Hacker News Reader

Comment by bendmorris | Hacker News Reader

>seemingly without audit or checks and balances

Federal agencies are regularly audited - internally by their own inspectors general, and externally by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) - and most of those reports are publicly available. There are numerous checks on these agencies including management by the president, who can typically fire at will, and oversight by Congress.

Like him or not, Elon Musk is not an auditor, has no relevant experience or expertise and is deeply compromised as he profits from large federal contracts. Giving him unchecked power with no accountability is not the proper way to shine a light on fraud, it's a way to get more of it.

View on HN

GAO audit is not a perfect tool, the evidence is a $2 trillion deficit that is ballooning every year. Very easy to pass GAO audit as long as there is some "paperwork" backing the expense.

What DOGE/Musk is doing is auditing expenses not in terms of "have these expenses been properly authorized with the paper trail?", but rather "are these expenses vital for the US taxpayer, can we remove them?"

GAO can only find some bogus expenses without paper trail

DOGE is funding expenses with proper and perfect paper trail, but ultimately unnecessary for the US taxpayer

The deficit is a result of deficit spending authorized by Congress. Audits have nothing to do with reducing the deficit.

DOGE is literally one deeply compromised person deciding what is "necessary" or "unnecessary" to spend, after Congress already authorized it. That is blatantly unconstitutional. There are checks and balances in the system for a reason.

checks and balances led to 36 trillion debt, they are not working

I have news for you. The Republican budget plan will increase the debt by about 4 trillion [1], an unprecedented amount. They're slashing spending in tiny departments and then handing out multiples of that as tax breaks, mostly to very wealthy people. So if you're relying on "DOGE" and the Trump administration to bring down the debt, you're going to be disappointed.

The last budget surplus was under Clinton.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-reveal-trump-tax-plan-w...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com