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.

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invalidOrTaken 5 months ago | parent | next [-]

DOGE is actually the USDS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service

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ganoushoreilly 5 months ago | parent | prev [-]

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	▲	root_axis 5 months ago \| parent [-]
		As tends to be the case, the ruling is nuanced. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-scores-win-suit-chall... FTA: In her decision, Chutkan wrote that the states "legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight." But the judge said the states had not shown why they were entitled to an immediate restraining order. That doesn't mean Elon was exonerated, it just means that an immediate restraining order won't be issued. > So in good faith, i'd ask you, what is your solution to solve the fraud issue? The question cannot be asked in good faith because it frames the discussion in a manner that suggests the concern here is one of fraud, however what we've witnessed by DOGE instead is arbitrary and partisan firings, as well as brazen falsehoods and mischaracterizations about the nature of what is being cut and the total numbers of what is being saved (by several orders of magnitude in some cases). I don't feel the need to discuss an earnest plan about cutting fraud and waste because that is not what is on the table right now with DOGE. Further, I don't see any evidence presented to explain why the GAO and other bipartisan efforts to curtail fraud are regarded as ineffective. Simply stating "fraud still exists" is not an honest rebuttal, since fraud will always exist.