Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

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rodoheel said:
The federal government has websites that detail all the spending the government engages in. That's where Musk is getting this supposedly "secret" information.

You may want to reconsider which side is "transparent" and which is not in this circumstance.
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they need to reconsider using silence dogood as their screen name bc they are neither as smart as Franklin nor stand for the same democratic values as he did.
 
There is absolutely fraud, waste, abuse and inefficiencies in government and the US Government is no exception. This is why Trump is benefitting from DOGE politically. Because whether it's a scalpel, a knife or a sledgehammer - attacking fraud or waste (or being perceived to do so) is popular. So, regardless of the merits of the "cuts" or the chaos engendered by it, he and Elon are on the popular side of the ledger here. Why do you think USAID was targeted first? Because it was uniquely wasteful or corrupt or represented a genuinely meaningful portion of the budget .... or because foreign aid, generally, is not very popular with voters (and particularly his base).

If folks were serious, you would be having a genuine forensic audit happening. Not Elon live-tweeting for ***** and giggles. And, as we've seen, at times making erroneous or wild claims. But all that feeds the beast and is a calculated approach.

I'd also note that one role of government should be to safeguard against market efficiencies that have external costs for society. Medicare and Medicaid (in large part tho far from perfectly) are examples of this.

I think Dems have been poorly prepared to deal with DOGE. Instead, they've gotten cornered into defending the status quo (or so it feels). The defense of institutions can't necessarily be a defense of those institutions as they are. But the importance of institutions as they should be.
 
NOVAHEEL13 said:
I work in the world of fed contracting. The number of reviews that a defense contract goes through before any money is paid is staggering. There are 7 or 8 independent sets of eyes looking at every single defense contract and I review their reviews for data and accounting accuracy EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. If fraud does occur it's on the private side when contractors over inflate their costs and it goes unnoticed bc it's not super obvious.
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I did not know that about the defense contracts. That's a lot of oversight. I wonder if it's new -- my stint at C&B was a long time ago, and I'm sure I was hearing war stories from the 90s.

But I think we agree that the private contractors are by far the primary source of fiscal mismanagement.
 
superrific said:
This seems like the Matt Gaetz nomination. Trump is easily convinced. Putin said something to him that convinced him it was the right course of action. I suspect that more responsible people will convince him not to do it. I'm not sure of it, of course, because nobody can be sure of what that man will do (except that it will be destructive), but that's my intuition.
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Based on his past behavior, what leads you to believe he will listen to anyone responsible?
 
Igs149 said:
I think Dems have been poorly prepared to deal with DOGE. Instead, they've gotten cornered into defending the status quo (or so it feels). The defense of institutions can't necessarily be a defense of those institutions as they are. But the importance of institutions as they should be.
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That's right, but I think the Dems are going to get there. First, they are trying to stop the bleeding.

The best strategy, politically, will be for Dems to just let them break everything and then the people who depend on that stuff might realize they've been conned all this time. Some of them, at least. Like the forest rangers who lose their jobs for no reason, or the people who buy houses based on government employment and then they got canned.
 
mynameisbond said:
Based on his past behavior, what leads you to believe he will listen to anyone responsible?
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He clearly listens to the people around him. They are, of course, not responsible. However, pulling troops out of the Baltics is so daft that even the irresponsible people could talk him out of it. Just like with Gaetz. He put zero effort into defending him once he realized that he'd been played, and even the Senate GOP was like, "no fucking way."

Someone told him to kill the tariffs on Canada and Mexico. That person was probably not responsible, but anyone could see that tanking the markets was a bad idea.
 
superrific said:
My experience is that there's little waste within the government itself. Elon thinks this is the first "find government inefficiency" rodeo. It very much is not. These things pop up every few years, where some politician says he will go "line by line" through the federal government. That's in addition to the ordinary inspection/audit processes.

