The claims of fraud are a pretext for going into the agencies and making the partisan changes they wanted to make anyway. There's no point asking for a detailed discussion because the whole plan is to use the discussion of fraud as cover for the thing they're actually doing.

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 “do not pay” lists that lack frequent updates.

Here are some of my opinions, as someone who is mostly supportive of the effort but also realistic about its outcomes and risks:

1. The people voted for smaller government, and if the executive doesn’t have the power to reduce the size of its own bureaucracy, then there is no check on ever-expanding government. The executive must have full authority to examine all data produced by itself.

2. Federal spending on salary, agencies and operations is a drop in the bucket compared to entitlements and defense budget. Slashing jobs and even deleting entire agencies will not make a significant dent in the deficit. But if DOGE can really cut $1 trillion by end of year, it will have positive knock-on effects in the bond market.

3. Entitlements shouldn’t be treated with same bull-in-a-china shop approach as the current one towards agencies.

4. Social security probably has some fraud but I doubt it’s significant and is better resolved by identifying and punishing retroactively. Most of the “150 year old people” problems are exaggerated or outright wrong. However, it’s worrying that a system of age-based payouts has such uncertainty in its data.

5. It’s widely known there is significant fraud in Medicaid and Medicare. The true volume of this fraud is unknown and any effort to quantify it would be welcomed. But while fraudulent claims may be an issue, the real problem is unaccountable pricing of the healthcare system that allows for “legitimate” claims to cost more than any sane person would pay out of pocket.

6. In general, “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true. But it does not follow that “things breaking” is an acceptable cost to pay. The approach needs to come with a well-defined rubric for evaluating not only “what to cut,” but also “which cuts to rollback.”

The government itself self-reports $149B in "improper payments"

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/doge-musk-government-was...

They will twist the narrative and not provide any evidence. I appreciate your request but please don’t be naive. Have you heard of trolling?

Fraud means anything that they don't like.

WSJ reports today that the gao Itself reported 140 billion in improper payments. https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/doge-musk-government-was...

This is based on their statistics so I imagine the next step is to find the actual waste and fraud and stop it or get the money back.

One month (2 weeks?) is too early to tell if something will be uncovered, so there are no examples yet.

If they were actually trying to eliminate waste, they’d be working in tandem with these departments instead of just trashing them.

More broadly: People who care about improving things move carefully and deliberately and involve all stakeholders. They are open and transparent and they listen. Trump and Musk are exhibiting horrible leadership skills because they do not care about improving things. Trump wants to hurt his perceived enemies and feel like he’s a big smart boss man. Musk wants to be the first trillionaire. That’s the start and end of it.

CAT should audit DOGE.