They recommended a review of leases and to tighten up their employee expense reporting requirements.
You have no reason to believe Elon is either competent, nor independent, nor well-intentioned on any of this.
No, no one is against “a more efficient government.” Obviously. No one is “pro-fraud.” Obviously.
Please post specific examples of fraud that DOGE has surfaced, not just “things that were congressionally approved but I don’t like.”
I imagine it will be thousands and thousands of examples of "small time corruption" with a few million here and a few tens of millions here that in no sane world should be spent. And for some reason, people prefer to hate billionaires that create wealth when instructed by multimillionaires who siphon wealth from taxpayers but happen to own newspapers.
> You have no reason to believe Elon is either competent, nor independent, nor well-intentioned on any of this.
You could say the last two about anyone, but to deny that Elon is competent, especially coming from an anonymous internet commenter... okay.
Ah, yes, there are. They're called auditors. They audited USAID 4 months ago.
The entire US government spent only $7.7MM on Politico over the last 12 months. Oooo spooky stuff, if only there was a way to see what for! Turns out there is. You can scroll down and see the shocking revelation that the US government paid a news publication for subscriptions to a news publication!
Similar to how if you work in the energy industry, for example, a smart employer would pay for energy trade publications so you can do your job better.
https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/fa0cefae-7cfb-881d-29c...
In fact you can drill down all the way to individual line items. Here's the 49 subscriptions to Politico Pro that HHS, an organization with 83,500 employees, purchased. Looks suuuuper abusive... /s
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75F40120P00453_75...
> to deny that Elon is competent
Please show evidence of Elon being a competent public sector financial auditor. Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?
> Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?
I would wager that even you are more competent than the average auditor, assuming you know how to program. I'm seeing a lot of appeals to authority and credentialism, and assumptions that people who are hired by bureaucrats and politicians to audit themselves have better aligned incentives than a wildcard entrepreneur. If we can't agree on the fundamental axioms, I don't see this conversation going anywhere.
You say that like it’s a good thing…
This is what’s known as “compromise,” or otherwise “being a fucking adult.”
That's part of living in a society. As a child, you may have run into situations where you had to accept something you didn't think was perfect in order to get something you really wanted. This is like the big kid version of that! It's so complicated and so important to do at scale that we actually create these very elaborate systems called "governments" to manage the process. What we found over time was that these big systems could be captured by people who didn't want to compromise, so we invented "Constitutions" that constrain the system, regardless of who is currently operating it.
Right now, you're saying that your personal assessment of what's pork and what's not justifies weakening the system that keeps all of us safe from our government.
lol @ civilized people in 2025 falling for the “authoritarianism in exchange for quality of life promises” trick.
