Yves here. Trump opponents are slowly regaining their footing at least as far as messaging is concerned. Here we see DOGE’s central claim, that it is rooting out waste and fraud, not holding up to scrutiny. The numbers tossed about as results are pathetically small, and the instances, as documented below, are not for fraud but merely for initiatives that were authorized and budgeted in the Biden or earlier eras. Musk and his minions are depicting their kneecapping as evidence of bad earlier action, when the reality in nearly all cases in the show of brute force in halting spending is a violation of statute or other provisions. Or rather, Trump is following Nixon: “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
Another DOGE plan presented as rooting out corruption is to identify Federal employees whose apparent net worth is excessive compared to their income. That’s all well and good, but guess who is supposed to be in that business? The IRS, for the purpose of finding underreported income and collecting taxes, interest, and penalties. And what has limited that effort? Republicans blocking efforts by the IRS to increase staffing (which BTW would also lead to more agents to answer questions and process tax returns on a timely basis). And they would improve compliance and root out misconduct like money laundering across all America, not just Federal employees. So this is close to being asking for sympathy for being an orphan after having killed your parents.
Remember as Lambert chronicled in Water Cooler, Musk is setting up a parallel government. The Democrats are nowhere to be found in doing much about that. Better messaging is nice but falls way short of what ought to be happening.
By Jake Johnson, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made a show Wednesday of providing “receipts” to bolster the Trump administration’s claim that an Elon Musk-led advisory commission known as DOGE has already uncovered massive fraud at federal agencies.
“There’s a lot of paper we can show you,” Leavitt declared.
But a closer look at the evidence Leavitt presented to members of the press underscores the ridiculous sleight of hand the Trump White House is using as it attempts to justify Musk and his lieutenants’ lawless rampage through departments responsible for overseeing the nation’s public education system, dispersing Social Security benefits, and supporting lifesaving medical research, among other critical functions.
The documents Leavitt waved during Wednesday’s briefing were screenshots of contracts purportedly “found” by the Musk-led DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, which has dispatched staffers—many of them with close ties to Musk—across more than a dozen federal agencies.
One of the items Leavitt highlighted was a $36,000 contract for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Another was a roughly $57,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture for climate change mitigation efforts in Sri Lanka.
Neither of those examples, nor any of the others Leavitt cited, constitute evidence of fraud—a point that one reporter pushed the press secretary to address during the briefing Wednesday.
“Are all those things you just mentioned fraud?” asked CBS News reporter Jennifer Jacobs. “Or are they just contrary to the president’s policies?”
Leavitt’s reply indicated to critics that the Trump administration is defining as “fraudulent” programs which it opposes, a narrative that depicts the administration’s attacks on federal agencies and spending as commonsense efforts to rein in abuse—rather than a far-right demolition project spearheaded by an unelected billionaire with glaring conflicts of interest.
“I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent, they are wasteful, and they are an abuse of the American taxpayer’s dollar,” Leavitt insisted. “This is not what the government should be spending money on. It’s contrary to the president’s priorities and agenda.”
Journalist Aaron Rupar wrote in response to Leavitt that “going against Trump’s policies is not fraud.” (The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has estimated that the federal government could lose up to $521 billion to fraud per year, defines fraud as “the act of obtaining something of value through willful misrepresentation, which is determined through a court or other adjudicative system.”)
Watch the press secretary’s remarks:
JACOBS: Are all those things you just mentioned fraud? Or all they just contrary to the president's policies?
LEAVITT: I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent.
(They are not fraudulent.) pic.twitter.com/TMehAQOu3O
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 12, 2025
Journalist and media critic Adam Johnson welcomed the growing push for concrete evidence regarding the large-scale fraud DOGE purports to have revealed during the first 30 days of Trump’s second White House term.
“Musk’s definition of ‘fraud’ is ‘spending priorities duly approved by Congress and previous presidents (including Trump 1.0!) that the richest person on Earth randomly decided he doesn’t like,'” Johnson wrote on social media. “This is obviously not a very honest or useful criteria for ‘fraud’ and thus reporters should frame Musk’s attack on the liberal and administrative state as an ideological project, not one concerned with some type of value-neutral ‘efficiency’ or ‘cost-cutting.'”
Reuters noted Wednesday that “of the 15 agencies Musk’s team have targeted so far, nine were singled out for elimination or downsizing in Project 2025.”
A former Republican staffer acknowledged to Reuters that DOGE’s playbook thus far “has not been for the dollar savings, but more for the philosophical and ideological differences conservatives have with the work these agencies do.”
