For sake of testing your position, let's assume the fraud is true and he does what you want and publishes the details like that.

What about the corner-case person who actually is legitimate and now has incredibly private information out there to make stealing their identity trivial? As a statistical anomaly who is often that corner case, I'm glad you're not the one making the policy. I wish Elon wasn't as well, and I'm sure there's going to be a giant mess at the end, but using government power (which Elon has, whether rightly or wrongly) to publish personal information about people (which they get by force giving their monopoly on government power) especially without trial or due diligence is very wrong IMHO.

> What about the corner-case person who actually is legitimate and now has incredibly private information out there to make stealing their identity trivial?

Elon usually has doesn't have any compunction about throwing innocent people under the bus if he thinks he gains something even if indirectly.

But that aside, you can show evidence of massive fraud, without revealing private information to general public. Can certainly reveal it to relevant authorities.

You fix the system not because of the cost today but because the cost it will eventually cause.

Poor record keeping and bad policies about data validation tied to sending money to people if not today will eventually result in massive fraud.

Furthermore the notion you put forth is trash lazy thinking. Cost or no cost you do things the right way. But I don’t even buy you can calculate the cost of doing it wrong correctly to even have a sound conjecture that fixing it is more costly.

I think the problem they should be considering more acutely is, eventually the number of people trained in that specialized knowledge will go to 0, and they will then be paying the cost to either train more (and the increased risks of less familiar people) or replace the whole thing with no backup plan.

Given the age of the COBOL programmers I know, that window is rapidly shrinking...

OIG Response:

  We acknowledge that almost none of the numberholders discussed in the 
  report currently receive SSA payments. However, SSA issued each of these 
  individuals a valid SSN and these SSNs could allow for a wide range of 
  potential abuse. 

  [...]

  We also note we initiated our 2015 review upon the receipt of information 
  that a man opened several bank accounts using SSNs belonging to 
  numberholders born in the 1800s who had no death information on the 
  Numident. In addition to being used to obtain employment or open bank 
  accounts, identity thieves can potentially use these SSNs to create 
  synthetic identifies, obtain credit, government benefits, or private 
  insurance.

On top of that, there's an assumption that there's no existing cleaning effort. I'm sure there is and it's just a difficult problem. The cases left must be either in progress, hard to track down, or not actually meaningfully active.

Or, as is really common with the federal government, the agency is actually underfunded and hasn't been able to modernize because the Republicans in congress have been trying to starve the administrative capacity the classic, slow way until now.

Like with the IRS. I've made mistakes in filing, and gotten a notice from the IRS about it, but sometimes years later (!). In the meantime, if you "audited" the IRS records, you'd see that my records are out of compliance and could claim "See, there's fraud!". In reality, the IRS just has slow antiquated systems, and is barred from giving taxpayers direct access to their records. Which is by design from the rich and anti-government.

Also those identities can't collect checks, because if they tried it would set off alarm bells and reviews because they're over a standard "assume they're already dead" limit.

Imagine the brouhaha these same folks would be raising about "wasting your tax dollars hiring historians" if that other direction was in their self-interest.

And then faked his degrees

I obviously agree, but for anyone reading along, this is also the legal definition: reasonable care. Reasonable is determined by peers, not the general population. So...

> ignoring the millions wasted on everything from a $90,000 bag of bushings to $1,300 coffee cups to $150,000 soap dispensers to billons on empty government buildings

Who's ignoring it? Once the problem is identified by someone, you fix it and move on. This already happens.

$1,300 coffee cups: https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/22... Audit of C-17 Spare Parts: https://www.dodig.mil/In-the-Spotlight/Article/3948604/press...

See also, the myth of the $600 hammer: https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...

Trashing whole departments/agencies first and then trying to find all of the 'waste' amongst the wreckage creates more work in the long run when you have to rebuild all of the processes and try to reclaim some portion of the institutional knowledge that got flushed down the toilet for no reason.

Musk doesn't give a shit about any of that waste. People aren't pro government waste, they're anti political grandstanding about meaningless crumbs as a distraction while a literal nazi-saluting fascist eats the rest of the pie.

