DOGE list of some programs being cut

[Rideback]

Trump's personal lawyer Alina Habba this morning when asked about the many veterans who have been fired from government jobs;
"Perhaps they're not fit to have a job at this moment"

btw, in her words she's a giant fan of Andrew Tate, the human trafficker that Trump just brought back from Romanian prison.

[mister_coffee]

I didn't know they grew avocados in Russia.

[THL]

My Dad told me this joke back in the day (remember the Pentagon's $2000 toilet seat):

'Remember the Texas oilman who made a million dollars? Well, he wasn't from Texas, he was from Oklahoma. And it wasn't in oil, it was in cattle. And he didn't make a million, he lost a hundred thousand. But the rest of it is true!'

This list needs some serious fact-checking.

Elon is a real exaggerator. He works with a liar and con-man. What could go wrong? No vetting, they find what they want. They want to stoke outrage to justify themselves.

Trump will try to ruin trade with Mexico and Canada so he can lift sanctions and trade with his handler Putin. Watch.

[Rideback]

NYT looked into the claims and also found contracts that weren't cancelled by DOGE, were triple counted, were fulfilled already...
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politi ... d=fb-share

[Rideback]

Elon Musk’s DOGE deleted hundreds more claims from its mistake-plagued “wall of receipts,” wiping out an additional $4 billion in so-called savings that the group had claimed to secure for U.S. taxpayers. By late Sunday night, DOGE had erased or altered more than 1,000 contracts it previously claimed to have canceled—amounting to over 40% of all contracts listed on its site last week.
ANPS audit team

[Rideback]

NPR finds DOGE receipts page has inaccuracies, some fixed, some not and some new ones, but bottom line is that there's no way Musk is finding the $ he promised and instead is going backwards.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-53 ... rm=nprnews

[Rideback]

While George W Bush was president the US Coast Guard signed a contract with a company in N Virginia. The contract was for $144,000 and the work was completed by June, 2005.

20 years passed.

Last week Elon Musk's DOGE said it had just cancelled the long dead Coast Guard contract and in doing so saved taxpayers $53.7 million.

Reporting by David Fahrenthold. He and 2 other reporters reviewed the contracts that DOGE had cancelled.

[Rideback]

It's a curious thing. One of the first groups that Trump & Musk fired were the Inspectors General from each department. Their offices are responsible for detecting and investigating fraud within govt. They annually save this Country billions. So it goes without saying, or maybe not, that if Musk and Trump were truly using DOGE to ferret out fraud and abuse they would have naturally turned to the offices of the Inspectors General to at the very least point them in the right direction. But no...

Just so you know, Jingles, here some of the work the fired Inspectors General were working on:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/02/12/t ... and-abuse/

and in case you're wondering, that's a great deal more fraud than the DOGE gang has been able to find.

[Jingles]

The Republican Congress could very well have created committees to take a look at the expenditures. But did they? No.

Well the last administration was controlled by the Dems and they could of as well but had they, they would of lost their gravey train and that's why they are raising so much hell now their gravey train is coming to and end

[mister_coffee]

Starlink is (well, was) the subject of a USAID investigation. Sounds like a conflict of interest there.

https://oig.usaid.gov/node/6814

I don't know how long that site will be up, though.

PROJECT ANNOUNCEMENT: Inspection of USAID's Oversight of Starlink Terminals Provided to the Government of Ukraine
Announcement
May 14, 2024
The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine.

Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals.

[Rideback]

IG reports Trump/Musk's cuts have made it impossible to track billions of funds and unspent aid.
https://www.therepublic.com/2025/02/10/ ... ump-moves/

[PAL]

The Republican Congress could very well have created committees to take a look at the expenditures. But did they? No.

[Rideback]

You're in over your head Ken.
IG report on USAID status
https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/fil ... 021025.pdf

Response and explanation of why subscribing to Politico Pro and other news outlets is to the advantage of the fed'l govt. It is a transaction not a grant.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-52 ... musk-trump

[dorankj]

Yes, they really did. They just hide it and run it through BS cover ‘titles’ and nonsense ‘subscriptions’ or shell companies of their preferred billionaires and millionaires. Time for the grift and corruption to stop and we voted for this so shove your nonsense where the sun don’t shine!

