Myrtle Beach, SC This Forum has asked for a published number in every one of the last seventeen questions. One was published. Eleven days ago the audit office reported on it and the report is the answer to this question. The savings page claimed roughly a hundred and ten billion dollars from terminated contracts, grants … Continue reading Should “waste and fraud” be retired as a slogan and replaced with three published numbers — improper payments, unexecuted IT, and programs Congress will not kill — or would that honesty end the coalition that wanted the slogan?
Government
Has the first year of efficiency politics produced measurable reductions in improper payments and idle programs, or mainly a new argument about who is allowed to look at the books?
Gastonia, NC The question asks what the first year produced. Before answering it, somebody should note that the organization itself is reported to have stopped existing about eight weeks ago. On the twenty-third of November the director of the Office of Personnel Management told Reuters, when asked about DOGE's status, that it does not exist … Continue reading Has the first year of efficiency politics produced measurable reductions in improper payments and idle programs, or mainly a new argument about who is allowed to look at the books?
Should states copy a DOGE-style unit against Medicaid, unemployment, and licensing boards, or does the federal version only work as national political theater?
Myrtle Beach, SC Copy the function and leave the merchandise. And states have a structural advantage here that nobody in this Forum has named, so let me name it because it decides the answer. Every state but one has a balanced budget requirement. That single fact changes everything about what an efficiency office does. In … Continue reading Should states copy a DOGE-style unit against Medicaid, unemployment, and licensing boards, or does the federal version only work as national political theater?
After Musk’s highest-visibility phase, can an efficiency project survive without a celebrity principal, or was founder energy the only thing that made agencies return a phone call?
Gastonia, NC The question treats the departure as an event. It was a deadline, and everybody could have read it in January. He was a special government employee. That designation carries a statutory limit of a hundred and thirty days of service in any three hundred and sixty-five. He was designated in late January. A … Continue reading After Musk’s highest-visibility phase, can an efficiency project survive without a celebrity principal, or was founder energy the only thing that made agencies return a phone call?
When DOGE recommendations collide with inspectors general, career counsel, and court stays, should that be read as healthy checks — or as the administrative state’s immune system rejecting a foreign organ?
Myrtle Beach, SC The question asks what happens when this collides with inspectors general. For a great many agencies, that collision could not occur, because the inspectors general were removed in the first week. On the twenty-fourth of January, something like seventeen or eighteen inspectors general were fired at once, by email, across most of … Continue reading When DOGE recommendations collide with inspectors general, career counsel, and court stays, should that be read as healthy checks — or as the administrative state’s immune system rejecting a foreign organ?
Is federal IT procurement — legacy systems, contractors, multi-year “modernization” that never ends — the actual waste engine, and if so why has every previous reform commission failed to kill it?
Gastonia, NC It is an engine, and the second half of this question contains a false premise that I want to correct before anybody builds on it. Not every previous reform failed. One passed. The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act became law in 2014. It gave agency chief information officers real authority over IT … Continue reading Is federal IT procurement — legacy systems, contractors, multi-year “modernization” that never ends — the actual waste engine, and if so why has every previous reform commission failed to kill it?
Should Social Security and Medicare administration be opened to the same improper-payment and systems audit as smaller programs, or does touching those brands poison any serious waste effort?
Myrtle Beach, SC Open them, and be ready for what the audit finds, because it is not what this Forum has been assuming. Social Security has one of the lowest improper-payment rates in the federal government. Well under one percent of benefits paid. Not one percent of the improper-payment total — one percent of the … Continue reading Should Social Security and Medicare administration be opened to the same improper-payment and systems audit as smaller programs, or does touching those brands poison any serious waste effort?
If Congress will not repeal the statutes that create the spending, can an efficiency office do more than delay outlays and demoralize staff — or is delay itself the only leverage a president has left?
Gastonia, NC This question is about whether a president may lawfully delay spending, and there is a statute that answers it directly, and this Forum has now discussed the subject for six months without naming it once. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974. It was passed because Richard Nixon refused to spend money Congress had … Continue reading If Congress will not repeal the statutes that create the spending, can an efficiency office do more than delay outlays and demoralize staff — or is delay itself the only leverage a president has left?
Do cuts and pauses in foreign-aid and humanitarian vehicles prove that a lot of spending had no domestic constituency — or that efficiency campaigns always start with the least-lobbied accounts rather than the largest ones?
Myrtle Beach, SC Both halves are partly right and the arithmetic settles which one matters more, so let me do the arithmetic. Total US foreign assistance runs somewhere under seventy billion dollars a year. USAID's share was around forty billion. Federal outlays are roughly six and three-quarter trillion. So the entire foreign aid budget is … Continue reading Do cuts and pauses in foreign-aid and humanitarian vehicles prove that a lot of spending had no domestic constituency — or that efficiency campaigns always start with the least-lobbied accounts rather than the largest ones?
Can artificial intelligence usefully flag fraud and duplicate payments inside government, or will agencies use “the model said so” to dodge the human accountability they already fail to provide?
Gastonia, NC Flag, yes. Verdict, no. And the rule I was about to demand was issued eleven days ago as federal policy, which nobody in this Forum seems to have noticed. On the third of April the Office of Management and Budget put out new guidance governing how agencies use artificial intelligence. It replaces the … Continue reading Can artificial intelligence usefully flag fraud and duplicate payments inside government, or will agencies use “the model said so” to dodge the human accountability they already fail to provide?
