Anyone else confused by the pearl clutching regarding DOGE cuts? We’re financial professionals and know government spending fraud waste and abuse was beyond a reasonable threshold.

It is a bunch of people barely out of high school assisting an unelected official through government programs. They are constantly mischaracterizing their findings. They make outlandish claims that are easily rebutted. They misstated an $8 million contract as an $8 billion contract.

If these people were audit associates at my firm, they would be the first ones riffed.

Many friends in forest service, NIH, IRS of course have been fired. Pearl clutching is a bit insensitive to describe actual people losing their jobs and livelihoods. It’s not like they were raking in the big bucks to start.

If the focus was geared toward qualified people scrutinizing private contracts and conflicts of interest I’d be more supportive (looking at you Tesla contracts).

PREACH!!!

I’m in favor of what DOGE is trying to accomplish. I’m not in favor of how they’re doing it. Instead of taking a hatchet to everything and firing a bunch of people, they should have started out just identifying and reporting the supposed waste, fraud, and abuse. After you’ve finished reviewing an agency, then go back and do a deep dive and really dig into it. Then, you’d have more support for the headcount cuts. Using USAID as an example, I don’t think most taxpayers would be in favor of some of the things being reported as funded by our tax dollars.

I spent some time at a company brought in to review the contracts for a small segment of the DoD. Nothing related to weapons, equipment, etc. We were trying to apply proven and accepted practices used by businesses all the time. The program failed after a couple of year when it became apparent that the government had no interest in recovering the funds we had clearly identified and documented. It was literally as simple as taking the documentation we prepared, send it to the contractor, and either deduct it from the next payment or request it be refunded. The government people we were working with were much more concerned about protecting the bureaucracy, not bringing to light that their departments didn’t catch the errors when they happened, and not upsetting their contractors. Recovering taxpayer funds was way down the list of priorities.

My late brother in law spent his entire career working for the federal government, rising to a position of being in charge of operations covering a number of states. That’s when he could really see the waste, fraud, and abuse. He said that short of killing a coworker, he couldn’t fire a government employee, no matter how bad they were at their job. Some of the things he talked about seeing would make your blood boil. Back when Clinton was doing a federal reduction in force, he jumped at the chance to get a buyout. His bosses begged him to stay, but he was done. Of course, they then hired him back as a contractor for some special projects.

Nowadays, most people act like political parties are football teams. Their own party can do no wrong and the other party does everything wrong. What they don't realize is that there are not two parties. There is one party, and its goal is to take all the money and power it can from us, the People. The fourth estate is dead, eaten up by the propaganda machine. There are two types of people freaking out here - the grifters in government, NGOs, and their cronies, who have been robbing the public treasury for forty plus years, and the people who haven't figured out that those grifters are lying to them.

Government got to big need to fire all the freeloaders and arrest the people claiming social security for a 150+ year old dead person

It’s astounding to me personally that people just don’t care that we have had our taxpayer money literally stolen for kickbacks.

You’re a financial professional but you didn’t realize he didn’t even hire accountants or forensic accountants at that for this “audit”?
You didn’t realize that when he said dead Americans are still receiving payments of social security, that he hadn’t even ran an aging report or payment summary for said dead American so he could see the date of the last payment made?
You’re a financial professional and don’t know that the real fraud and abuse is tesla paying $48 million dollars in taxes on over $12 billion of income?
You’re a financial professional but did you know that Trump is a felon because he committed fraud by over inflating assets (valued by his son in law) to borrow money at higher amounts for low interest rates?

I think it’s close to impossible to get the real truth about how DOGE is operating bc each media network has their bias.

But we HAVE to do something - the US govt pays federal employees and sends aid to other countries using borrowed money.

It will hurt and feel like indiscriminate cutting but how else do you get a deficit down that’s so ridiculously high? I’m definitely open to suggestions.

@Manager1 He doesn't care. It's not an argument on principle, he doesn't like Trump or his cabinet. It's crazy how unprincipaled some people are when it comes to politics. 😂

I think it'll be interesting to follow the audit reports issued this year - seems like sys admin rights being granted outside of standard protocol may be an issue, given some of the reports being made.

Strange times folks

White House Administration should have led by example and cut its own budget for non-essential staff and operations.

Pearl clutching? Seriously?

Given your self-identified designation as a Senior Associate, one rightly questions what type of seniority do you mean. You claim to be a financial professional, but where is the empirical evidence buttressing your knowledge that "... government spending fraud waste and abuse was beyond a reasonable threshold"? As the learned Senior Manager 1 responds to your post, when it comes to lies, damn lies and statistics, Elon Musk and his Presidential stooge 'The Mango Mussolini' are totally inept when coming to telling the truth about anything. It seems you are also afflicted with the same propensity to bend the truth to fit your narrative. Just give us the facts mate, not politicised opinion.

Because the cuts are being done without thought. Keeping hiring from happening for the national park system as they get ready for the summer? Fire people who work directly on tracking and trying to find help the avian flu? Firing people who work on nukes? Then turning around and going "doh, my bad, please come back."

We can all agree excess federal spending should be taken into consideration. Let's start with the contracts we have with Elon first. Also, the fact that he has contracts with the government but hasn't had any of those touched shows there's not actual accountability being taken.

The biggest problem here is Elon and Trump are treating this like a corporate take over and steam rolling everyone around them to get to their goal. Which by the way, is costing them more money then some of these people are taken out are. Then they promise a "dividend" to the people (which most likely won't happen due to a lot of clauses that will most likely benefit the rich) as if we are a corporation. They even said "we'll have to make you hurt a little before you get any benefit." Which is corporate take over BS for "we don't care about you all but we'll make promises we won't keep."

You can't run the government like a corporation. Millions of lives are affected by changes.

Well thought out audits and processing of data takes time. It's also not done by people who are directly influenced by the monetary gains from some of the financials processes of what's being audited. If any company had a major contractor go in and audit a company that they contacted it would be seen as fraud. Even if you wanted to run the government as a company, you could not in good faith watch everything going on and think it's done in good faith and is not fradulent.

No because as a former auditor and now a certified fraud examiner this is not how you go about finding “fraud, waste and abuse.” Also it is not “fraud and abuse” just because you don’t like it, especially if the money is appropriated legally.

If these morons had any goddamn sense, they wouldn’t look like such goddamn fools across the country to anyone with a modicum of sense.

This post aged better than scotch!

It was recently shared with me that colleagues at ADP barely had higher education because possessing a college degree is becoming increasingly irrelevant, as many employees, including those in top management, do not hold one. This comment left me questioning the direction in which this country is heading. Are high school graduates now surpassing individuals with Bachelor's, Master's, and even Doctoral degrees in terms of career success and professional achievement? This raises concerns about the evolving value of higher education and its impact on professional development in today's workforce. This mentality of hiring high school graduate is not only in government offices but also in private companies.

it is crazy what theyre cutting as waste or fraud

Considering the fact that the person you all elected to lead the country is a criminal and owes the federal government and the state of NY money and his buddy is currently in the processing of using tech to funnel money into both of their pockets, I'm not really concerned.