Incompetent vs. crooked: DC's rotten system revealed by Musk

But despite all the hoopla, what’s actually going on is straightforward stuff that most people probably — but wrongly — assumed the government was doing all along. - Glenn H. Reynolds 

DC wastes how much of budget?
Musk wrote on X Saturday that DOGE and the Treasury Department have agreed to take the following steps:

• All outgoing payments must have a categorization code in order to be paid. That’s supposed to already happen, but Musk has found the code is often left blank, making audits nearly impossible...
• Musk went on to express disbelief that more than $100 billion worth of entitlements every year are going to “individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.”...

Yes, the government is big. 

And of course when you’re writing lots of checks, there will be some errors.
But the system should be designed to minimize mistakes and catch them when they happen, not to make them easy and undetectable.

• Generally, when auditors find that an organization’s accounting system makes errors easy to commit and difficult to spot, they assume the system is designed that way because it is intended to facilitate fraud.
• Maybe that’s not true here. Maybe the federal government is simply incompetent.

If that’s the case, though, then maybe it shouldn’t get so much of our money...