> and removing it won’t reduce efficacy, it should be purged.

This is the load-bearing idea that is made of toilet tissue.

It will create inefficiency. In the best case because it's not how the decades of built up institutional knowledge knows how to get stuff done. If the worst (and most probable) case, because what you're removing is actually needed... and we'll get an "oops sorry" later when the damage is done.

Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes. I have seen so many times (in private organizations) clearly inefficient processes getting ripped out, only to be replaced with much more inefficient ones.

Sometimes there are no shortcuts: You have to know what you're doing. The "This is 'something', therefore we must do it" bit only gets you so far.

Jumping into a complex system and trashing big swathes of it without taking the time to understand why it's there, what it does, and the consequences for destroying it will be, is one of the worst possible ways to 'reduce waste' that I can think of.

Deeming things as waste within days of gaining access to the info is 100% in bad faith. There is no possible way that musk and his minions took the time to find out why anything is the way it is. Nevermind the fact that you don't have to shut anything down to perform an audit. He is going through with a bulldozer and saying "oops" when he destroys institutional knowledge and capabilities. The damage is the point.

You are both correct. It's not an either-or.

This is not how to accomplish that. Musk is looting the government for personal gain and installing lackeys that are loyal to him.

> It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt.

There should be little to doubt at this point, however. "Dismantling of the administrative state" was a mantra for many who are now in positions of power.

Then: "Prices will come down on day 1!" Now: "It's hard to get prices to come down once they're up".

At some point, there's not much reason to doubt someone's goals, regardless of what they say. You can look at past say/do combinations and make reasonable predictions.

Stop giving 'benefits' to people with years of documented track records under the aegis of 'doubt'.

> It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt.

I would implore you to develop the skill of judging one’s character overtime. Some folks have proven they don’t deserve the benefit.

Otherwise, I fear that your good nature will become a vulnerability instead of the strength that I can be.

> It is in my nature to give the benefit of the doubt.

Then you should be giving the benefit of the doubt to the people and institutions that are accused on flimsy evidence. Then you should be giving benefit of the doubt to Harris and Clinton too, to progressives, to SJWs, feminists, to centrists.

Do you give the same benefit of the doubt to the 10s of thousands of civil servants who have already been abruptly fired without cause? Do you assume that they are capable and productive members of their departments who have been making good faith efforts to improve the lives of their fellow Americans? If so, then shouldn't the administration take a bit more than 30 days of careful analysis and deliberation before declaring their jobs wasteful and fraudulent?

I appreciate that nature, but not when the stakes are _this_ high.

So you do give them the benefit of the doubt because they tell you exactly what you want to hear.

What will you do when they break your benefits of the doubt. Wait for the next time for more of the same words?

Post your bank account number here. Give us the benefit of the doubt.

So far they said 20% refunds, 20% against the debt, and the rest...presumably they are determining to what extent to put that into tax cuts and the other two buckets some more. This way everyone wins, assuming their savings so far are sustainable and annualized.

Here you got then - https://docs.house.gov/meetings/BU/BU00/20250213/117894/BILL...

Spoiler: Nobody is _directly_ getting a refund. That money will be less than the planned increase in the deficit. (This is the house's budget bill which is the supported version of the president unlike the senate's version).

> because they make promises around goals with incomplete understanding and data and then recalibrate as more information becomes available.

Perhaps you should simply announce an investigation, then deliver findings of the investigation and recommendations.

They're starting with the end in mind - the dismantling of the administrative state - then making cuts. Then finding out what the impact might be, then continuing cuts.

There is no good faith here, and there is nothing in 'doubt' that someone should benefit from.

> I don't consider this to be a lie, per se, is because they make promises around goals with incomplete understanding

They didn't even try to formulate an understanding. All of their actions show willful and deliberate disregard for how the system works. That's not "incomplete understanding" or a good faith effort.

Trust is objectively bad for systems design and processes, especially without audit and oversight! Everything should be trustless whenever it can be. They have broken every best practice in the book.

