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Comment by brendoelfrendo | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, how can an outsider like Musk and his DOGE compatriots make any claim at all? I think it is far more likely that Elon was mistaken, or lied, than the SSA is paying out to multiple non-existent 150 year-olds. In fact, that there are so many plausible explanations that don't involve fraud, it really behooves us to be skeptical. Elon made the claim: he is responsible for supplying the 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.

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I’ve gone rushing to my boss in the past with similarly hastily researched claims and conclusions to what Musk is tweeting. In my experience, they were usually the result of me having performed insufficient research, and did not have nearly the impact I thought they would. However, these kind of junior level mistakes make for great propaganda. Anyone can read his conclusion and the chart and with zero critical thought, think “duh! The government is so stupid! I knew I couldn’t trust them to run a benefits program correctly!” And that’s exactly what Musk wants us to conclude. As you note, however, we cannot conclude that - there is a much, much higher burden of proof we should be demanding.

We all know that Musk is not someone with a strong commitment to the truth. We all know he's a grifter. How long has FSD been coming now? What was the deal with the diver?

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.

> But so much of these DOGE criticisms are simply reflexive "Musk bad."

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

But people aren’t saying that. Instead, they’re just inventing reasons why Musk is wrong, with no evidence or invented evidence, like the subject of this article.

Because Musk has already given ample evidence of how wrong he is on multiple accounts.

It's on Musk to provide evidence for his extraordinary claims. So far that evidence has been in very short supply.

Yes, but people are just making stuff up about why he’s wrong. That is literally no better.

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.

"No amount of evidence" does not equal "no evidence".

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?

Are these made up?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-mus...

This is not a good article. The Reuters and Politico examples, for instance, are particularly tendentious. Overpaying for subscriptions, or buying unnecessary subscriptions is exactly how such payments would operate.

Tons of evidence released already, even if you've only been casually following DOGE. And for some, no amount of evidence will ever be enough. Why is it so hard to believe an agency as big and inefficient as the US Govt. would have plenty of waste?

I love comments about there being "tons" of evidence without pointing to a single piece of it. Few things make me chuckle as hard as this.

I've been waiting for that evidence. All I see is a message stating "Receipts coming over the weekend!"

https://doge.gov/savings

Nope, there's no evidence. There's an endless list of something cut, with no evidence that it was wasteful, fraud, or not within the remit of the agencies in question.

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

I started out with a similar position, but so far everything I've heard out of DOGE is either:

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.

> 1. Misrepresenting congressionally approved expenditures he royally disapproves of as "fraud"

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.

There is of course a feedback loop here. It's not like they get a check and no one ever looks to see what it was spent on. Congress has multiple levels of oversight over these agencies, including several congressional Committees (House and Senate), inspectors general, and whistleblowers. This oversight serves to minimize fraud, waste, and abuse.

I think the issue is a mix of "the boy who cried wolf" and really smart programmers with almost no real world experience who have been told to find "fraud". I am confident the government is rife with it. Issue is we have unleashed these young developers who I am sure are all excellent programmers who can code me under the table. Issue becomes developers with experience will question requirements, very good developers without experience will say "this is easy" and then just implement it. They were told to find fraud so we are presented with the classic "to a hammer, everything looks like a nail" .

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"

I've personally worked in such a system. I can tell you -- as someone who asked the question often -- that often, the answer is "because we wrote it that way in 1975 and no one has bothered to spend the time to learn how to make it better since then.

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.

Fair point

And don't forget that the programmers in question are specifically selected based on their ideological adherence and loyalty. Which is to say, they are already convinced that waste is there, and that it is welfare and entitlements mostly.

Given that other systems do have problems with paying out to dead people or people who are alive but faking their age, it'd be impressive if the US system had zero such cases. The claim isn't unlikely on its face, especially given what he said about Treasury never denying payments for any reason in order to minimise complaints.

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).

I'm sure the US system has a few cases of dead claimants. I mean, it's a country of 330m people.

Dead and 150? Bit harder to believe. It's an extraordinary claim, if you get my drift.

Why? Japan found over 200k ghost centenarians in their database. A significant amount were fraud related, relatives that keep receiving checks for example. So not hard to believe for me.

> Japan found over 200k ghost centenarians in their database

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.

The SSA OIG has done a couple of investigations into this the past decade. In 2023 [0], it agreed with the SSA that "almost none of the numberholders discussed in the report [people aged 100 or older] currently receive SSA payments" (while disagreeing that the costs and risks of a mass correction effort outweigh the benefits)

> 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

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