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.
> 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.
That's the problem, there is no amount of money that separates something "appropriated by congress" or "slush funding in USAID". USAID was given 50B a year, can spend it on ANYTHING it wants, there is no further congressional approval required. I do think we need to get back to a point where a congressmen needs to approve each check over 10k.
Heck, it would at least give them something to do, and feel the money roll and make their choices in Congress mean something again.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Which, you know, is why liberals on this site and Reddit and Bluesky are so shocked at how many conservatives they have created by silencing them.
Let me repeat I VOTED FOR HARRIS. I just want to get real information! Flag away, censors!
3 replies →
[flagged]
> 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!"
[flagged]
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.
That's the problem, there is no amount of money that separates something "appropriated by congress" or "slush funding in USAID". USAID was given 50B a year, can spend it on ANYTHING it wants, there is no further congressional approval required. I do think we need to get back to a point where a congressmen needs to approve each check over 10k.
Heck, it would at least give them something to do, and feel the money roll and make their choices in Congress mean something again.
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.
4 replies →
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.
[dead]