> Just two days ago the DOGE committee stated that they discovered 2.7T of improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid to people overseas. 2.7T is a nontrivial amount of money.
I don't know how true this is, and if there really is 2.7T of "improper" payments, then yeah that needs to be stop.
The issue is that Musk just makes shit up. All the time, I genuinely think it might be a pathological problem. He lies about everything. He said "full self driving" would be available in Tesla "next year" in 2018, he claimed he'd have stuff on the moon by 2022, he faked a press release about robots, he publicly posted about taking Tesla private to drive up the stock price. I could go on, but I don't want to spend three hours typing this out.
So if DOGE is claiming 2.7T of Medicare fraud, it's tough for me to take it seriously because Musk is known for constantly lying. He also has shown a complete lack of understanding of very basic US civics. So even if he isn't "lying", it's entirely possible that he just doesn't understand what the fuck he's talking about, and declaring all this stuff as superfluous.
> I would love to hear justifications for things like this and how they help US global influence.
Largely the justification is the programs don't do what Musk says they do.
You've got to understand the source of your information is from habitual liars. The Tesla's autopilot [1] marketing video still starts of with "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself". That person in the driver's seat had to take control of the car numerous times include one time where the car drove off the road and struck a fence. These are not people whose word you can take at face value.
Anybody can throw together a list but it doesn't make it real.
Ignoring the fact you left off the rest of the description (as pointed out by another commenter) which also means that like $2 could go towards that purpose and $1,999,998 to something else (also $2M hasn't been spent; just $350,000 per your own link ...).
The quote you have starts of with "Activity to strengthen" which is uh incredibly vague. Like if you provide say _leadership training_ that sounds like an activity that could strengthen an organization as well as create individuals that could organize to promote Democratic values in their home country and promote good will towards the US for helping them out (unlike say what goes on in Iran). So there's so far no evidence it's surgery or pills.
Even if it is strictly gender-affirming care that does not mean it's surgery and pills. Gender affirming care is more vague than that [1].
And then finally, even if somehow none of the funds are for "ADVOCATE FOR IMPROVED QUALITY AND ACCESS TO SERVICES, AND PROVIDE ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OPPORTUNITIES." (the part you left off) and the funds for "ACTIVITY TO STRENGTHEN TRANS-LED ORGANIZATIONS TO DELIVER GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE" are strictly for surgeries; there appears to be ~0.95% of the US identifying as transgender so spending 0.0000002% of the federal budget seems uh fair (or really 0.00000006% of the federal budget because it's over 3 years while the budget is annual).
---
Ol' Musk isn't working at Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, or any of his other companies right now. He has the time to ask people and figure out if it's actually sex-changes or something else (it's always something else btw).
> ACTIVITY TO STRENGTHEN TRANS-LED ORGANIZATIONS TO DELIVER GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE, ADVOCATE FOR IMPROVED QUALITY AND ACCESS TO SERVICES, AND PROVIDE ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OPPORTUNITIES.
It's 2M for a lot of things. And let's be real, you didn't pay 2M in taxes, you don't really get to say this is "your" tax dollars. This is a lot of people's money, and they may want their money to go to these things. Why do you get the final say?
The "$47,000 transgender opera in Colombia" for example was a production of an award-winning opera that the US Embassy in Colombia sponsored. It's diplomacy.
Who is Mark Buffington, and why should I trust that his “recent web information” is an accurate and representative sample of spending that DOGE has cut? The official doge.gov site provides no breakdown other than a Twitter stream and an empty savings tab, although they claim on this lovely Valentine's day that "receipts" will be coming "no later than Valentine's day". Big if true!
You can audit all of this without immediately shutting down in-flight programs that save lives. You can say "we're going to go line by line and cut programs that we think are not properly spent".
But they in their arrogance, ignorance, malice, or all three, have been on an ideological war against agencies as a whole. Musk brags about trying to destroy 18F and the IRS free file system. They're trying to tear apart the entire department of education. They're trying to fire anyone who isn't explicitly loyal to the wannabe dictator in chief.
And I'll tell ya, it's not because of spending.
Let me be clear: there are right ways and wrong ways to cut spending. Doing it illegally with a bunch of unvetted fake-ass hackers and by stopping all government functions and installing loyalists isn't the way to do it.
>I am so far definitely satisfied with the progress.
I don't think it's good for the country to shut down agencies illegally on a whim, set up the mayor of NYC to be blackmailed at the drop of a hat, pause enforcement of foreign bribery laws, or hire political loyalists as tools of retribution to lead the DoJ and FBI.
But what do I know about helping the middle class or maintaining our place in the world?
> Just two days ago the DOGE committee stated that they discovered 2.7T of improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid to people overseas. 2.7T is a nontrivial amount of money.
I don't know how true this is, and if there really is 2.7T of "improper" payments, then yeah that needs to be stop.
The issue is that Musk just makes shit up. All the time, I genuinely think it might be a pathological problem. He lies about everything. He said "full self driving" would be available in Tesla "next year" in 2018, he claimed he'd have stuff on the moon by 2022, he faked a press release about robots, he publicly posted about taking Tesla private to drive up the stock price. I could go on, but I don't want to spend three hours typing this out.
