Not trying to doxx myself here, but I am intimately familiar with the US government and government contracting.
You say "you're happy to have someone finally investigate it". But, what you don't realize is
there already are people who investigate this in government. They're called the Offices of Inspector General, the Governmental Accountability Office, and Congressional Committees (among others). For example, GAO found $250b in improper payments in 2023, and they don't just identify them, they chase them down and get the money back. In 2023 the Social Security's OIG uncovered $10b in improper payments (that's less than 1% of all their payments by the way) - same deal, they go after that money when they discover it. These agencies also turn cases over to Law Enforcement in cases of fraud and oooh boy do people get prosecuted. And they're not the only ones; I have no connection to any of those agencies and I've personally been involved in efforts where the government is chasing down hundreds of millions of dollars in funds that were properly distributed, but the recipients broke the rules that came with the funds and now owe the money back.
A lot of government systems are mission critical and things sometimes don't get fixed because it is not worth the risk of breaking something to fix them, particularly when the thing that is "broken" doesn't actually matter. Or it's too expensive to fix. For the case you are citing here, according to
this SSA OIG report, there are over 18.9 million people who are in the SSA's system who are over 100, and of those, 18.4 million
aren't receiving benefits,
haven't paid into the system in over 50 years, and therefore SSA assumes they are deceased. Why weren't they removed from the rolls? It would cost $5.5m to $9.7m to do so, and since 98% of them aren't receiving benefits, and we can be reasonably sure the vast majority of the 400,000 people over 100 who are are getting benefits are still alive, it would be a waste of government funds to do so. And now ironically, Elon is accusing SSA of wasting taxpayers' money
because SSA didn't waste taxpayers' money. (To my point that people are already looking into these things DOGE is "uncovering", that report was PUBLISHED in 2023, which means the investigation started probably a year or two before hand).
And DOGE has already been caught
misrepresenting and lying about stuff repeatedly, so they absolutely shouldn't get the benefit of the doubt. To give you another example, you may have read that DOGE claims to have canceled 800-900m worth of contracts at the Department of Education. I happen to know people who were working on some of those contracts. What DOGE doesn't tell you is they're counting the entire lifetime value of the contract they canceled as savings. So if your company had a 5 year, $10m a year contract that was set to conclude next month, DOGE is claiming $50m of savings from canceling it, not the $833k that is left to be paid. Even better, in a lot of cases, the final deliverable wasn't finished, so thanks to DOGE, the government just paid $50m over 5 years for literally nothing, when if they had waited a month the government would have gotten what it paid for. And that doesn't count the cases where they said a contract was $8 billion, but turns out the contract
was actually for $8 million.
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