Even if you believe that trust shouldn't be earned, it is inadvisable to believe anything that Elon Musk says is in good faith. How many more examples do you need after the Hyperloop debacle? Here's an expanding list: https://elonmusk.today

How many times do you need to be lied to by the exact same person before you realize that facts don't mean anything to them?

At this point, I'm surprised when I hear something from Musk that is verifiably true.

>I've seen was an offer of 8 months

Wasn't that actually "if you agree to resign and leave next September we'll continue paying your salary until then and you wont have to RTO if you work remotely" rather that actually 8 months of severance?

> then recalibrate as more information becomes available.

So you are waiting until they will start actually lying when they have more information (instead of "just" being incompetent)?

Giving someone who has proven time and time again to be exceptionally dishonest (Trump but also arguably Musk) the benefit of the doubt seems unwise. Why would they suddenly stop lying?

The fact alone that they have promised a huge tax cut to high income earners will will inevitably outweigh any potential savings by DOGE means that any claims about reducing public debt are inherently dishonest.

>with unemployment benefits as well, perhaps that ends up getting close enough

It won't be, unemployment benefits are a fraction of what the severance benefits are. Its disingenuous to bundle them together due to that fact alone.

Hi, I’ve read a lot of your comments, and you are going to get short shrift for it.

The core issue is the idea that they are incentivized to act in good faith.

Theres a great article which was shared here: "Why is it so hard to buy things that work" https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ The idea here is that since its the right thing to do, firms will do the right thing. or: "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive" > Although it's possible to find people who don't do shoddy work, it's generally difficult for someone who isn't an expert in the field to determine if someone is going to do shoddy work in the field. and > More generally, in many markets, consumers are uninformed and it's fairly difficult to figure out which products are even half decent, let alone good.

I'm still waiting on orange to release his tax returns like he promised from his first presidential debate. That audit's gotta be almost complete by now, right?

> DOGE and POTUS are incentivized to follow through on this type of thing because it would increase good-faith in the masses big time.

Trump has no interest in increasing good faith. He doesn't need to. He can't run for office anymore, and even if he could, there's literally nothing he could do to lose voters. And he certainly doesn't give a shit about the future of the Republican party.

The people that voted for Trump fully support everything that's being done.

How are those public contradictions going?

> increase good-faith in the masses big time

What incentive is there for anyone in the Trump administration to care about that? I don't see one.

> I don't think they'd renege on it.

Lower prices on day 1. Stopping Ukraine war on day 1.

Trump just says things in the moment to play for approval, then says something contradictory later if need be. There is no fallout, pushback or consequence from his supporters, and they have control of ... all branches of government right now.

I am not reading your twitter history to say that assuming Elon and Trump wont renege on something is the worst bet of your entire life.

This is a Wikipedia article about you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_information_voter

Sadly, there were enough people like you to enable a fascist coup.

Like many Elon fans, you quack “audit” and don’t know what the word means.

Audits measure compliance to an process or objective. They require that you have written down the process or objective, and retain sufficient information to measure whether you achieved it or not.

In this case, the DOGE boys do whatever Elon says. What is said isn’t recorded or written. People who attempt to do their duty who are seen as obstructive of the whim of the DOGE “agent” are fired.

Yeah, if only we had independent regulators in our government who could oversee and regulate it in order to prevent and reduce corruption. Oh wait, Trump fired them all like 3 weeks ago. On purpose. Because they are not operating in good faith, my dude.

They're siding with the Republicans because they don't want to be seen agreeing with the folks who hate what the Israeli government has been doing in Gaza; Netanyahu especially so. So the strongly pro-israel sources are too biased.

So you trust a war criminal and Israels propaganda arm more than your eyes?

Who do you trust, the Party, or your lying eyes?

Bibi wants to curry favor with Trump. Of course he’s going to say it wasn’t a Nazi salute.

The ADL doesn’t want to get sued out of existence so… of course they going to say it wasn’t a Nazi salute.

