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Comment by bs7280 | Hacker News Reader

One of my biggest criticisms of DOGE that I have not heard elsewhere is - why can't we have a "Department of Government Transparency". Giving Elon the ability to judge, jury and executioner any congressionally approved spending he wants has its own legal issues, but I do think there is a lot of value in having a massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes.

I envision something similar to a massive sankey diagram like dataset in a public git repo that anyone could access and audit. There is certainly lots of waste, but there is also loads of government spending where the value is not obvious.

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We already have that in the GAO. We also have personnel who's job is to root out fraud: inspector generals. The budget is constantly audited scrutinized for excess and waste, except 2 departments: defense and Medicare. The former is pork for the politicians' home states. The later is so complex it relies on the healthcare industry to help write the rules. And they can't help making sure they get paid the most.

Yes, the GAO exists. But under the current administration, it's basically like a security guard that just sits there and watches crooks do bad shit, reports it, and then nothing happens.

And the Trump administration would similarly hamstring any newly created transparency organization. Not that the current congress would ever pass such a thing. And anyway, the Supreme Court has made sure that even if congress passed a law to make a(nother) government transparency agency, they can't make that agency truly independent and protected from presidential interference.

Creating an executive agency to investigate the executive would be pretty stupid. It'll likely lead to "we've investigated ourselves and found nothing", even if the president wasn't vested in all executive power, as the executive branch consolidates.

However, creating an agency in the legislative branch is another story. One of the duties of the legistive is to investigate the executive, is it not? (not that this matters when both the executive and legislative are controlled by the same party)

The GAO is a "legislative agency"...

Fair enough, but wishing for an independent agency without creating its own government branch is still foolish.

It's more like they fired the security guard and never bothered to hire a new one.

Aren't most of the inspectors general positions they fired still vacant?

Good thing trumps on that fraud by bolstering the IGs and not just gutting them across all agencies...

> massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes.

That existed! The links the various DOGE apparatchik kept posting as 'evidence' were from publicly available databases of spending, contracts, etc. The 'receipts' site was just a poor, partially-understood scrape of that data!

People do this all the time

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iu44ub/up...

https://usafacts.org/government-spending/

https://sankeymatic.com/gallery/federal-budget.html

There is also Michael Lewis's book "Who Is Government?" if you want more meaningful stories.

Also: https://sam.gov/

Do you mean something like the longstanding Government Accountability Office, which was formed by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921?

no no, they mean some other thing, which is different in totally unexplainable ways and – most importantly – doesn't make one feel stupid for not knowing it existed

The issue is deciding importance and most people are too stupid to understand nth order effects. So that will turn into the usual pitchforks.

People don't pick up pitchforks because they don't understand something; people pick up pitchforks because they're told to pick them up. The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.

>The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.

What was bad faith about it? As someone who literally only heard of this drama because of this comment, so far as I can tell the controversy is that they omitted some white immigrant neighborhoods (eg. little italy), and Mamdani backtracked on it?