$1B/week in Unequivocal and Obvious Fraud

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Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.

When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!!

This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.

Elon Musk @elonmusk
Posted on X, February 8, 2025

Tar, feathers, and rail rides are too good for them. We need prosecutors and “hanging” judges.

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29 thoughts on “$1B/week in Unequivocal and Obvious Fraud”

  2. Might we also enquire who would authorize such payments? One party to the crime is applying for money they should not be getting.
    And another one is authorizing it.
    I think they will find like they did with USAID. The money wasn’t going anywhere near the “label”, used to name it. 90% “administrative” cost. 10% to the street.
    Pam Bondi is going to be a busy girl.
    And as for the courts worry of “big balls”, stealing private information to use for himself later? I say the kid couldn’t possibly steal anything near what has been/is being stolen already.
    As for “private information”. You’all let the freaking Chinese have it already! And God only knows who else.
    Maybe Trump will grow an even bigger pair and tell us who actually “owns”, the federal reserve banking corporation?
    Wouldn’t that be nice to know.

  4. “If accurate” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that post.

    Musk has already demonstrated that much of his ire is directed at departments investigating his own companies for fraud, so I basically believe nothing he says. If you really think there’s fraud in a financial system, you send in accountants, not 20 year-old techbros.

    • The Feds have long had an interest in tracking financials in order to find and prosecute criminals. “Follow the money” works for them, too. With the “Global War on Terror” following 9/11, a lot of that ramped up and went international. Then during the Obama years, in the wake of the flaming cluster that was Obamacare, additional money-tracking software was mandated and implemented to fight fraud. It was largely unused, and all but forgotten, deliberately ignored because fraud in support of Your Guys ™ is OK, because no measure is wrong if you are fighting Team Evil (the other guys).

      Much of what DOGE is doing is simply having smart guys who know these system already exist run bank account transaction tracing to make money-flow connections, like a web-crawler tracing links to map who is connected to whom. They are not genius hackers who are breaking into systems and writing things from whole cloth. They knew it existed, how it worked, and how to efficiently extract those connections from the mass of data it had.

      Yes, Musk has milked government contracts for all their worth, and played more than a little fast and loose in the gray areas. That said, he appears to be highly incentivized to be useful to the new administration. Do most of us on the Tin Foil Right trust him as far as we can throw a cybertruck? Nope. But he can still be useful, and expose fraud that needs to be revealed, and like Trump he’s the sort of showman who can do it.

      If you are the sort who doesn’t think there is massive fraud and waste in FedGov spending, then I’m wasting my time saying this, but hope springs eternal that you will see the light some day at just how much of a “Truman Show” the mainstream narrative you appear to believe really is.

      • Oh, I’m fully aware that the government is full of fraud and waste, no need to convince me of that. Or of the fact that the corporate media doesn’t cover it because it’s boring.

        However: “Much of what DOGE is doing is simply having smart guys who know these system already exist run bank account transaction tracing to make money-flow connections”

        Many of these systems are old crusty things barnacled on top of older crustier things, with spaghetti code that takes months to begin to understand much less audit or modify. I’d be shocked to hear that there was any real capability to do real transaction tracing. What motivation does some bureaucrat in the Treasury have to implement auditing systems that are just going to get used to make his life harder? Do we have evidence those systems were implemented, and are fully functional?

        When I was at Expedia one of the things that drove me nuts was the extent to which the travel industry is still running on really old crappy systems that are too mission critical to revise on the fly, and for which real updating is made exponentially more difficult because of all the thousands of external parties who have to tie into those systems. Even *within* Expedia they were running old Oracle code that everybody knew was garbage, but couldn’t be touched because doing so posed a direct threat to daily revenue. Yes, they always talked about updating it, and maybe by now they have (been a few years since I was there), but at the time it was obvious to me that it would take a lot of people a long time to study the code and get it updated to modern standards and functionality.

        So then I translate that to a government, where they’re even less motivated to update, and I think, “yeah, that’s not something a 20 year old raised on React Native or Swift is going to grok in a few weeks.”

        • Yes, it’s layers of crusty hacks on top of old layers of bad code. The beauty is that they don’t need to change the system, just track how much gets transferred, where from, and where to, meaning the basic datasets generated by the transfers are far more important than the various back end details of “how.”

