Setting politics aside for a moment, I find it fascinating that an audit of this scale is taking place within the government. Has there ever been a historical precedent where an external agency thoroughly reviewed all departments, published its findings for the public, and then based decisions on that analysis?

Is it really possible to root out governmental fraud using this approach? Fraud and theft exist at every level of government, but if not through a drastic measure like this, what else can be done? Relying on the status quo, the courts, and current processes hasn’t yielded substantial results—if it had, corruption wouldn’t persist.

Still, I can appreciate the creativity here. Sometimes it takes an outsider to think differently.

That said, I’m not naive enough to assume this is done entirely in good faith. The prevailing opinion—both in this community and the media—seems largely negative; I’ve yet to see a single positive headline. Even so, I find it intriguing.

So here’s my question: if you were in charge of addressing this problem, how would you tackle it differently?

It's already been a thing for quite some time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(U...

They are independent of the things they review, they find inefficiency, overspending, fraud, and embezzlement. They make their reports public and work with transparency. There are also other similar departments like CIGIE. There have been very substantial results.

What DOGE is doing is not finding inefficiency. They are doing two basic things. 1) Completely eliminating programs they don't think the US should be spending money on. And 2) Reducing headcount. Both of these actions may reduce costs, but may end up costing the US more money in the long term.

Lets assume for a minute that what's going on is a good faith comprehensive audit of these agencies. (It's not, but lets just say it is.)

1) How long do you think it takes to perform a comprehensive audit of an agency in order to accurately determine waste, corruption and fraud. If you've ever audited a large corporation, you know what that takes -- it is not something you whip up in a week or two.

2) Who do you think is qualified to audit government entities? Some "young Turk" DOGE engineers? We're not talking about determining whether computer systems are well architected or should be refactored (though that also takes time to do correctly). We're talking about financial transactions and whether they were legitimate and legal (because if not, that would be "corruption" or "fraud").

Which Fortune500 company would hire a team of (relatively inexperienced) software engineers to audit its books?

They aren’t auditing or thoroughly reviewing shit. They're stealing the data and then waving their hands about non-existent crimes and nickel and dime levels of misappropriated or weird spending.

DOGE is not necessarily about fraud. Their summary of cancelled projects for USAID for example is often vague. For example, "$14M for "social cohesion" in Mali." As a reader, I have no context for this program, its impact, or who ran it. I don't even have the ability to discern whether other things were lumped in. Can I guess this was aimed at preventing further in-roads of Al Qaeda? Who knows.

An actual cherry-picked example of DOGE's potential fraud finding is at the SSA where Musk showed his query of "DEAD" = "FALSE" (I am paraphrasing a bit) yielded a huge number of folks over ages 115. Context is what is scarce. Are they receiving payments, are there other reasons for why the query returned those results, what other context do I have to interpret these results? Again, I have no idea.

I think the safest way of couching what is going on, is a drastic curtailment of government programs and employees. Equivalents to this? Maybe Gorbachev. I am sure there are other historical parallels, but they are probably apples to peaches comparisons at a certain level.

And to your last question, I am not sure if anyone really knows the problem/s that are being addressed right now other than debt and the capability to pass a tax cut.

The Clinton administration conducted a thorough audit, eventually laying off 351k people [1]. But they did so using a six-month review of all agencies performed by experienced federal workers. They ensured there were no national security ramifications and provided severance.

Reagan also had the Grace Commission [2].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/06/politics/doge-musk-gore-rego-...

[2] https://www.history.com/news/ronald-reagan-grace-commission-...

Idk about the US, but the 'government' fraud that I know of, does not show up in the tax office records or in the foreign aid accounts. The common thing is that civil servants/officials are bribed. At usually on the cheap too, so it'll take a lot of digging to find it, and worse, prove it. But, this kind of corruption is probably even more widespread among companies. If you want to exact justice, that's the place to look.

Before even debating the effectiveness of this audit, we have to address the fundamental problem: Elon Musk has no legal authority to be conducting this in the first place. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not a real government agency and Musk has not been confirmed by the Senate or given formal oversight. It's illegal and unconstitutional.

Beyond that, yes, large-scale government audits have been done before. In fact, we already have institutions designed to do exactly that. The GAO, the Office of the Inspector General, and even bipartisan commissions have uncovered fraud and inefficiencies without letting an extremely partisan private individual with massive conflicts of interest connected to his businesses arbitrarily rip apart government agencies.

Your claim that the continued existence of fraud means the system does not work is also specious, it's obviously not possible to eliminate all fraud, statements like that make me doubt that your comment is made in good faith.

> if you were in charge of addressing this problem, how would you tackle it differently?

I would start by not firing people doing jobs I don't understand. They do that a lot, even for very, very important jobs.

This isn't an audit, it's a blindfolded hatchet job. They've already been caught either deliberately or accidentally misinterpreting data, to the tune of they called an 8 million dollar contract an 8 billion dollar contract, among many other glaring discrepancies. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/19/doge...

