[doodlebugging]

I saw your comment and saw it getting downvoted or flagged but it is useful to have a discussion so that others similarly inclined can potentially learn something that they obviously don't already understand. I reproduce that comment here in case it somehow disappears.

>i voted for that, i voted for the destruction of the federal government because it's bankrupting us by stealing our money

If you're concerned about the federal government bankrupting "us" by stealing our money then ask yourself why one of the first things that happened was the firing of OIG personnel. The Inspectors General and their OIG employees are the federal employees with the mandate to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in every federal program regardless of size. They have the power to audit any recipient of taxpayer monies and to work with US Attorney federal prosecutors to prosecute those who steal, waste, or otherwise violate plan guidelines in disbursing money. US Attorneys will not even take a case to trial unless agency auditors can document in detail that a crime has occurred and that crime fits within prosecutorial guidelines and a conviction is nearly guaranteed. To take a case that has any weaknesses risks wasting public money prosecuting a case you might not win. The whole point is to make sure you have the evidence that forces the defendant to either make restitution or to spend some time in a federal lock-up.

It's suspicious to me that the first thing they do is fire all the people who not only can watch, but who have the Congressional mandate to seek out waste, fraud, and abuse of federal programs that disburse money to individuals, small businesses, cities and other non-federal entities, non-profits, and corporations.

Though I am not a doctor, I do think that you should seriously work on your mental health. Start by changing your diet to include less kool-aid as the sugar high you're on can cause metabolic changes that lead to seriously bad health outcomes.

My spouse has spent a career in a federal department working to insure that the money Congress allocates to specific programs ends up being spent for purposes that are allowed under the guidelines of those federal programs. If you think the federal government is the one stealing your money you are sadly mistaken.

Federal programs are full of fraud but the fraud occurs at the recipient end, not within the department.

If you or anyone else are so concerned about where your tax money goes then the last agency entity that you would eliminate would be the one charged with insuring that all the monies in all the programs administered by the agency are disbursed lawfully according to plan guidelines which were approved by Congress. These people, as part of their job, have to read and internalize all the nuances, conflicts with existing programs, and contradictions in all the programs that they serve as watchdog over and it is their skills that allow federal prosecutors to take fraud cases to trial and to convict those who have abused federal programs for personal gain.

You voted for someone who has a documented history of fraudulent use of federal money who made it a point in both of his administrations to remove the specific persons and agencies that would guarantee oversight so that they can do anything without worrying about accountability. Internalize that.

[nailer]

> The Inspectors General and their OIG employees are the federal employees with the mandate to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in every federal program regardless of size.

There are more than 1 million 150-159 year old Americans that receive social security and America is funding trans comic books for children in Peru. Do you think the OIG was doing a good job?

[lostdog]

I'm sure you heard that from a trustworthy person who provided clear evidence? Perhaps you could share some of that evidence?

[nailer]

Yes, the head of the department of government efficiency published this earlier today.

[lostdog]

No link to their statement?

And please don't link to X. I don't have an account so I cannot read X threads, which is very surprising because the owner said he really wanted to make it so logged-out users could read X easily, but then changed his mind because he wanted to make more money. Sounds like a really untrustworthy person to me!

[nailer]

Ho hum.

[claudenm]

Is it wise to credulousy believe everything your government tells you without source data?

[nailer]

The breakdown is readily available and even the Guardian read about the issue 10 years ago

[claudenm]

You knew a decade ago that a million 150 year olds were collecting social security and nothing came of it?

[doodlebugging]

I'm gonna break this down into pieces that are easier for you to swallow.

>There are more than 1 million 150-159 year old Americans that receive social security...

Your powers of reasoning are taking a siesta if you believe this. It begs the question of how many people not only in America, but globally, are in the age group 150-159 years old? You claim that there are more than one million in the US alone.

I have worked with lots of demographic data and I have seen zero evidence that there are any people with a clinically detectable pulse on planet earth in that age group. How did you arrive at such an unreasonable number that is entirely unsupported by any demographic evidence available publicly?