          The “exciting” part of it is if they screw up, they might break the entire FedGov payment processing system entirely.

          If would be good if they could claw most of this back: https://usawatchdog.com/missing-21-trillion-means-federal-government-is-lawless-dr-mark-skidmore/

        • I really like this! “The fact that the corporate media doesn’t cover [government fraud and waste] because it’s boring.”
          No, the corporate media doesn’t cover government fraud and waste because they support that fraud and waste, some of which goes right into their pockets!

    • If Elon is not accurate, I expect professional journalists will discover this and report on it within a day or two at most.

      Let me know if you see something.

    • “Musk has already demonstrated that much of his ire is directed at departments investigating his own companies for fraud, so I basically believe nothing he says. If you really think there’s fraud in a financial system, you send in accountants, not 20 year-old techbros.”
      Think Musk might be pissed off at being ripped off and investigated like the rest of us?
      You’re pointing at the candy bar thief, while the manager is ripping of billions.
      And the only thing that matters in that “crusty” old system is who got what, through where.

      “Oh, I’m fully aware that the government is full of fraud and waste, no need to convince me of that. Or of the fact that the corporate media doesn’t cover it because it’s boring”
      So, you and media know of all the fraud and abuse that’s going on. But no big deal, why bother, “it’s boring”?????
      Do you have a clue of the murder and misery those “boring”, criminal acts have cost humanity across this globe over the last 60 years?
      And all you can do is complain about how and who exposed it?
      And the media don’t cover it because it’s a major revenue stream for them.

      • Well, first off it’s the corporate media that finds it “boring” to report on financial corruption, not me. You read that wrong.

        Secondly, I think it does matter that unelected people are being given control over core government systems. If the tables were turned you’d be losing your shit about it. Imagine Bernie Sanders gets elected and decides to tap George Soros and his crack team of 20-year-old DEI experts to root out corruption in the government, and just happens to focus on organizations that irritate him. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be sitting back saying “well, as long as the corruption gets found, who cares who and how they do it?”

        What you think is corruption somebody else thinks is justified spending. Letting your local billionaire decide which is which is crazy.

        • Well, I will say that Musk made an interesting statement when he detailed what he found when they had to root out fraudsters that were causing problems in his early PayPal operations. In essence, he said that if something was flagged that was wrongly flagged, the aggrieved party was mostly patient and understanding as they worked with the PayPal staff to get it corrected. However, when they made a hit on actual fraudulent activity, those related to that fraud very quickly became unhinged because they knew that they were in serious trouble for their actions. I think there is good reason to believe that such indications are reputable indicators of behavior. Here is a link to an X post that I think does an exceptional job of laying out how and why DOGE is proceeding in the way it is. https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1887257546211115429?t=1YyB8bQD4Kmhddv3nRQW_g&s=09
          I believe that it will not be too long before incontrovertible evidence is found that will result in serious prosecutions and there won’t be a few of them either.

        • “Letting your local billionaire decide which is which is crazy.”
          You mean like Soros, Gates, Bloomberg, Etc. were doing?
          You mean that kind of which is which?
          I tried to warn you before, hypocrisy is a bitch.

  5. Unfortunately I expect as the pendulum swings back in the quest to find and eliminate fraud a LOT of people who are supposed to get monthly checks will get cut off for a variety of reasons and suffer interminably while the bureaucracy grinds slowly in terms of correcting it’s mistakes.

  6. Quite a few Democrats openly attacking DOGE, effectively coming out in support of the fraud, waste, and abuse… they should probably do a quick google search on French history… and be happy that their funding is the only thing getting cut off.

  7. By shutting down USAID we’re basically giving China a big wet kiss on the lips, plus handing them one of our primary forms of soft power in the world. This guy has a fairly concise explanation of why giving people food is a good thing:

    https://www.instagram.com/reel/DF3btguScSe/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

    Sure, there’s probably also some corruption to be dealt with. But talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater….

