I'm very sure that there is a lot of spending that is used inefficiently. Any large organization does run into that problem. Resolving some issues, cutting red tape, making processes more efficient, all that is probably a good idea. However, "DOGE" and those cheering them on have not produced any evidence for the vast majority of the claims they made. Often they also just misrepresented facts (e.g., USAID supposedly funding media sites, condoms in Gaza and many other nonsense) or simply lied. I also don't see much promotion of actual nuanced views on the topic like the Hamilton Project's tracker of federal expenditures which you can find here: https://www.hamiltonproject.org/data/tracking-federal-expend...
At the moment, the US government seems to be mainly focused on causing headlines to make their base happy who want quick victories and have not shown resilience to simplistic takes, and - of course - to make the opposition party and their supporters panic.
And what qualities of an audit would you trust from a department that acts like that? They’re not, for example, combining all prior audits into a sophisticated longitudinal audit research tool. They’ve prepared their conclusions to hold even if they misplace three orders of magnitude.
I believe the audit stuff is overblown [1], there are strict requirements for passing and it doesn’t mean the money is literally disappearing into a black hole. I don’t have every Chipotle receipt saved in the past year but that doesn’t mean my spending is mysterious. I assume that’s why being audited by the IRS is considered a nightmare, it’s nontrivial.
It seems the Pentagon audit process only started in 2018, and Congress gave a deadline of 2028 to pass a fully clean audit, which they have made progress on:
> Of the 28 military agencies, DoD leaders think 11 are expected to receive clean audit opinions, one more than the previous fiscal year.
There are plenty of charts based on public budgets, you can pick your favorite. How shall we judge whether transparency is improved? What if all of this results in less transparency?
Your question can be answered without giving away control and access to unauthorised and inexperienced auditors.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance has been missing. Too many decades of nepotism, insider trading, corruption ( starting with lobbying ), have led to the lack of transparency. The movie “The Big Short” has explained some of these issues.
Don't mistake obliviousness for a conspiracy. The vast majority of the doge savings link straight to the Federal Procurement Data System that anyone can search or ingest from. You're of course free to disagree with the spending but if you weren't even aware you could look at these contracts then maybe you should ask if you're being shown the whole picture or if it's closer to a politically motivated hit job on our civil servants.
And one could peruse that under any administration. The challenge for an honest DOGE is that they must do better than 100% of past Federal efficiency policy, which is maybe a hundred incremental changes[0]. If they cause _any_ problems that those fixed, then they’re at best not up to the job and maybe even deserving cynicism.
