One of my biggest criticisms of DOGE that I have not heard elsewhere is - why can't we have a "Department of Government Transparency". Giving Elon the ability to judge, jury and executioner any congressionally approved spending he wants has its own legal issues, but I do think there is a lot of value in having a massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes.

I envision something similar to a massive sankey diagram like dataset in a public git repo that anyone could access and audit. There is certainly lots of waste, but there is also loads of government spending where the value is not obvious.

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yardie 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We already have that in the GAO. We also have personnel who's job is to root out fraud: inspector generals. The budget is constantly audited scrutinized for excess and waste, except 2 departments: defense and Medicare. The former is pork for the politicians' home states. The later is so complex it relies on the healthcare industry to help write the rules. And they can't help making sure they get paid the most.

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bikezen 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Good thing trumps on that fraud by bolstering the IGs and not just gutting them across all agencies...

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jimt1234 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, the GAO exists. But under the current administration, it's basically like a security guard that just sits there and watches crooks do bad shit, reports it, and then nothing happens.

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sjsdaiuasgdia 16 hours ago | parent [-]

And the Trump administration would similarly hamstring any newly created transparency organization. Not that the current congress would ever pass such a thing. And anyway, the Supreme Court has made sure that even if congress passed a law to make a(nother) government transparency agency, they can't make that agency truly independent and protected from presidential interference.

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bit-anarchist 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Creating an executive agency to investigate the executive would be pretty stupid. It'll likely lead to "we've investigated ourselves and found nothing", even if the president wasn't vested in all executive power, as the executive branch consolidates.

However, creating an agency in the legislative branch is another story. One of the duties of the legistive is to investigate the executive, is it not? (not that this matters when both the executive and legislative are controlled by the same party)

	▲	nullocator 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The GAO is a "legislative agency"...

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kristjansson 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes.

That existed! The links the various DOGE apparatchik kept posting as 'evidence' were from publicly available databases of spending, contracts, etc. The 'receipts' site was just a poor, partially-understood scrape of that data!

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j2kun 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People do this all the time

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iu44ub/up...

https://usafacts.org/government-spending/

https://sankeymatic.com/gallery/federal-budget.html

	▲	estearum 17 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Also: https://sam.gov/
	▲	j2kun 18 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There is also Michael Lewis's book "Who Is Government?" if you want more meaningful stories.

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asdff 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The issue is deciding importance and most people are too stupid to understand nth order effects. So that will turn into the usual pitchforks.

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tremon 17 hours ago | parent [-]

People don't pick up pitchforks because they don't understand something; people pick up pitchforks because they're told to pick them up. The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.

	▲	gruez 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency. What was bad faith about it? As someone who literally only heard of this drama because of this comment, so far as I can tell the controversy is that they omitted some white immigrant neighborhoods (eg. little italy), and Mamdani backtracked on it?

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ThinkingGuy 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You might be interested in this:

"So you want to reform democracy" - Joshua Tauberer https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-...

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butlike 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To what end? Won't a dataset with no actionable items just be a sensationalist headline generator? What if someone did find something funny with the money? What's the process for acting on it? Do they go to the press? What about all the false positive of people who interpret the data incorrectly, then fire off (essentially spam) to the news outlets?

I'm struggling to see an upside to that one (but I'd like to).

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felixgallo 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you mean something like the longstanding Government Accountability Office, which was formed by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921?

	▲	estearum 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		no no, they mean some other thing, which is different in totally unexplainable ways and – most importantly – doesn't make one feel stupid for not knowing it existed

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dgellow 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The general public has no idea how to evaluate government spending, and because of this people are incredibly susceptible to being manipulated and lied to. That’s what we’ve seen with DOGE, people who have no idea how scientific research work cancelling funding based on vibes. It turns out the shrimp treadmills that do sound ridiculous at first glance are in fact made for a very good reason

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estearum 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

www.sam.gov

knock yourself out