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Comment by blitzar | Hacker News Reader

The liberal thesis is that DOGE defines anything they don't like as waste / fraud / abuse.

Claiming something is "fraud" removes opposition to cancelling it. This isn't 5d chess, it is 1d chess.

Fraud is also a crime that can be prosecuted. The lack of prosecution exposes they have not found any fraud, and probably aren't even looking.

Never mind the prosecution, if you work on the hypothesis there probably is some government expenditure that is at least slightly unnecessary, the shitshow where DOGE look for the most obvious examples and end up bragging about saving money until someone points out that budget was spent last year or that the billion is actually a million or that maybe the people on probation due to recent promotions probably weren't the most dispensible employees, or oops, can we unfire the Ebola staff presents a surprisingly positive impression of how good actual auditors have been at weeding it out...

The president was convicted of fraud and that doesn’t seem to matter. Let’s maybe stop acting like the rule of law is getting applied evenly in these times.

And if there is fraud, there's this thing called the "Inspector General" whose sole job is to find and prosecute fraud.

Guess who they fired first?

I am deep blue, but if you accept the premise that the government is spending money inefficiently, which is a rational thing to think (after all, the government doesn't pass audits which means no one really knows how DoD money is spent at minimum), then it stands to reason that inspector generals were doing a poor job and therefore their removal is a good thing because they were complicit in the inefficiency.

Firing the policemen so you can commit crime is what's happening, but your argument isn't a convincing one, neither is the age one. We can do better than that, and by focusing on those as the problem, we disempower ourselves and our message.

"There will be a revolution, and it will be bloodless if the left allows it to be." We are going through a revolution.

DOGE is the revolutionary force purging the old government, just like every other revolution. Just like Stalin, just like the bolsheviks, just like Mao. The only reason it's not violent like those yet is because power was peacefully transferred to them, and FBI agents, generals, US marshals, and other agents of enforcing the law aren't completely replaced with loyalists yet.

There's a reason historians are freaking out.

> government is spending money inefficiently, which is a rational thing to think (after all, the government doesn't pass audits which means no one really knows how DoD money is spent at minimum), then it stands to reason that inspector generals were doing a poor job and therefore their removal is a good thing because they were complicit in the inefficiency.

That doesn't follow.

First, the existence of inefficiency doesn't mean the IGs are doing a poor job. It's rational to expect the optimal amount of inefficiency and fraud to be nonzero, so it could be the case they are performing as good as they possibly can be expected.

Second, government agencies do routinely pass audits. You highlighted the one that doesn't routinely pass audits, but that doesn't mean others don't. Incidentally DoD is the one with the most bloat, and the one DOGE isn't really going after. In fact, they went after USAID first, which just passed an audit.

> if you accept the premise that the government is spending money inefficiently, which is a rational thing to think (after all, the government doesn't pass audits which means no one really knows how DoD money is spent at minimum), then it stands to reason that inspector generals were doing a poor job and therefore their removal is a good thing because they were complicit in the inefficiency.

No it does not stand to a reason. Inspector general is not even supposed to deal with efficiency, he is supposed to deal with fraud. Those are two different things.

Second, no, there being a crime does not imply you need to fire all cops. Or cops boss. There would never be any stable enforcement body if you applied that standard.

Third, random decision making creates inefficiency.

> Those are two different things.

They are not orthogonal. Even if they were, you are wrong.

Office of Inspector General (OIG) is a generic term for the oversight division of a federal or state agency aimed at preventing inefficient or unlawful operations within their parent agency.

> there being a crime does not imply you need to fire all cops

I think you misunderstood. DOGE is a purge of all the "cops" in the government (such as inspector generals) so that crimes can be more easily committed. I was stating that it's rational for someone who is in favor of DOGE to want inspector generals fired which makes the argument that was being made a very weak argument.

> . I was stating that it's rational for someone who is in favor of DOGE to want inspector generals fired which makes the argument that was being made a very weak argument.

Not really. People who are in favor of DOGE seek destruction of goverment and democracy. People who care about efficiency or fraud are not in favor of doge, because doge itself is braking laws and something designed to make the government less efficient.

IANAL. I would think fraud needs investigation much deeper than; "This $200 million is being spent on <insert program> that we don't need at the moment."

First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off. If there is potential for fraud, you mark the case for further evaluation and investigation. The most important first step is always to stop the bleeding and in this case, bleeding money.

You can come back to investigate at a later time. Prosecuting fraud before the bleeding has stopped is a waste of time imo.

> First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off

The executive doesn't appropriate funds, Congress does. So that's completely wrong.

> think fraud needs investigation much deeper than...

Exactly but DOGE isn't doing that.

> First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off.

If you're attempting to illegally seize control of the government's spending from Congress, sure, you do that.

> "This $200 million is being spent on <insert program> that we don't need at the moment."

That's "waste" (in their opinion), but they keep saying "waste, fraud, and abuse".

Fair enough, prosecuting takes time but announcing what happened doesn't. So far we seem to get them claiming that 160 year old people are claiming social security which turned out to be them just defaulting to an old date of birth if they didn't know the actual one. Have there been any announcements of actual fraud found that stand up to a common sense look at what they are saying?

the 'fraud' will come out around midterms when it's politically advantageous to have publicity.

The right's take on this also seems premised on the idea that the bureaucracy has just grown and grown (it's been fairly steady over time, and leans small when compared to our international peers, so...) and that nobody's worked on efficiency or tracking work that whole time, when in fact there's been a shitload of that and, while you can find waste or even, rarely, fraud, it is not rampant, unless you define waste or fraud as "doing things I don't want them to, even though it's in the budget". In fact, on the fraud front, a lot of government inefficiency has been deliberately introduced—to fight fraud or corruption. So even if you find something inefficient, you better be careful or you'll be undoing an anti-fraud or anti-corruption measure.

You see stuff like Elon asking for those dumb-ass "five things" emails when a large proportion of government workers already have their productivity tracked multiple ways, many of them quite objective and hard to fake, because people who are not complete morons have already worked on these problems.

This is government based on dumb right-wing misconceptions about how government works. Or, if the people doing it aren't true believers, at least playing to those incorrect notions among voters.

It tracks with their opinion of elections. They're sure there's fraud everywhere, but they can't point anything substantial whatsoever. Nevertheless, we have to spend a ton of money to combat it, and wouldn't you know, all the things the propose are designed to do nothing more can fix "problems" that don't exist.

DOGE on government: tech-style "This would be easy to fix if you just..."

It's not even 1d chess. It's like playing War with a deck of cards.

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