This is the same chilling effect that Trump suing ABC and ABC settling so yeah nobody feels comfortable enough to speak truth to power because nobody has the money or the army to back it up

But those of us with ears to hear and eyes to see know what we saw. He might not want to exterminate Jews but he knows what MAGA likes and he like they loves the power a fascist dictator like Hitler wielded

But you did see the videos? You still trust a right wing politician, who stands to profit immensely from Trump and Musk in power, more than your own eyes? That's wild

Seriously??

Netanyahu a fascist war criminal and ADL a back pocketed political party paid by elite right-wing evangelists.

Of course they'll claim not.

If this was the case at any point, or is still the case, DOGE should definitely be quarantined until CAT audits DOGE's accesses and changes. There should be two teams operating alongside each other on this. Not just DOGE. I do believe so far they were claimed to have received read-only access...but other reports were that they even had some admin access. Do we know for sure what access they had unmonitored?

And prior to this he was forced to do a 'nazi death camp PR tour' because he agreed with the nazi agenda on X. But sure, it's unfortunately old boy just keeps accidentally being a nazi. Last is he now tweets 14 flags.

Who do you trust, the Party, or your lying eyes?

And then he went to speak at an AFD rally so I guess we are back at the Nazi interpretation

If you believe right-wing-specific sources about Musk's intentions, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

So, the guy who held off a genocide to get trump elected and the people who are in direct cahoots say its ok, big "All my black friends I can say the N word so its ok" energy there.

> You can find any number of links talking about how unequal the tax cuts are.

All of those links are comparing dollars rather than percentages. It's obvious that a given percentage of $400,000 is more than the same percentage of $40,000.

> That's an insane thing to do in an economy that's already breaking records for inequality.

The cause of inequality isn't taxes, it's market consolidation. Rich people are rich because they own a large fraction of a megacorp. Under the existing system, higher corporate taxes, if anything, increase market consolidation because massive international corporations can use cross-border avoidance mechanisms whereas smaller purely domestic corporations can't, so they're effectively a tax on businesses too small to get out of them.

> That's not what these are.

It's essentially what they are, and the rate reduction in the lower brackets was slightly more. The highest bracket was lowered by 2.6% whereas the brackets from ~$12k to ~$100k were each lowered by 3%. And as a percentage of taxes paid, 39.6% was only 7% more than 37% at the top, whereas for the working poor 15% had been 25% more than the current 12%.

> Trillions of dollars are trillions of dollars.

You can turn any annual amount into trillions of dollars by multiplying it by an arbitrary number of years. And the only reason it can get so big so fast is that the US government spends a stupefying amount of money, so if you reduce it by even a small percentage it's a big number.

> Money IS a zero sum game

This is definitely false and is one of the major fallacies in the taxes vs. inequality problem.

In general people don't actually store wealth as money. Rich people store it as stocks and things. So if you tax them, you're not causing them to have less cash, or even causing them to sell their car or mansion. You're causing them to sell stocks.

If the person you transfer the money to is doing anything with it other than buying the same exact stocks, you're reconfiguring the economy, which is very much not zero sum and could be negative or positive sum depending on who gets it and what they do with it.

But Wall St. and Main St. are somewhat isolated pools of money. Making a transfer from one to the other has effects not entirely unlike printing new money and handing it out, because it gets spent very differently than it would have otherwise. And this is the nasty part: The sources of inequality are money sinks.

If you're paying high rents because there is a housing shortage as a result of captured zoning boards inhibiting new construction, and all the tenants suddenly have more money, the rent is going up. That's one of the reasons you can't solve it with taxes. You have to address the actual causes of inequality -- market consolidation and regulatory capture. Otherwise the incumbents just take the money right back out of your pocket.

What's interesting to me is how what constitutes a 'third rail' topic changes over time.

A quick search will show that it used to be fine to talk about Curtis Yarvin on here a decade ago but now that he's more relevant than ever it's suddenly taboo?

Did Curtis Yarvin and the ideas he espouses suddenly become less interesting or are a group of people working together to prevent critical discussion of his ideas?

Even the theory that the executive can just not spend money it finds wasteful doesn't extend to the executive being able to unilaterally reconfigure an in-kind assistance program into a refundable tax credit. Admittedly, an even bigger grab of dictatorial power is not out of character for this administration, though.