuts Leave a Vacuum That China Can Fill

The Department of Government Efficiency is shuttering organizations that Beijing worried about most, or actively sought to subvert.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

“… As the Department of Government Efficiency roars through agencies across government, its targets have included some of the organizations that Beijing worried about most, or actively sought to subvert. And, as with much that Elon Musk’s DOGE has dismembered, there has been no published study of the costs and benefits of losing those capabilities — and no discussion of how the roles, arguably as important as a manned fighter, might be replaced.

On the list of capabilities on life support is Radio Free Asia, a 29-year-old nonprofit that estimates its news broadcasts reach 60 million people in Asia each week, from China to Myanmar, and across the Pacific islands where the United States has been struggling to counter China’s narratives about the world. It furloughed all but 75 of its Washington staff members on Friday, trying to stay on the air while court cases develop on Trump officials’ moves to defund U.S. government-supported media.

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Office of Net Assessment, an internal think-tank. With an annual budget that accounted for a few seconds of Pentagon spending each year, the office tried to think ahead about the challenges the United States would face a decade or two in the future — such as the new capabilities of artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons and the hidden vulnerabilities of supply chains for military contractors. …”
 
gtyellowjacket said:
Yeah. I actually misread it. I thought it was Doge threatening the social security administration and the director saying that she might have to shut off payments. It's actually the courts doing that and the director saying if we have to follow this ruling, people aren't going to get their checks and the court system will need to figure it out. Malicious compliance by Trump allies.

I'm sure this kind of thing happens all the time as a judge, who's a really smart person, makes a ruling on something they have no background in and has to go back and adjust it. Seems like that sort of thing happens to tech billionaires and unpaid 20-something coders as well. Its likely just hitting the news now because of what's going on. I think it'll all work out and not one check will be missed but we'll have to see.
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Will it stop you from doing gymnastics to give perpetual benefit of the doubt to people who don't deserve it?
 
wmheel1287 said:
Will it stop you from doing gymnastics to give perpetual benefit of the doubt to people who don't deserve it?
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No. In fact you must have misunderstood. Just like a federal judge who is an expert at the law, but might not understand how to administer a large government program would make a mistake and need to adjust after the fact, a billionaire and his young workforce trying to cut a bloated bureaucracy might also make a mistake and need to correct it after the fact.

And both of those things are okay and don't mean the end of our democracy or that old people won't get their checks or whatever else people are afraid of this week.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
No. In fact you must have misunderstood. Just like a federal judge who is an expert at the law, but might not understand how to administer a large government program would make a mistake and need to adjust after the fact, a billionaire and his young workforce trying to cut a bloated bureaucracy might also make a mistake and need to correct it after the fact.
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The judge didn't need to adjust anything. The order was crystal clear and the judge furiously responded to the media rantings of the Director.
 
You know who else “might not understand how to administer a large government program”? Elon Musk and his teenage hackers. So maybe they should talk to people, develop an understanding of how the organization works, and listen to reason before they announce their sweeping edicts. No, I won’t give them the benefit of the doubt because they are behaving maliciously and intentionally doing irreparable damage with their institutional woodchipper.

They get exactly the degree of respect they have shown to the people whose lives have been unnecessarily wrecked. Fuck them.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
The judge needed to clarify and that's fine. The order could have been interpreted either way.
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No, GT, this is false. The government official who made this claim eventually got upbraided by the Trump Administration for taking this aggressive position (more as a political matter of saying the quiet part out loud about threats to SSA benefits, but also because it was obvious nonsense that even they couldn’t effectively defend to the public with a straight face).
 
nycfan said:
No, GT, this is false. The government official who made this claim eventually got upbraided by the Trump Administration for taking this aggressive position (more as a political matter of saying the quiet part out loud about threats to SSA benefits, but also because it was obvious nonsense that even they couldn’t effectively defend to the public with a straight face).
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I certainly believe you more than some of these other folks. Statement withdrawn.
 
nycfan said:
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Based on his past comments, he likely thinks that the vast majority of humanity doesn't deserve or need to survive some kind of apocalypse. Only people like him are worthy to survive, and with his billions he likely has some kind of doomsday survival plan in place for himself and some other uberwealthy white men and women. The guy is a Social Darwinist, pure and simple - he's superior and almost everyone is else is inferior. Sounds like a classic Bond movie villain, which is what he is.
 

Why DOGE is struggling to find fraud in Social Security​

Claims of massive problems by Elon Musk and President Trump are at odds with the agency’s audits and reports.

GIFT LINK 🎁 —> https://wapo.st/41O5ZNm

“… Musk’s intense focus on Social Security appears central to his promise to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. The agency distributes $1.6 trillion in benefit payments each year, making up about 20 percent of all federal spending.

… But less than 1 percent of Social Security’s payments in recent years were determined to be improper — often the result of an accidental oversight or change in benefit status, according to a report last year by the agency’s inspector general. That works out to about $9 billion a year, and more than two-thirds of the mistaken payments were eventually clawed back. Another agency audit, which looked only at payments to retired workers, survivors and people with disabilities, found fraud was listed as the cause behind just 3 percent of improper benefit payments.

Despite the flood of money flowing through it, Social Security didn’t make a 2024 list by the General Accounting Office, the legislative branch’s nonpartisan watchdog, detailing the 16 agencies with improper payment rates of at least 10 percent. That report further found that 80 percent of all improper payments were due to just five government programs, including Medicare and Medicaid — but not Social Security.

… Social Security is among the most scrutinized and audited agencies in government, with frequent probes by its 500-person Office of Inspector General. It pays outside auditors to examine its books. Congress grills agency officials. Last year, a major focus in congressional hearings led by the GOP wasn’t waste or fraud — it was about Social Security being too aggressive in clawing back accidental benefit overpayments. …”
 
I have 30 ish young friend who suffers from a variety of MH issues He has finally found a group home type setting-on a farm . Has been doing Okay about 11 mths a year.
He recieves his Meds in the mail prepacked, daily doses etc. Helps him "do it right"
His mother told us just now that the firm that does this has been "defunded" by the DOGE fucks . Very sad. This literally could screw up his life-it has been a struggle for years-but he stays out if the Hospital 11 mths year
 
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