Please provide a good cite for these claims. All I see is some random website from a website in Pakistan and a NY Times article calling the claim about funding Politico a conspiracy theory.
Becker and Johnson’s claims are false. The only payments received by Politico LLC from USAID were for two subscriptions to *E&E—*an energy and environment publication it produces—totaling $44,000 over two years.
According to USAspending.gov, an official source for U.S. government expenditure data—and the resource used by Becker in his post—Politico received $8.2 million in total payments in the previous 12 months. However, payments from USAID are a small fraction of that total. Of the two payments from the agency, only one was in that timeframe.
Please provide a cit for this other than Nancy Mace screaming offensive terms in a committee hearing.
As someone who works in government, I’ve got some opinions.
There are elements of government that fundamentally do not make money (most in fact), and if people are looking at them from a P&L sort of mindset, they’re always going to be easy targets. And the trick is figuring out what’s reasonable funding for that department to do their jobs very well without overly enriching them or fattening them up.
Another thing that often trips people up when they observe government is that people are motivated differently. In the private world, most are motivated by not getting fired, and a privileged few are motivated with incentives, etc… In government incentives are hard to come by (due to fairness/review leveling processes) and firings are as hard to come by due to civil service regulations, etc… So people are motivated by their desire to do the job, not by carrots and sticks. Which makes things work at a different pace. Not necessarily a bad one, but to private sector people it looks abominably lazy, because people aren’t running around out of abject fear, and nor are they working to get incentive pay. People think this is akin to some sort of fraud or malfeasance, but it’s really (IMO) how people should be working. Not killing ourselves trying to scratch a few more bucks, and not worrying about whether you’ll get fired for getting on someone’s wrong side, or not fitting in, or whatever.
I’ll say that it’s nice to come from the corporate world and work somewhere that tends to have a less relentless cost focus. We’re often actually given enough money to do our jobs correctly, and aren’t doing things with bailing wire & duct tape like in the corporate world because the bean counters have decided that since we’re a cost center, we can get by with less. It’s awfully nice to actually have decent stuff to work with, instead of the most bargain-basement crap the company can find. Stuff like pens and notepads don’t have to be whatever the absolute cheapest that Office Depot can source from the most obscure Vietnamese factories. We can actually use normal, run-of-the-mill pens that work well for once in my career.
Actual waste is something that we should look out for, but it’s often hard to identify, because like I was saying, one person’s waste is buying Papermate pens instead of the very cheapest possible. Fraud ought to be rooted out relentlessly, but waste is a lot harder to identify.
Another extremely egregious example of fraudulent funding, imo, involved PPP funding in 2020. That, of course,was during the Trump administration.
Edit to note a lot of that was necessary but a lot was fraudulent. I am a residential contractor, involved in real estate since the early 80s. In 2020 a lot of local real estate firms received over a million dollars each, and then proceeded to make more money that year than any before or after. I haven’t heard about any payback and know for a fact that some of those “loans” were forgiven
A controversial example, for sure, but I believe most US citizens wonder why we are so involved with the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Did we learn nothing in Vietnam? Estimates vary about how much we have spent so far. Apparently 175 billion or more.
I disagree with this statement; we should not be preventing people from starvation simply because we think they’re in some way useful to the US. Helping the needy should be out of altruism, not because it in some way benefits us.
Government budgets are not like personal budgets. The government can and does run on deficit spending far longer than any individual can. People think we can balance the budget by cutting fat- but there really isn’t that much to cut. Imagine a couple sitting around a table trying to figure out how to make ends meet. Imagine the husband saying “we can’t afford to keep spending more than we take in. The first thing we gotta do is cut our income!” That’s exactly what the Republican position has been for a half century. Put the taxes back where they were in the early 1960s would be a tremendous first step toward long term fiscal responsibility.
What exactly are your sources? You do not provide names, let alone links.
First, are we discussing whar most taxpayers think or what you think? Exactly what do you think on this issue?
Second, yes most taxpayesr would think these are examples of waste. Has it been proven that they are? Have these examples even been proven to exist?
You started this thread. You made claims. Either provide cites or withdraw your claims.
Now, we are getting somewhere. Please provide cites and links when you do so.
Do they? Do you have a cite (a reliable poll for example) proving that?
Again, do you have a cite for that figure?
Eliminating waste and fraud is a good thing.
