Hacker News Reader

Comment by braincat31415 | Hacker News Reader

I work, and the fact that my tax money is going into a black hole makes my blood boil. God bless Musk and DOGE for what they do.

Here is just one headline from today, The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are "almost impossible" to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.

View on HN

Will you go on the record and say that $4.7T in a year is fraudulent or misspent? I want to be crystal clear with what you're insinuating, because that's a massive amount of money, easily the biggest fraud of all time by a factor of almost 30.

The poster or the headline doesn’t say they are all fraudulent. It says the payments are nearly impossible to trace.

so then misspent? Must be, because if it's not misspent than impossible to trace is a little irrelevant. It can't be unaudited, because every department passes an audit every year (except the DoD, but they basically pass an audit and the reasons they currently don't are mostly technical)

Well, it’s going to have to pass the Elon Misk audit now. Bless his efforts.

That's not what he said. He said the accounting is bad making it impossible to know how much is misspent.

I don't understand what this means though, almost all of our money passes an audit which necessarily has a paper trail. The few agencies which don't usually have very idiosyncratic audit misses which are, in any event, overseen by inspectors general (or were until trump fired all of them) which have been very zealous to jump on this.

That's not accurate. The Pentagon, for example, has not passed its annual financial audit since it was first required to undergo them in 2018.

This is definitely not accurate.

"insinuate -- suggest or hint (something bad or reprehensible) in an indirect and unpleasant way."

I am not "insinuating" but saying that I would like to know where my money goes. If you pay taxes, would not you?

Can you not find it? I can find basically any spending data I want at the tip of my fingers (well, less so now that it's unclear what's being paid) - anything specific that you feel is missing that you want to see?

If you know where the 4.7T went, please reach out to Elon.

I. don't. know. what he's talking about. that's the problem. If I tell you "I'm thiking of $5T, tell me where it is" where does that leave you?

> Here is just one headline from today, The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are "almost impossible" to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.

And you believe them?

This is a department that fired multiple different nuclear weapons inspector and maintenance teams without knowing what their job was.

Had to re-hire them. They weren't redundant teams. DOGE just didn't understand what they (or the teams) were doing.

Now, I'm very happy for the US nuclear stockpile to shrink. I sure think you have too many of them. But then, I'm foreign and a hippy, so I would. But (1) do you?, and (2) do you want it to shrink by some of them accidentally exploding? Or being relocated by a hostile power taking advantage of the inspectors all being on early retirement?

I am not jumping to conclusions and will reserve the judgement for later. They provided no proof so far, but hopefully it will be forthcoming, and I would not dismiss their claim outright.

Relocated where and by whom? Just curious.

> Relocated where and by whom? Just curious.

As I'm asking you if you want this done, take your pick.

Loss of oversight made a bunch of USSR suitcase nukes, ~100 or so, go walkabout when they collapsed. Russia denies this, of course. They might be fine, or not, nobody (in public) really knows. Probably not a huge risk without maintenance, if you nick it but don't know what it is you might scrap it for parts and mistake the core for tungsten or lead, but… not great, unless it was existing nuclear powers who took them.

And even then, not great for Russia.

They deny that, but of course you know for sure that they are lying, that the nukes went missing, and you have the proof. Just like I know for a fact that there are alien craft hidden in Area 51.

It was a statement made by General Aleksandr Lebed, former Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, in a meeting with an American congressional delegation.

Here's the first US government report I found on it with all of the entirely negligible effort I am willing to entertain: https://commdocs.house.gov/committees/security/has078010.000...

Perhaps he was drunk, or lying, or just plain unable to find the people who knew which cupboard the devices were safely locked in. But he did make those claims. And you are missing the wood for the trees.

This "wood" (and the US report) consists of exactly one person who made this claim, and a member of corrupt Yeltsin's entourage to boot. I'd say if these nukes were real, they would have exploded somewhere by now. Try harder.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com