Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
The Trump administration came into office with a pledge to uproot waste, fraud, and abuse within the government’s system of transfer payments.Leading the charge would be Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
They began their work early on with earnest and passion, starting inauguration evening, with many long days and nights of data crunching and number slinging, under the assumption that auditing government would be similar to auditing a private company.
DOGE quickly found itself buried and overwhelmed.There were too many programs, too much leakage, no coordination between departments, strange sources of incoming and outgoing payments, shadowy institutions and names flying everywhere, and eye-popping levels of inefficiency. It became obvious that many decades had gone by without any scrupulous concern for how taxpayer dollars were used.
After months on the job, DOGE backed away from the big picture job and embedded itself in specific agencies with more focus and less in the way of press releases. Elon went back to his enterprises which had been suffering with his absence and distractions. Meanwhile, his small cadre of data mavens stayed on and got to work, agency by agency.
This much became clear: the job was too much for them.They had to prioritize their work. It was decided that the most important priority would be to sync up the many random databases strewn here and there and everywhere into large packages that were manageable and could be checked, with lines of spending matching sources and purposes. Nothing like this existed before.
Once that was done, it became clear that the datasets were too large for a team of workers.They needed to open source all the data and enlist help from the public. In essence, the problems were just too big to isolate problem spending from legitimate spending. The decision was made to bundle it all up and do waves of file dumps on the public.
After all, we live in the age of the citizen researcher, people with fast Internet connections, large machines, high degrees of skill, and a passion to discover.For too long, the affairs of government have lived in a cloud of secrecy, probably for one hundred years or more. The excuse has always been discretion: It wasn’t the public’s business how the money was spent. But this is ridiculous; we are talking about taxpayer dollars. The citizens do in fact have the right to know. The goal of bringing all this out into the open would represent a fundamental change in the operation of public policy.
The most elaborate installation yet was just posted on the website of the Department of Health and Human Services, with a focus on Medicaid. This is a program designed to provide needed services to the poor. Annual spending exceeds $1 trillion a year, having entered into new upward slopes of spending in the COVID era where government unleashed the printing presses and spent money as if it were in infinite supply. This one program now accounts for 18 percent of U.S. health care expenditures.
Exactly where is all this going?
Source: ZeroHedge News
