by James Varney, Real Clear Investigations:
As Elon Musk and his tech team urge their fellow Americans to become “domestic auditors” to help rein in federal spending, people have been encouraged to use the Treasury Department’s usaspending.gov website to identify and track government finance.
But usaspending.gov is wrong on the biggest picture, RealClearInvestigations found.
The total amount of spending across “all agencies,” as recorded at usaspending.gov, appears to be 50% higher than most experts interviewed for this article think it actually was.
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In Fiscal Year 2024, for instance, the website pegs total spending at $9.7 trillion, when several experts said it was probably around $6.5 trillion. No one could explain the much bigger figure. Officials with usaspending.gov conceded to RCI that their totals were wrong and said the error, which shows up in similar fashion for the last five fiscal years would be fixed soon. They offered neither an explanation for their higher total nor an estimate of what it should be. Two weeks later, the erroneous figures remain.
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Budget experts say the website’s seeming multi-trillion-dollar error illustrates a core challenge Musk and his colleagues at the Department of Government Efficiency face as they try to reduce Washington’s spending. In a twist on the classic Washington line, the problem is not just following the money but finding it in the first place. The federal government has become so big and so expensive that even experts have trouble navigating the morass of contracts, awards, grants, loans, and other items that have transformed the U.S. spreadsheet into a labyrinth pitted with dead ends and rabbit holes.
The federal budget chainsaw massacre? Maybe, but Elon Musk has a problem: not just following the money but finding it in the first place. DOGE’s real accomplishment so far has simply been to bring attention to the federal government’s broken accounting systems.
“When you see the process has become so arcane even I don’t claim these are real, hard numbers, then you know the process is definitely and irreparably FUBAR,” said David Ditch, using the acronym for “fouled up beyond all repair.” He spent years poring over federal budgets and spending at the conservative Heritage Foundation before moving this month to the Economic Policy Innovation Center.
Musk’s job may strike everyday Americans as ordinary in the sense that he’s trying to balance accounts, but Washington is a different animal, and several experts told RCI it stays that way on purpose. The complexity and layers Musk’s team has encountered are a feature, not a bug, according to this view.
“Federal government spending is nebulous and almost designed to be that way because no one person benefits from it being straightforward,” said Lydia Mashburn Newman, a managing director at the American Institute for Economic Research. “No one is trying to get a holistic picture of what this or that agency is doing and the way money gets appropriated is very fragmented.”
Newman has seen the beast from two sides, as a congressional aide and federal worker, and she says the comprehensive nature of DOGE is something new under the sun for the Washington bureaucracy.
Read More @ RealClearInvestigations.com
Originally Posted at https://www.sgtreport.com