5 ms·
I guess so, but based on current events, it doesn't seem like the US Govt. has any secrets that it places any value on. Between a bunch of glorified interns bei
by im_down_w_otp 2y ago
I guess so, but based on current events, it doesn't seem like the US Govt. has any secrets that it places any value on. Between a bunch of glorified interns being given access to anything & everything and a bunch of known compromised department heads being appointed... it doesn't strike me that the US Govt. takes its national security very seriously at all.
The US Govt. seems empirically much more vested in what goes on in public restrooms than it does in what goes on in global affairs and military conflicts.
- niceice 2y ago[flagged]
- ugexe 2y agoWhat audits?
- Onawa 2y agoPentagon audits, they've failed for 7 years in a row and they don't expect to be able to pass an audit until 2028 https://breakingdefense.com/2024/11/pentagon-fails-7th-audit-in-a-row-eyes-passing-grade-by-2028/ https://breakingdefense.com/2024/11/pentagon-fails-7th-audit...
- NekkoDroid 2y agoHas Elon (I guess rather his "DOGE" department) so far even remotely touched anything military related?
- theandrewbailey 2y agoPoster is probably referring to the audits that the Pentagon keeps failing year after year: https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2023/11/16/pentagon-fails-sixth-audit-with-number-of-passing-grades-stagnant/ https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2023/11/16/pentagon-fai...
- im_down_w_otp 2y agoI have literally no idea how this relates to what I said. Did you mean to reply to someone else?
- lostlogin 2y agoIt’s that mentality of ‘flooding the zone’.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoMany many years ago I used to work at a drug store with two tills and we couldn't account for every penny.
- ttyprintk 2y agoThere are plenty of charts based on public budgets, you can pick your favorite. How shall we judge whether transparency is improved? What if all of this results in less transparency?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- solarengineer 2y agoYour question can be answered without giving away control and access to unauthorised and inexperienced auditors. Governance, Risk, and Compliance has been missing. Too many decades of nepotism, insider trading, corruption ( starting with lobbying ), have led to the lack of transparency. The movie “The Big Short” has explained some of these issues.
- Boldened15 2y agoI believe the audit stuff is overblown [1], there are strict requirements for passing and it doesn’t mean the money is literally disappearing into a black hole. I don’t have every Chipotle receipt saved in the past year but that doesn’t mean my spending is mysterious. I assume that’s why being audited by the IRS is considered a nightmare, it’s nontrivial. It seems the Pentagon audit process only started in 2018, and Congress gave a deadline of 2028 to pass a fully clean audit, which they have made progress on: > Of the 28 military agencies, DoD leaders think 11 are expected to receive clean audit opinions, one more than the previous fiscal year. [1] https://thenationaldesk.com/news/fact-check-team/pentagon-fails-seventh-consecutive-audit-department-of-defense-finances-government-efficiency-biden-administration-fact-check-team https://thenationaldesk.com/news/fact-check-team/pentagon-fa...
- sympil 2y agoThe only audits that have failed have to do with national defense budgets. athis is the one area of government that Republicans hate to cut.
- pell 2y agoI'm very sure that there is a lot of spending that is used inefficiently. Any large organization does run into that problem. Resolving some issues, cutting red tape, making processes more efficient, all that is probably a good idea. However, "DOGE" and those cheering them on have not produced any evidence for the vast majority of the claims they made. Often they also just misrepresented facts (e.g., USAID supposedly funding media sites, condoms in Gaza and many other nonsense) or simply lied. I also don't see much promotion of actual nuanced views on the topic like the Hamilton Project's tracker of federal expenditures which you can find here: https://www.hamiltonproject.org/data/tracking-federal-expenditures-in-real-time/ https://www.hamiltonproject.org/data/tracking-federal-expend... At the moment, the US government seems to be mainly focused on causing headlines to make their base happy who want quick victories and have not shown resilience to simplistic takes, and - of course - to make the opposition party and their supporters panic.
- ttyprintk 2y agoAnd what qualities of an audit would you trust from a department that acts like that? They’re not, for example, combining all prior audits into a sophisticated longitudinal audit research tool. They’ve prepared their conclusions to hold even if they misplace three orders of magnitude.
- enragedcacti 2y agoDon't mistake obliviousness for a conspiracy. The vast majority of the doge savings link straight to the Federal Procurement Data System that anyone can search or ingest from. You're of course free to disagree with the spending but if you weren't even aware you could look at these contracts then maybe you should ask if you're being shown the whole picture or if it's closer to a politically motivated hit job on our civil servants.
- ttyprintk 2y agoAnd one could peruse that under any administration. The challenge for an honest DOGE is that they must do better than 100% of past Federal efficiency policy, which is maybe a hundred incremental changes[0]. If they cause _any_ problems that those fixed, then they’re at best not up to the job and maybe even deserving cynicism. [0](https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/management/office-federal-procurement-policy/ https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/management/office-f...)
- hammock 2y ago[flagged]
- im_down_w_otp 2y agoI'm not sure I'm understanding the relationship to what I said there. Is that example supposed to be an indication that the US Govt. does take its national security and secrets seriously?
- watwut 2y agoAnd people who made big deal about that while being silent now are quite massive hypocrites. It is so clear in retrospect how fake the outrage was.
- vrosas 2y agoThe outrage wasn’t only fake, it was literally manufactured by Russian bots.
- arunabha 2y agoYou do realize that whataboutisms don't actually prove your point? Implicitly you're saying that what Hillary did was wrong, but now that my guy is doing it, it's ok, since Hillary did it. You can't have it both ways. You either believe something is wrong, or it's not. To argue both sides usually means a bad faith attempt at pushing a narrative.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paganel 2y ago[flagged]
- danaris 2y ago[flagged]
- watwut 2y agoI see Americans defending Trumps and Musk. Or acting as if everyone just overreacted. So I would say, quite a lot of Americans are either fine with this or actively want it.
- moshun 2y agoThere are 300M people here and Trump won by ~200K. You can safely say that some are fine with this administrations behavior, but many are not and starting to actively protest and resist. Both are true simultaneously.
- DaSHacka 2y agoHe still got almost 48% of the overall vote, however. He may not have won the popular vote by much, but he certainly has a dedicated base of staunch supporters. By their unceasing jeering, bright hats, and constant online presence I'd be surprised if there's anyone hasn't noticed them by this point. Somehow it's worse than in 2016
- sydbarrett74 2y agoThe masses are asses.
- ttyprintk 2y agoI heard a meaningful quiet after the H1B fight. The kind of guys who said “kick em out! Imma get me one of them high-pay tech jobs” Those guys had to watch Trump, revealed to employ a lot of H1-class workers, claim we need more.
- im_down_w_otp 2y agoThe very fact that it's even possible to have this kind of thing happening unfettered, unconstrained, and unaccountable is evidence in and of itself that the US Govt. doesn't take its national security & secrets seriously though, isn't it?
- jaimsam 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoYou can't post like this here. Since this account has been doing it repeatedly, I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DaSHacka 2y agoThe sheer number of flagged replies to this comment is telling.
- torstenvl 2y agoSome political views are now prohibited on HN, it would appear. EDIT: Case in point.