US Government Audits vs. Hacking Away at the Bones & Muscles of the US Government

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Last Updated on: 4th April 2025, 12:59 am

In response to a recent April Fools Day article about the Tesla board asking Elon Musk to step down as CEO, we received an anonymous email from someone who was apparently quite upset about criticism of what Musk has done at DOGE. Among other things, the emailer wrote, “77 million people want the govemrent audited. These left wing anti American liberals will get violent no matter what. You can’t even talk to them without them freaking out.  Never thought I’d see the day so many people get violent over goverment audits, and America first.” Among the 300+ comments on that article, there were others who brought up the supposed audits and “cleaning up of government” that the DOGE crew has been doing. Reading these comments, it made me realize a little more than normal that many people really just don’t understand what has been going on with these DOGE cuts. Yes, we are living in different realities with different news sources, and we all know that by now, but the loss of any real, basic understanding of the harm that’s being done is still a bit shocking. Without a doubt, I will not solve this problem and bring light to so many lost souls with this article. But I just felt I had to write something in response to what has become a common myth concerning Elon Musk and DOGE.

There’s a proper way to conduct a real audit, and you can hire professionals who do that for a living if you are serious about it. You can hire teams of professional accountants, investigators, and independent experts to try to truly understand a program or agency and whether it’s being run as intended (in this case, per the direction of Congress). However, having a handful of 20-something techbros do searches for “DEI” or other concepts they don’t like and then mass cutting funding for huge programs and agencies they don’t understand is not how you do a proper audit. I’m sorry, but who actually thinks these guys pictured below are equipped to judge tens of billions of dollars of government programs over the course of a sleep-deprived weekend and decide what to cut and what not?

Call them want they really are: HACKERSThis “DOGE engineers” thing is bullshit! They are boy hackers! Plain and simple This is 2016 Cambridge Analytics bullshit on steroids

— Larry Tenney (@larrytenney.bsky.social) 2025-02-03T20:33:54.676Z

We’ve seen countless basic errors from the DOGE “audits” because the people doing them are not equipped at all to understand what they are doing or do it well — not to mention that they weren’t legally authorized for this.

Congress has “the power of the purse,” and the ability to review and change any spending they wish. That’s their core job. It’s not the job of recent college grads and college students who know how to code and are vehemently opposed to DEI and other “woke” stuff.

It should also be pointed out that many claims of savings have been riddled with errors — like somehow having the decimal point in the wrong place and claiming an $8 billion contract was cut when it was an $8 million contract, listing the same cuts repeatedly, claiming a $232 million contract was cut when it was a $560,000 contract, “cutting” programs that had ended and for which there was not going to be any more money allocated, “cutting” contracts that had already been canceled under Biden, “cutting” programs and contracts that didn’t even exist, etc.

There are many stories out there of these kinds of mistakes and others. It sure makes you wonder how well they are investigating “fraud” and understanding the giant organizations and programs they are supposedly carefully auditing.

It’s not “cleaning up fraud” to shut down huge programs and agencies. It’s also not constitutional when those were created by Congress. And, beyond illegal and unconstitutional actions, many of these actions have just been unhelpful, harmful, cruel, counterproductive, and certainly not in line with “Christian values.”

An early target, USAID, for example, is a hugely helpful and authorized agency that benefits the US and the world. Waving arms around, claiming mass fraud, and cutting all sorts of helpful work under USAID is not helping the US, but it is leading to deaths, harm to actual humans, and billions of dollars of wasted food that was supposed to help people get basic necessities of life. Cuts have led to children in need not getting medical care, dangerous viruses not being contained well, and life-saving care being defunded. (See some stories here and here and here and here if you dare.)

(Meanwhile, though, the Trump administration and supporters kept putting out wild claims of USAID spending that wasn’t actual USAID spending.)

USAID cuts are already hitting countries around the world. Here are 20 projects that have closed“Many of the programs are in fragile countries that are highly reliant on U.S. aid to support health systems, nutrition programs and stave off starvation”apnews.com/article/usai…

— The Dangerous Ones (@dangerousones.bsky.social) 2025-03-01T15:38:48.099Z

USAID used to buy $2B worth of food from US farmers. Now, their food is just rotting away as poor people starve. And next year, many of these same farmers will be farming for government subsidies instead of food. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202…

— Social Media Lab (@socialmedialab.ca) 2025-02-08T20:53:29.579Z

This reckless and cruel cutting of formerly bipartisan US programs and agencies is not helping you and me. It’s going to do us all long-term harm. Cutting the work of the Environmental Protection Agency, NOAA, Health & Human Services, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Education is not going to make us great again. It’s going to make us weaker, dumber, less healthy, and poorer. Cutting foreign aid and anti-terrorism programs is going to put the US in worse light, weaken our alliances, and put the country at more risk in the long term. Honestly, this is not even complicated stuff to understand if you spend 5 minutes thinking about it or trying to learn why these things were set up in the first place.

The idea that cutting programs and agencies that help protect Americans is good, let alone considering it a legit “government efficiency audit,” is the actual fraud.

And then there’s the harm being done to veterans, and the attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. There’s also the disruption of basic, core government work on these matters. Countless claims have been made incorrectly about Social Security fraud. But, hey, if it makes people’s blood boil and does well on social media, who care if it’s completely inaccurate or misleading?

Again, what makes a handful of coders barely out of high school or college equipped to evaluate large programs and agencies they know nothing about in order to find fraud at a breakneck pace? What makes Elon Musk fit for that job? The fact that he has expertise in making rockets and electric cars?