Doing an audit starting with the treasury department seems like the right first step. Every outflow of money ultimately has to start there. It's the root node of the Sankey diagram. Then you follow the money outwards from there.
okay then...how many billions are completely unaudited?
If you're not fine with that, how do we suggest we even fix this?
The USAID literally financed the development of a virus that killed tens of millions of people worldwide. And then it greased many wheels to try to make people believe it couldn't possibly have been a lab-leak.
Trump just asked an audit of all the US donations that have been made to Ukraine: this looked like one of the biggest operation of money laundering in a long time.
Why are you even against trying to fix things?
Might be the first data you secure though.
> a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers
> One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving
You think the treasury doesn’t have a metric ton of procedures, and laws, on data management, integrity, access, backup and retention?
Breaking these protocols by giving unfettered write access to this data to ridiculously inexperienced and ignorant goons exponentially increases the risk of data tampering and corruption…
It makes any kind of audit LESS likely to be accurate.
But they’re very obviously not doing any kind of credible audit. As mentioned, that’s literally impossible and nonsensical to do this way.
The problem is agencies that haven't been audited in a decade. The agencies literally don't report how much money they get, their current balances, or where it goes.
Here's the DOD proudly announcing that they now have clean audits for 11 of their 28 departments: https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/39.... Surely nothing bad is happening in the other 17.
But pretending that Musk and co are doing an audit by accessing treasury records and payment systems or that it will help with government waste in any way is laughable.
Again, literally no one would be able to make any kind of credible department spending audit out of the bank records of a mid-sized company.
This is the US government’s treasury we’re talking about here! This is several orders of magnitude bigger and more complicated!
Not to mention an audit would not require any write access.
If only they had a standing list of more than 5000 such improvement opportunities...
Welcome to the Government Accountability Office!