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DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

theatlantic.com

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Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#411

Post by Symmetry »

chatmasta wrote: post #356
dzdt wrote: post #320

Related to a comment on a now-flagged subthread: can anyone who believes that DOGE is uncovering fraud please post a reliable reference that gives a specific example of fraud uncovered by DOGE? To be clear, this should be a third-party analysis of some credibility, not DOGE's or Musk's twitter feed or "receipts" website which shows cancelled contracts with no clear link to fraudulent activity.

It’s marketed as “fraud, waste and abuse.” The top-line summaries are definitely consistent with “waste.” Probably some of them have more nuance when you dig deeper, but does anyone disagree that there is not waste in the government? Fraud and abuse are less clear. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the legitimacy of payments when they’re leaving treasury on checks with no memo or reference, and they’re compared to…

With regards to (4), it's been well known for a while that since Social Security doesn't check the payments being made into the program with any sort of scrutiny illegal immigrants can often get away with giving the social security numbers of dead people to their employers. Here's an article from 2024 that mentions the problem.

https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/immigration-social-se...

From a policy perspective making it harder for illegal immigrants to be employed might make it worth cracking down on this. But doing so would cost the government money both by preventing these payments into Social Security that don't have to be paid out and also the cost of the crackdown itself.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#412

Post by cha42 »

chatmasta wrote: post #356
dzdt wrote: post #320

Related to a comment on a now-flagged subthread: can anyone who believes that DOGE is uncovering fraud please post a reliable reference that gives a specific example of fraud uncovered by DOGE? To be clear, this should be a third-party analysis of some credibility, not DOGE's or Musk's twitter feed or "receipts" website which shows cancelled contracts with no clear link to fraudulent activity.

It’s marketed as “fraud, waste and abuse.” The top-line summaries are definitely consistent with “waste.” Probably some of them have more nuance when you dig deeper, but does anyone disagree that there is not waste in the government? Fraud and abuse are less clear. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the legitimacy of payments when they’re leaving treasury on checks with no memo or reference, and they’re compared to…

If I may:

Their is a huge conflict of ingerest of giving this power to a major economical actor that vastly depends on public investment and under public scrutinity.

Executive should have the audit right and in some measure probably it should be widespread to all citizens up to sensitive data not being leaked. But what good is there to give this power solely to one of the richest and more powerful man in the world? This is crazy.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#413

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

dzdt wrote: post #320

Related to a comment on a now-flagged subthread: can anyone who believes that DOGE is uncovering fraud please post a reliable reference that gives a specific example of fraud uncovered by DOGE? To be clear, this should be a third-party analysis of some credibility, not DOGE's or Musk's twitter feed or "receipts" website which shows cancelled contracts with no clear link to fraudulent activity.

Fraud means anything that they don't like.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#414

Post by alabastervlog »

WesternWind wrote: post #188
scarab92 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dupe]

See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years. That's not what I'm seeing happen. I'm not seeing cost benefit analysis, I'…

What’s especially frustrating, if you care about governance being more serious than pro wrestling, is that we have a couple organizations in government that’d happily provide all kinds of ways to reduce the deficit: the GAO and the CBO.

But they tend to say reality-based things like “no, your tax cuts won’t pay for themselves, in fact they’ll cost $1.2T over ten years” or “no, this war won’t pay for itself, lol, what the fuck even” or “no, you can’t make meaningful progress on cutting the deficit by attacking benefits fraud, because there’s not very much of that.”

All things Republicans would rather pretend aren’t true, and certainly don’t want to act on. So what do you do when you need to show progress but are constrained by operating based on fiction? You tout tiny wins and hope the numbers seem big to people who don’t know much; you make things up; and you cause harm or even incur long-term costs or cause waste and call that savings by doing bad accounting.

