Viral Waste

The Times investigation found that Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency first approached U.S.A.I.D. as a source of useful anecdotes of what it called “viral waste” - government spending that seemed foolish, and could be exploited to support the case for cuts.

From the start, DOGE has declared that its mission has included fighting fraud, and there are now multiple examples where DOGE teams have been directed to go into agencies and find something salacious that Elon Musk or Trump could tweet about as confirmation of the view that government is riddled with waste and fraud. Unfortunately, many of these examples turn out to be DOGE misunderstanding the data rather than finding a problem:

2025-01-28: The White House press secretary reports the astounding statistic that USAID spent $50 million on condoms for the Gaza Strip. This figure was actually for a variety of family planning services (largely birth control medication) and, more importantly, it was for the Gaza province in Mozambique.
2025-02-06: DOGE staff analyzing payments at the Treasury Bureau of Fiscal Services find examples of payments being sent to people without Social Security Numbers or who appear in other cases to be dead. This leads to Elon Musk proclaiming the team had found “massive fraud”. A DOGE team was immediately dispatched to SSA where agency staff wrote a detailed memo explaining that the issue was DOGE misunderstanding the data. But that analysis was immediately dismissed by CIO Mike Russo who declared he couldn’t trust any federal staff and instead assigned the investigaton to Akash Bobba. Mr. Bobba’s investigation found nothing.
2025-02-16: Elon Musk posts a tweet claiming that DOGE had uncovered that there were millions of people older than 120 who were collecting social security payments. “Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” he joked. The problem of missing death data was real, but that didn’t mean they were all receiving benefits - Social Security automatically stops payments for people older than 115, and recent audits did find that up to 24,000 people being paid erroneously after their deaths, but that focused on improving verification processes rather than cleaning the data in NUMIDENT, which was seen as a lot of labor and risk for no real benefits. Nevertheless, that is exactly what DOGE worked on doing at SSA.
2025-03-27: In an interview on FOX News, Aram Moghaddassi mangles a statistic that 40% of SSA fraud involved a call to a service center to change direct deposit information. He instead announces that 40% of all calls to service centers are for fraudulent purposes, a wild misinterpretation which gets amplified across conservative media and the White House refuses to correct. As a result of this, DOGE institutes a new system for fraud checking all phone calls. Later analysis by SSA finds that only 2 out of 110,000 claims analyzed might have been fraudulent and that the system had slowed claims processing by 25% and introduced other service degradations.
2025-04-01: During campaign rallies in Wisconsin, Elon Musk and Antonio Gracias publish a chart claiming to show an increase in social security numbers being granted to noncitizens as evidence of voting fraud or benefits fraud by immigrants. The problem is that these numbers are necessary for immigrants to work in roles, and are used for paying taxes rather than receiving benefits, and the statistics were from a program to replace a more cumbersome process for assigning SSN IDs. Based on this interpretation, the Trump Administration argued for a change where applicants would have to instead visit an already overstretched field office, a change that is likely to both reduce tax income from immigrant workers and increase the per-person cost from $8 to $51,000.
Sahil Lavingia reported that while he was working on projects at the VA, he was ordered to drop all other work to investigate a 137-year-old who was receiving disability payments. After calling around, he finds a VA engineer who offers to cross-check the person in another database. The person is actually 75, and the error was likely caused by how a field was set in a database rather than actual fraud. He reported that DOGE found no other fraud at VA while he was there.

You might notice that many of these examples are from the SSA, illustrating the vicious cycle that is kicked off by DOGE’s conviction that waste and fraud are rampant. An initial accusation leads to a swarm of DOGE engineers descending on the agency. Those engineers then make further mistakes when trying to find other fraud. Which leads to more DOGE pressure on the agency, with experts sidelined and ignored when they attempt to correct the record. All of this leads to wasted work and deliberate falsehoods as DOGE makes claims without any investigation and then refuses to admit that it made a mistake.