Musk is trying to say DOGE is the ‘Good Guys’?

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought said in a 2023 video obtained by ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Meanwhile, President Trump has stood by Musk, defending his work overhauling the government and defending him as a person and a businessman. The White House has gone to bat for Tesla too, including when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick encouraged Americans to buy Tesla’s struggling stock.

But, critics think the efforts to defend Musk and improve his image won’t help change Americans’ minds, given the outrage critics have about his work.

“No amount of spin can change what Americans are feeling first-hand from the devastating impact that Elon Musk’s DOGE is having on everything from Social Security to national parks. The damage is done and Americans know that Musk, Trump, and their cronies’ DOGE efforts are designed to enrich themselves at the cost of everyday Americans,” said Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, a nonpartisan government watchdog.

He added, “It’s a message we will continue to reinforce as DOGE grows even more extreme.” ….

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Musk  issue’s with ‘his’ fraud claims by the US Government…

The below NY Times linked piece points to the inaccuracies in DOGE’s accounting and Musk’s baost’s of savings his people ‘say’ they have pushed on Departements and Agencies of the Government….

 

Elon Musk, the billionaire leading a government efficiency initiative, has for weeks made broad and unsupported claims of rampant fraud in federal spending.

In a series of interviews on conservative podcasts and television interviews, Mr. Musk has defended attempts by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to target popular entitlement programs like Social Security and access sensitive payment systems with a series of inaccurate claims. A representative for DOGE did not respond when asked for evidence of Mr. Musk’s claims.

Here’s a fact-check….

Federal law bars unauthorized immigrants from receiving Social Security or Medicare benefits, as well as most other federal government assistance programs, but they do pay taxes. (Immigrants, including those who those received asylum, refugee or humanitarian parole status, may be eligible for more programs.)

In a 2013 report, the Social Security Administration estimated that 3.1 million unauthorized immigrants were working and paying Social Security taxes, contributing about $12 billion to the trust in 2010 and about $100 billion over a decade. A 2016 study estimated that unauthorized immigrants contributed about $35.1 billion to Medicare from 2000 to 2011.

A 2024 study from the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank, found that unauthorized immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, including $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $6.4 billion Medicare taxes….

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Mr. Musk repeatedly misrepresented the findings of that 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office.

The watchdog agency projected that the federal government lost between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to detected and undetected fraud during the 2018 to 2022 fiscal years. The estimate also was governmentwide, and not limited to fraud in entitlement programs or fraud committed using false Social Security numbers. The report gave several other examples of fraud like falsifying invoices, trafficking benefits and overbilling.

It was unclear whether Mr. Musk was arguing that the report was issued under the Biden administration or if all the fraud occurred under the Biden administration, but the time covered in the report included about three years under the Trump administration and over a year and a half under the Biden administration….

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A federal judge in New York in late February barred members of the DOGE team from regaining access to the sensitive payment systems operated by the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, but Mr. Musk continues to criticize one of those systems.

The Payment Automation Manager, or PAM, is a payment processing system developed over a decade ago to streamline payments across the government and standardize fiscal data to provide better transparency. It issues checks and deposits for the vast majority of federal payments including Social Security benefits and tax refunds. PAM processed over $4.7 trillion in payments in the 2024 fiscal year.

Government watchdogs have found issues with payment traceability across the federal government, and specific ledger lines in PAM may not include the level of detail Mr. Musk is requesting. But he is wrong that those payments amount to “untraceable blank checks” and Mr. Musk has provided no evidence that omitting those details has caused $100 billion annually in improper payments….

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Neither the Government Accountability Office nor Mr. Krause has estimated that lack of reporting detail in PAM leads to $100 billion annually in improper payments….

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In a social media post this month, DOGE wrote that the Interior Department was dissolving its Federal Consulting Group, a little-known directorate that since 1987 has provided and procured consulting, executive coaching and survey services for other agencies. According to the post, the group had brokered a $75 million contract to design satisfaction surveys, and DOGE said it had canceled $830 million in unsigned “similar contracts” to be awarded by the group.

But there is no single contract for one 10-question web survey worth $75 million, let alone $830 million or $1 billion listed in DOGE’s own list of terminated contracts as of Monday….

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