llamaimperative

It indicates that reducing headcount is almost certainly a poor way to "increase efficiency."

Can you share a specific instance of fraud that has been found?

"Contracts I don't like" != fraud, obviously.

So I'll ask again: Can you share a specific instance of fraud that has been found?

Fun fact that a lot of people find surprising: the US federal government was already at or near its smallest size (headcount per capita) in American history.

It’s honestly shocking that so many public services work under such resource-constrained conditions at all.

Yes, USAID was successfully audited by an independent 3rd party financial auditor literally in November, for example.

And that was using actual GAAP accounting auditing methods!

So I guess if the “like this” you mean an ideological Cmd+F “audit” done by people with apparently zero financial experience, never mind public sector auditing, then no.

Can you share a specific instance of fraud that has been found?

To be clear, I am talking about the approval rating. Yes, the actions are aberrational, but they're cheap pandering to the base so that so far have not materialized much.

They will soon (in next few weeks) become far more material, and you’ll see approvals fall.

All big things are actually just series of little things.

This is unfortunately a fact that’s easily obscured by the “clarity” of retrospection, through which big things look like obviously big things.

Not really, most administrations have a bump out of the gate when they can make cheap talk and the consequences haven't yet come to fruition.

What government policies compelled companies to create DEI programs?

Well if that's "the case," I think I'm comfortable getting rid of it.

It would be historically extremely aberrational for this to materialize.

I wasn’t shaming anyone for condemning DEI, I was shaming them for being bad at solving problems.

Why were you skeptical of it?

I can help here: the group who is canceling life-saving treatment for millions of people, including 566,000 children, as part of a purge of “political enemies” are the bad ones.

Scapegoating politically and culturally disempowered groups is super useful to such movements.

Notice how literally every single problem in our country is “caused by DEI” now?

It helps because it’s easier to solve fake problems with fake solutions instead of real ones.

Encouragement is definitely not a required element. https://www.cantorcolburn.com/news-newsletters-387.html

IMO yes. The entire purpose of copyright law is to protect the incentive to create new material. A huge portion of the value prop of AI is that it captures the incentive normally bound for the creators of the training material (i.e. the whole point is you can ask the AI and not even see, never mind pay, the originator).

One man's pork is another man's bacon. That's why it's in the budget. Everything in the budget had someone advocating for it, whether you agree with them or not.

That's part of living in a society. As a child, you may have run into situations where you had to accept something you didn't think was perfect in order to get something you really wanted. This is like the big kid version of that! It's so complicated and so important to do at scale that we actually create these very elaborate systems called "governments" to manage the process. What we found over time was that these big systems could be captured by people who didn't want to compromise, so we invented "Constitutions" that constrain the system, regardless of who is currently operating it.

Right now, you're saying that your personal assessment of what's pork and what's not justifies weakening the system that keeps all of us safe from our government.

lol @ civilized people in 2025 falling for the “authoritarianism in exchange for quality of life promises” trick.

If only there were professionals we could pay to go into an organization and find waste, fraud, and abuse so we wouldn't have to rely on people like @ricwe123 on X.

Ah, yes, there are. They're called auditors. They audited USAID 4 months ago.

The entire US government spent only $7.7MM on Politico over the last 12 months. Oooo spooky stuff, if only there was a way to see what for! Turns out there is. You can scroll down and see the shocking revelation that the US government paid a news publication for subscriptions to a news publication!

Similar to how if you work in the energy industry, for example, a smart employer would pay for energy trade publications so you can do your job better.

https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/fa0cefae-7cfb-881d-29c...

In fact you can drill down all the way to individual line items. Here's the 49 subscriptions to Politico Pro that HHS, an organization with 83,500 employees, purchased. Looks suuuuper abusive... /s

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75F40120P00453_75...

> to deny that Elon is competent

Please show evidence of Elon being a competent public sector financial auditor. Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?

It isn’t “administrative overhead.” It’s indirect costs.

Does research happen in buildings? Yes.

Is that an indirect cost? Yes.

What happens when you can’t pay to use buildings? You can’t do research in them.

Private foundations and other grantors can pay lower overhead because universities are often losing money on those programs and footing the difference.

Again, I am not suggesting the rates need to be where they have wound up. I am saying that you cannot remove 50%+ of a program’s budget overnight and expect not to disrupt or potentially fatally damage its operations.

Thinking a research university can lose tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year in funding and not cut research is beyond naive.

You really do have skin in the game, given how many medicines you use and will use are also developed with NIH funding.

Have you considered whether this was driven by the relative positions of Jupiter and Mercury? Or perhaps by the swirling of the tea leaves in Musk’s cup? It’s driven by a reckless attempt to reduce spending without having to think through the consequences because it’d take “too long.”

I’m not arguing that the overhead rates are correct or can’t be lower. I’m saying if you take a sports car to the shop and they start tearing parts out because “hey that looks different than the one in the Corolla,” you’d go to a different mechanic.

There is no reason to be jolting any of these systems this severely. The entire emergency is contrived in order to force through an ideological purification.

All language is lossy compression, obviously. Your version just overlays wishful thinking.

Following the constitutionally designed balance of powers is a good thing, even when some line items appear in the budget which I personally disagree with.

This is what’s known as “compromise,” or otherwise “being a fucking adult.”

USAID was audited by an (actual) independent (actual) auditor in November of 2024.

They recommended a review of leases and to tighten up their employee expense reporting requirements.

You have no reason to believe Elon is either competent, nor independent, nor well-intentioned on any of this.

No, no one is against “a more efficient government.” Obviously. No one is “pro-fraud.” Obviously.

Please post specific examples of fraud that DOGE has surfaced, not just “things that were congressionally approved but I don’t like.”

Because otherwise the weird mental contortions get super uncomfortable!

For how many of those did BYD exist in western markets and for how many was the Tesla brand toxic to the demographics that care about climate?

New things happen all the time, even things that had been predicted to happen sooner than they did.

> on display throughout Asia: Subsidies and government investment.

Also on display throughout the United States during the Biden administration.

Yes ultimately it will. People don't have a good intuition for this, but when you buy a good you are paying for the entire supply chain of that good. All the way up to the batteries that go into the miner's headlamp as he pulls raw ore out of the earth.

Uhhh... I was referring to the number of people currently -- and now, no longer -- receiving life-saving HIV treatments via USAID/PEPFAR. These people will die.

It's frankly mind-boggling that we can be in the middle of conversation about USAID/PEPFAR, you say "yes I agree with this prioritization," I reply back with what that prioritization actually is, and then you... jump to thinking that I'm talking about half a million children transitioning genders?

Yeah, totally not a cult. Lol.

https://www.state.gov/pepfar-latest-global-results-factsheet...

USAID passed an independent audit literally 4 months ago. [1]

Please elucidate what graft 1) they missed, 2) you've found, and 3) justifies withdrawal of life-saving treatments for millions of people while inflicting enormous damage upon our country's international image?

[1] https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/0-000-25-0...

Okay got it. Near the top of ganoushoreilly's priority list are:

1. Stopping life-saving treatments for 560,000 children

2. Stopping life-saving treatments for another 20 million people

Ganoushoreilly thinks this might be actually the right course of action, because s/he believes the funding is not audited and "there might be fraud." S/he appears ignorant of the easily discoverable fact that this funding was last audited a jawdropping, wildly irresponsible four months ago. By actual independent auditors.

Eh, I think "stealing is bad" is a plenty sufficient rationale for the vast majority of people not to engage in this type of behavior regardless of what kind of threats people dangle over their head.

Obviously this kid would reasonably expect to get a pardon for any law he breaks anyway so long as he breaks it in service of the cult.