“We’re getting noticed,” said Seto Baghdoyan, director of forensic audits and investigative services on the GAO, in an interview with
The documents don’t offer a crystal ball into Musk’s plans, but they suggest a blueprint, or not less than an indicator, of where his newly formed and largely unaccountable task force is trying to make cuts.
DOGE’s footprint in Washington has quickly grown. Its members are reportedly establishing shop on the Department of Health and Human Services, the Labor Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which provides storm warnings and fishery management programs), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The developments have triggered lawsuits, including allegations that DOGE is violating data privacy rules and that its “buyout” offers to federal employees are illegal.
When citing the GAO reports in conversations on X, Musk and DOGE supporters sometimes blur together terms like “fraud,” “waste,” and “abuse.” But they’ve distinct meanings for the GAO.
The office found that the US government made an estimated $236 billion in improper payments within the 12 months ending September 2023—payments that shouldn’t have occurred. Overpayments make up nearly three-quarters of those, and the share of the cash that gets recovered from any such mistake is within the “low single digits” for many programs, Baghdoyan says. Others are payments that didn’t have proper documentation.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean fraud, where a criminal offense occurred. Measuring that’s more complicated.
“An [improper payment] be the results of fraud and due to this fact, fraud could possibly be included within the estimate,” says Hannah Padilla, director of monetary management and assurance on the GAO. But on the time the estimates of improper payments are prepared, it’s not possible to say how much of the full has been misappropriated. That may take years for courts to find out. In other words, “improper payment” implies that something clearly went flawed, but not necessarily that anyone willfully misrepresented anything to profit from it.
Then there’s waste. “Waste is anything that the one that’s speaking thinks just isn’t a great use of presidency money,” says Jetson Leder-Luis, an economist at Boston University who researches fraudulent federal payments. Defining such waste just isn’t within the purview of the GAO. It’s a subjective category, and one which covers much of Musk’s criticism of what he sees as politically motivated or “woke” spending.
