Democrats have their panties in a wad over the work that Elon Musk and DOGE are doing to control government spending.
But despite all the hoopla, what’s actually going on is straightforward stuff that most people probably — but wrongly — assumed the government was doing all along.
Musk wrote on X Saturday that DOGE and the Treasury Department have agreed to take the following steps:
- All outgoing payments must have a categorization code in order to be paid. That’s supposed to already happen, but Musk has found the code is often left blank, making audits nearly impossible.
- All payments must have an explanation attached — another procedure that has been routinely ignored, making it hard to determine what or who federal payments are actually for.
- Every payment must be checked against an up-to-date “Do Not Pay” list of known frauds, terrorist groups, deceased people and expenditures that do not match congressional appropriations.
“The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees,” Musk noted. “It is ridiculous [these rules] didn’t exist already!”
Yes, it is.
Musk went on to express disbelief that more than $100 billion worth of entitlements every year are going to “individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.”
“When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!” he exclaimed.
On Sunday, Musk vented about another discovery: That the Social Security Administration has no mechanism to prevent duplicate Social Security numbers from being issued — “which further enables MASSIVE FRAUD!!” he wrote.
This is all very basic stuff necessary to safeguard our taxpayer dollars, yet up to now our federal government just hasn’t bothered.
Why not?
I’m hearing plenty of excuses, mainly on the order that the federal government is big, and that many people who work for it are incompetent and can’t be expected to do better.
I don’t actually believe that.
Yes, the government is big. And of course when you’re writing lots of checks, there will be some errors.
But the system should be designed to minimize mistakes and catch them when they happen, not to make them easy and undetectable.
Generally, when auditors find that an organization’s accounting system makes errors easy to commit and difficult to spot, they assume the system is designed that way because it is intended to facilitate fraud.
Maybe that’s not true here. Maybe the federal government is simply incompetent.
If that’s the case, though, then maybe it shouldn’t get so much of our money.
But as Musk also noted, he’s getting a lot of help from lower-level officials who have wanted to do this for many years, but have been stopped by prior management.
So maybe the problem isn’t incompetence. Maybe the system is in fact set up to facilitate fraud.
With trillions of dollars passing through the federal government every year, there are a lot of opportunities for crooks and financial predators to siphon some off.
A cynic might even speculate that the people screaming the loudest about DOGE’s audits are the people most invested in the fraud.
A cynic might.
At any rate, we’ve often heard it’s impossible to achieve meaningful savings by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.
But in just a couple of weeks, DOGE has identified low-hanging fruit everywhere it’s looked.
A General Accounting Office report from last April estimated that the federal government loses $233 billion to $521 billion to fraud every year, and now that figure seems likely to be low.
When you subtract the money being lost to fraud, perhaps closer to a trillion dollars when all the news is in, and then you get rid of the money we shouldn’t be spending at all — with USAID, and all its efforts to reward compliant media, foment revolutions and promote global censorship, as just one example — it seems like Musk’s boast that he could cut federal spending by $2 trillion may turn out to be pretty accurate.
Not everyone will be happy, since all that money is going to somebody, whether it’s a fraudster or some NGO official in a $500K job funded by government grants.
But the people paying the taxes, who are more likely to be making $50K a year than $500K, are likely to feel differently.
Bring it on.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
