Comment by Arn_Thor
8 days ago
It befuddles me too. My understanding is that government spending is approved by congress and that all organizations except the Pentagon have passed their audits. This is not to say that there isn't _some_ waste, fraud and abuse in between the cracks, but any large expense is approved by Congress and the executive can't unilaterally override those spending choices.
FYI, the Marines have passed two audits so far: https://www.marines.mil/News/Press-Releases/Press-Release-Di...
They were even able to account for all their crayons! PT belts on the other hand...
Color me surprised. But good on them!
Crayons were accounted as food supplies? /s
It was a line item under "consumables".
Congress approves the annual budget for each department, it's not micromanaging how it's spent
What exactly do you think a budget is?
There's a reason the federal budget is several inches of very thin paper. The budget spells out how much money gets spent for various purposes, programs, projects, etc. Of course they don't specify the kind of paperclips the FAA buys. But they will approve or modify the FAA's budget plan which includes $X for office supplies, $Y for an upgrade to the FAA's network equipment in a branch office, $Z for upgrading some nav beacons, and so on.
The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
It certainly can't stop issuing payments for existing obligations, and it especially can't take money back, which M did a day or two ago to NYC because he read a tweet that said NYC was spending money housing migrants in "luxury hotels", which shockingly turned out to be nonsense...
That's why all of this DOGE crap is such theatrical nonsense. Congress, representing their state's interests and the interests of those who live in their district, via two separate branches, approves all the budgets.
No matter what T and M say, no federal agency can just willy-nilly decide to spend money it's allocated by congress on other stuff.
> The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
That's all great in theory: in actual reality those laws are just words on paper, Congress has no interest in asserting its authority, and enforcement rests with the executive.
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It had approved the budget for USAID which was slashed wholesale.
That's not true. At all.
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This is a good example of what I mean. There is no evidence that DOGE is acting on actual fraud and abuse, that is immediately obvious if you consider how broad most of their actions are. And unless you think that the federal government should essentially not exist at all I don't think you can declare all this just "waste".
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I mainly see a ton of likely Chesterton's Fences.
Or unintended 2nd order effects.
Who knows if the final outcome will be an improvement but it resembles fixing a TV by dropping it from a height and hoping.
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Everything they’ve been cutting so far has been ideological (DEI USAID and other agencies that are“run by Marxists”) or retribution (DOJ lawyers getting sacked) or self-serving (EPA CFPB).
The only example of waste are the 150 yr old SA recipients. Sure that happens (we’ve been hearing about “welfare queens” for decades) but certainly not something new the DOGE “uncovered “.
And why are we entrusting a bunch of young engineers to identify fraud? They might be qualified to refactor and streamline computer systems but are certainly not qualified to determine what is “legitimate “ spending and what is not.