Quote:Elon Musk wrote a long post today explaining the changes that have been jointly agreed by the Treasury Department and DOGE.
Musk also revealed that there is $100 billion being spent every year on entitlements to people without social security numbers. He polled the people at Treasury and the consensus is that about half of it is fraudulent.
He did credit the working level people, saying they’ve been wanting to do something about this fraud for years but were stopped by prior management.
Here’s what Musk said:

Quote:To be clear, what the @DOGEteam and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following:
– Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.
– All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!
– The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.
The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already!
Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.
When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!!
This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.

Responding to someone who asked how Treasury can be aware of this much fraud and not do anything about it, Musk said:

Quote:Nobody in Treasury management cared enough before. I do want to credit the working level people in Treasury who have wanted to do this for many years, but have been stopped by prior management.
Everything at Treasury was geared towards complain minimization. People we receive money don’t complain, but people who don’t receive money (especially fraudsters) complain very loudly, so the fraud was allowed to continue.