Elon Musk’s cost-cutting and fraud detection devices have recently been shaken by the government’s efficiency department.
result? Two stunning strikeouts.
A series of announcements by Doge and President Musk and Donald Trump advocate for the agency’s efforts, while also crumbling under scrutiny despite being widely repeated by conservative experts, sympathetic media and the White House. I did.
Two of the most notable claims regarding social security fraud, and two claims regarding the $8 billion savings found in the Department of Homeland Security contract are being exposed. Meanwhile, Trump’s agenda is set to add to the federal deficit beyond what Doge is reducing.
“It’s federal amateur time,” said Martin O’Malley, former Maryland governor who ran the Social Security Administration under President Joe Biden. “There are unelected people who are still given the power to riot through our personal data and riot over them for reasons no one can understand yet. Not for efficiency.”
Reducing government waste and hunting for fraud is a permanently popular topic for politicians across political spheres. Each federal agency has its own internal watchdog (known as inspectors) aimed at hunting down misuse of taxpayer dollars. Dozens of those have been fired by the Trump administration.
Instead, Doge has worked to make drastic cuts, but most of them seem to focus more on Trump’s politics than anything else.
“They’re also a great opportunity to spend their money,” said Elaine Camarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who oversaw eight years of efforts to dispose of government spending and waste under President Bill Clinton.
Those cuts “will explode in their faces,” she said, warning that fired staff could undermine the US’s ability to deal with national security, food safety, the pandemic and aviation crises did.
While cleaning up the private sector, particularly Silicon Valley, may be celebrated, government services can be life and death, she said.
“You’re going to knock down the Medicare payment system, you’re going to delete Social Security checks, you’re going to knock down food tests, you know? It kills people,” she said.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Doge’s cuts appear to be opposed to Trump’s politics, particularly diversity initiatives and media outlets, as explained through a “receipt” posted online on Monday, but are still circumstanced across the US government I’ll run. The website says more than 1,000 listing cuts have been achieved in about a month’s work by Doge, $55 billion in savings.
This list includes cancelled media subscriptions, contracts, leases Hodgepodges, and a significant number of notable errors. One item on Doge’s receipt claimed $8 billion in savings in a Department of Homeland Security contract if the contract was $8 million. The receipt also seemed to undermine Doge’s own rhetoric. One of the Doges wins from the beginning of the month. The $57,000 contract at Sri Lanka, which is cancelled by Doge, focuses on climate mitigation, will not save taxpayers.
The majority of the savings mentioned in the receipts are due to the closure of the US International Development Agency, and are caught up in lawsuits relating to the legality of the closure. USAID accounted for approximately 1.2% of the total US budget.
“We’re a nonpartisan group that supports government waste,” said Josh Swell, director of taxpayer research and policy for common sense.
Musk admits that his team makes mistakes and corrects them.
“No one is going to hit 1,000,” he said at a White House press conference this month. “We make mistakes, but we act quickly to correct the mistake.”
However, his false claims have been gaining great attention. A Media Watchdog NewsGuard study released Tuesday found that 28 false claims have recently generated over 825 million viewings.
The White House announced Monday that Doge was tackling social security fraud shortly after Doge posted a spreadsheet for the ages of people in the Social Security database, which are over 100 years old.
“There are far more “qualified” social security numbers than American citizens,” he writes in X. “This may be the biggest scam in history.”
Not that; it’s a known issue with government data. The Social Security Administration database contains millions of people over the age of 100, but the majority have not received benefits. The issue has been repeatedly identified by agency inspectors, but the Social Security Bureau argues that renewing old records is expensive and unnecessary.
According to agency online records, only 89,106 people (not tens of millions) received retirement benefits in December 2024, who were 99 and older.
It’s “a humiliating mistake for others, but they’re double it and tripling it,” says Kathleen, director of Social Security and Disability Policy on Budget and Policy Priorities. “They said,” Romigg. Address government spending. “That’s scary because they also have keys to the kingdom and have all the access to this data.”
Due to concerns about access, Michelle King’s top social security acting executive left his job this weekend after denied Doge access to agency sensitive data about Americans receiving Social Security.
“If they act on these falsehoods, that’s really scary,” Romigg said. The Social Security Administration notes that it marks individuals as dead because it causes a series of events that allow people to cut off from their bank accounts as well as the interests of the government.
She also warned that she would fire new employees (targeted by probationary employee Doge) at the Social Security Agency, which would undermine the future of government agencies and make payment errors difficult to sort out. .
O’Malley agreed. “The biggest threat to Social Security is not these falsehoods. The biggest threat to Social Security is that they crater agents by kicking out 10,000 people.”
And while experts disagree with the cut, many agree that Doge has drawn the public to the spending debate.
“People may discuss some details, but we’ll take this kind of action, do it quickly and do it in a way that’s paying attention to how the government can help.” , said Thomas Schatz, the citizens’ president, against government waste.
But essentially, Sewell warned that unless Doge changes courses, he wouldn’t enjoy the necessary deficit reductions.
It is “mathematically impossible” for Musk to achieve the trillion dollar savings he promised without cutting defence spending or eligibility, he said.
“The severity of our debt is $32, pushing $33 trillion in annual spending. This is about $6 trillion, which is very large and very difficult to understand, and everything. You need it on the deck with your hands. You have to look anywhere,” Swell continued. “If a political actor just finds savings in his opponent’s backyard, that’s not a recipe for success.”
This story first appeared on nbcnews.com. More from NBC News:
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