Burning Down The House

 NPR:

In fact, the chair of the Council of Inspectors General actually reached out to the contacts at DOGE to try to engage with them and talk about what we do, because, if you're interested in waste, fraud and abuse, that's what our offices go after, right, and have gone after for years. And so he never heard back.

Now, why would that be?

Here’s a neat trick for saving taxpayers billions of dollars: billions of dollars: just make stuff up! 

I mean, sure, you could do all the hard work of actually finding government waste and fixing inefficient processes. But why bother when you can just… invent numbers? (This is not financial advice.) 

The innovator of this approach — and I really should give credit where credit is due — is DOGE, the government agency that is totally, absolutely, definitely not run by Elon Musk (wink wink). 

After there were complaints about the near total lack of transparency from the DOGE brats, Musk insisted that the website was super transparent, except at the time the website was empty. It has since been updated with what they claim are receipts, but if these are receipts, they’re complete nonsense. The topline claim is that DOGE has saved taxpayers $55 billion.

The correct answer is: TRANSPARENCY!

Let’s look at their crown jewel: an $8 billion contract that DOGE proudly claims to have canceled. Except… it wasn’t an $8 BILLION contract. It was an $8 MILLION contract. 

That’s quite a difference! (About $7.992 billion, if you’re counting.) 

Now, to be slightly fair to the DOGErati — and I do try to be fair — there was indeed an incorrect document floating around that listed the contract as $8 billion. That document was corrected weeks ago, because, you know, reality. The actual payments were set at $8 million total over multiple years, with $2.5 million already paid out. So even if we’re being incredibly generous, the maximum possible savings here would be $5.5 million. 

That’s 0.069% of what they claimed (a number that I’m sure would still get a snicker out of Musk). 

But why let reality get in the way of a good story? 

When reporters called this out, the DOGE team made a fascinating choice. Instead of fixing their error, they actually removed the correct document from their website and replaced it with the old, incorrect one. They are now deliberately posting false information to support the narrative.

So they didn’t really alter government documents. That just made up documents to suit their story, and called that a “government document”! Transparency! Hey, presto!

DOGE also claims it has saved $55 billion, when its receipts only add up to $16 billion. And some of that includes taking credit for closing offices of the National Archives.

Those closings were announced on August 1, 2024.

But even that’s not the best part. That same article notes that many of the contracts DOGE claims to have “cancelled and saved” were contracts that had already been fully paid out. This is like claiming you saved money on last year’s rent by deciding not to pay it today. The money’s already gone! But DOGE adds these amounts to their total anyway, because apparently that’s how math works now. 

The cherry on top of this mathematical fantasy sundae? The Liar-in-Chief of DOGE, Elon Musk, has already amplified someone’s made-up claim that DOGE had saved $110 billion — a number that somehow manages to double their own already massively inflated figures.

But Elmo is a genius businessman, and genius businessmen never lie!!! (“Businessperson” is way too DEI.)

And it can’t be repeated too often now:

It’s worth noting that the US government already has established, professional watchdogs with actual expertise in tracking down waste, fraud, and abuse: the Inspectors General (whom Trump illegally removed upon taking office) and the Government Accountability Office. These are people who know how to follow the money, understand federal contracting rules, and can tell the difference between waste and, you know, normal government operations. (A distinction that seems to elude the DOGE crew.) 

DOGE seems determined to ignore these existing competent oversight bodies, perhaps because their methodical, fact-based approach doesn’t generate enough social media buzz with which to fluff Musk’s ego.

"Move fast and break things."

This is Government Finance 101, but apparently DOGE skipped that class to instead share dank memes in Telegram chat groups. If you cancel a contract that helps collect taxes more efficiently, you haven’t “saved” the contract cost — you’ve just made tax collection less efficient. If you eliminate training that helps prevent costly mistakes, you haven’t “saved” the training budget — you’ve just guaranteed more costly mistakes.

And never look back; something might be gaining on you.

At last week’s White House briefing, Musk claimed DOGE would welcome corrections when they make mistakes. Yet when confronted with actual errors — like that pesky $8 billion vs. $8 million difference — their response wasn’t to fix the mistake, but to deliberately showcase the incorrect information. It’s a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with this approach: rather than leveraging actual expertise to address real government waste, DOGE is manufacturing outrage through mathematical sleight-of-hand. The real fraud isn’t in the government contracts they’re “investigating” — it’s in their own reporting.

Something called “reality.”

I mean, lay off enough people, and the economy starts to show it (not to mention government services, which are what everyone misses in a government shutdown, when we are assured no one will miss the government).  Whither the magic of government savings then?