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".
DOGE should be able to make those arguments themselves. They're also not particularly transparent, so we have to assemble information from various sources.
They're right now firing all probationary employees at multiple agencies. That is entirely indiscriminate, and almost certainly disruptive to the mission of those agencies.
The actions at NIH and NSF will likely kill a large portion of the scientific research they used to fund. So unless you consider science in general be a waste I think these broad cuts clearly don't target actual waste and abuse.
The Twitter DOGE account posted a screenshot of where a 'Gender Identity Section' had been removed from a website.
Where is the efficiency saving and where was the waste?
This is really what has been on my mind. Simone tagged Elon showing him a screenshot of some veteran website allowing you to select more than two genders. Elon replies with a “On it. @DOGE”
I thought doge was about efficiency, why is he spending resources on the culture war?
USAID, CFPB, 18F (free tax filing), DOJ (lawyers who worked on Trump cases), EPA (halting alternative energy projects), NSF/NIH (funding by keyword search of anything remotely DEI related) etc
There aren’t any examples so far of stuff that is clearly waste and abuse.
If you don't think foreign aid is important for the continued safety of the US then you don't understand soft power and have no business in modern politics.
Sadly the people in charge fit into this category, except for the ones like Marco Rubio who actually do understand this but have no spine and are willing to overlook this stupidity for a seat at the table.
You have a child like nativity if you think foreign aid doesn’t come with strings attached.
You do know the polio vaccine program in Pakistan where DNA analysis to find Bin Laden was done through USAID? The one that set vaccination back decades?
I looked at the screenshot they posted about the 2.23M, which is all they posted. So we know, if I’m correct, absolutely and precisely nothing about this payment? Who was doing the equity assessment, how many people over what time period? What are the details of this, what was the purpose? I went digging briefly and found nothing. Why would I assume this is waste without any clue what it is?
The question is - are they fundamentally altering the function of government agencies.
I think you can get the answer from what they post. Cutting $400M in external contracts for a $10B agencies isn’t cutting major functions of the agency.
To be fair, the guy I was responding to got flagged so you probably can’t see it.
This wasn’t really our argument, and would look more like moving the goalposts.
To have the argument anyways, I looked back through their posts back to jan 20, and there’s really no information about most of the cuts. I presume that the few things they highlight, eg equity programs or whatever, are the worse of the worst that they could find, cause isn’t that what they’d show us? They could be cutting basically anything behind the scenes, and they themselves may not have a good idea what they’re cutting. As of jan 31st, they claimed to have cut 1-1.2 billion dollars overall. I assume that number is much higher now. Why would I trust that, while fumbling around looking at payment descriptions, one of Musk’s techbro zoomers didn’t hamper or cripple an important function of one of these departments? Where can I find the in-depth information on every cut?
Because the tech bros said it. Because that's how all tech bro gimmicks over the years went, be it crypto or investments or you name it - they claimed to "disrupt", "improve" and "revolutionize", and your guess how much of that actually happened.
Even if we decided that all of these were waste, that's still not even the bulk of their cuts. "Hey we got rid of some wasteful stuff because we closed 95% of the organization and some portion of that stuff was waste" is not sufficient.
the problem is labeling anything ideological as “waste”; one can get rid of anything under that cover, quite convenient.
You don’t need to write “the agency will no longer do X” you just need to fire the people doing X. Case in point the EPA and CFPB (which catch fraud among companies but were not worried about that anymore are we)
No – but why would you trust their Twitter feed and their Twitter feed only? Elon Musk himself has talked openly about dismantling the CFPB and USAID on his private account; in that case, it's a matter of "agency will no longer do anything".
Oh, they are posting a lot of cancellations, they rarely, if ever show what payments are for, exactly, and whether they are actual waste, or that it doesn't "neatly fits into the function the government agency is supposed to fill".
> but you see a few building leases sprinkled it.
You think agencies cannot lease buildings? And that it's a waste and fraud?
> I haven’t seen anything so far that says “Agency will no longer do X”, but happy to be be corrected.
They have literally unilaterally shut down several government agencies with bogus claims.
It's a damn shame the IRS funding is getting gutted and those billionaire 1% will be getting cuts anyways. Hard to go after those not paying when Daddy Trump and Daddy Musk cut the legs out from under the enforcement and audit folks.
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.