Since the formal inception of DOGE at the start of Trump’s new term, critics have expressed deep skepticism over the advisory body’s stated mission of identifying and rooting out fraudulent federal spending and regulations, particularly given its leader’s ideological and financial commitments and motivations.
“It’s clearly a bad-faith effort rooted in ignorance and a knee-jerk desire to shrink the federal government, both for ideological reasons and the creation of space to preserve the tax cuts for the rich and corporations that will be locked-in later this year,” Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote last month.
In testimony before the House Oversight Committee earlier this week, Donald Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said that “if President Trump was serious about promoting government efficiency,” he would have “prioritized strengthening… already-existing independent government watchdogs,” such as inspectors general across federal departments.
Instead, Trump fired inspectors general en masse, a move that—according to Sherman—”substantially increases the risk that government waste and fraud will go undetected, and unremediated.”
Even when its stated objectives are taken at face value, DOGE has not lived up to the lofty rhetoric of its leader and boosters inside and outside the Trump administration.
Speaking to reporters with Musk at his side earlier this week, Trump claimed without a shred of evidence that DOGE has already found “tens of billions of dollars” in improper government spending. The president added that “when you get down to it, it’s going to be probably close to a trillion”—Musk’s stated goal.
But The Washington Postnoted that Trump’s figure doesn’t “come anywhere close” to matching numbers DOGE has posted on its X account.
“We added up all the figures posted, taking most of them at face value, though virtually no documentation was presented,” the Post observed. “The numbers add up to about $6 billion a year, though $4 billion comes from a proposed cap on National Institutes of Health research overhead payments to universities, medical centers, and other grant recipients. A judge has blocked that for now.”
The Post‘s Aaron Blake wrote in a column Thursday that “Trump would indeed seem to believe that many things he simply doesn’t like or agree with are fraudulent, which helps explain the White House’s posture right now.”
“But that doesn’t mean they are fraudulent,” he added. “And that’s a problem when you’re using that as your justification for dismantling large portions of the government.”
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Thank you for your excellent reporting at Naked Capitalism. Please keep up the good work you do.
Does bringing back the Railroad Baron economy + mass deporting “illegals” mean that Jane and Joe Citizen are the new “immigrant labor”? Asking for a few friends.
Hmmm,
If the President does it, it’s “legal”
If the President doesn’t like it, it’s “fraud”
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We seem to have developed a government “of men”, rather than “of laws”
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Get those seeds started. I’ve read that dacha gardens, especially potatoes, in the hinterlands around towns and cities in Russian Federation significantly diminished the food insecurity in that country in the depths of its ’90s crises. Similar precautions might be prudent in US, and in any event, gardening and outdoor work in general is good for physical and mental health.
I’ll add, in connection with the “shrink the Federal government” agenda mentioned in the post, that I’ve been wondering whether this (as it seems to me) ham-fisted combination of apparent attempts at spending reductions and the threats of tariffs is in some sense an acknowledgment of implications of the sectoral balances identity, that the Federal Government deficit is a mirror image of the non-Federal government surplus (and that surplus is dominated by the external sector surplus, which is approximately the US trade deficit). You can’t shrink the Federal deficit without also shrinking the trade deficit (granting that the US non-government sector cannot persist in deficit for long).
But trying to do this with shock therapy seems to me sure to have lots of unintended consequences, very few of which are likely to be welcome.
I hope that there is opportunity for discussion of Yanis Varoufakis’ hypothesis about the thinking behind the policies that was linked yesterday’s Water Cooler.
Get those seeds started, yes. Parsnips too, and they have added value as they can be left in the ground for a spring harvest.
Our Fedco order went into the coop this am.
Plant a little extra for your neighbors or the food bank.
Good luck all
Heat mats and the long LED gro-light are already hooked-up in the greenhouse for starting seeds.
Fraud is “…the act of obtaining something of value through willful misrepresentation, which is determined through a court or other adjudicative system.” Sounds familiar.
Taibbi had an interesting piece last night where it’s been identified that 20 billion in EPA funding got pushed out to a financial agent (Citibank) in September ahead of Trump’s presidency. Financial agent agreements themselves aren’t unusual, but it would seem the implicit reason was to keep the money off the federal books where it would be easier to spot and freeze. The specific allocations of that money looks kind of suspect to me (5 billion to the “Clean Communities Investment Accelerator”). Maybe this is a case of even an ideologue being correct twice a day.
Once again, thank you for being a voice of sanity that can point out in detail the failings of the Republicans and the Democrats.
An aside: I wonder now if federal employees, when it’s time to vote, will rethink their support of the two party system, when one party demonizes them and the other does so little to support them.
Or will this mean the Dems can offer even thinner gruel in the future?