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The liberal thesis is that DOGE defines anything they don't like as waste / fraud / abuse. Claiming something is "fraud" removes opposition to cancelling it. T

The liberal thesis is that DOGE defines anything they don't like as waste / fraud / abuse. Claiming something is "fraud" removes opposition to cancelling it. This isn't 5d chess, it is 1d chess.

MarcelOlsz 2y ago
It's not even 1d chess. It's like playing War with a deck of cards.
xnx 2y ago
Fraud is also a crime that can be prosecuted. The lack of prosecution exposes they have not found any fraud, and probably aren't even looking.
- localghost3000 2y ago
  The president was convicted of fraud and that doesn’t seem to matter. Let’s maybe stop acting like the rule of law is getting applied evenly in these times.
- ineedaj0b 2y ago
  the 'fraud' will come out around midterms when it's politically advantageous to have publicity.
- monkmartinez 2y ago
  IANAL. I would think fraud needs investigation much deeper than; "This $200 million is being spent on <insert program> that we don't need at the moment." First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off. If there is potential for fraud, you mark the case for further evaluation and investigation. The most important first step is always to stop the bleeding and in this case, bleeding money. You can come back to investigate at a later time. Prosecuting fraud before the bleeding has stopped is a waste of time imo.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    > First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off. If you're attempting to illegally seize control of the government's spending from Congress, sure, you do that.
  - hypeatei 2y ago
    > First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off The executive doesn't appropriate funds, Congress does. So that's completely wrong. > think fraud needs investigation much deeper than... Exactly but DOGE isn't doing that.
  - xnx 2y ago
    > "This $200 million is being spent on <insert program> that we don't need at the moment." That's "waste" (in their opinion), but they keep saying "waste, fraud, and abuse".
  - tim333 2y ago
    Fair enough, prosecuting takes time but announcing what happened doesn't. So far we seem to get them claiming that 160 year old people are claiming social security which turned out to be them just defaulting to an old date of birth if they didn't know the actual one. Have there been any announcements of actual fraud found that stand up to a common sense look at what they are saying?
- notahacker 2y ago
  Never mind the prosecution, if you work on the hypothesis there probably is some government expenditure that is at least slightly unnecessary, the shitshow where DOGE look for the most obvious examples and end up bragging about saving money until someone points out that budget was spent last year or that the billion is actually a million or that maybe the people on probation due to recent promotions probably weren't the most dispensible employees, or oops, can we unfire the Ebola staff presents a surprisingly positive impression of how good actual auditors have been at weeding it out...
- theshrike79 2y ago
  And if there is fraud, there's this thing called the "Inspector General" whose sole job is to find and prosecute fraud. Guess who they fired first?
  - hayst4ck 2y ago
    I am deep blue, but if you accept the premise that the government is spending money inefficiently, which is a rational thing to think (after all, the government doesn't pass audits which means no one really knows how DoD money is spent at minimum), then it stands to reason that inspector generals were doing a poor job and therefore their removal is a good thing because they were complicit in the inefficiency. Firing the policemen so you can commit crime is what's happening, but your argument isn't a convincing one, neither is the age one. We can do better than that, and by focusing on those as the problem, we disempower ourselves and our message. "There will be a revolution, and it will be bloodless if the left allows it to be." We are going through a revolution. DOGE is the revolutionary force purging the old government, just like every other revolution. Just like Stalin, just like the bolsheviks, just like Mao. The only reason it's not violent like those yet is because power was peacefully transferred to them, and FBI agents, generals, US marshals, and other agents of enforcing the law aren't completely replaced with loyalists yet. There's a reason historians are freaking out.
