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We all know that Musk is not someone with a strong commitment to the truth. We all know he's a grifter. How long has FSD been coming now? What was the deal with

We all know that Musk is not someone with a strong commitment to the truth. We all know he's a grifter. How long has FSD been coming now? What was the deal with the diver? But so much of these DOGE criticisms are simply reflexive "Musk bad." There is no a priori reason why it's unlikely that a small amount of people are being paid benefits out of a byzantine bureaucratic system that's almost a hundred years old. Just a few years ago, I was listening to a story on NPR about SSI fraud (also administered by the SSA) and how common it was. Now, apparently we're all convinced all government agencies contain approximately zero fraud, or at least detectable-by-Musk fraud, simply because it's the cause du jour. It's totally bizarre to read these HN stories (I flag most of them) and people are making totally unfounded claims on the processes, controls, and operation of government IT systems, apparently assuming they are just as good as what exists at Meta or Google. Well, I have personal experience, and maybe my program was an outlier, but these people seem to have extremely rosy expectations, and often have no idea how the government works even in theory ("there's an IG to find things like this!"). It's really exhausting and disappointing. DOGE can be a misguided operation run by a grifter that misreports findings and will never save the amount of money promised and a lot of stuff in the government can be awful, missing even basic controls.

troupo 2y ago
> But so much of these DOGE criticisms are simply reflexive "Musk bad." I mean, these are your own words: > DOGE can be a misguided operation run by a grifter that misreports findings And that's the main issue and criticism, not that everyone believes that the government is perfect
- Amezarak 2y ago
  But people aren’t saying that. Instead, they’re just inventing reasons why Musk is wrong, with no evidence or invented evidence, like the subject of this article.
  - troupo 2y ago
    Because Musk has already given ample evidence of how wrong he is on multiple accounts. It's on Musk to provide evidence for his extraordinary claims. So far that evidence has been in very short supply.
    - Amezarak 2y ago
      Yes, but people are just making stuff up about why he’s wrong. That is literally no better. You may as well just suspend judgement about these claims. No amount of evidence is going to convince most people here: we saw that with the Hunter laptop, where the goalposts moved with each additional proof the smallest amount possible.
      - troupo 2y ago
        "No amount of evidence" does not equal "no evidence". In case of Hunter laptop there was a grand jury, an FBI investigation, a criminal case, a joint investigation by two Republican committees against Joe Biden etc. etc. What evidence has Musk provided?
      - buttercraft 2y ago
        Are these made up? https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-musk-pushes-false-claim-ex-usaid-chief-earned-23-million-the-biggest-doge-hoaxes-spread-on-x/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-mus...
        Amezarak 2y ago
        This is not a good article. The Reuters and Politico examples, for instance, are particularly tendentious. Overpaying for subscriptions, or buying unnecessary subscriptions is exactly how such payments would operate.
    - thordenmark 2y ago
      Tons of evidence released already, even if you've only been casually following DOGE. And for some, no amount of evidence will ever be enough. Why is it so hard to believe an agency as big and inefficient as the US Govt. would have plenty of waste?
svachalek 2y ago
I started out with a similar position, but so far everything I've heard out of DOGE is either: 1. Misrepresenting congressionally approved expenditures he royally disapproves of as "fraud" 2. Misleading, under-researched, unsupported statistics as "waste" The longer this goes on, the more impressed I am with our government. I had no idea it would be this hard to find anything legitimate to attack.
- kolanos 2y ago
  > 1. Misrepresenting congressionally approved expenditures he royally disapproves of as "fraud" This seems dubious to me. In almost all congressional expenditures the funds allocated are done so at a department level with broad statutes applied. It is largely left up to that department to decide what to actually do with those funds specifically. It seems like a stretch to characterize this as "congressionally approved" and more like an abdication by congress on large swaths of government spending.
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    There is of course a feedback loop here. It's not like they get a check and no one ever looks to see what it was spent on. Congress has multiple levels of oversight over these agencies, including several congressional Committees (House and Senate), inspectors general, and whistleblowers. This oversight serves to minimize fraud, waste, and abuse.
wonderwonder 2y ago
I think the issue is a mix of "the boy who cried wolf" and really smart programmers with almost no real world experience who have been told to find "fraud". I am confident the government is rife with it. Issue is we have unleashed these young developers who I am sure are all excellent programmers who can code me under the table. Issue becomes developers with experience will question requirements, very good developers without experience will say "this is easy" and then just implement it. They were told to find fraud so we are presented with the classic "to a hammer, everything looks like a nail" . On top of that, Musk is so eager to announce progress that he just repeats what he is told as he knows that these are very smart programmers. I found myself working in an heavily regulated industry recently and I can tell you if you dropped a young really smart programmer into the code base they would find a million things that are inefficient and wrong. In reality they were carefully coded that way to support some byzantine law or legacy program or one off. An experienced dev will ask "anyone know why we do X in module Y"? and he will get an answer saying "yes, its because of...". The young hotshot dev just deletes and rewrites it or yells "fraud" So Musk is shooting himself in the foot when if he just waited and verified he could release valid and I am sure damning evidence of fraud but currently he is just "crying wolf"
- jki275 2y ago
  I've personally worked in such a system. I can tell you -- as someone who asked the question often -- that often, the answer is "because we wrote it that way in 1975 and no one has bothered to spend the time to learn how to make it better since then. It is not necessarily true something written forty years ago is right. It is not necessarily true that something written forty years ago has some secret logic in it that cannot be improved upon. It is not necessarily true that something written forty years ago cannot be improved by fresh eyes. Obviously one must not change things recklessly -- but there are often improvements that can be made.
  - wonderwonder 2y ago
    Fair point
- int_19h 2y ago

