Summary
Elon Musk claims to have saved taxpayers $105 billion, but its own figures add up to just $19 billion.
A New York Times report found DOGE falsely credited itself for long-canceled contracts, including a 2005 Coast Guard contract.
DOGE’s inexperienced staff, many tied to Musk’s companies, may be unqualified to understand complex government programs. Mistakes could be deadly, with one former USAID staffer warning tens of thousands of lives may be lost.
The Times alleged DOGE has been removing erroneous “savings” from its wall of receipts just to replace the mess-ups with new errors.
Meh, close enough! Drinks for everyone!
I get that math is hard to some people, but every computer I’ve used has had a calculator of some sort.
Unless you let AI do the math…
DOGE’s inexperienced staff, many tied to Musk’s companies, may be unqualified to understand complex government programs. Mistakes could be deadly, with one former USAID staffer warning tens of thousands of lives may be lost.
Yeah, but are any of those lives billionaires? Then who cares? -Dogebags, probably.
Are these tools using LLMs for their math?
Measuring the savings is pointless as they were not cut for the money but for the perceived merit to musk and trump. Parroting their stated motivations seems harmful.
It’s like he’s writing a performance report and desperately trying to pad the bullet points because he doesn’t have enough to fill the required “what have you accomplished” area.
The point is to undermine their authority in the eyes of those who believe the propaganda. If they are continuously fucking up and costing money then you may get say a state level clerk telling them to fuck off when they inevitably try to fuck with the states, a clerk who may have allowed them to do some very damaging shit
Cmon guys. The math adds up.
19 billion saved for the plebians, 86 billion saved for himself.
Whatever happened to Andrew Yang? That guy could math so much harder than these guys
DOGE’s inexperienced staff, many tied to Musk’s companies, may be unqualified to understand complex government programs.
Yes AND they are doing this on purpose. Evil fucks are trying to lie to their followers who will most likely eat that shit up.
Musk describing something as bigger than it really is? Color me surprised.
Damn, the ketamine really is freeing his mind! Freeing it to be worse in every way, that is.
ketamine is like rocket fuel for the brain. unfortunately his brain is less of a rocket and more of a 3-cylinder Lada.
Even if it adds up to 19 billion, it will never be that number. There are costs to terminating a contract, usually requiring compensation for all materials bought or produced, as well as overhead costs related to the contract. There is a reason that contracts exist and it’s to disincentivize the dissolution of an agreement… Termination for convenience is not cheap.
That’s not even getting into lawsuits related to direct employee terminations.
And at the end, this is for what? What benefit do we get from tearing up contracts that are half completed and half paid for? What benefit is there in laying off people that wanted to serve and in many cases took a pay cut to do it, knowing that the trafeoff is stability of their employer and the knowledge that they are helping the country.
knowing that the tradeoff is stability of their employer
This shit will haunt us after I die. Trust has been shattered. Good luck calculating the cost of that.
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.
-1984
1984 is really 2025
even the date of the year had become uncertain.
oh *snap*!
We’re not quite there yet, but you can definitely see the direct line to get there at this point and we’re running down it.
Is our reality part of a failed Austin Powers script?
I am sorely disappointed in the lack of machine gun jubblies if so.
Maybe that’s why it failed
Elon Musk claims to have saved taxpayers $105 billion
So we’re gonna be getting all of the money he saved us back as a tax rebate, right?
…right?
Yea, the whole.ten.dollars.
You’re welcome!
DOGE’s inexperienced staff, many tied to Musk’s companies, may be unqualified to understand complex government programs.
😲 the hell you say!
The fact they actually put “may” in there is insulting to readers. We KNOW They are totally and completly unqualified for 99.99% of the work they are doing.
