Comment by rzz3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rzz3 | Hacker News Reader

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In the case of one of my examples, it took someone dragging a bag of bushings to congress. And though these specific examples may have been addressed, the point is there are likely many more in every corner of the government. It needs to be systematically reviewed and prevented; waste like this should never have happened and should never happen again. I’m not at all saying I support DOGE’s methods here, but I do want to eliminate government waste, and I don’t think the existing methods have worked. The national debt is out of control, and I think the reality is 25% of government spending could be eliminated without anyone even noticing a reduction in service.

I guess the question that should be asked if the examples of waste presented thus far are exceptions or if there's just rampant waste everywhere that nobody has been able to find. We have (well, had) a Government Accountability Office that's supposed to be empowered to audit the federal government's spending, and should be able to catch fraud and waste on the scale of billions of dollars. If they're not able to find it, then I can only think of three reasons why that might be: fraud and waste on that scale doesn't exist despite certain outlets constantly insisting that it must be there, it does exist but they're either understaffed or otherwise not empowered to adequately remediate what they do find, or it exists and they're complicit in hiding it.

I'm sure I'm missing something, I'm no expert by a long shot, but government spending isn't a secret. Budgets get approved by congress and spent by the executive out in the open. Maybe someone interested in curtailing waste could start by auditing budgets? Making sure that the money allocated got spent where it should have and that the budgets weren't padded with unnecessary spending? But that takes a lot of time, effort, and energy, is kind of boring, and wouldn't generate dozens of headlines every day.

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