What happens in the realm of federal contracting is a completely different story. I know little about the details. I summered at Covington and Burling, which at the time had a very robust federal contracting practice. Boy, did I hear some stories. But again, that's outside the government and the government has little insight as to how to control that. And of course, most of it is in the defense contractors.
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It also depends on how you define waste. The Fourth Circuit courthouse in Richmond is massive and beautifully ornate. I can’t imagine how much it costs to maintain, heat and cool it. Most of the time, the building is largely empty. But a few weeks every year, it’s packed with lawyers and judges. The hearings held there could surely be spread out among other smaller courthouses if necessary.

Is that building a waste? I’d say not, but from a purely financial perspective, I could see the argument that its cost outweighs its benefits.

Lots of things like that in the federal government, which is why those decisions are best made by our elected representatives in Congress and not by a neo-Nazi billionaire who runs his social media company like a chop shop.
 
superrific said:
In the non-DOD federal government? There's essentially no fraud, and little waste. The agencies that spend money absolutely do have budget constraints, and they are often constraining. I can testify to that with personal experience. What people like you just don't understand is that streamlining, in the first instance, *consumes* money. And the agencies rarely have money to spare for that sort of thing. The next thing is that *streamlining* doesn't solve any problems, because most of this isn't "waste." It's public services.

Now, in the world of federal contracting, I don't know but I'd imagine there is quite a bit of fraud and waste. That, of course, is not what DOGE is looking at. They can't. It's not something you can find in a payment system. In defense contracting, there absolutely is tons of waste but they ain't gonna be looking at that, for reasons that surely you can understand.
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"The next thing is that *streamlining* doesn't solve any problems, because most of this isn't "waste." It's public services."

There's a joke about union workers. One guy digs a hole and another guy comes by immediately and fills it. The union guy, who normally places the tree in the hole is off today, but the other two guys still do their technical jobs.

It seems to me that the fact that the work being done is "public services" doesn't mean a) there is the right number of people performing the work, b) there isn't a person who's job, like the guy who places the tree in the hole, can't be absorbed by someone else and c) there's a regular look at efficiency. How often does the federal government downsize?

I've worked at a large company since 2008 and have gone through at least 3 significant downsizes. That's the cycle. We add people at all levels and we spend money and then we realize that there are too many managers, too many support people in specific jobs, too many unused tools, underutilized buildings we're paying for, etc and then we downsize. Then the cycle starts over again.
 
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superrific said:
I did not know that about the defense contracts. That's a lot of oversight. I wonder if it's new -- my stint at C&B was a long time ago, and I'm sure I was hearing war stories from the 90s.

But I think we agree that the private contractors are by far the primary source of fiscal mismanagement.
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The oversight has increased over the years with several FAR & DFARS provisions being added in the last decade along with several additional CFR requirements since 2008ish

All that said, indeed it's the private sector that's the true issue. Particularly when they get creative with their numbers that make it difficult to tell if it's fraud or not.
 
ZenMode said:
"The next thing is that *streamlining* doesn't solve any problems, because most of this isn't "waste." It's public services."

There's a joke about union workers. One guy digs a hole and another guy comes by immediately and fills it. The union guy, who normally places the tree in the hole is off today, but the other two guys still do their technical jobs.

It seems to me that the fact that the work being done is "public services" doesn't mean a) there is the right number of people performing the work, b) there isn't a person who's job, like the guy who places the tree in the hole, can't be absorbed by someone else and c) there's a regular look at efficiency. How often does the federal government downsize?

I've worked at a large company since 2008 and have gone through at least 3 significant downsizes. That's the cycle. We add people at all levels and we spend money when times are good and then we realize that there are too many managers, too many support people in specific jobs, too many unused tools, underutilized buildings we're paying for, etc and then we downsize. Then the cycle starts over again.
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1. That's a joke, not reality. I hope you realize that.
2. I think what you don't understand is that agencies do that type of right-sizing *every single year as part of the appropriations process.* Maybe that's fallen off since we've been keeping the government open with continuing resolutions for years now (thanks, Pubs!) but for the most part, everything an agency asks for has to be justified. If they want to add capacity, they either need more money (which Congress is reluctant to give) or shift priorities.