    • Musk isn’t shutting down or doing anything. Trump is. Musk is gathering data/proof of fraud.
      “Boring” is your word. The media isn’t bored. They’re freaking out like a box of rats and spiders dumped into a school girl pajama party.
      You wonder how I would feel about Bernie and some snot-nosed commies going after the rest of us? Where you been for the last 4 years? The only difference in Bernie and Biden is Bernie can still complete a sentence.
      And Biden was using drag-queer-luggage-thieving- pedophiles. And geeks not so much.
      As for China, they need to go back and read Sun Tzu, no faster way to kick their ass than to hand them the rest of the world.
      And dude. I’m trying real hard not to like Trump. But what you and the media are whining about? Is an excellent sales pitch.
      I’m starting to warm up to the guy.
      The commies literally took their shot and missed. And now they lost legitimacy that ain’t coming back.
      And something the communists need to understand bigtime. Trump is being a lot nicer than what was going to happen to us all if the CIA-globo-homo’s would have installed Harris.
      That was a shooting war the communist had already lost.

    • “By shutting down USAID we’re basically giving China a big wet kiss on the lips.”
      You mean like Biden had been doing to China’s butt this whole time?

    • USAID doesn’t feed a single person who isn’t already an employee. The money goes to the governments – you know, the rich tyrants who enjoy making people suffer.

    • “Sure, there’s probably also some corruption to be dealt with.”

      The only time I have ever seen any data on our food giving to the rest of the world is when it is mentioned that it is found being SOLD in the countries that have received it. Not much ever gets to the purported “people in need”. It may not be a scam here where it starts, but it sure is out in the real world. Too damn many hands between the US and the needy. It ends up being a joke, and we don’t look good to anyone outside the US as a result.

      • “The only time I have ever seen any data on our food giving to the rest of the world is when it is mentioned that it is found being SOLD”

        Sure, because that’s the only time when it’s a story. If everything goes normally, nobody reports on it ’cause that’s boring. “If it bleeds it leads” concept of journalism.

        • If that’s all you can say for USAID?
          I’m with J.D.Vance on this one. ” I don’t really care, Margaret.”
          Nor should we. We’ve known (even if you haven’t), that 90% of all aid goes to bureaucrats and thieves, and always has.
          F’em.

          • Much of why the U.S. has been the world leader for so long has been our “soft power” projection by economic means. Our military is impressive, our economy moreso. And our willingness to help other countries has meant access to those countries’ resources and land, which means open markets for our corporations and open land for our military bases. Do you like modern technology? Much of it exists because of mineral deposits we get from Africa, and many of those countries we get it from are allies because we give them aid through USAID. Does some of that money get misappropriated? Probably, and we should push on that. But cutting off aid entirely is a great way to cut off *our* access to natural resources we need to keep our own economy running. Lithium, anyone?

            https://miner.africa/2024/12/02/rare-minerals-in-african-soil-next-steps-for-exploration/

            Take away that goodwill and give it to China, and suddenly we’re well on our way to being Britain: a declining world power who’s no longer in the captain’s chair.

            Foreign policy is a complicated, nuanced thing. Responding to the needs of potential allies with “fuck ’em” is not a recipe for success. China already has a plan in place to take over our position in the world economy, I’d rather not hand it to them on a silver platter.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative

            You should read some Peter Zeihan. Or watch his YouTube vids. He does a great job of boiling down a lot of these issues and explaining their interconnections.

            https://www.youtube.com/@ZeihanonGeopolitics

            • It’s absolutely moronic to think you can buy friends in governments.
              Leaders, of all countries, are snakes. They shake your hand? Better count your fingers afterward.
              And the British “empire”, was doomed from the start because it wanted to be an empire.
              And having worked in mining most of my life, I’m qualified to say that we need almost NOTHING from outside our own country to have the society we have.
              And if we would have stuck to honesty and meritocracy? What little we needed we could purchase from others without all the waste and fraud. And end up a whole lot better off as a nation.
              “Foreign policy is a complicated, nuanced thing.”
              Only if you want to be a moronic empire controlling everything.
              But not if you mind your own business. And take care of your own people first.

              • Ya, I’d hate to think of what someone who only met diplomats and business people from America would think of us.
                Same as us getting everyone else’s criminals dump here, I guess.

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