For decades, government guards and budget supervision experts have been trying to get someone, anyone, listen about the need to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending, frustrated that Washington is not heard His calls to a systemic change.
Many were cautiously optimistic when President Donald Trump trained billionaire Elon Musk to obtain inappropriate spending under control and modernize federal systems of scandalously outdated payments.
But in interviews with half a dozen guardians, most said that this is not what they had in mind.
The vertiginous agitation of the federal agencies headed by the Efficiency Department of the Musk Government, or Doge, has unnecessarily politicized the problem and could make the promulgation of the real changes necessary to eliminate the incorrect expense, said five experts in good governance.
“Elon Musk says we have shocking fraud amounts, and you are right, we do it. Nobody has cared a lot so far, “said the expert in prevention of fraud Linda Miller, former member of the main personnel of the Liability Office of the Congress Independent during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
“But the examples they bring are silly, made for red meat made for television, facts so that people are surprised, horror and surprise,” Miller continued, pointing out some arts projects related to diversity, equity and inclusion in The White House. List of the American agency objectable for international development programs, some of which were not funded by the agency. “It makes the government sound like a mockery.”
Trump defended Doge’s efforts during an informative press session with Musk this week, saying without details that the group has unearthed “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse.” The White House did not respond to a request for comments.
Miller and other supervision experts said that Musk has highlighted some legitimate and long data that the federal government has not addressed under both parties. Among them are the need to improve the government “not pay” system to verify if people are deceased or prohibited to receive federal payments because they are blocked by foreign citizens from countries under US sanctions, for example.
Publishing in X, Musk pointed out the need for the list of non -eligible people to “not pay” be updated much more frequently, among other supervision changes he has proposed. “There are follies, such as only a superficial examination of social security and we have people there who are about 150,” Musk said during an informative session of the press on Wednesday.
Experts also pointed out the amazing scale of the problem. Last year, the government’s responsibility office said that in 2023, the Federal Government obtained an estimated $ 236 billion in inadequate payments, which include those that were higher and lower than they should have been.
“There are absolutely waste, fraud and abuse, and there are inappropriate payments, and there are inefficiencies,” said Dylan Hedter-Gaudette, director of government issues of the Government’s Supervision Project, a non-partisan surveillance group. “And they come up with all kinds of reasons that are basically reduced to ‘is too difficult, and we don’t want to do it'”.
In a house supervision hearing this week, Hedtler-Gaudette and other expert witnesses proposed to improve the monitoring requirements and reports for federal spending and the strengthening of identity and verification of assets, among other changes, mentioning mass fraud in Covid aid programs as evidence of the pressing need for change of change. .
Supervision experts say that there is an important distinction between potential criminal activity such as fraud and self -care and the category of waste very broad and inherently subjective, a difference that has often been confused in the statements of the administration about their efforts of their efforts cost reduction.
Both Musk and Trump have affirmed that Dege has unearthed radical fraud and corruption within federal agencies without providing specific evidence. On the other hand, the official Doge website has greatly highlighted the elimination of “wasteful contracts” related to DEI, climate change, consulting and media.
“The waste is in the viewer’s eye, that is a political problem,” said Bob Westbrooks, former Federal Government General Inspector during the administrations of Obama and First Trump. “We are combining the difference between waste and fraud, I believe, in an irresponsible and reckless way. It is causing agencies to be closed. It is causing people to lose their work. “
The Trump administration has cited the problem of “waste, fraud and generalized abuse” in its efforts to stop USAID’s work, the Office of Financial Protection of the Consumer and other agencies, as well as to fire thousands of federal employees. Doge’s rapid efforts to return to agencies caused a wave of legal challenges that allege a lack of transparency and data privacy violations; The demands are pending.
Some supervision experts and budget persecutors have welcomed Musk efforts given the deep federal government failures to solve real problems with inappropriate payments.
“The tire has so many holes: it can no longer be fixed,” said Haywood Talcove, CEO of Lexisnexis Risk Solutions for Government, an anti-fraud company, which also testified to Congress on the subject of this week. “You have people who are brilliant: they have done things that others do not have a blow.”
However, Haywood emphasized that the general objective should be not only to avoid inappropriate payments as fraud, but also to ensure that the government works for those who deserve federal assistance and have been hindered by bureaucratic obstacles.
“People depend on the government: the government is very important and nobody wants to be tortured with systems and processes,” he said. “Anyone who can fix what we need to have there.”
But others warned that tearing federal agencies on behalf of eliminating inappropriate spending could end up delaying, both by undermining Doge’s credibility and encouraging Trump’s and Musk critics to ignore the real problem of inappropriate spending.
“The way to do it is not to enter and break things,” said Steve Ellis, president of common sense taxpayers, a fiscally conservative budget guard dog, who criticized the dismissal of the administration of more than a dozen federal general inspectors, who, which They carry out non -partisan supervision of agencies.
“Those are the people who should have been their allies. And instead, they have now moved them away, ”he said.