The answer of course is that you musk've listened to or read about a post your newest right-wing jesus made on his misinformation network or at a white house back-patting session and, lacking any deductive reasoning skills of your own to help parse the post you just took it to be true since it was easier than thinking rationally about a collection of words. Minimum energy expended.

Though I have seen posts on HN addressing age issues of Social Security recipients, I haven't been following this part of the dysfunction very closely so I had to do some digging to try to understand where the idea that anyone might be that old came from.

It appears that musk posted a table of ages of recipients in the SS database where the Death field was set to FALSE implying that they might be alive and receiving benefits. He had some white house appearance where he stated that people over the age of 150 were receiving benefits.

Since all that happened the issue has been debated rigorously. It is likely not smart to conclude that anyone over the age of 150 is receiving SS benefits, anywhere. Instead it turns out that this is a known issue, detected in audits back in 2023 which were designed to detect and eliminate fraud in the benefits payment system at the SSA. The OIG auditor at the time, appointed by Trump during his first administration, Gail Ennis, took on the task of identifying and quantifying the problem of SS payees whose personal information in the SS databases implied an age greater than the maximum that could reasonably be expected. That audit report is here [0].

[0] https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf

On completion of the audit, it was concluded that correcting the database would waste money and effort so instead, new methods were introduced to help eliminate payments to non-qualifying recipients through a couple of initiatives called "Do Not Pay" and "Earnings After Death".

Basically your DoGE people didn't discover anything that the SS administration had not already discovered but it does serve as rage bait for those like yourself who refuse to do any independent research to help themselves understand whether something they heard is true or false.

There's a bit of additional info that may also help you. The acting Inspector General of the SSA at the time, Gail Ennis, later retired from her position because of charges that she obstructed a DoJ investigation into her own ethics violations. [1] Her retirement letter if I read it right is right here. [2] She toots her own horn quite a bit and in reading that, which I assume you will since it is only a few short paragraphs with no disturbing content, she provides a short summary to the reader about how an OIG office operates. As a citizen it is useful to know that these people are on our side. She served under two presidents, being appointed by Trump and retained by Biden. That illustrates a commitment by both administrations to the work that the SSA-OIG was doing during her term.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2] https://oig.ssa.gov/news-releases/2024-06-05-letter-from-ssa...

Anyway, let's move on now while I still have you in the audience.

>...and America is funding trans comic books for children in Peru.

I work on cars a lot so I had to put this into context. Seeing how you are feeding on the rage bait I decided that these comics were not trade school training for automotive techs in Peru. Lucky guess for me I'm sure.

This whole blurb of misinformation can evidently be attributed, of course, to the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who in an interview after USAID was shuttered, [3] evidently got some facts crossed in her memory banks causing some people in the audience to see red again and shout at the sky about government waste in USAID programs. According to reports by FactCheck.org [4] the claims that she made about USAID's funding of several things were false in 3 of 4 claims.

Only one of the projects was funded by USAID, the others were funded by the US Dept of State, including the comic book.

If you dig into that looking for facts you will discover that not only did the comic book in question not have a trans character but it won an award in Peru. The comic book designer ultimately produced three comics for distribution in Peru, none of which used transsexual characters though the second one did have a gay guy as the main character hero at the request of the State Department. The total cost of this comic edition is documented here [5] but in case you are already burnt out with this wall of words, it cost $32000, and was paid to the Florida artist who did the work of producing the three comics for the DoS.

[3] https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/white-ho...

[4] https://www.factcheck.org/2025/02/sorting-out-the-facts-on-w...

[5] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_SPE50022CA0009_19...

>Do you think the OIG was doing a good job?

At this point I think it is obvious to anyone still reading where each of our individual biases lay.

As an arm of government charged by Congress with detecting fraud, waste, and abuse of federal money disbursements through any agency that dispenses money I think that OIGs are a vital component for accountability in federal programs. They have the responsibility and the ability to investigate anyone in their department at any level who receives federal money for any purpose. That includes the department heads and all staff under them, not just members of the general public, etc.

