“Here’s another fine mess you have gotten me into” - a perspective on the Herculanean task faced by DOGE and Musk

The Musk team is addressing easily recognisable fraud and corruption in the US Federal system - it is not going back years to identify the trillions misspent.

The task of ferreting out fraud and corruption is enormous - rooting out past sins is as large as the 37 trillion of national debt - piles upon piles of debt - wracked up with little to no oversight by Congress and all the agencies charged with safeguarding the spending of taxes.

Spending money the US does not have, is how the debt accumulates. Politicians simply increase the budget every year, without any thought of “balance” or, heaven forbid, accountability,

From here:

DOGE's Key Revelation: A Federal Budget Made FFF a Maze Impervious to Reform | RealClearInvestigations

The article starts out with how people can help DOGE identify waste, fraud and corruption. It took years of “Congress critters” to create the mess and its up to the people to get things back on an even keel.

“As Elon Musk and his tech team urge their fellow Americans to become “domestic auditors” to help rein in federal spending, people have been encouraged to use the Treasury Department’s usaspending.gov website to identify and track government finances.”

Needs a little co-ordination, else we will get a few million tripping over each other! I suggest a database if “citizen auditors” listed by government department” thar people can sign up to! Sort pf “Department of Education - 500 auditors, Department of Deface - 1,000 names - and so on.

Let’s dive into the article.

There are a number of noteworthy items.

“The total amount of spending across “all agencies,” as recorded at usaspending.gov, appears to be 50% higher than most experts interviewed for this article think it actually was.”

“In Fiscal Year 2024, for instance, the website pegs total spending at $9.7 trillion, when several experts said it was probably around $6.5 trillion. No one could explain the much bigger figure. Officials with usaspending.gov conceded to RCI that their totals were wrong and said the error, which shows up in similar fashion for the last five fiscal years would be fixed soon. They offered neither an explanation for their higher total nor an estimate of what it should be. Two weeks later, the erroneous figures remain.”

“The federal government has become so big and so expensive that even experts have trouble navigating the morass of contracts, awards, grants, loans, and other items that have transformed the U.S. spreadsheet into a labyrinth.”

““When you see the process has become so arcane even I don’t claim these are real, hard numbers, then you know the process is definitely and irreparably FUBAR,” said David Ditch”

The article has a different take on “fucked up beyond all recognition”!

“On Jan. 16, four days before Biden vacated the White House, the Government Accounting Office said it was “unable to provide an opinion on the reliability of the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2024 and 2023.”

The Office of Management and Budget has also flunked six of the 24 departments and agencies it looked at, including Labor and Education. The Defense Department has failed seven consecutive audits, while the Department of Education hasn’t gotten a “clean” opinion for three years.”

The thought occurs to me that these two fancies are pointing fingers and not actually helping.

“The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has a workforce of fewer than 500 professional and administrative staff. Over ninety percent of the staff hold career, rather than political, appointments.”

“The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has around 3,000 employees. This number includes staff in its 11 field offices and its headquarters in Washington, DC.”

Lastly, consider this:

“DOGE will confront the “sinkhole of bureaucracy”: records still kept on paper and processed almost entirely by hand by some 700 workers who toil 230 feet below ground in an abandoned limestone mine in northwestern Pennsylvania.”

The answer there, is to get the damned data off of paper and onto a computer database!

Final thoughts echoed here:

““Complexity isn’t an accident; it’s a consequence of a government that has grown far beyond its core functions and is tied down by a self-serving bureaucracy and public-sector union power,” said Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute.”

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Onwards!!!