troupo 2y ago

> But so much of these DOGE criticisms are simply reflexive "Musk bad." I mean, these are your own words: > DOGE can be a misguided operation run by a grifter that misreports findings And that's the main issue and criticism, not that everyone believes that the government is perfect

Amezarak 2y ago
But people aren’t saying that. Instead, they’re just inventing reasons why Musk is wrong, with no evidence or invented evidence, like the subject of this article.
- troupo 2y ago
  Because Musk has already given ample evidence of how wrong he is on multiple accounts. It's on Musk to provide evidence for his extraordinary claims. So far that evidence has been in very short supply.
  - Amezarak 2y ago
    Yes, but people are just making stuff up about why he’s wrong. That is literally no better. You may as well just suspend judgement about these claims. No amount of evidence is going to convince most people here: we saw that with the Hunter laptop, where the goalposts moved with each additional proof the smallest amount possible.
    - troupo 2y ago
      "No amount of evidence" does not equal "no evidence". In case of Hunter laptop there was a grand jury, an FBI investigation, a criminal case, a joint investigation by two Republican committees against Joe Biden etc. etc. What evidence has Musk provided?
    - buttercraft 2y ago
      Are these made up? https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-musk-pushes-false-claim-ex-usaid-chief-earned-23-million-the-biggest-doge-hoaxes-spread-on-x/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-mus...
      - Amezarak 2y ago
        This is not a good article. The Reuters and Politico examples, for instance, are particularly tendentious. Overpaying for subscriptions, or buying unnecessary subscriptions is exactly how such payments would operate.
  - thordenmark 2y ago
    Tons of evidence released already, even if you've only been casually following DOGE. And for some, no amount of evidence will ever be enough. Why is it so hard to believe an agency as big and inefficient as the US Govt. would have plenty of waste?

svachalek 2y ago

I started out with a similar position, but so far everything I've heard out of DOGE is either: 1. Misrepresenting congressionally approved expenditures he royally disapproves of as "fraud" 2. Misleading, under-researched, unsupported statistics as "waste" The longer this goes on, the more impressed I am with our government. I had no idea it would be this hard to find anything legitimate to attack.

kolanos 2y ago
> 1. Misrepresenting congressionally approved expenditures he royally disapproves of as "fraud" This seems dubious to me. In almost all congressional expenditures the funds allocated are done so at a department level with broad statutes applied. It is largely left up to that department to decide what to actually do with those funds specifically. It seems like a stretch to characterize this as "congressionally approved" and more like an abdication by congress on large swaths of government spending.
- ModernMech 2y ago
  There is of course a feedback loop here. It's not like they get a check and no one ever looks to see what it was spent on. Congress has multiple levels of oversight over these agencies, including several congressional Committees (House and Senate), inspectors general, and whistleblowers. This oversight serves to minimize fraud, waste, and abuse.

wonderwonder 2y ago

I think the issue is a mix of "the boy who cried wolf" and really smart programmers with almost no real world experience who have been told to find "fraud". I am confident the government is rife with it. Issue is we have unleashed these young developers who I am sure are all excellent programmers who can code me under the table. Issue becomes developers with experience will question requirements, very good developers without experience will say "this is easy" and then just implement it. They were told to find fraud so we are presented with the classic "to a hammer, everything looks like a nail" . On top of that, Musk is so eager to announce progress that he just repeats what he is told as he knows that these are very smart programmers. I found myself working in an heavily regulated industry recently and I can tell you if you dropped a young really smart programmer into the code base they would find a million things that are inefficient and wrong. In reality they were carefully coded that way to support some byzantine law or legacy program or one off. An experienced dev will ask "anyone know why we do X in module Y"? and he will get an answer saying "yes, its because of...". The young hotshot dev just deletes and rewrites it or yells "fraud" So Musk is shooting himself in the foot when if he just waited and verified he could release valid and I am sure damning evidence of fraud but currently he is just "crying wolf"

jki275 2y ago
I've personally worked in such a system. I can tell you -- as someone who asked the question often -- that often, the answer is "because we wrote it that way in 1975 and no one has bothered to spend the time to learn how to make it better since then. It is not necessarily true something written forty years ago is right. It is not necessarily true that something written forty years ago has some secret logic in it that cannot be improved upon. It is not necessarily true that something written forty years ago cannot be improved by fresh eyes. Obviously one must not change things recklessly -- but there are often improvements that can be made.
- wonderwonder 2y ago
  Fair point
int_19h 2y ago