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Would you buy shares in a company if the sole auditor of their financials was the CEO's best friend, who had no experience or qualifications in auditing, and he was not accountable to anyone if he was wrong? "Trust me bro" does not cut it. These structures and processes can be onerous but they exist for good reason. BTW our government is not so strapped for cash that they can't afford to do this properly.

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snisarenko 2 days ago | parent [-]

Your analogy is absurd.

In a publicly traded company you get to chose whether to buy or sell the shares of a company based on how the CEO is running the company (including who he appoints to audit it)

In US Govt, we don't get to chose whether to "invest" in the govt or not, our taxes our collected by force.

So instead we have the power to vote for people in congress (who decide home much taxes are collected on how they are spend), and the president (who can execute on the spending directed by congress, but also has the power granted by constitution to audit and spend effiecntly)

The US Govt Shareholders (Voters) have SPOKEN, and SPOKEN LOUDLY! (Electoral College victory, and Popular Vote victory). They elected republican majority congress, and President Trump. Thus the voters voted for a deep gov't audit headed by Musk (Trump publicly campaigned on auditing and cleaning up spending, and publicly stated who will be in charge of the audit).

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randerson 2 days ago | parent [-]

The point I was trying to make is that DOGE is not doing a proper audit, and this should concern everyone including those who voted for him.

Many of the findings Musk has published have been proven to be mischaracterized or erroneous (numbers off by 1000x etc), which gives us grounds to question the rest. Except their process and data is opaque. Trump is firing entire departments based on this bad information. This could ironically _increase_ govt expenditure when they realizes we need to hire new people, possibly at higher salaries (after paying the old people a severance).

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snisarenko 2 days ago | parent [-]

Fair point. But i don't think a few mistaken reports, justifies calling it as an invalid audit.

They are auditing a Multi-Trillion bureaucratical behemoth (with terrible record keeping on top of it). Even a "certified auditor" can make a few mistakes.

Instead of focusing on onef misreported 8 billion line item, you should focus on the fact that they discovered 3 TRILLION in payments with no budgetary codes (literally TRILLIONS in blank untraceable checks)

I would rather have an businessman experienced making billion dollar companies efficient doing the audit, and doing it FAST, but making some mistakes.

Than having a typical beurocratic "certified auditor" audit, that does it slowly and won't even make a dent in a budget in a single year.

The US Govt is paying TRILLIONS in just INTEREST on the debt every year, and not even paying down the principal right now. And they have to borrow MORE MONEY, just to be able to cover the INTEREST payment next year. The US Gov't is in dire financial straights. We don't have time for a typical "bureaucratic auditors" auditing a trillion dollar bureaucracy.

We need an experienced businessman to come in and start cutting, and cutting FAST.

	▲	randerson 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Don't downplay it as just a few mistaken reports or one wrong line item. The majority of the dollar value they claimed to have saved was wrong. Now they _allege_ to have found 3 trillion in mystery payments, but we can't take them seriously because of their lack of proper audit techniques. They have no idea what they are doing. I believe the entire country is watching in real time as a teenager tries to navigate his first legacy system and he just hasn't found the rest of the business logic. Just like how they implied that millions of dead 150 year olds were still receiving social security payments. It was a known issue that dead people are still in the database, but they are not in fact receiving payments. A real auditor would have known what to ask and where to look.