From the people who make “self-driving” cars
Did Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers never have to produce answers for grades?
David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine reported last week how Musk’s DOGEes “repeatedly posted error-filled data that inflated its success at saving taxpayer money. ” Called out on it by people who don’t reflexively believe what’s spit out by a computer, DOGE has made its exaggerated claims impossible to reality-check. They removed embedded identifiers from their “wall of receipts”:
The New York Times, at first, found a way around the group’s obfuscation. That is because Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded the federal identification numbers of these grants in the publicly available source code. The Times used those numbers to match DOGE’s claims with reality, and to discover that they contained the same kind of errors that it had made in the past.
And then the identifying codes were gone. Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, tells the Times, “They responded by giving less information publicly, so that it’s harder to question them … without doing anything to suggest that they’re actually correcting the mistakes, or learning from them.”
But the Times had downloaded what was live before DOGE stripped the data. The paper’s team used it to match savings claims with the actual programs.
At least five of the 20 largest “savings” appeared to be exaggerated, according to federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list.
The largest item on the list was savings of $1.75 billion, which the group said it achieved by cutting a U.S. Agency for International Development grant. But the organization that got the grant — a public-health nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — said that information was wrong twice over.
For one, the grant had not been terminated. Second, the government had already paid out all the money it owed. So even if the grant had been terminated, the savings would have been $0.
In other cases, Mr. Musk’s group seemed to misunderstand a key figure in U.S.A.I.D. grants.
Nonprofits said these grants often contain a ceiling value — an upper limit on what the government might pay. But the groups said that this top amount is not always guaranteed. In some cases, the actual payments are worked out separately, they said, and often total far less.
“It’s not a promise, in any sense,” said Traci Baird, the chief executive of a nonprofit called EngenderHealth.
There’s more in the reporting, including the White House claiming that terminating the grants saves what might have been spent, blah, blah, blah.
In other words, the DOGE naifs don’t know what they’re looking at and don’t know that they don’t know. Or don’t care, if it hastens the techbro efforts to install a techno-monarchy and quash “political dissent [using] algorithms that no citizen can vote against and no court can oversee,” warns The UnPopulist:
If we do not act now, we may wake up one day to find that democracy was not overthrown in a dramatic coup—but simply deleted, line by line, from the code that governs our lives.
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