Very official-looking
The bird with the pointed stick represents
accountants and their reports to congress
The GAO (Government Accountability Office) is a congressional agency. It is not an executive branch agency under djt's or Musk's control. The GAO is an investigative agency that finds and reports annually on fraud, waste and abuse in government spending and operations. Being under the control of congress, it is not subject to direct attack by DOGE and MAGA thugs. Will the GAO investigate DOGE for waste, fraud and abuse committed by DOGE? That is an interesting question. Wall Street On Parade reports:
There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor
Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
For more than a century [the GAO] has been doing the work that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been pretending to do, that is, competently root out fraud, waste and abuse in federal government programs without leaving a dangerous trail of chaos that threatens national security, personal privacy and the U.S. Constitution.
If Elon Musk is sincerely interested in efficiency and government savings, why is he duplicating the work of the non-partisan GAO – while doing it in a grossly subpar and deeply conflicted manner?**
**Grossly subpar? That’s an understatement. Deeply conflicted? That’s a statement!
On February 12, the GAO confirmed by written letter that it will pursue the request for an investigation made by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee, and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, into how and why DOGE accessed the Treasury’s payment system.
According to the outstanding research and reporting on DOGE at Wired, Musk seems to be more interested in using the DOGE.gov website to generate traffic to his X social medium platform, than he is in conducting himself in a non-conflicted, professional manner.
Last Thursday, Wired reported this:“A WIRED review of the [DOGE.gov] page’s source code shows that the promotion of Musk’s own platform went deeper than replicating the posts on the homepage. The source code shows that the site’s canonical tags direct search engines to x.com rather than DOGE.gov.“A canonical tag is a snippet of code that tells search engines what the authoritative version of a website is. It is typically used by sites with multiple pages as a search engine optimization tactic, to avoid their search ranking being diluted.“In DOGE’s case, however, the code is informing search engines that when people search for content found on DOGE.gov, they should not show those pages in search results, but should instead display the posts on X.”After Musk promised for days to put DOGE’s “receipts” of savings on the DOGE.gov website, today that page shows $55 billion in savings thus far. The bulk of that appears to be from firing federal workers and canceling building leases, not fraud detection.That there is fraud, waste and abuse in federal government programs is not some epiphany handed down from the heavens to Elon Musk and Donald Trump. GAO has been reporting that fact every year for decades.
As recently as April of last year, GAO reported that “annual federal losses due to fraud are estimated to be between $233 billion and $521 billion based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022….”
The GAO report also notes, however, that “The estimated losses represent about 3 to 7 percent of average federal obligations for fiscal years 2018 through 2022” and these fraud losses “are generally in line with fraud estimates” by foreign governments, including studies from the United Kingdom’s Public Sector Fraud Authority. (emphasis added)
The degree of criminality that both djt and Musk routinely operate with is staggering. And it is blatant. Repubs in congress are silent and therefore complicit in the criminality and needless, vast waste that djt, Musk and MAGA elites are causing. djt has immunity for his crimes and he can and probably will pardon Musk and all other MAGA elites that get caught in lawbreaking. The Constitution and rule of law are almost completely irrelevant in terms of being a source of accountability for large-scale MAGA criminality.
A huge partisan fight is coming real soon,
assuming it hasn't already started!
Obviously, Repubs do not want the GAO to investigate DOGE. There is going to be a gigantic partisan fight this year over who and what the next Comptroller General (CG) of the GAO will be. The current CG's 15 year term in office expires in 2025. The CG has to be someone who the Dem and Repub leadership in the House and Senate approve of. Since the GAO was created in 1921, congress gave increasing responsibility on the agency to serve as a watchdog and a check on executive power. Initially, the GAO's principal goal was to get control of wasteful tax dollar spending after World War I. Congress directed the agency to find “efficiency in public expenditures” and gave it broad statutory investigative powers. Improved efficiency in public expenditures and evidence of corruption are the absolute last things congressional Repubs want to see made public. All or nearly all of them are authoritarian, kleptocratic, complicit and up to their eyeballs in MAGA's kleptocratic sleazefest.
So, the Repubs will very likely pick a thoroughly corrupt MAGA zealot, while the Dems will probably pick someone reasonably competent, comparatively honest and mostly independent. Given the vast Dem and Repub mindset differences, a reasonable democratic compromise looks to be extremely unlikely. One side or the other will probably have to cave in.
2025 is definitely going to be a very interesting year for politics. Heck, it already has been.
