[ModernMech]

I thought the plan was to reduce the deficit/debt by reducing fraud and waste; not to eliminate 100% of fraud at the expense of the deficit/debt. You seem to be fine spending unlimited money to reduce fraud to 0, which is not what anyone else seems to want including Trump/Musk.

But I was not actually asking you to justify which is worse because the point I was making was I disagree with you — so what system do we use to resolve our differences?

[Dalewyn]

Your logic would make perfect sense if you were talking about waste. If reducing or eliminating a given amount of waste incurs an expense larger than the waste concerned, that defeats the point of reducing expenses by reducing waste. We can certainly discuss how important reducing that waste further is at that point.

But we are talking about fraud. Fraud is deliberate misuse or theft of funds, which is made even worse because the funds are American tax dollars. This isn't a question of whether I agree with reducing fraud to zero at any cost, simple ethical logic dictates that any fraud especially of taxes is absolutely and unconditionally unacceptable because of its malicious nature.

If we are fine with excusing $1 of fraud because dealing with it is "too expensive", we might as well be fine with excusing trillions of dollars of fraud because it's the same thing: It is ultimately acceptable to misuse and steal taxpayer money. That is absolutely not a great society to live and participate in.

Even if an expense larger than the fraud is incurred the fraud must be eliminated, because the principle of the matter is much more important than the funds themselves.

>so what system do we use to resolve our differences?

Ideally, Congress should be auditing and prosecuting fraud themselves as stipulated by the Taxes and Spending Clause of the Constitution.

Obviously though, in reality they clearly haven't filled those shoes adequately, or the Executive Branch would not have to be rifling through the budget as we speak let alone all the complaints from the people about government waste and corruption.

[ModernMech]

To the first half of your comment, as you said, "I don't really care, Margaret." Our disagreement is intractable and so we move on to your answer to my actual question of how to handle our differences:

> Ideally, Congress should be auditing and prosecuting fraud themselves as stipulated by the Taxes and Spending Clause of the Constitution.

Not "ideally Congress should be", "Congress must be" -- according as you point out, to the Constitution. And they are prosecuting and auditing. For instance, USAID just passed an audit in the Fall, and despite all his noise, Musk has not yet been able to show fault with that audit.

What you advocate in your "obviously though.." paragraph is an extra-constitutional power grab of the Executive branch. Their job is to "faithfully" (that's the operative word) execute the laws, and they aren't enabled by the Constitution to do what they are, which is shut down Congressionally chartered federal agencies that the American people want to exist. If we follow this to its logical conclusion, that means as soon as the other side is in power, they'll just negate all laws and rights of the other side.

Congress exists so this does not happen, and that's why it's not the ideal solution, it's the only Constitutional solution we can use unless you're fine with rule by edict. Which, if that's what you're getting at just say it plainly. I get the feeling I'm arguing with people here who actually want a dictatorship but don't want to admit it yet. Because the process you're defending is a dictatorship by construction.