Incompetent or crooked? Elon Musk exposing Washingtons rotten system

Democrats have their panties in a wad over the work that Elon Musk and DOGE are doing to control government spending. But despite all the hoopla, what’s actually going on is straightforward stuff that most people probably — but wrongly — assumed the government was doing all along.Musk wrote on X Saturday that DOGE and the Treasury Department have agreed to take the following steps:“The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees,” Musk noted.“It is ridiculous [these rules] didn’t exist already!”Yes, it is. Musk went on to express disbelief that more than $100 billion worth of entitlements every year are going to “individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number.

If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.”“When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!” he exclaimed.On Sunday, Musk vented about another discovery: That the Social Security Administration has no mechanism to prevent duplicate Social Security numbers from being issued — “which further enables MASSIVE FRAUD!!” he wrote. This is all very basic stuff necessary to safeguard our taxpayer dollars, yet up to now our federal government just hasn’t bothered.Why not?I’m hearing plenty of excuses, mainly on the order that the federal government is big, and that many people who work for it are incompetent and can’t be expected to do better.I don’t actually believe that.Yes, the government is big.And of course when you’re writing lots of checks, there will be some errors.But the system should be designed to minimize mistakes and catch them when they happen, not to make them easy and undetectable.

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