Keeping up with the DOGE news
I can’t keep up – there’s too much news breaking every day. But I try.
This seems important. Some of it isn’t due to payments to people perpetrating fraud, but some definitely is. At the very least, we seem to have utterly incompetent bookkeeping. How much is merely that and how much is payment to people perpetrating fraud? Either way, it’s shocking:
On Wednesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) held her DOGE subcommittee hearing and announced it has discovered that over the past 20 years, the U.S. government has squandered $2.7 trillion on improper payments. Just last year alone, the government handed out $170 billion to individuals who were deceased, criminals, or otherwise ineligible for government programs.
Even more alarming, the government made $44 billion in payments with no clear record of where the money actually went — officials simply don’t know.
Medicare and Medicaid are the biggest culprits when it comes to these improper payments. The Biden administration lost a staggering $764 billion due to a combination of inaccurate record-keeping, bureaucratic incompetence, and outright fraud.
This has been going on under presidents from both parties. No one seemed to have the power and energy – and in some cases, even the inclination – to look into it. Before we had computers, it would have been difficult – well-nigh impossible – to search thoroughly. But we’ve had computers for a long time.
Remember the old adage, “good enough for government work”? This isn’t good enough – even for government work.
And what’s up with the limestone mine? Yes, the limestone mine (and I linked to Yahoo because they’re not known for being sympathetic to any causes on the right, and nevertheless they’re covering this):
In a press conference in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, said that the US government stores and processes all retirement paperwork in a limestone mine.But he added: “We were told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000 because all the retirement paperwork is written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine.”
Musk said: “Instead of working in a mineshaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine, you could do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way.”
DOGE’s X account later published photos of the facility.
I’m surprised they haven’t enlisted monks to be scribes.
This is actually not news, although it was news to me and probably to you. But the article mentions that:
A 2014 Washington Post report said 600 Office of Personnel Management workers processed federal employees’ retirement papers by hand at the site, with them passing thousands of case files from cavern to cavern.
The manual process continues to operate because of successive administrations’ failures to automate it, the outlet said, delaying how fast workers receive their full retirement benefits.
The left is trying very hard to stir up outrage about what DOGE is doing, with stories like this one, parts of which seem bogus. But yes, I am pretty sure that DOGE is causing some hardship. But something needed to be done, and it’s been needed for a long, long time.
In addition, although this isn’t a DOGE action, it’s along the same lines. From Lee Zeldin:
?The Biden EPA tossed $20 billion of “gold bars off the Titanic”.
BIG UPDATE! We found the gold bars and they are now being recovered for you, the hardworking American taxpayer.
Here are more of the details: pic.twitter.com/DM4C0TQcpj
— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) February 13, 2025
This Ricochet member actually once worked in the underground paper mine:
https://ricochet.com/1782211/doge-is-coming-the-eye-of-elon-swivels-to-the-mines-of-moria/
I am excited about possibility of explaining how our politicians became multi millionaires in short periods of time.
Perhaps the culprits are even more excited.
I suspect that all the IT systems in the government is outdated. Add old accounting programs and so on. This would not be acceptable for any NYSE registered company. I hope that DOGE recommends dramatic changes to the systems.
Having so many personnel files still on paper and in file cabinets is a bit outdated.
However, keeping it all safe and sound inside a literal stone mountain is not such a bad idea.
After all, it’s where all the important government people plan to go when the SHTF for real.
Doesn’t every business send records somewhere for disaster management. Boeing sends their stuff to Iron Mountain too. Dealt with this over PII.
First Interview as HHS Secretary – RFK Jr interviewed Thr Night by Laura Ingrahm – Video
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/02/first-interview-as-hhs-secretary-rfk-jr.html
The people who work in that mine are most likely Trump voters.
If Elon can fix this, he deserves space on Mt. Rushmore.
Meanwhile
https://x.com/ConnieHair/status/1890189817046294733
Unrelated
https://x.com/i/web/status/1888175854397567313
On another front
https://www.nysun.com/article/un-balks-at-trump-move-to-deny-an-illegitimate-icc-prosecutor-entry-to-america?seyid=51212?lctg=1434349307&recognized_email=eaortiz1069%40gmail.com&newsletter-access&utm_source=MG&utm_medium=email-newsletter&utm_campaign=Morning%20Sun%20%202025-02-14
Dave Begley on February 14, 2025 at 8:32 am said:
If Elon can fix this, he deserves space on Mt. Rushmore.
_____________________________________________
What’s happening here? No more Cornhead?
Even a genius can get distracted chasing a shiny object that appears to confirm the ultimate example of government waste and inefficiency. The real story of USG record keeping at Iron Mountain is about long-term archival storage. Whether retirement records of USG personnel need the extraordinary long-term archival storage they receive at Iron Mountain is debatable but the ’73 St Louis fire that destroyed millions of veterans records is a good example of why OPM uses Iron Mountain.
Salena Zito explains what she’s learned from visiting OPM’s archival storage room in the Washington Examiner. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/3318785/complicated-story-iron-mountain/
Fifty years after the St Louis fire, the AP wrote about the ongoing impact on veterans and their families from the record destruction. https://apnews.com/article/military-records-fire-veterans-2f8337c58bc87c10179a2cf6ee54136a
Multiple attempts to modernize and automate USG record-keeping from Clinton to Obama have failed. IMHO that’s where the DOGE guys could put their exceptional coding skills to work. The need for secure archival storage is probably not going to change.
