DOGE Is Doing the Opposite of Government Auditing

Katie Drummond: Right, available to the public, as opposed to DOGE, despite the claims that Musk and even President Trump have made, that this is a maximally transparent group of people doing this work. We don’t actually know that much about what they’re doing, what they’re finding, and the changes that they’re making, short of journalists like you and so many of your WIRED colleagues and other news organizations obtaining that information and publishing it. Now, I want to back up a little bit because at the heart of all of this is this notion of fraud, of waste, of financial abuse. It’s something that Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed is widespread, pervasive across government agencies that there is fraudulent spending, there is excessive waste happening. There is abuse of financial power, financial authority on the part of these agencies. Now, from what you’ve reported over the last several months and in your role, how valid is that claim to begin with?

Vittoria Elliott: There was a report from the government accountability office that covered the years 2018 to 2022, and that found that there’s actually over $200 billion of waste, fraud, or abuse that happens. So it’s like, it’s not this made up thing, but in the context of a $7 trillion federal budget, that is not what’s breaking the bank. I don’t think anyone, Democrat or Republican, DOGE fan or not, would argue that, hey, that’s a problem that we need to solve. That’s a very valuable thing. But one of the auditors that I spoke to basically said DOGE could go look at the current recommendations from the IGs. They could go look at the current outstanding investigations. They could pick up that work if they are really dedicated to this because there actually are systems, and there actually are reports about this. But from what the auditors I spoke to said, they said that doesn’t really seem to be what DOGE is doing. And one of the other things they said was a lot of auditors would probably be really happy to help them, to offer advice. They’d be happy to work with them, they’d be happy to bring young talent into their teams to sort of make the auditing system more robust. But DOGE is really kind of siloed, it doesn’t seem like they’re really interested in that.

Katie Drummond: Right. Now, speaking of DOGE and the auditors that you spoke to for this story, they certainly didn’t have kind words to say about how DOGE is going about its work. Tell us a little bit more about their impressions of DOGE and their commentary on sort of what is happening under the auspices of this idea that Musk and DOGE are essentially auditing the federal government. What do the actual auditors think about that?

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, so to give some context, first off, a regular audit, which involves like five different steps, so there are five steps to an audit. One is where you plan it, you sit down, you say, “This is what we’re looking at, this is the kind of information we’re going to need to go after.” You sort of map out who the stakeholders are, who you’re going to have to interview, because a lot of times they’re going into programs or systems that maybe they don’t fully understand. So, it’s almost a little ethnographic. You got to go in, you got to interview people, you got to be like, “What is your job? What does this connect to? What does this mean inside your system?” You have to do that baseline understanding of getting to know the program or the agency. Then you do the actual field work, which is, you go out, you talk to people. In the case of, for instance, the hurricane stuff, they actually sent auditors, I believe, to Puerto Rico to see what was going on. You go into the systems, you do that kind of human on the ground legwork. Once you’ve done that, they sort of pull all this information together into a report, they sort of do this analysis. They talk to the agencies, they say like, “Hey, these are the problems we found. You have the opportunity to correct these. These are our recommendations.” And then they submit that to the agencies, to Congress, and then they get to follow up. They get to come back and be like, “Hey, we recommended this thing. Did you fix this problem?” There’s a level of accountability for trying to fix that thing. So, there are very clear understandings within the government of what the best practice of this is, and all of these people do that. That takes six to 18 months.