Comment by jart

I'm not questioning the reliability of their systems but the content of their databases.

The DOGE workers are already legends in their own lifetime, having saved $55 billion, and they haven't even gotten started. That's like 20% of Google's yearly revenue, all in a few weeks, and without needing to write petabytes of code in a monorepo.

I don't think it's accurate to mentally model these payments as though they were counter intuitive algorithms in a deeply embedded software system. Waste fraud and abuse can be painfully obvious. So it's not the complexity of the problem that has prevented it from being solved. It's the political cost. Senior people have spent a lifetime accruing political capital. They're afraid to lose it. They're only going to spend political capital if they get something in return. They know and have cultivated relationships with the people who will be unhappy if particular instances of waste get solved.

So it makes sense that Elon is unleashing his crackerjack juniors.

They're perfect for the job.