The National Archives details more of the story of what was lost or damaged in the ’73 fire and what has been done to recover or reconstruct as much as possible.
https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973
I look at all the wailing and gnashing among the Democrat’s as simply more proof that the phrase “… the party of government” is insufficient to describe reality.
The Democratic Party and the vast amorphous mass of the federal bureaucracy are joined at the hip. The few Republicans are not leavening, they’re absolutely insignificant. Trump and his Cabinet and maybe one layer down minions don’t have a prayer of moving that mess in a different direction. He recognizes this, which is why he is using the fact of waste and inefficiency as a club to reduce the size of the blob drastically, hopefully to the point where it is, literally, manageable.
And BTW, the fire is becoming more insignificant every day. The youngest person affected is 87 today.
“space on Mt. Rushmore”
No, no, no. Mt. Rushmore is Borglum’s art work. We have no right to alter it.
@Chases Eagles:Mt. Rushmore is Borglum’s art work. We have no right to alter it.
Except maybe to chisel them off. Is there anything more Communist than sculpting a mountain into the image of our Great Leaders’ glorious heads? George Washington would have slapped Borglum into the ground for suggesting it. (And one of those heads is not like the others, little bit of recency bias there.)
@crasey:Multiple attempts to modernize and automate USG record-keeping from Clinton to Obama have failed. IMHO that’s where the DOGE guys could put their exceptional coding skills to work. The need for secure archival storage is probably not going to change.
Nobody has really wanted to change it. Too many paychecks depend on keeping it as it is. There are fifty state governments who need to keep records, many comparable to an entire European nation in population, how many of them have hollowed-out mountains in which to do so? How many European nations have needed a hollowed-out mountain to keep their records in? (I will give you Switzerland, their National Redoubt hollowed out of the Alps probably has storage for government archives.)
One refreshing thing about the second Trump administration is the exposure of a lot of bullshit accepted as conventional wisdom.
Maybe the euros use the same mines the nazis stashed their loot in.
Incidentally, what makes it harder to keep up with DOGE news is the inaccuracy and confusion of the reporting on DOGE activities, sometimes by people who deliberately want to cause as much fear, uncertainty, and doubt as possible. And sometimes by people who are in favor what DOGE is doing.
I would recommend that anything you read about DOGE, click through to the source material (if any) before believing it. An example is anything you read in the legacy media about what an executive order says or does. They have always lied about anything they didn’t like (e. g. “Don’t Say Gay” in Florida, which did none of the things they said it was going to do) , or liked a lot.
Yep thems the mean kids
https://fxtwitter.com/cb_doge/status/1890120471032869151
Swisher is one of the leading deplatforming hacks
Niketas Choniates, The Washington Post wrote about the same problem in 2014. https://archive.is/8Q5HX#selection-879.0-879.220
” in 1958, the U.S. government was in the market for storage space. It needed 30,000 square feet to hold personnel files that were being relocated from a building in Washington. Officials looked at buildings in Richmond, Va., and Syracuse, N.Y., before choosing this place, an underground complex where 1,000 workers had once cut limestone to feed the steel mills.
The government moved its old records here in 1960. At first, it was just a file room. Records were shipped to Washington for processing. But over time, the government began to hire more people to work in the mine itself.”
The rest is a quick read that answers many of your questions. Iron Mountain the company serves something like 60+ countries and thousands of customers in 1500+ facilities worldwide. Only a handful are underground. https://www.ironmountain.com/resources/landing-pages/i/iron-mountain-virtual-facility-tours
The Post does a good job of explaining what happens there, why it’s important to retirees, why it takes anywhere from 1 hr to several weeks to ensure each retiree’s record is complete and accurate.
The USG has spent $100’s of millions trying to marry and/or replace paper and computers with only marginal improvements. Some problems are hard. Contractors propose expensive solutions. Many dollars later contracts are cancelled and the process starts again with a new proposal and more dollars.
We can spend dollars to move the OPM retirement section above ground in leased or owned space and then spend more dollars for archival storage of whatever records they process but it’s unlikely to be cheaper and more effective than the abandoned mine the USG chose in 1958, but if it is let’s do it.
Bush retainer once in charge of USAID insists everything was ship shape.
When I retired from the fed gov I was due a lump sum for a specialized benefit. The amount was not in question, and there was nothing being contested. It took 8 months for the amount to electronically transfer into my account.
Dave Begley on February 14, 2025 at 8:32 am said:
“If Elon can fix this, he deserves space on Mt. Rushmore.”
Or at least on Iron Mountain. Or on some rocky crag on the Moon or Mars.
@crasey:The Post does a good job of explaining what happens there, why it’s important to retirees, why it takes anywhere from 1 hr to several weeks to ensure each retiree’s record is complete and accurate.
Then how on Earth do the rest of us retire? I can confirm that tens of millions of people who have never worked for FedGov have nonetheless retired, grown old, and died without a problem, and without needing Iron Mountain to store their paper files.