FLBear5630 said:
whiterock said:
FLBear5630 said:
whiterock said:
FLBear5630 said:
whiterock said:
FLBear5630 said:
whiterock said:
FLBear5630 said:
whiterock said:
FLBear5630 said:
Only to match your intellectual gymnastics to make his actions fit want you want to see, not necessarily what is really happening.
As I said on another thread, he deserves credit and congrats. He seems to have avoided mission creep, which is a huge positive and consistent with his campaign promises. If he does what he says, I will call it that way. If he doesn't and goes off doing whacky **** like the Musk DOGE fiasco I will call it. It doesn't matter to me one way or another, he is not my choice but he is better than Biden/Harris or Obama. Actually throw in Bush/Cheney, I was not fans of Cheney/Rumsfled...
There you go again. The Musk/DOGE program was not a fiasco. It identified hundreds billion dollars of waste/fraud/abuse and horribly defective business structures (particularly in the IT area). Shrinking the number of software platforms in an agency from dozens to ONE will save money and make organization more effective. Entire agencies were collapsed, saving further monies on overhead. Recissions packages are coming. The plan, the process, and the results are all rational, effective....yet another promise kept.
I mean, wake up. Just because you abhor the private sector concept of "move fast & break things" when trying to restructure a business does not mean the process itself was a disaster. It was in fact highly beneficial. Your problem is that it was done in a manner you find detestable. Ergo you cannot allow yourself to see any positives at all.
Would I have preferred that the savings were in the trillions rather than billions? Sure. But facts are facts. Taxpayers are better off today than they were a year ago, by hundreds of billions of dollars + obvious future savings on costs of running government. And it's not like we've got this beast down to bare bones. We CAN keep working the problem and making more improvements. So we take the win, and come back for more tomorrow.
Turn off the MSNBC.....
No it didn't!
Uh, yes, it did indeed identify hundreds of billions of dollars of direct spending cuts. Plus reductions in workforce. Plus efficiencies (like selling empty government buildings). ETC.... The true savings will likely end up exceeding $550B. I mean, if it doesn't...if nothing is happening.....if it's all smoke and mirrors that will have no impact on anything at all, then why are you so agitated? Just shrug & let it pass as politics of the day. Instead, you act as though your own ox has been gored. 
It identifed things Trump doesn't like, that doesn't make it fraud or abuse.
It identified a long list of things that no reasonable person should like, wild wastes of money, employees not showing up for work, stadiums rented for staff parties, former admin shuffling money out the door as fast as possible, etc..
Those are legal acts, if they were they would prosecute. They do not have 1 case that they can prosecute.
Gotcha. How do you know they are NOT going to prosecute anything? The premise of your assertion here is that prosecution is announced the day after discovery of the problem. If that was happening, you would be screaming (this time with some justification) about politicization of the whole process. But that's not happening. The admin is being deliberate. They formed a DOJ task force to take referrals. DOGE has made dozens of referrals. Which will be investigated. Which will take months/years to complete.
Task Force: https://www.rvmnews.com/2025/03/doj-launches-news-task-force-to-go-after-the-fraudsters-doge-uncovers-watch/
Vote fraud: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5276489-musk-doge-voter-fraud/
SBA loan fraud: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/doj-threatens-to-prosecute-fraud-uncovered-by-doge/ar-AA1BY3CZ
....etc....
Waste??
Yes, renting out a stadium for a government office party is wasteful use of taxpayer dollars. So is sending monies to spread the LGBTQ abroad. And on and on and on.
They disagree with what Congress or past Administrations wanted to do? Stop the presses, no ***** You are putting what you and MAGA like and dislike as waste. Those are subjective decisions, not waste or abuse. Whether YOU or anyone on this Board agrees with studying something does not make it illegal, abuse or waste. The money was approved and went to do what it was said to do. Just because you don't agree with the hourly rates or the hours doesn't make it fraud! You are real lose with your terminology to make **** fit your world...
Congress delegates much of the decision-making process on spending to the Executive, with no real oversight. USAID monies have been used in ways that few reasonable persons would defend, yet here you are, a typically stable, phlegmatic fella now flecking spit all over his chin because someone dared to suggest that something might be amiss in a $6.5T budget $2T in deficit and then actually do something about it - auditing, cutting structure, reducing workforce, referring the worst discoveries for prosecutions, etc....
Who poured pi$$ in your Wheaties this morning? It's really gotten you off your game. Come back to us!
Who rented out a stadium? Would I do it? No. F-ing idiots...
My only issue is framing everything as some malicious intent. It is not, these people when in power believe that is a good use of public funds, even USAID. Whether I do or not, is irrelevant. I think it is a waste and should have went to infrastructure.
Based on the submitted budget, I fear DOGE is a shell game to keep the eye looking one way while the hand is somewhere else...
the irony is sublime.......
When you worked with the CIA, did you go into projects that did not turn out or ended up being wastes of time with the intent to be wasteful, fraudulent or malicious against the sitting Administration?