So if DOGE is claiming 2.7T of Medicare fraud, it's tough for me to take it seriously because Musk is known for constantly lying. He also has shown a complete lack of understanding of very basic US civics. So even if he isn't "lying", it's entirely possible that he just doesn't understand what the fuck he's talking about, and declaring all this stuff as superfluous.
> I would love to hear justifications for things like this and how they help US global influence.
Largely the justification is the programs don't do what Musk says they do.
You've got to understand the source of your information is from habitual liars. The Tesla's autopilot [1] marketing video still starts of with "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself". That person in the driver's seat had to take control of the car numerous times include one time where the car drove off the road and struck a fence. These are not people whose word you can take at face value.
Anybody can throw together a list but it doesn't make it real.
[1]: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
You can look them up on the actual government website:
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_72052024FA00001_7...
> ACTIVITY TO STRENGTHEN TRANS-LED ORGANIZATIONS TO DELIVER GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE
This is 2M of my tax dollars that was/is being sent to Guatemala for gender affirming care. Which is sex change operations and hormones.
Ignoring the fact you left off the rest of the description (as pointed out by another commenter) which also means that like $2 could go towards that purpose and $1,999,998 to something else (also $2M hasn't been spent; just $350,000 per your own link ...).
The quote you have starts of with "Activity to strengthen" which is uh incredibly vague. Like if you provide say _leadership training_ that sounds like an activity that could strengthen an organization as well as create individuals that could organize to promote Democratic values in their home country and promote good will towards the US for helping them out (unlike say what goes on in Iran). So there's so far no evidence it's surgery or pills.
Even if it is strictly gender-affirming care that does not mean it's surgery and pills. Gender affirming care is more vague than that [1].
And then finally, even if somehow none of the funds are for "ADVOCATE FOR IMPROVED QUALITY AND ACCESS TO SERVICES, AND PROVIDE ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OPPORTUNITIES." (the part you left off) and the funds for "ACTIVITY TO STRENGTHEN TRANS-LED ORGANIZATIONS TO DELIVER GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE" are strictly for surgeries; there appears to be ~0.95% of the US identifying as transgender so spending 0.0000002% of the federal budget seems uh fair (or really 0.00000006% of the federal budget because it's over 3 years while the budget is annual).
---
Ol' Musk isn't working at Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, or any of his other companies right now. He has the time to ask people and figure out if it's actually sex-changes or something else (it's always something else btw).
[1]: https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-02/gender-affir...
2 replies →
Why did you leave out the rest?
> ACTIVITY TO STRENGTHEN TRANS-LED ORGANIZATIONS TO DELIVER GENDER-AFFIRMING HEALTH CARE, ADVOCATE FOR IMPROVED QUALITY AND ACCESS TO SERVICES, AND PROVIDE ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OPPORTUNITIES.
It's 2M for a lot of things. And let's be real, you didn't pay 2M in taxes, you don't really get to say this is "your" tax dollars. This is a lot of people's money, and they may want their money to go to these things. Why do you get the final say?
Are you this stupid naturally or do you take some sort of Alex Jones supplement to help with it?
The "$47,000 transgender opera in Colombia" for example was a production of an award-winning opera that the US Embassy in Colombia sponsored. It's diplomacy.
Neutral party here: who wanted that? Award-winning doesn’t mean anything standing alone, unfortunately.
who wanted diplomacy?
2 replies →
Who is Mark Buffington, and why should I trust that his “recent web information” is an accurate and representative sample of spending that DOGE has cut? The official doge.gov site provides no breakdown other than a Twitter stream and an empty savings tab, although they claim on this lovely Valentine's day that "receipts" will be coming "no later than Valentine's day". Big if true!
> idk how we can have the mindset that this is all pointless, if you never make any effort to cut wasteful spending
So you've never heard of the Government Accountability Office, huh? This is literally its purpose.
Here's my take:
You can audit all of this without immediately shutting down in-flight programs that save lives. You can say "we're going to go line by line and cut programs that we think are not properly spent".
But they in their arrogance, ignorance, malice, or all three, have been on an ideological war against agencies as a whole. Musk brags about trying to destroy 18F and the IRS free file system. They're trying to tear apart the entire department of education. They're trying to fire anyone who isn't explicitly loyal to the wannabe dictator in chief.
And I'll tell ya, it's not because of spending.
Let me be clear: there are right ways and wrong ways to cut spending. Doing it illegally with a bunch of unvetted fake-ass hackers and by stopping all government functions and installing loyalists isn't the way to do it.
>I am so far definitely satisfied with the progress.
I don't think it's good for the country to shut down agencies illegally on a whim, set up the mayor of NYC to be blackmailed at the drop of a hat, pause enforcement of foreign bribery laws, or hire political loyalists as tools of retribution to lead the DoJ and FBI.
But what do I know about helping the middle class or maintaining our place in the world?