For decades, government watchdogs and budget oversight experts have been trying to get someone — anyone — to listen to them about the need to root out waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending, frustrated that their calls for systemic change were going unheard by Washington.
Many were cautiously optimistic when President Donald Trump empowered billionaire Elon Musk to bring improper spending under control and to modernize outrageously outdated federal payments systems.
But in interviews with half a dozen of these watchdogs, most said this isn’t what they had in mind.
The breakneck upheaval of federal agencies spearheaded by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has needlessly politicized the issue and could make it harder to enact the real changes needed to root out improper spending, five good-government experts said.
“Elon Musk is saying we’ve got shocking amounts of fraud, and you’re right, we do. No one’s really cared until now,” said fraud prevention expert Linda Miller, a former senior staff member for Congress’ independent Government Accountability Office during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
“But the examples they’re bringing are silly, made-for-TV red meat, made for people to be amazed and horrified and shocked,” Miller continued, pointing to some diversity, equity and inclusion-related arts projects on the White House’s list of objectionable U.S. Agency for International Development programs, some of which weren’t actually funded by the agency. “It makes the government sound like it’s a mockery.”
Trump defended DOGE’s efforts during a press briefing with Musk this week, saying without specifics that the group has unearthed “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Miller and other oversight experts said Musk has highlighted some legitimate, long-standing problems that the federal government has failed to address under both parties. Among them are the need to improve the government’s “Do Not Pay” system to check whether people are deceased or barred from receiving federal payments because they are blocked foreign nationals from countries under U.S. sanctions, for example.
Posting on X, Musk noted the need for the “Do Not Pay” system’s list of ineligible people to be updated far more frequently, among other oversight changes he has proposed. “There’s crazy things, like, just a cursory examination of Social Security and we’ve got people in there that are about 150 years old,” Musk said during a Wednesday press briefing.
The experts also pointed to the staggering scale of the problem. Last year, the Government Accountability Office said that in 2023, the federal government made an estimated $236 billion in improper payments, which includes those that were higher and lower than they should have been.
“There is absolutely waste, fraud and abuse, and there are improper payments, and there are inefficiencies,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, director of government affairs at the Project On Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “And they just come up with all kinds of reasons that basically come down to ‘It’s too hard, and we don’t want to do it.’”
At a House oversight hearing this week, Hedtler-Gaudette and other expert witnesses proposed improving tracking and reporting requirements for federal spending and strengthening identity and asset verification, among other changes, mentioning massive fraud in Covid relief programs as evidence of the pressing need for change.
Oversight experts say there is an important distinction between potential criminal activity like fraud and self-dealing and the far broader, inherently subjective category of waste — a difference that has often gotten muddied in the administration’s claims about its cost-cutting efforts.
Both Musk and Trump have claimed that DOGE has unearthed sweeping fraud and corruption inside federal agencies without providing specific evidence. Instead, the official DOGE website has largely highlighted the elimination of “wasteful contracts” related to DEI, climate change, consulting and media.
“Waste is in the eye of the beholder — that’s a political issue,” said Bob Westbrooks, a former inspector general for the federal government during the Obama and first Trump administrations. “We’re conflating the difference between waste and fraud, I think, in an irresponsible and reckless way. It’s causing agencies to be shut down. It’s causing people to lose their jobs.”
The Trump administration has cited the problem of widespread government “waste, fraud and abuse” in its efforts to halt the work of USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other agencies, as well as to lay off thousands of federal employees. DOGE’s rapid efforts to upend agencies prompted a wave of legal challenges alleging a lack of transparency and data privacy violations; the lawsuits are pending.
Some oversight experts and budget watchdogs have welcomed Musk’s effort given the deep-seated failures of the federal government to solve the real problems with improper payments.
“The tire has so many holes in it — you can’t fix it anymore,” said Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, an anti-fraud company, who also testified before Congress on the issue this week. “You’ve got people that are just brilliant — they’ve done things that others haven’t. I would give them a whack at it.”
Haywood stressed, though, that the overarching goal should be not only to prevent improper payments like fraud, but also to ensure that government works for those who deserve federal assistance and have been stymied by bureaucratic hurdles.
“People depend on government — government is super important, and nobody wants to be tortured with systems and processes,” he said. “Anyone who can fix this we need to have in there.”
But others warned that tearing apart federal agencies in the name of rooting out improper spending could end up backfiring, both by undermining DOGE’s credibility and encouraging Trump and Musk’s critics to overlook the real problem of improper spending.
“The way to do this is not go in and break things,” said Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a fiscally conservative budget watchdog, who criticized the administration’s firing of more than a dozen federal inspectors general, who conduct nonpartisan oversight of agencies.
“Those are the people who should have been their allies. And instead, they’ve now alienated them,” he said.
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