But since the Republicans are the biggest offenders, any effort to actually combat waste and fraud is labeled as “weaponizing” the government, and they can’t have that.
OK. Cool.
We’re still $34 trillion in debt. We still need to fix it. Cutting frivolous spending is a good place to start.
Sounds good. Government spending is dominated by Social Security, Medicare, Defense, and debt service. The rest are all a bunch of much smaller programs that won’t make a dent. So, how many tens of billions do you think congress is willing to cut from those big items?
@BorealisCooper, it appears that your news sources are terrible. Maybe find better ones and come back with cites for your claims as you make them.
These aren’t issues of fraud or waste, though. They’re purely political, and so subject to personal feelings on the appropriate role of government.
What I’ve said before, though, is that far too many people don’t understand what the US gains by a lot of these programs.
Take the Egypt tourism thing, for example. Egypt makes a lot of money from tourism, but in the last decade or so, they’ve had problems with people being concerned about safety while visiting. The US spends a relatively small amount of money promoting tourism, and maybe for improving safety at some of the major sites, and Egypt benefits.
But the US benefits as well. Now, Egypt knows they owe the US. That buys influence. Before Trump started screwing things up, you saw the effect of that with the current situation in Gaza. Egypt was willing to discuss ways to help the situation, because the US had influence. You bought that influence with seemingly unrelated things like this program.
And Ukraine vs. Russia has been discussed to death. $175 billion seems like a lot to us as regular people, but the annual US military budget is almost $900 billion. That’s per year. The US support to Ukraine has averaged about $58 billion per year. So that’s about 6% of your annual budget. And that’s not even really “cash”, most of it has been equipment, a lot of which was scheduled to be decommissioned soon anyways, so the real cost is much lower. And what did you get for that? Well, aside from the benefits of not letting democracy die in Ukraine, you’ve tied up an aggressive rival (some would say enemy) state for three years, bleeding them dry, and demonstrating that they aren’t the massive military power we thought they were. If Russia didn’t have The Bomb, we could destroy them in a week. That’s good to know.
And this is why you have to think before declaring something “wasteful”. And thinking isn’t the strong suit of anyone Trump has hired since January 20th.
Maybe ‘’‘we’‘’ could start by not saying ‘’‘we’re’‘’ going to buy fucking countries?
When spending went crazy after covid, my immediate thought was that it sounded like a license to steal. Which many folk did. I believe many folk felt that risk was worthwhile to prop up the economy. And I believe there has been at leas some effort to identify and recover fraudulently received funds. Do you disagree? Would you have preferred a more measured approach and, if so, at what potential costs to the economy?
As I said above, I believe military spending may well be the single greatest area of waste. How much effort has been made to track down the missing pallets of money - or other spending in our absolutely unjustified excursion into Iraq? I personally believe that supporting Ukraine is worthwhile.
Other of your examples - sex changes and tourism, are minuscule in terms of federal spending, and I guarantee they exist because SOMEONE (obviously not you) and their representatives thought them very worthwhile. You seem to be simply defining fraud and waste as things you do not personally consider important. My personal preferences would be to reduce agricultural and corporate welfare, and to require that both pay for their externalities.
I need a link to specific examples. And then, how about you cite verifiable sources that prove it’s wrong, and just some politician , let alone some www poster, saying it’s not true isn’t a verifiable source.
Thread topic - “Is eliminating govermental waste and fraud a good thing”.
Me - Cutting frivolous spending is a good place to start.
No money has been spent on buying countries yet. Money, however, has been spent on buying electric cars in vietnam. That money was wasteful.
Is it? Is that how Clinton, Obama and Biden reduced the deficit when they were in office? Was frivolous spending how all those Republicans increased the deficit?
I can tell you how those 3Ds reduced the deficit. Growing economy, and no frivolous tax cuts to the wealthy.
Nothing jacks up the deficit like tax cuts and a corked economy.
We don’t endeavor to prove negatives on this message board. It’s incumbent on the person making the assertion to back up that assertion with credible sources.
Again, Cool. The deficit stands. Lots of people in the past messed it up. let’s fix it.
Grow the economy? Cool. Go do it.
And stop spending money on waste and fraud, as is the topic of this thred.
Is this thread about the futile task of eliminating government waste and fraud or the bullshit from the current frauds in the White house are using to get rid of effective government programs so they can waste and steal all that money? Those are two completely different bad ideas.
Topic? Yes. Content? Not so much.