Of all the nonvital issues lefty rags like Wired would have me worry about, audits of government spending conducted by Elon Musk's Department of Government not measuring up to Washington's strict standards (cough, cough) is so far down the list that I ran out of witty metaphors.
Yet here we are.
Before I take you into that Wired report, let me share the latest news about what Musk calls Washington's "Magic Money Computers" because it's a story that the legacy dinosaur media seems to have somehow missed but that plays directly into Wired's story.
Appearing on Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-Tex.) podcast earlier this week, Musk described "one of the biggest scam/fraud hauls we've uncovered — which is crazy — is that the government can give money to a so-called 'non-profit' with very few controls and there's no auditing subsequently of that non-profit."
That much you probably knew already, thanks to DOGE and Data Republican's online database. But then Musk detailed "a 'magic money computer,' any computer which can just make money out of thin air."
"It just issues payments. And you said there’s something like 11 of these computers at the Treasury that are sending out trillions in payments? They’re mostly at the Treasury. Some are at HHS, some—there’s one or two at State. There’s some at DoD. I think we’ve found now 14 magic money computers. They just send money out of nothing."
Sounds like something a government auditor might be interested in, yes?
Yeah, about them.
Wired's Vittoria Elliott found two anonymous federal auditors "with years of experience" who "say that DOGE’s actions are the furthest thing from what an actual audit looks like."
“Honestly, comparing real auditing to what DOGE is doing, there’s no comparison,” one of the auditors told Wired. “None of them are auditors.”
Allow me please to ask one simple question of Wired's anonymous inside sources: "How's that auditing been workin' out for ya?" I ask because based on DOGE's discoveries, a federal auditor wouldn't know a fraudulent payment if it ended up in his own wallet — not that I'm implying anything actionable in a civil court. I'm just having a little fun at the expense of the professionally incompetent.
Even the Wired report had to admit that "a Government Accountability Office study published in 2024 estimated that the government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud each year." Auditors can estimate all that fraud, you see, followed up by... what, exactly?
But then Elliott simply waved all that away, describing those hundreds of billions each year as mere "instances of government money siphoned off to fraud" that "wouldn’t amount to the $1 trillion Musk hopes to cut from the budget."
Wired waved away up to [dr_evil_voice] HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS [/dr_evil_voice] in annual waste and fraud. Auditors admit to trillions in waste every few years and... do nothing. Wired is arguably worse, making excuses. I wish I were privileged enough to apply some magical handwavium to that much money, but I'm not a lefty or a government auditor.
It's enough to make you wonder if a government auditor's real job is to play Sergeant Schultz — I know nothing! I see nothing! — regarding anything auditable in the way D.C.'s magic money computers spit out tax dollars.
Musk told Cruz that the rot runs "many layers deep" and that "the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers and see what’s going on."
Now that sounds like a real audit.
"So, that’s what I call, sort of cryptically refer to 'reprogramming The Matrix,' you have to understand what’s going at the computers. You have to reconcile the computer databases in order to identify the waste and fraud."
If only Washington had had real auditors to figure this stuff out before the amateurs came in to do their jobs for them.
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