[Rideback]

more bogus claims against USAID. No USAID didn't pay Epstein $265,000 in '23 - the guy was dead folks.
No USAID didn't pay Politico $8 mil and no USAID wasn't paying media to trash Trump.
https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p ... irect=true

[mister_coffee]

War is profitable and manufacturing weapons is too.

Also manufacturing weapons means jobs. Which is why the F-35 program has subcontractors in all states and nearly every congressional district.

[PAL]

Yes, it was a Republican Congress that approved this, I believe. That is something to fact check.
War is profitable and manufacturing weapons is too.

[mister_coffee]

I've had another thought about military spending. All of our lives we've spent trillions of dollars building tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. So far none of those weapons have been used. Do you really feel ripped off that we haven't used those weapons and consider that money "waste"?

It would take only a handful of those weapons to match the cost of all of the programs, fake or not, on the DOGE list. Would not building those weapons have made any practical difference in where we are today? Would they have made any difference if we actually had a nuclear war?

We spent enormous amounts of money preparing for a World War III in central Europe. That war fortunately never came. And the military that we built for that war, at ruinous cost, was far from optimal for the wars we ended up fighting. Again, the amounts of money "wasted" on those endeavors dwarf spending on transgender comics or condoms.

[mister_coffee]

What I don't get is that elected officials have been promising to cut out waste, fraud, and abuse all of our lives (and probably long before any of us were born). Why have those efforts not been very effective? What makes us think that the current crop of people are going to be so much better at it?

I've had fortunately brief experiences working for the government. What I saw there directly has led me to conclude that on average government agencies and government employees are a lot more conscientious about spending money than their counterparts in the private sector. Sometimes to the point that it got in the way of doing their jobs.

If there was spending on billions of condoms for Gazans or transgender comics for Peru, that had to have been authorized by Congress somehow. Given the times in question it had to have been authorized by a Republican Congress. So maybe we are barking up the wrong tree here.

[Rideback]

Not a single person is arguing not to cut waste. No one. But if it ain't broke don't fix it applies here. The list is bogus. People focus on the bogus list vs the things that are really in need of correcting. Meanwhile, while eyes are on the bogus problems Musk's DOGEkids are intruding into the mainframes of systems that do good for this Country.

Are you ok with no Fed'l firefighters this season? Are you ok with no Nat'l weather service websites, no NOAA information, no medical research. You'll still be paying taxes you just won't get the services. And don't worry about the notices that the FDA puts out of salmonella in your food, of bird flu problems anymore, they're gone. You won't know what's coming 'til it arrives and hospitals and doctors will have their payments cut or delayed so that they'll be scrambling.

But you go ahead and focus on the bogus claim about condoms Ken.

[dorankj]

Millions and millions and at some point you have something! Are you seriously arguing NOT to cut bull*** because of its relative percentage of the entire budget? Such a dumba**!

[mister_coffee]

It would be nice to fix that mindset. But I am doubtful that it would make a significant difference in the piles of money our federal government spend every year.

"Transgender comics for Peru" aren't even a rounding error in the federal budget. Arguably unspent travel allowances are barely a rounding error.

Basically the United States is a large insurance and pension fund with an Army. There isn't any politically survivable way to cut either social insurance payouts (e.g. Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid) or the military budget in a significant way. Everything else the Federal Government does is around ten percent of the Federal Budget.

You can't cut spending by a third or half without taking a big bite out of mandatory spending -- like Social Security and Medicare. And I doubt that would be very popular.

[pasayten]

There is still waste that should be stopped. I was a career fed employee at the US EPA... When September rolled around it was spend the rest of our travel $$ and purchase $$ or we would "lose it". I imagine that is a common thread in many agencies of government. It's a mindset... I am hoping DOGE will affect that mindset. Make it a positive to save... not just turn it back into the big black hole of the treasury with no acknowledgement or reward.

[PAL]

Yeah, and where does all that money go, if it is not being used for programs.

[mister_coffee]

Only a arithmetical illiterate would believe you'd get spending under control by focusing on spending, no matter how ridiculous, of less than a few hundred thousand dollars.

Out of a trillion-dollar budget there would be millions such line items. You'd need to pay a large army of auditors to find them all and judge their legitimacy.

It doesn't help that most such lists of ridiculous spending are in fact fictional or at least wildly overblown or maliciously misrepresented.