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If only there were professionals we could pay to go into an organization and find waste, fraud, and abuse so we wouldn't have to rely on people like @ricwe123 on X.

Ah, yes, there are. They're called auditors. They audited USAID 4 months ago.

The entire US government spent only $7.7MM on Politico over the last 12 months. Oooo spooky stuff, if only there was a way to see what for! Turns out there is. You can scroll down and see the shocking revelation that the US government paid a news publication for subscriptions to a news publication!

Similar to how if you work in the energy industry, for example, a smart employer would pay for energy trade publications so you can do your job better.

https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/fa0cefae-7cfb-881d-29c...

In fact you can drill down all the way to individual line items. Here's the 49 subscriptions to Politico Pro that HHS, an organization with 83,500 employees, purchased. Looks suuuuper abusive... /s

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75F40120P00453_75...

> to deny that Elon is competent

Please show evidence of Elon being a competent public sector financial auditor. Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?




Millions of dollars worth of subscriptions for reporting on government press releases with added spin seems like a great example of waste to me... The government shouldn't be paying any media outlets purely due to the conflict of interest, regardless.

> Or are we to believe that competence is just arbitrarily cross-applicable?

I would wager that even you are more competent than the average auditor, assuming you know how to program. I'm seeing a lot of appeals to authority and credentialism, and assumptions that people who are hired by bureaucrats and politicians to audit themselves have better aligned incentives than a wildcard entrepreneur. If we can't agree on the fundamental axioms, I don't see this conversation going anywhere.




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