WHOSE Waste, Fraud and Abuse?

Count me unimpressed

You want to cut government waste, fraud, and abuse? Hey, I’m all for it. And yes, you can stretch the law and let the courts decide—let me repeat that: let the courts decide, since the Republican Congress won’t—whether or not you’ve broken it. But you’re accountable for what you do and don’t find. And what has the Department of Government Efficiency under Elon Musk found? Not much. Some of its assertions have been inaccurate. And virtually none have been subject to third-party verification. Contrary to Musk’s assertion, unvetted posts on X don’t count as “transparency.”

Eight million dollars in Politico subscriptions? Unnecessary, maybe. But scandalous? Can’t you do any better than that? Yes, the whole business where only 10,000 government employees can retire at a time because of all the (literal) paperwork it takes to process at an underground bunker in Pennsylvania is serious waste. But we’ve known about that for a decade (thanks to the Washington Post). Doing something about it by way of modernizing systems would help. Musk should be good at that kind of thing. But while I’ve heard about a lot of slashing and burning, there’s been virtually nothing about building, reforming, restoring. I’d be less skeptical if I head more about that.

There are of course laundry lists of outrages that are often in the eye of the beholder. (Twenty million for Sesame Street in Iraq? Better Big Bird teach kids than ISIS.) But given all the hype, you’d think there’d be billions and billions of dollars—to use a familiar Trumpism—of documented malfeasance by now. Instead what we’re getting amounts to pennies on the taxpayer dollar. Maybe government bureaucrats’ fear of scandal explains some of the plodding character of its process. If the DOGE folks had a sense of shame maybe there’d be a building sense of embarrassment. But I don’t expect that to happen.

Instead, there will be games of gotcha. How about that $50K worth of paint for Pete Hegseth’s government housing? Is that a sober expense of Department of Defense funds? And more serious questions: Four hundred million for armored Teslas? Who vetted that one? I expect there will be lots of noise amid the fog of partisan war. But over time the real scandal may be the waste, fraud, and abuse on the part of those claiming to attack waste, fraud, and abuse. (I had to laugh when President Trump, promising to abide by court rulings, rued the procedural delays that impede the flow of legal resolution.) I just hope the collateral damage won’t be that bad.