So if I was in charge, I would start by making sure I did the math right and didn't blindly trust my database scraping scripts as they appear to be doing (and that's the most generous interpretation). I would also make sure that before recommending that I fire any group, I at least have a high level understanding of what that groups works on. So I don't, say, fire the people who oversee the nuclear arsenal, or a group of researchers working on the current bird flu outbreak (both of these have been done). Rehiring takes money and time because upon firing their contact information is apparently deleted, and you aren't going to get a 100% return rate.

I also have some experience working with giant bloated blobs of legacy code managing critical systems, where many variables are arcane acronyms because they were written in a time where compilers had character limits. Moving fast and breaking things in that environment is just a good way to break a lot of things and not even understand how you did it. Which is fine if it's twitter, and a little more important when you're managing aircraft, nuclear weapons, disease outbreaks, entitlement payments that people depend on, etc.

I would not fire staff responsible for safeguarding nuclear material, and I wouldn't be trying to avoid transparency.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-02-14/elon-m...

conveniently sweeping aside the fact that those who depend the most on the 'inefficient' programs/agencies that are being 'optimized' are the poorest and weakest members of society. those who can afford private everything will be fine.

>Has there ever been a historical precedent where an external agency thoroughly reviewed all departments, published its findings for the public, and then based decisions on that analysis?

They are 't reviewing and publishing shit, it yes there is historical moments when those types of things happened, usually after coup, dictatorship, or just any authoritarian government everyday dismantling everything, that's why everyone looking outside of USA with a bit of history knowledge see as a very bad precedent

>So here’s my question: if you were in charge of addressing this problem, how would you tackle it differently?

I would not do it differently. Well, probably it's going to be worse (but most measures). DM and EM are being too nice in my opinion.

>Is it really possible to root out governmental fraud using this approach?

It's possible it will, but not without a lot of false positives and innocent bystanders.

At the scale of the federal government, there are plenty of things that appear to be fraud but actually have a reasonable justification.

In the Dunning-Kruger world we unfortunately seem to live in now, I don't think having every single yokel personally analyzing every line item on a budget as large as the federal government's, especially when those yokels don't really understand any of it, is the best way to go about this.

This admin isn't trustworthy either. They'll sit here an cry about 0.01% of the federal budget being "wasted" on a bunch of National Park probies, and meanwhile the self-appointed king is out golfing on the taxpayer dime.

The US has actual independent auditors at various agencies. They're called inspectors general. Trump is trying to fire all of them: https://apnews.com/article/trump-inspectors-general-fired-co...

Instead of firing all the auditors(Inspectors General) I'd bring them in and get their input on how to tackle something of this magnitude. Then see about getting them the resources necessary as I'm assuming they would need to staff up massively with experienced auditors(aka not DOGE) and other resources.

Only because you didn't inform yourself properly. Did you know about the position of inspection general? Did you read any of their reports? Do you know Trump fired all of them? In a totally illegal move?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43116844

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/25/trump-fires-inspectors-gene...

> So here’s my question: if you were in charge of addressing this problem, how would you tackle it differently?

For one, with responsibility and care for the public. Not with reckless abandon. Not with malice. Not with a child-like perversion towards breaking things because it’s fun.

Politics aside, this has been an extremely unsettling disruption in the faith we have in our institutions. Trust and stability are the backbones to societal and economic growth. The unseen costs Trump/Musk/doge have wrought are massive, are spread equally among all people (globally, in US, minus the wealthy class), and is hard to see on a spreadsheet

I think it's certain that there will be positive and negative consequences and both of those will be on a large scale. I too am curious about the positives.

I think the negatives could have been easily minimized to more-reasonable-level without affecting the positive ones, if it wasn't headed by hothead Elon.

>published its findings for the public

Is doge actually doing this in a meaningful way? What is the website? Thus far I'm only aware of them celebrating partisan victories like chopping funding for trans theater etc.

Considering how atrociously bad they have been at estimated money saved, I don't think they have any positive results at all.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates...

Twitter guy is going to do so much damage to America.

It's shocking to me how many people think that auditing government agencies is some new thing being implemented by Trump/Musk.

These agencies all have Inspector Generals, who are outside of the agency and responsible for auditing their particular agency. And they do, there are reports on this sort of thing.

Most of the IGs, if not all, were fired by Trump first thing.

> corruption wouldn’t persist

We still haven't seen any evidence of corruption, by the way. Yeah, I'm sure there's some gov employees here and there doing fraudulent stuff, skimming off the top or getting gov contracts to their buddies. But there has been zero evidence of any widespread or systemic corruption in a single agency. Nothing.

The agency that did get axed the most -- USAID -- was because of "woke ideology" that they were supposedly pushing (though there wasn't any evidence of that being widespread either), not corruption/fraud (breaking the law).

It's like the WMD excuse to invade Iraq.