When I was clerking, appellate judges had four clerks and district court judges two. I think that now district courts get more than two clerks (as well they should!). That's right-sizing.

3. The point about "public services" is that what seems like waste is actually part of the service. For instance, I don't know how national park rescue operations work exactly, but for the sake of discussion, let's say the park has a team of rescue operators ready at all times. Most of the time, they are not doing much. But if you cut the number of teams, replacing "on site" with "on call," you're not eliminating waste. You're compromising the service. If someone needs to be rescued, there isn't always time to wake the team up, have them drive to the office, gear up and then go. They need to go right away. I don't know if this is literally true about national parks, but it absolutely is true about parts of the government.

Also consider that personnel management is important. If there are 10 people doing a job, and you cut three of them with the expectation that the other 7 will just take 30% more work . . . I think you can see what's likely to happen there. There will be burnout and pretty soon there will only be three left.

Musk doesn't understand this because he had captive labor at twitter (i.e. h-1B visa holders). The government doesn't. So when Musk determines that a skeleton crew will suffice to cover full staffing . . . that might be correct for a few months (might). But it's not going to save money even in the medium term. When everyone quits due to overwork, institutional knowledge walks out the door. Training walks out the door.

4. The other thing you appear not to understand is that the government is generally staffed with smart people. Ramrouser would never be hired by the DOJ. The technical staff at EPA is top-notch. That's because a lot of people seek education in part for the moral satisfaction of making the world better, or at least serving a goal larger than themselves.

And when a lot of smart people get together and establish policies, those policies are likely to be at least pretty good (unless they are acting in bad faith). Again, what outsiders see as "waste" is more likely a policy that responds to situations outsiders don't even know about -- in part, perhaps, because the policies prevent those situations from occurring. It's like when the W administration (and Greenspan's federal reserve) started dismantling financial regulations. They said, "nothing bad has happened in 70 years." Yeah, nothing bad happened because of those policies. You saw what happened when the policies disappeared.
 
the government will need to rehire more people than most pubs realize. The effects will be a total shitshow. Indeed, most people have zero understanding how our fed gov works and why it needs the people it does
 
superrific said:
Gutting the CDC and the NIH in a world of infectious disease is political suicide. If there's a disease wave (even short of a pandemic), Trump now owns it. It doesn't matter if the CDC funding actually contributed to it. Cut public health funding, and the public will blame you if there's disease.
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I wish and hope you are correct.

If a disease wave can be blamed on a foreign lab or immigrants, a huge percentage of Americans will back Trump. Hell, if the disease(s) can be blamed on American scientists, that’ll work, too.
 
altmin said:
"Things are not okay. I am not okay."
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Raphael Warnock has an answer for you, dude:



Still gives me goosebumps. Probably the most inspirational political moment I've seen in a while. That's the guy who could convince me to run through a wall for him.
 

Office of the Inspector General

The Office of the Inspector General is directly responsible for meeting the statutory mission of promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in the administration of Social Security Administration programs and operations and to prevent and detect fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in...
oig.ssa.gov oig.ssa.gov

From back in August

SSA also has not implemented a number of recommendations related to its processes to recover overpayments and issue underpayments. OIG’s audits found the Agency’s actions to process over and underpayments were not always effective or consistent. SSA anticipated a new debt management product would address many of the recommendations. However, the Agency stopped implementation efforts in FY 2024 because the new product was not funded.

“Improper payments have been a longstanding challenge for SSA. While the Agency has taken actions to address this challenge, it needs to do more, and OIG’s recommendations can guide the Agency as it determines those corrective actions,” said Michelle L. Anderson, Assistant Inspector General for Audit and Acting Inspector General. “Without better access to data, increased automation, systems modernization, and policy or legislative changes, improper payments will continue to be a major challenge for SSA into the future.”

So we know it's happening, but DOGE is bad lol
 
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