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Update on the continuing dramatic saga of DOGE: apparently the Department of Education no longer exists.
Now this could be a sensationalist media headline, but if not I am shocked that the DOGE team and Trump's cadre et al are going this hard, this fast. They must basically be saying they're going to get a ton of legal challenges anyway, so they might as well do as much as possible and keep up the momentum, destroying everything before the dust clears. It's a bold strategy, and frankly as a spectator it's incredibly exciting, I must admit!
Curious for people's thoughts on the Dept of Education getting shut down? Personally I think it's a good thing - our education system has had terrible outcomes with no accountability for far too long.
In other related news, FEMA send $59 Million dollars to house immigrants in luxury hotels in NYC last week, and Social Security has been sending money to dozens of people over 150 years old, among other issues like the system for SSNs not being re-duplicated.
So many people have been saying "we can never fix the deficit because Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are its primary drivers and can't be touched".
And yet, every time we look under the hood of a government program we see waste and fraud. Why should those programs be any different?
Another thing that I've thought of but which nobody has mentioned: the tendency of multiple of illegal immigrants to work under the same social security number. Are people who fraudulently lent out their identity now becoming the recipients of Social Security because of this?
If what Musk says is true, than it might be very easy to realize tens or hundreds of billions in savings simply by "fixing the glitch" and removing fraudulent payments.
Big if true. But I feel like almost every time something like this comes up, either with estimates of the illegals that vote, dead people voting, people voting multiple times, etc some expert chimes in with a just so story about how it might look bad on the face of it, but this is actually just how it works and only ignorant normies spreading misinformation could possibly be worried.
I mean, if you think about it, SS reuse makes sense. They only go up 999-99-9999, or 1B - 1. The US is supposed to have 333M people. If we weren't reusing SS numbers by now, we really should start soon.
That said, I still want someone to aggressively comb over the payments, instead of hand waving away that everything is totally normal and nothing at all to be concerned about what so ever. Check the names on accounts, send people to do in person interviews if need be. I'm sure the FBI could be put to more productive use than having 40% of their agents conducting no-knock paramilitary raids on grandmas who got waved through the capital by confused police.
I agree with this sentiment. I'll add as well that even if the gross amount of money saved isn't that huge, it sends an incredibly important signal to the rest of the government - if you commit fraud and/or waste money, we will find it, and you will be punished.
The chilling effects from this alone I'd imagine would save a ton of money. Plus it improves public sentiment towards the government, encourages people who just want to grift to stay away, etc etc. It's not just about saving money right off the bat, it's the entire mindset of the people who would go in and do something like these cost cutting measures.
That this could even be an argument against it drives me up a wall. I know you aren't making that argument, the opposite in fact. But we both know that argument will be made. "Elon spent some billions of dollars to save some millions from Social Security Fraud! Who's wasting tax dollars now?!" But we don't apply that to the money spent catching murderers, auditing minimum wage workers, the FBI entrapped autistic kids in their mother's basements, etc, etc. The people likely to complain about the cost of catching fraud and waste in the government are never the same people worried about the cost to enforce censorship on the internet, anti-racist departments in every institution in America, etc. They won't complain about all the money spent on lawfare to get Trump the last 4 years. Money means nothing to them, but they know it means something to us, and so they will disingenuously complain that the things we want cost too much to get us to back down. God help us if the "reasonable centrist" gets talked into believing it.
The argument about saving only millions in Social Security fraud seems like the opposite of the actual controversy. First, DOGE seems to not cost a lot of money. Second, that DOGE is not reducing fraud and waste in SS/Medi and is instead targetting programs that it ideologically opposes is the actual criticism of DOGE.
Of course, if you also are ideologicslly opposed to various DOGE targets, then you probably view these targets' existence as counterproductive and their removal to be an efficiency gain.
This is just who/whom. One person's "Why is USAID funding drag shows in the 3rd world?" is another person's "Yay! USAID is funding drag shows in the 3rd world!" Unambiguous fraud/waste to one seems like we're just getting rid of programs we "ideologically oppose" to another.
Then let's publicize "USAID is funding drag shows in the third world" and see how many people react in the first manner and how many react in the second.
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