The news of the spending that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is uncovering has come fast and furious in the last 4 weeks. Every day new headlines of yet more outrageous expenses litter the internet. In this issue, we do our best to keep up with the handful of 20-something financial whiz kids who are calling out federal expenses.
Number 5. The Gateway Pundit. DOGE reveals $4.7 trillion in lost taxpayer money.
Someplace there must be a really large ledger book that federal employees use to track their departmental spending. My dad used to speak of his 1930s-era employer: There was an accountant with an eyeshade who wrote “little bitty numbers in a great big book.”
Today, DOGE has been granted read-only access to some, but not all, U.S. government departments. In each, there is a space in the accounting software to record the purpose of an expense item. This is called a Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) and allows an auditor to identify the destination of the money.
The only problem is, until last Saturday, the TAS was an optional field. In your checking account at home, for example, you might enter “Dining” to show that a $200 expense was for a meal. If you wanted to hide from your spouse the fact that you blew a pair of Ben Franklins on lunch, you might leave that field blank. While she (or he) might then know how much you spent, they would not be able to determine where it went.
This could perhaps lead to an uncomfortable conversation later.
Musk’s operatives found exactly such untraceable entries amounting to $4.7 trillion.
The article does not specify what department, or departments, were being investigated at the time. I presume this is a summary of many of the audits currently underway.
Separately — or maybe not separately — Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the blonde Republican firebrand from Georgia, revealed that her DOGE committee had identified $2.7 trillion in improper federal payments.
The news comes too quickly to assimilate.
Whether the 2.7 is part of the 4.7 is unclear.
Those who have been disbursing the payments are quite reasonably unsettled by all this activity. Can’t say I blame them. On the other hand, they (whoever THEY is) have been responsible for spending somebody else’s money. Not an enviable position when questions arise.
Whether MTG’s 2.7 is part of DOGE’s 4.7, or is a separate issue entirely, it’s still a honking big number.
And it appears it will only get bigger. Read on.
Number 4. Fox News. Millions of Social Security recipients are 150 years old.
The Social Security database keeps a record of all the people who have social security numbers, and all their ages. That would be approximately 100% of Americans.
Musk’s people somewhat impolitely asked to see the records, and constructed a fairly simple chart showing how many people exist in the database, by age.
You could easily excuse the one single individual who appears to be 360 years old as a mere clerical error. Whether that unusually elderly person is receiving a monthly payment is not specified.
There are, however, about 12 million over the age of 120, surely something worthy of a national award. Likewise undisclosed is whether and how much these super-seniors are being paid through direct deposit, to bank accounts where some likely younger descendant has power of attorney.
Just eye-balling the list of numbers, there are some 400 million social security numbers in circulation. Not bad for a population of 335 million.
Another version of this article indicates that a spokesperson for Social Security — or maybe it was Treasury — indicated that they cannot simply delete a person from the database on the assumption that they are too old. “We have to have evidence of their death,” the source claimed. “If there is no death certificate on file, how are we to know?”
Good question, spoken like a true bureaucrat. Meanwhile, the money keeps rolling on.
To be fair, this article does NOT claim these aged seniors are receiving benefits, only that they exist in the database.
Only a cynic would suggest a link between a messy database and an unscrupulous payout.
Number 3. Newsweek. What is the DOGE clock?
Of course there is a DOGE clock! I am surprised you didn’t think of this.
A site completely unconnected with the federal government, called The Department of Government Efficiency Community Meme Project, has set up their website showing real-time savings racked up by the real Department of Government Efficiency.
Similar in concept to the U.S. Debt Clock, the Climate Clock, the Carbon Clock, the World Poverty Clock, the national Abortion Clock and the international nuclear war Doomsday Clock, the DOGE Clock tracks identified overspending.
The claim is that the DOGE clock measures in real time how much taxpayer money will be saved by changes recommended by DOGE.
Some of those recommendations include cancelling:
85 DEI contracts, $1 billion
a Scholarship program in Myanmar, $45 million
12 underutilized government leases, $3 million
12 contracts in the Department of Education, $30 million
I don’t know what some of those mean, but as of this writing the DOGE clock stands at $55 billion. That is up from some $34 billion when I started writing this post.
Number 2. Newsweek. DC housing market in chaos as federal employees panic.
