politics

There's plenty of fraud, waste and abuse. It's just conveniently called "contracting", so money can be shoved out the door to private companies which do half the work at twice the price and end up delivering shoddy results. The reason DOGE didn't find anything was that they weren't looking at the contracting companies and instead were looking at the agencies themselves and the employees working for them. I won't say that some of those agencies aren't a complete waste of money (see: TSA, ICE, DOGE); but, DOGE was hyper-focused on agencies which actually do useful stuff (e.g.: SSA, NOAA).

Just saying, military related contracts are some of the most wasteful contracts that overpay private companies by however much money they want

I've heard stories of a simple paper towel dispenser being billed as thousands of dollars. Imagine the billed costs of actual military equipment

Literally, between the GAO and Inspectors General alone there is constant oversight of most of what the federal government does. Thats not even nearly every form of oversight, those are just agencies whose entire job is finding any waste or fraud. Of course before DOGE was even started Trump first kneecapped those parts of the government.

If we want to talk about waste and fraud we should be looking at the president who spends as much time as possible golfing on his own properties, spending government money on his team staying at his own properties…

Source: Dealt with government contracts (admittedly, low-level, but still) for a couple of decades.

There's plenty of fraud and waste.

I've seen plenty of people take advantage of government regulations because they know that the relevant overseers either are too inexperienced/overworked to notice, or simply don't care. I dealt with school lunch programs. You'd be absolutely amazed at what food service vendors try to get away with, and you'd be even more amazed at how much of it gets through because of the ineptitude of the state officials they're dealing with. (And on the flip side, you'd also be amazed at what inept state regulators who don't understand the regulations they're supposed to be enforcing try to push on school districts and vendors. Trust me, it goes both ways.)

And even when everybody is on the up-and-up, there are some government regulations that are simply out of date. Regulations that sometimes directly contradict each other. Procedures that shouldn't be a thing in 2025 but still are because the bureaucracy hasn't kept up with technology.

There is plenty of fraud and waste to go around. I saw it all over the place, and I'm about as close to the bottom of the totem pole as you were going to get. I can only imagine how bad it is higher up the food chain. But that's not the kind of fraud and waste they're looking for. To them "Fraud" is "anything that helps poor and brown people", and "Waste" is "anything that doesn't result in more tax breaks for the wealthy".

As someone who used to work for an org: I got this bridge for sale. I'll get it to you for a good price.

Generally speaking, those orgs are designed around punishing those who are so egregious that it can't be covered up and going after peons committing time fraud.

But there is very much a reason that the dream of most workers is to negotiate a big purchase and they just so happen to buy new cars or leave for a private industry job with the contract winner shortly after. Same with how orgs outright structure their travel/reimbursement in ways that encourage misreporting and taking the most expensive options.

Again. If the goal were ACTUALLY to have "outsiders" identify fraud and waste, they would have found MASSIVE amounts. And most of it would actually make the average worker happier. Instead they just gutted the government and carved out more contracts for musk.

the cycle continues, we remain plausibly sentient beings condemned to a bad Beckett play