How Soon Is Now?
How can you say I go about things the wrong way?
DOGE is biased towards cost saving and away from deregulation because the more they dig, the more spending weirdness they discover. This thread is nuts for its third-world corruption.
Good grief, the top employee was listed as being on “a six-year-long business trip to DC” so he could expense everything. But it gets worse.
‘One of the 7 federal agencies shuttered by DOGE on Friday is the most DOGE-able agency of all time. FMCS (before the pandemic!) had a 9-story K Street tower for 60 employees. Its halls were lined with oil paintings of those employees, and other art purchased from the boss's wife’
Terminating $580 million in DoD contracts and grants is a drop in the ocean of defense spending, but every penny counts.
An HR software grade scheduled for one year and $36 million? Instead it’s eight years and $280 million over-budget without success. 780% over budget?
Cutting unused IT licenses sounds reasonable, too.
Why weren’t people looking at this stuff before?
Hegseth is focused on the word “lethal”.
The IRS modernization program is “currently 30 years behind schedule and it’s already $15 billion over budget.”
That is a complete sentence.
‘NOW - DOGE Staffer Speaks Out, Unveiling Mission to Fix IRS’ Outdated Infrastructure | “I really care a lot about this country, and this is a huge program that is currently 30 years behind schedule.” For the first time, a member of the DOGE team has spoken publicly about the mission that they're on. Sam Corcos, now a special adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department, is laying out his undertaking to drag the IRS’ outdated systems into the present. Corcos said: “I have been brought in to look at the IRS’ modernization program, in particular, as well as the operations and maintenance budget. I really care a lot about this country, and this is a huge program that is currently 30 years behind schedule and it’s already $15 billion over budget.” “The goal is to take——the IRS has some pretty legacy infrastructure——It’s actually very similar to what banks have been using. It’s old main frames running COBOL and assembly.” “The challenge has been, how do we migrate that to a modern system. Virtually every bank has already done this, but we’re still using a lot of those same systems.” “Typically, in the industry this takes a few years, maybe a few hundred million dollars, and we’re now 35 years into this program.”’
The NGO grift continues to be the gift that keeps on giving.
‘BREAKING: Aimee Bock, the mastermind behind Feeding Our Future, has been found GUILTY on all counts. The NGO stole over $250 million from taxpayers—the largest pandemic fraud scheme in the country, all made possible by the incompetence of Gov. Tim Walz’s administration.‘
The key test is simple. If you cancel something and nothing breaks, did you need it in the first place?
‘DOGE canceling Accenture contracts is the single easiest way to cut government waste imaginable. The government spends over a billion dollars a year with these guys and literally no one can explain what they even do. Pull the plug on the entire thing. And do McKinsey next.’
For all the talk of Congress losing to the Executive Branch in the separation of powers debate, Niskanen argues that much of the damage was self-inflicted by administrative measures Congress took to reorganize its internal workings.
‘We often think of Congress’ primary job as lawmaking. After all, it is the legislative branch of government. But while the legislative branch is obviously the primary driver of new law, the role of Congress is much bigger: It also needs to oversee, on an ongoing basis, the implementation of existing law, the vast majority of which was produced years ago.
‘Think of Congress as the board of directors of a corporation. The executive branch is the actual company, making the widgets. The president of the United States is the CEO, managing the day to day operations of the company. Congress is the board of directors, setting broad policy and overseeing the CEO and the company on behalf of the voters. Most of the work is the oversight.
‘Traditionally, Congress has organized itself for oversight via the committee system. Unfortunately, the modern committee system has diminished to the point that it falls short of performing the necessary oversight of the executive branch.
‘Much of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of Congress itself. Most observers correctly view the rise of partisanship — and the unwillingness of co-partisans to investigate their own administration — as a key driver of reduced oversight.
‘But over the past 30 years, both parties have also made internal institutional changes to the committee system that reduced the capacity and effectiveness of congressional oversight. More often than not, these changes were made for entirely other reasons, the reduced oversight merely an unfortunate byproduct.’