[tlb]

Not if the company had up-to-date audited financials, no. You'd start with those.

The problem is agencies that haven't been audited in a decade. The agencies literally don't report how much money they get, their current balances, or where it goes.

Here's the DOD proudly announcing that they now have clean audits for 11 of their 28 departments: https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/39.... Surely nothing bad is happening in the other 17.

[Naklin]

I’m all for better accounting practices and better tracking of government spending as well as eliminating waste. Absolutely.

But pretending that Musk and co are doing an audit by accessing treasury records and payment systems or that it will help with government waste in any way is laughable.

Again, literally no one would be able to make any kind of credible department spending audit out of the bank records of a mid-sized company.

This is the US government’s treasury we’re talking about here! This is several orders of magnitude bigger and more complicated!

Not to mention an audit would not require any write access.

[llamaimperative]

If only there were a part of the government whose job it was to proactively and continuously crawl the interiors of the bureaucracy to identify opportunities for improvement...

If only they had a standing list of more than 5000 such improvement opportunities...

Welcome to the Government Accountability Office!