It’s not that we are insensitive or uncaring. There are thousands of former federal employees in the DC area who are suddenly out of work. I can identify with the rising panic at the prospect of the paycheck coming to an abrupt stop.
From a USA Today article last Friday, here are some of the terminations either planned or already carried out at that time:
Veterans Affairs 1,000 employees
US Forest Service 3,400
Department of Interior 2,300
Centers for Disease Control 1,300
Small Business Administration 720
Environmental Protection Agency 388
Department of Education 60 (with thousands more promised.)
Department of Energy 2,000. (At the National Nuclear Security Administration, 110 who oversee the nuclear football had to be reinstated. That was probably embarrassing.)
In the fog of this war, it is not clear how many of the above are part of the 75,000 federal employees who accepted the 8-month termination buy-out.
The impact goes far beyond the people out of work. All those people out of work in Washington DC actually lived somewhere. The “somewhere” is soon to be a vacant house or apartment. This will have an enormous impact on that market.
Again, I believe most Americans are not insensitive to the problems this creates. On the other hand, it seems that many millions of us are keenly aware that a $36 trillion national debt, growing by about $2 trillion every year, is unsustainable.
A national budget of $6.7 trillion requires about $1.5 trillion for Social Security, $1 trillion for Medicare another $1 trillion for Medicaid. Add to this $1.2 trillion for interest on debt and another $1 trillion for defense.
After a while, you’re getting into real money.
Those numbers are rounded, and some are a year or two out of date. They amount to well over $5 trillion. Seeing that our national revenues are about $4.5 trillion, we are already in the hole, and we have not yet considered other federal spending: Foreign aid, highways and bridges, border patrol, judges, Congressional salaries, national parks, disaster management… on and on.
Yeah… the housing in DC will be a problem. Deal with it.
Number 1. New York Post. DOGE’s “limestone mine” discovery.
This one is by far my favorite story this week.
Federal employees being federal employees, there is paperwork required for their out-processing. Other federal employees are required to fill out such paperwork — for some reason this has never been outsourced.
And we do mean PAPERwork. As in hardcopy, 8-1/2x11 pages. These papers are stored in — wait for it — manila envelopes and cardboard archival boxes.
And where, pray tell, do the boxes go? Well, to a limestone cave, of course. Just as we Kansans store important archives in the Carey Salt Mine at Hutchinson, Kansas, so the feds use a limestone mine at Boyer, Pennsylvania.
Mines make perfect storage facilities: They do not take up space above ground; they are generally dry and climate-controlled; and access is necessarily limited by the elevator shaft.
Speaking of which, the elevator at Boyer PA is used to move all those boxes down to the bottom. The elevator car has a certain capacity, which means only a limited number of boxes can move the 220 feet down at a time.
There are 700 federal employees involved in filling out the paperwork and managing the storage. Given the tedious nature of ink-on-paper, forms-in-envelopes, and boxes-on-elevator, and considering the (unknown) speed of the elevator, the estimate is that the capacity of the paperwork system is a maximum of 10,000 retirements per month.
Not counting active-duty military and Postal service, there are maybe 2.4 million federal employees today. (Less than 6% of these actually show up at an office, since COVID, but that is a different story.)
Trump has declared that he wants large-scale reductions in force. He has not said what that means exactly, but whatever it is, Elon Musk is working swiftly to make it happen.
If we were to assume that “large-scale” means a 20% reduction, that would be 480,000 departures. Maybe only half would be actual retirements. 240,000.
Using the limestone mine at the rate of 10,000 per month, in two years we could be there.
Somehow I do not think Trump had in mind that it would take 2 years to reduce the federal workforce. He’s made a pretty good start at it in the first 3-1/2 weeks.
(This all means, by the way, that with 10,000 retirements being processed by 700 employees, each worker manages to do a whopping 15 retirements in a month. Which means, on average, it takes a federal employee about a day and a half to complete the paperwork to retire someone.)
I wonder if anyone in Boyer PA realizes there are 49,257 Human Resources businesses currently operating in the U.S.? With payroll of 700 government employees being paid roughly $100,000 a year, that would be a budget of about $70 million. Surely some of those private sector enterprises might step up to bid on a government contract.
And maybe even convert the new retirees to electronic records. Shudder the thought!
And on that happy note, thanks for joining The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, February 21, 2025. Keep smiling as you pay your taxes this year. Tell yourself it’s for a good cause!
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