    - watwut 2y ago
      > if you accept the premise that the government is spending money inefficiently, which is a rational thing to think (after all, the government doesn't pass audits which means no one really knows how DoD money is spent at minimum), then it stands to reason that inspector generals were doing a poor job and therefore their removal is a good thing because they were complicit in the inefficiency. No it does not stand to a reason. Inspector general is not even supposed to deal with efficiency, he is supposed to deal with fraud. Those are two different things. Second, no, there being a crime does not imply you need to fire all cops. Or cops boss. There would never be any stable enforcement body if you applied that standard. Third, random decision making creates inefficiency.
kernal 2y ago
[flagged]
- tombert 2y ago
  I think part of the issue is how impossible it is to know which parts of the cuts that DOGE has are honest. The easy example is when they said we're spending millions of dollars for "condoms for Gaza", only for it to be the wrong Gaza, and the Gaza that that spending was referring to was one of the largest HIV hotspots in the world, and it wasn't millions of dollars. It's tough to know how much of that is idiocy vs outright dishonesty.
- kemayo 2y ago
  The feed lacks enough context for me to tell what I think about basically everything on it. If I uncritically accept that things on it are exactly what they're presenting them as being, sure, there's stuff that looks sketchy. But Musk is also the guy who has been telling me that Teslas will have "full self driving" within a year or two for the last decade, so... Plus, should you trust that raw feed? There's already news stories about them going through and removing stuff from their big list of cuts that they messed up: https://archive.is/fCO84 https://archive.is/fCO84
- jcranmer 2y ago
  I haven't bothered to read the feed, but I'm going to go with "all of them", because what I personally object to is the process, so even trying to frame it in the veins of "do you support spending on X" is the wrong question to ask in the first place. There's already a lot of evidence for these cuts happening in large part by someone doing the equivalent on Ctrl-F on a database for terms and zeroing them out, which is not an effective process if you're trying to reduce "waste," no matter what your definition of "waste" is.
  - kernal 2y ago
    [flagged]
alabastervlog 2y ago
The right's take on this also seems premised on the idea that the bureaucracy has just grown and grown (it's been fairly steady over time, and leans small when compared to our international peers, so...) and that nobody's worked on efficiency or tracking work that whole time, when in fact there's been a shitload of that and, while you can find waste or even, rarely, fraud, it is not rampant, unless you define waste or fraud as "doing things I don't want them to, even though it's in the budget". In fact, on the fraud front, a lot of government inefficiency has been deliberately introduced—to fight fraud or corruption. So even if you find something inefficient, you better be careful or you'll be undoing an anti-fraud or anti-corruption measure. You see stuff like Elon asking for those dumb-ass "five things" emails when a large proportion of government workers already have their productivity tracked multiple ways, many of them quite objective and hard to fake, because people who are not complete morons have already worked on these problems. This is government based on dumb right-wing misconceptions about how government works. Or, if the people doing it aren't true believers, at least playing to those incorrect notions among voters.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  DOGE on government: tech-style "This would be easy to fix if you just..."
- ModernMech 2y ago
  It tracks with their opinion of elections. They're sure there's fraud everywhere, but they can't point anything substantial whatsoever. Nevertheless, we have to spend a ton of money to combat it, and wouldn't you know, all the things the propose are designed to do nothing more can fix "problems" that don't exist.