You will never know of some of the things that OIG auditors uncover that are never prosecuted though evidence to convict is there. In many cases, the subject being investigated has deep connections that shield them from accountability. In other cases the recoverable amount of fraud and waste does not meet a threshold for prosecution and the result is that the person or group committing the fraud loses their position and in the future is barred from any positions that would allow them access to federal funds.

The OIG and all the audit staff are frequently working simultaneously on multiple audits within their assigned regions. Each person involved must learn and know all of the program guidelines and in some cases the programs being audited have been operating for more than a decade and the program has received money in several budget phases with each infusion potentially having a different set of guidelines based on how and what Congress decided to allocate.

All things considered here I think you were a little fish swimming in search of food somewhere in the Sea of Misinformation which I can assure you is located between the west coast of Florida and the east coast of Texas. You're hungry for something delicious but will take whatever the other little fish around you leave. On the surface of this Sea of Misinformation we find fishermen, trolling for hungry fishies, their hooks securing morsels of rage bait knowing this is a preferred delicacy guaranteed to send their gullible quarry into a feeding frenzy.

It may be too late for you to escape the baited hook as it appears that the angler has already set the hook and landed you.

[claudenm]

Great work. I'm sure the brain-rotted OP will be back to regurgitate whatever he read on twitter and completely ignore your debunking.

[doodlebugging]

Thanks for this reply.

I think the part that tells the real story here that I forgot to add in that wall of text most won't read is that each of those links came up in the first 5 results for the simple searches I ran on DDG.

If any effort had been expended at all in attempting to understand whether anything in musk's post was accurate then they would easily have been able to find several high quality breakdowns from non-partisan sites.

Instead they made a choice to echo something, incorrectly too, that they thought they read somewhere. Didn't even provide a link.

I think if HN was to modify any rules that would improve the quality of discussions on contentious subjects that frequently devolve into unproductive political arguments then the posting rule could be changed to require posting of links to arguments that you are trying to make so that everyone can see the supporting data behind your beliefs and judge for themselves whether they should change their own beliefs or poke fun at the poster for believing nonsense.

Back when reddit was still a one-pager they tried to maintain a standard of backing up claims with data to support the claims. Over the years it has devolved into the site we have today where most posters do as this guy did and post simple one line replies to everything.

It's a hit and run way of trying to bring someone around to your way of thinking without giving them a reason to do so.

[nailer]

> On completion of the audit, it was concluded that correcting the database would waste money and effort so instead, new methods were introduced to help eliminate payments to non-qualifying recipients through a couple of initiatives called "Do Not Pay" and "Earnings After Death".

Thanks, that's a useful addition to the conversation.

> All things considered here I think you were a little fish swimming in search of food somewhere in the Sea of Misinformation which I can assure you is located between the west coast of Florida and the east coast of Texas.

If we're doing insults, which seems to be the new law on HN, you seem like a cunt.

[doodlebugging]

>If we're doing insults, which seems to be the new law on HN, you seem like a cunt.

That's pretty funny. I can assure you that as someone who spent 40 years working in the oil and gas industry your insult looks really green to me.

Thanks for jumping on the recycling initiative.

In our work profanity is a tool wielded by everyone for any situation whether it seems appropriate or not. We invent new insults and epithets instead of recycling all these ancients. We're at the forefront of insult technology every time a new worm shows up at the wellsite or a situation goes from rosy to catastrophic.

It makes the day go by, and so here I just made it through another 15 minutes with a chuckle.

Thanks.

EDIT: The more I think about it, reminiscing about all those glory days out in the oil patch, with that simple insult you may have just qualified as a potential friend. You're gonna need to up your game a bit though since most of my friends have multi-syllable nicknames for me, and I for them.

If you're in Texas maybe we could go get some ribs somewhere sometime and talk about things unrelated to right-wing jesus and his disciples.

In the meantime, since I know you must be bored from reading all this, here's a comic for you to enjoy. [0]

[0]https://www.scribd.com/document/825254795/The-Power-of-Educa...

Of course it's the one the DoS spent $32000 on. I figured you were unlikely to follow any of the links in the references I gave.