Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Americans vastly overestimate the amount of waste in the budget
Former DOGE employee Sahil Lavingia spoke to NPR:
I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent. And the reason is — I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.
The government has been under sort of a magnifying glass for decades. And so I think, generally, I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was. This isn't to say that it can't be made more efficient — elimination of paper, elimination of faxing — but these aren't necessarily fraud, waste and abuse. These are just rooms to modernize and improve the U.S. federal government into the 21st century.