The liberal thesis is that DOGE defines anything they don't like as waste / fraud / abuse. Claiming something is "fraud" removes opposition to cancelling it. This isn't 5d chess, it is 1d chess.

MarcelOlsz 2y ago

It's not even 1d chess. It's like playing War with a deck of cards.

xnx 2y ago

Fraud is also a crime that can be prosecuted. The lack of prosecution exposes they have not found any fraud, and probably aren't even looking.

localghost3000 2y ago
The president was convicted of fraud and that doesn’t seem to matter. Let’s maybe stop acting like the rule of law is getting applied evenly in these times.
ineedaj0b 2y ago
the 'fraud' will come out around midterms when it's politically advantageous to have publicity.
monkmartinez 2y ago
IANAL. I would think fraud needs investigation much deeper than; "This $200 million is being spent on <insert program> that we don't need at the moment." First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off. If there is potential for fraud, you mark the case for further evaluation and investigation. The most important first step is always to stop the bleeding and in this case, bleeding money. You can come back to investigate at a later time. Prosecuting fraud before the bleeding has stopped is a waste of time imo.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  > First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off. If you're attempting to illegally seize control of the government's spending from Congress, sure, you do that.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  > First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off The executive doesn't appropriate funds, Congress does. So that's completely wrong. > think fraud needs investigation much deeper than... Exactly but DOGE isn't doing that.
- xnx 2y ago
  > "This $200 million is being spent on <insert program> that we don't need at the moment." That's "waste" (in their opinion), but they keep saying "waste, fraud, and abuse".
- tim333 2y ago
  Fair enough, prosecuting takes time but announcing what happened doesn't. So far we seem to get them claiming that 160 year old people are claiming social security which turned out to be them just defaulting to an old date of birth if they didn't know the actual one. Have there been any announcements of actual fraud found that stand up to a common sense look at what they are saying?
notahacker 2y ago
Never mind the prosecution, if you work on the hypothesis there probably is some government expenditure that is at least slightly unnecessary, the shitshow where DOGE look for the most obvious examples and end up bragging about saving money until someone points out that budget was spent last year or that the billion is actually a million or that maybe the people on probation due to recent promotions probably weren't the most dispensible employees, or oops, can we unfire the Ebola staff presents a surprisingly positive impression of how good actual auditors have been at weeding it out...
theshrike79 2y ago
And if there is fraud, there's this thing called the "Inspector General" whose sole job is to find and prosecute fraud. Guess who they fired first?
- hayst4ck 2y ago
  I am deep blue, but if you accept the premise that the government is spending money inefficiently, which is a rational thing to think (after all, the government doesn't pass audits which means no one really knows how DoD money is spent at minimum), then it stands to reason that inspector generals were doing a poor job and therefore their removal is a good thing because they were complicit in the inefficiency. Firing the policemen so you can commit crime is what's happening, but your argument isn't a convincing one, neither is the age one. We can do better than that, and by focusing on those as the problem, we disempower ourselves and our message. "There will be a revolution, and it will be bloodless if the left allows it to be." We are going through a revolution. DOGE is the revolutionary force purging the old government, just like every other revolution. Just like Stalin, just like the bolsheviks, just like Mao. The only reason it's not violent like those yet is because power was peacefully transferred to them, and FBI agents, generals, US marshals, and other agents of enforcing the law aren't completely replaced with loyalists yet. There's a reason historians are freaking out.
  - watwut 2y ago
    > if you accept the premise that the government is spending money inefficiently, which is a rational thing to think (after all, the government doesn't pass audits which means no one really knows how DoD money is spent at minimum), then it stands to reason that inspector generals were doing a poor job and therefore their removal is a good thing because they were complicit in the inefficiency. No it does not stand to a reason. Inspector general is not even supposed to deal with efficiency, he is supposed to deal with fraud. Those are two different things. Second, no, there being a crime does not imply you need to fire all cops. Or cops boss. There would never be any stable enforcement body if you applied that standard. Third, random decision making creates inefficiency.

kernal 2y ago

[flagged]

tombert 2y ago
I think part of the issue is how impossible it is to know which parts of the cuts that DOGE has are honest. The easy example is when they said we're spending millions of dollars for "condoms for Gaza", only for it to be the wrong Gaza, and the Gaza that that spending was referring to was one of the largest HIV hotspots in the world, and it wasn't millions of dollars. It's tough to know how much of that is idiocy vs outright dishonesty.
kemayo 2y ago
The feed lacks enough context for me to tell what I think about basically everything on it. If I uncritically accept that things on it are exactly what they're presenting them as being, sure, there's stuff that looks sketchy. But Musk is also the guy who has been telling me that Teslas will have "full self driving" within a year or two for the last decade, so... Plus, should you trust that raw feed? There's already news stories about them going through and removing stuff from their big list of cuts that they messed up: https://archive.is/fCO84 https://archive.is/fCO84
jcranmer 2y ago
I haven't bothered to read the feed, but I'm going to go with "all of them", because what I personally object to is the process, so even trying to frame it in the veins of "do you support spending on X" is the wrong question to ask in the first place. There's already a lot of evidence for these cuts happening in large part by someone doing the equivalent on Ctrl-F on a database for terms and zeroing them out, which is not an effective process if you're trying to reduce "waste," no matter what your definition of "waste" is.
- kernal 2y ago
  [flagged]

alabastervlog 2y ago

The right's take on this also seems premised on the idea that the bureaucracy has just grown and grown (it's been fairly steady over time, and leans small when compared to our international peers, so...) and that nobody's worked on efficiency or tracking work that whole time, when in fact there's been a shitload of that and, while you can find waste or even, rarely, fraud, it is not rampant, unless you define waste or fraud as "doing things I don't want them to, even though it's in the budget". In fact, on the fraud front, a lot of government inefficiency has been deliberately introduced—to fight fraud or corruption. So even if you find something inefficient, you better be careful or you'll be undoing an anti-fraud or anti-corruption measure. You see stuff like Elon asking for those dumb-ass "five things" emails when a large proportion of government workers already have their productivity tracked multiple ways, many of them quite objective and hard to fake, because people who are not complete morons have already worked on these problems. This is government based on dumb right-wing misconceptions about how government works. Or, if the people doing it aren't true believers, at least playing to those incorrect notions among voters.

ethbr1 2y ago
DOGE on government: tech-style "This would be easy to fix if you just..."
ModernMech 2y ago
It tracks with their opinion of elections. They're sure there's fraud everywhere, but they can't point anything substantial whatsoever. Nevertheless, we have to spend a ton of money to combat it, and wouldn't you know, all the things the propose are designed to do nothing more can fix "problems" that don't exist.