Well the never ending saga of DOGE access continues. Now the issue is access to the IRS database of all Americans and their tax information which of course includes addresses, social security numbers, etc; quite literally all the items people are constantly worried will be released in a data breach may now be accessible to Elon’s GEN Z coder clowns, once again without any legitimate reason behind why that would be. Let’s be blunt. Having access to the detailed individual info, whether it is read-only or not, isn’t actually necessary to identify fraud or waste. One could be looking for overview compilations of data without any of the personal identifiers. For example:
One could be seeing how many people filed tax returns with a specific type tax ID number without revealing a social security number. My understanding is people in the country illegally can still file a tax return and pay taxes without having a legal SSN. Would be nice to know the impact of getting rid of all of them wouldn’t it? One could be running a program to see what the average % paid in federal tax is by income level. Oh I forget, we don’t want to know how many rich people aren’t paying the right amount for their tax bracket through all of the outs available to them in our tax code. We’d rather say “half of Americans don’t pay income tax” casting that as horrendous fraud when it’s quite likely all of their adjusted gross incomes are such that they shouldn’t be. You really think fraud by the poor amounts to a significant impact vs. tax avoidance by the top 1%?
Perhaps this would make more sense if two things happened. One- contrary to Elon’s BS commentaries about “transparency” if in each department’s case, DOGE explains up front what they are going to look for, at or whatever. That hasn’t been done in any case. We just post completely non fact supported posts on X about our latest hysterical conclusion about the level of fraud, waste or something without EVER involving someone from the department who might actually understand the data. But don’t worry we’ll have AI analyze it. Oh wait, AI is only as good as those that program it and when those programming it know absolutely nothing about the computer system or department they are analyzing, well you can see what that will get you.
Second, why are we afraid to let the people in the departments in question investigate and fix whatever trends we find in the macro data analysis? That’s their job and they know how to do that better than the complete novices being tasked with drawing conclusions.
Don’t believe me? So how did we fire a bunch of employees associated with our nuclear weapons stockpile without knowing what they actually did, then struggle to contact them to say we’re just kidding you’re not fired, because our crack team of sleuths failed to have contact information for those they fired? They just used an email. How incredibly stupid, but not only that, incredibly dangerous when things like the nuclear stockpile are concerned. Same thing with firing any number of people that were part of the group working on avian flu. Why worry about that right? After all, we’re killing millions of chickens and egg prices are through the roof but so what? Buy Greenland! MAGA-C. Make America Get A Clue.