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#415

Post by hx8 »

sightbroke wrote: post #392
chatmasta wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s marketed as “fraud, waste and abuse.” The top-line summaries are definitely consistent with “waste.” Probably some of them have more nuance when you dig deeper, but does anyone disagree that there is not waste in the government? Fraud and abuse are less clear. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the legitimacy of payments when they’re leaving treasury on checks with no memo or reference, and they’re compared to…

> But if DOGE can really cut $1 trillion by end of year, it will have positive knock-on effects in the bond market. It will certainly be interesting to see how the US economy will be affected by $1 trillion less money circulating. How and why would this produce positive knock-on effects in the bond market?

I presume the idea of $1 trillion less bonds being issues would decrease supply and decrease the price we need to charge. (More demand for the same supply decreases bond prices). This would have the impact of reducing the interest payments in the federal budget, which is becoming burdensome.

I personally am just as worried that reducing US gov spending will worsen a potential 2025 or 2026 recession (which might lower rates...)

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#416

Post by throw0101c »

chatmasta wrote: post #356
dzdt wrote: post #320

Related to a comment on a now-flagged subthread: can anyone who believes that DOGE is uncovering fraud please post a reliable reference that gives a specific example of fraud uncovered by DOGE? To be clear, this should be a third-party analysis of some credibility, not DOGE's or Musk's twitter feed or "receipts" website which shows cancelled contracts with no clear link to fraudulent activity.

It’s marketed as “fraud, waste and abuse.” The top-line summaries are definitely consistent with “waste.” Probably some of them have more nuance when you dig deeper, but does anyone disagree that there is not waste in the government? Fraud and abuse are less clear. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the legitimacy of payments when they’re leaving treasury on checks with no memo or reference, and they’re compared to…

> 1. The people voted for smaller government […]

The people voted for President and the people voted for Congress. If Congress, who under the US Constitution controls the purse, votes for a level of "X" spending why does the President get to decide to spend > 6. In general, “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true.

It is not obviously true. Because what you're cutting may be resiliency.

To use a tech analogy: if I have two firewalls in an HA configuration, then decommissioning one to save on support costs will not break things… until the first one goes belly-up and there's no failover.

There's a reasonable argument to be made that more government capacity is actually needed (at least in certain sectors):

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...

The IRS for example would probably do better with more resources:

> That’s one reason that five former commissioners of IRS, Republican and Democrat, have argued eloquently that additional IRS resources would create a fairer tax system. The logic is simple. Fewer resources for the IRS mean reduced enforcement of tax laws. Though the tax code has become more complex, prior to the IRA real resources of the IRS had been cut by about 23 percent from 2010 to 2021.

* https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/cutting-irs-resources-and...

> Congress asked the IRS to report on why it audits the poor more than the affluent. Its response is that it doesn’t have enough money and people to audit the wealthy properly. So it’s not going to.

* https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#417

Post by sebastianconcpt »

eecc wrote: post #201

IMHO it's a bit of a shame that the productivity and efficiency gains that computing and cybernetics can bring to complex systems -- including government -- are always tainted and currently championed by anti-social elites that use them to break apart these collective machines. Bureaucracies are a common good, and it should be in everyone's interest to apply state-of-the-art system engineering to make them as valuabl…

[flagged]

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#419

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

willis936 wrote: post #192
tabakd wrote: post #35

Is there any reason this data shouldn't be public for everyone to read?

You personally are cool with me personally knowing your salary and where you live? Please just post that here right now.

What is it called when people cry free speech, democracy, and transparency while actively assaulting these ideals?

Re: DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data

#420

Post by [deleted] »

throw0101c wrote: post #416
chatmasta wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s marketed as “fraud, waste and abuse.” The top-line summaries are definitely consistent with “waste.” Probably some of them have more nuance when you dig deeper, but does anyone disagree that there is not waste in the government? Fraud and abuse are less clear. But it’s also difficult to ascertain the legitimacy of payments when they’re leaving treasury on checks with no memo or reference, and they’re compared to…

> 1. The people voted for smaller government […] The people voted for President and the people voted for Congress. If Congress, who under the US Constitution controls the purse, votes for a level of "X" spending why does the President get to decide to spend > 6. In general, “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true. It is not obviously true. Because what you're cutting may be resiliency. To use…

[deleted]
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