See I know something of what actually wanting to fix the government's waste fraud and abuse would look like. It would be beefing up the IRS (where every dollar more than pays for itself), it would be banning people in congress from buying individual stocks; it would be a lot of things that deeply nerdy policy wonks have been saying for years.

That's not what I'm seeing happen. I'm not seeing cost benefit analysis, I'm not seeing the use of existing experts.

What I am seeing... well perhaps we'd have different perspectives. To pick an example, look Musk saying that people who are over 200 years old are marked as alive.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891557463377490431

If you assume the worst of Elon Musk, you might think he's an idiot who doesn't understand how COBOL represents dates in the SSA system, nor how large government databases deal with missing data.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/new-social-security-chie...

I've worked, not for the SSA, but with public health data. Real people and historical records and old databases are messy as fuck.

The SSA neither throw out data, nor do they add data they haven't received, except when there is funding appropriated for it.

So these old people are simply actually people they never got death info on.

Could they just add a date? Well you have to consider the data integrity issues around date of death. If you pick a nonsensical date, can you assume that the SSA, department of commerce, and other orgs, not to mention the internal SSA progroms that rely on processing SSA data can handle it? Nope, an engineer can't assume that, there's an implicit API.

Oh yeah, agencies for state governments deal with that data too. https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/documents/sves_solq_manual....

But the fact is, this has been looked at. Per this 2023 audit the SSA estimated it would cost 5.5 to 9.7 million to mark people as deceased in the database when they don't have death date information. They didn't do that, probably because no money was appropriated for it.

https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

Does that mean there's massive SSA fraud of dead people? Nope. back in 2015 they decided to automatically stop giving benefits to anyone over 115. The oldest living American is, in fact, Naomi Whitehead, who is 114.

In other word, Musk is acting like saving the government 5.5 million minimum is a "HUGE problem".

Now, I don't think Elon Musk is an idiot who doesn't understand COBOL or how messy data can be from real people. I also don't think he thinks that 200 year old benefits fraud is really an issue.

Which begs the question, why bring this up at all?

My interpretation is perhaps less charitable than yours, but I'd be interested in hearing what you think.