No. We had other concerns which had the beneficial side effect of fostering frugality. We terminated unproductive operations, because A) there werent' a ton of ops officers available, B) you can't cut corners and still call a clandestine operation a clandestine operation, and C) the risks of running an ineffective one were the same as running a good one. Further, we had formal evaluation processes for the quality of the product. So retaining an ineffective agent was not something that could be hidden. So an agent that didn't add anything new would be redirected, and if that didn't work out, would be terminated.
The Agency is not a terribly good example. The overseas stuff is run very lean with a far smaller staff than most would believe possible (which makes sense if you're trying to do things without being noticed.....). Same for budgets. You would be shocked at how little even the most sensitive human sources are paid. Most of the skullduggery happens in the analysis side of the house, an entirely WDC operation that just by its nature creates relationships all across the intel community. No wasted monies. Just "back channels" that allow any self-style "resistance" to communicate and leak and (etc.....) more so than in other agencies.
Should you have been prosecuted for wasting Government funds when a new Administration found your activities wasteful?
If they were wasteful, yes.
Is that a bad thing?....for civil servants to act with an abundance of caution for how a new administration with different ideas on things might react to what was done?
Audits that cause arse-puckering are GOOD things, buddy, not bad. Very healthy for organizational dynamics.
Oh, audits are occurring? Where? There has been no organizational analysis or metrics being used here at all. It is who Donald likes gets rewarded, who he doesn't gets the chainsaw.
Doge is most certainly an audit, of spends, of systems, of software of structure.
Ass puckering? If your audits are ass puckering, what are you doing?
Part of the beauty of audits is that they are supposed to make people do business every day knowing what they are doing is going to get audited. Good, regular, thorough audits positively impact organizational behavior.
You didn't answer the question, how would you respond if they were coming after you for your actions? My question is, you did all that.
No, I did not. I didn't do anything that wasn't budgeted. I paid my agents what they were supposed to be paid. I took targets to lunch. I gassed up my GOV. All together for a year the spend was a modest mid-range 5-digit number. That's it. Nothing there for them to find. Completely unlike the C/Admin officer at one of my posts, who issued a security contract to a US company without proper coordination (and in the strictest sense a violation of his legal standing to do so) and it was allowed to stand because we didn't want to make enemies. He retired after that post. Guess who hired him. Yep. You guessed it. The same security company he gave the fat contract to.......
You followed the rules given to you. And DOGE comes after you and even wants to prosecute because they don't agree. That is what is happening.
Uh, no. Doge is auditing everything. They're going to the central nervous system, the ERP system, and logging all the spends. And they've found some doozies.
Having civil servants work extra hard and diligently, KNOWING their decisions today will be reviewed by a future administration of an opposing party is a very good dynamic. It will give people incentives not to do things that put their shadows on the lines of propriety. Incentivize them to be above reproach.
Tell us why is there no outcry from 1 in 12 social security recipients about not getting paid? What would explain this? Any chance there were some undeserving recipients that have been cut off by Doge reforms?
Have you ever been involved in a Federally funded project?
I'm an elected official for an entity which receives federal grants.
To say that civil servants haven't had to be diligent is showing you really haven't.
I haven't said that civil servants don't have to be diligent. I've said that Doge has obvious examples that many have not been.
Every expenditure and every form has to be there and approved or no payment.
Doge has documented that is not a true statement.
The problem is a political one, not a worker error problem. The politicians keep approving silly **** and the civil servants are there to get done what the electeds tell them.
The problem is that we do in fact have a politicized federal bureaucracy. The metrics of voting patterns and donation patterns are quite clear. There are never any leaks when Democrats in office, but when a Republican takes over there is a "resistance" which leaks and spins and frustrates and ignores, etc....
I have no issue pulling funding or changing direction, I have a huge problem playing it off like it is some civil servant deep state that is to blame.
False dilemma. There is a change of direction. And there is also a bloated and politicized federal bureaucracy that literally sees itself as a check & balance on the office of POTUS.
Look in Congress and the Executive Branch, THAT is who to blame.
Yes, Congress spends to much. They also delegate too much to the executive, particularly on rule-making.
The poor engineer who just did his job and is now DOGEed is the scape goat.
If he did his job he will not be scapegoated. Scapegoats rarely are blameless. They get just get a disproportionate share of the blame, become the face of the problem. And we've had a few of those, who never face any accountability EXCEPT the public opprobrium they had to bear.
The Tea Party Targeting scandal is a great example. Lois Lerner shoulda had a perp walk. I held in my hands the IRS letter sent to a Tea Party organization. They brought it to me and asked what they should do. I told them under no circumstances should they communicate any further. The letter was a trap. No way to respond that would not open them up to liability. I recommended they seek legal counsel and to contact their congressman (Bill Flores, at the time). Bill was a CPA and would know immediately how out of line the letter was. To his credit, Bill sent a blistering letter to IRS and went public with it. And his family trust fund got audited every year for the remainder of Obama's term.
So it was hardly a surprise when FEMA briefed its emergency response staff not to engage with residences with Maga or Trump signs in the yard.
The federal bureaucracy is a great big bloated entity full of partisan progressives that spends over a trillion dollars a year. To suggest there is no waste, fraud, abuse, or political corruption is.....well.....you are not living in the real world.
