X owner Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy are set to unleash DOGE (The Department of Government Efficiency) onto the federal government.
Trump said in a statement that Musk and Ramaswamy “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
A recent article in The New York Post provides a few ideas on where they can start.
From The New York Post:
John Hart, CEO of watchdog Open the Books, which monitors fiscal waste, told The Post they will curb “spending that has been on autopilot where there’s no real thought or purpose behind it.”
Dead people cashing in
In 2023, the federal government shipped $1.3 billion in checks to dead people from the IRS, Medicare and assorted veterans groups, according to RealClear Investigations.
According to Hart, it could easily be stopped. “The Treasury Department has a do-not-pay list. These people should all be on it. But there is no cross-checking between the agencies paying out and the Treasury,” he said.
Behind-bars benefits
Prisoners thought to still be free and out of work received $171 million in unemployment payments or Social Security in 2023. Medicaid and Medicare also sent out $101 billion in improper payments, largely due to fraud, and tax cheats took the IRS for at least $546 million.
Russian cat research
In 2021, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded $549,000 to a Russian lab performing experiments on cats, including removing part of their brains and seeing if they could still walk on treadmills, according to the Washington Times.
