How can anyone on the outside make all these guesses about the code and databases? It feels like a lot of speculation to try to prove a claim wrong, but without evidence.
Note that the doge.gov website has a section called "savings," which originally said "Receipts coming by Valentine's Day." Now it says "Receipts coming over the weekend!", and seeing as it's 11:50pm on the East Coast of the US right now, that seems unlikely, too.
As to "how can he make claims at all", it's because civil servants have been told to work for him, which means he is supposed to have access to more information than actual outsiders do (everyone on this thread).
Dead and 150? Bit harder to believe. It's an extraordinary claim, if you get my drift.
Weeeeeell.... https://cnrs.hal.science/hal-03478634/document
> Why?
150. I already said this.
The children of a 150-year-old would probably be in their ~120s. The grandchildren would be in their ~90s.
You're claiming a social security account that's been passed down through multiple generations, like some kind of family heirloom.
It's an extraordinary claim, if you get my drift.
> While we agree that adding presumed death information to these records will result in incorrect dates of death appearing on these Numident records, we do not agree it poses a significant risk of erroneously recording death information on living numberholders’ records. For example, we see little risk in adding presumed death information to the millions of Numident records belonging to individuals born in the 1800s who haven’t worked or received SSA payments in more than 50 years.
> SSA determined the estimated $5.5 to $9.7 million in expenditures to correct these errors was too costly to implement and that the effort would have limited benefit to the administration of SSA programs. We acknowledge that almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments. However, SSA issued each of these individuals a valid SSN and these SSNs could allow for a wide range of potential abuse.
[0] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf#page10
But so much of these DOGE criticisms are simply reflexive "Musk bad." There is no a priori reason why it's unlikely that a small amount of people are being paid benefits out of a byzantine bureaucratic system that's almost a hundred years old.
Just a few years ago, I was listening to a story on NPR about SSI fraud (also administered by the SSA) and how common it was. Now, apparently we're all convinced all government agencies contain approximately zero fraud, or at least detectable-by-Musk fraud, simply because it's the cause du jour. It's totally bizarre to read these HN stories (I flag most of them) and people are making totally unfounded claims on the processes, controls, and operation of government IT systems, apparently assuming they are just as good as what exists at Meta or Google. Well, I have personal experience, and maybe my program was an outlier, but these people seem to have extremely rosy expectations, and often have no idea how the government works even in theory ("there's an IG to find things like this!").
It's really exhausting and disappointing. DOGE can be a misguided operation run by a grifter that misreports findings and will never save the amount of money promised and a lot of stuff in the government can be awful, missing even basic controls.
I mean, these are your own words:
> DOGE can be a misguided operation run by a grifter that misreports findings
And that's the main issue and criticism, not that everyone believes that the government is perfect
It's on Musk to provide evidence for his extraordinary claims. So far that evidence has been in very short supply.
You may as well just suspend judgement about these claims. No amount of evidence is going to convince most people here: we saw that with the Hunter laptop, where the goalposts moved with each additional proof the smallest amount possible.
In case of Hunter laptop there was a grand jury, an FBI investigation, a criminal case, a joint investigation by two Republican committees against Joe Biden etc. etc.
What evidence has Musk provided?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-mus...
Like this one: https://x.com/DOGE/status/1890593889314038216
Or claims with literally no evidence other than the tweets like this: https://x.com/DOGE/status/1890849405932077378
1. Misrepresenting congressionally approved expenditures he royally disapproves of as "fraud"
2. Misleading, under-researched, unsupported statistics as "waste"
The longer this goes on, the more impressed I am with our government. I had no idea it would be this hard to find anything legitimate to attack.
This seems dubious to me. In almost all congressional expenditures the funds allocated are done so at a department level with broad statutes applied. It is largely left up to that department to decide what to actually do with those funds specifically. It seems like a stretch to characterize this as "congressionally approved" and more like an abdication by congress on large swaths of government spending.
On top of that, Musk is so eager to announce progress that he just repeats what he is told as he knows that these are very smart programmers.
I found myself working in an heavily regulated industry recently and I can tell you if you dropped a young really smart programmer into the code base they would find a million things that are inefficient and wrong. In reality they were carefully coded that way to support some byzantine law or legacy program or one off. An experienced dev will ask "anyone know why we do X in module Y"? and he will get an answer saying "yes, its because of...". The young hotshot dev just deletes and rewrites it or yells "fraud"
So Musk is shooting himself in the foot when if he just waited and verified he could release valid and I am sure damning evidence of fraud but currently he is just "crying wolf"
It is not necessarily true something written forty years ago is right. It is not necessarily true that something written forty years ago has some secret logic in it that cannot be improved upon. It is not necessarily true that something written forty years ago cannot be improved by fresh eyes.
Obviously one must not change things recklessly -- but there are often improvements that can be made.
But we're generally assuming that he's clinging to anything that justifies a pre-existing narrative.