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Speaker 2: Hey, Carrie, this is Robert Ian with conker Change dot com.
This past week, on March twenty seventh, there was an
interview with Elon Musk and about a dozen CEOs who
participate on the DOGE team. Rettbear on Fox News spent
about forty minutes trying to frame the larger picture of
what DOGE is attempting to accomplish. There were many examples
cited regarding systemic inefficiencies, redundancies from computer systems that are
very old, many of which do not communicate with each other,
and outright fraud. The stated goal of DOGE is to
reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars, essentially cutting it
in half, and by extension, cutting federal spending from seven
trillion to six trillion dollars annually, and all of this
supposedly without affecting critical government services. One of the CEOs
on the panel said that the criticisms he's hearing about
DOGE are not lining up with their experience on the ground,
and that those criticisms tend to be more generalized, to
which their response has been which line item of the
cost savings do you disagree with? The messaging was well
presented and I believe will resonate in particular with younger
and more technologically aware segments of the population. However, there
were some rather large unanswered questions that remained throughout the interview,
and I was actually quite surprised that Bret Bair didn't
ask more aggressive follow on questions that would dig deeper
into the ramifications and consequences of what DOGE is certifying
that they have found. In our discussion today, I'll focus
on several of those key follow on questions that Fox
News failed to ask. First, several key findings were presented
that formed the outline of the interview. The centerpiece of
the project revolves around the idea that DOGE is applying
public company standards to the federal government. The CEOs emphasized
that departments of the US government would not be able
to pass a financial audit like the audits that public
companies are required to pass on a regular basis. One
example cited was the NIH that has twenty seven different
centers with twenty seven different chief information officers utilizing seven
hundred different IT systems that apparently can't communicate with one another.
They indicated that forty percent of the phone calls received
by Social Security are from fraudsters who regularly attempt to
convince Social Security representatives to change people's direct deposit information
over the phone. In the efficiency realm, there's a cap
on the number of federal employees who can retire each month,
which is around eight thousand people. The system that houses
retirement records is paper based and uses filing cabinets, which
creates a processing bottleneck for the retirement process. An area
of much concerned discussion and debate is within Social Security.
It was stated there are over fifteen million people over
the age of one hundred and twenty who are marked
as alive in the Social Security system. This has apparently
been known since two thousand and eight. Several days after
the interview aired, the DOGE website indicated there were approximately
twelve million recipients marked is alive over the age of
one hundred twenty nine point nine million of them were
now marked as deceased, with another two million to go,
making the actual number about twelve million instead of the
previously stated fifteen million. People reading through the doge website
at doge dot gov will show a long list of
various contracts being canceled by the auditors. Reminded me of
Senator William Proxmier from Wisconsin, who started the Golden Fleece
Awards during his tenure as a US Senator. Back in
his day, the Golden Fleece Award was considered a sapirical
award given to frivolous research conducted with government grants. I
grew up in Wisconsin and was very familiar with this
branding and marketing stunt used by Proxmire, which resulted in
giggles and winks from the media and voters alike. However,
there are no giggles and winks with the activities of doge.
In some places, there is outright hostility. It's a sad observation,
but in my opinion, most people will not visit the
doge website to read and analyze what is being posted. Sadly,
as with most things, including political items. People tend to
receive their education in sound bites from the media rather
than reading the legislation, reports and websites and ultimately making
their own choices based on the facts they themselves have read.
And when we do listen to people like Elon Musk
and the CEOs who are the new face of DOGE,
we have to listen carefully and not only to what
is said, but what isn't said as well. In the
Brettbear interview, there was no follow on questioning or scrutiny
to an open ended implication that seemed to be left
hanging for the viewer to infer the answer. The inference
I'm referring to is the fifteen million people cited as
alive who were listed as over one hundred twenty years old, which,
as we now know from the DOZE website, is closer
to twelve million people listed as over one hundred twenty.
What was never openly discussed or followed up on is
if those twelve million people were actually receiving monthly Social
Security checks or direct deposits. That's actually a really big
deal because if we assume an average two thousand dollars
a month's Social Security benefit, times twelve months a year.
That's twenty four thousand dollars per year per person. If
we multiply twenty four thousand dollars by twelve million people, well,
I had to turn my calculator on its side to
get it to do the calculation. It comes out to
two hundred and forty billion dollars a year. That's one
fourth of the money Doze is attempting to save. No
discussion was made, and sadly, Brett Baer never asked the
question were those dollars actually being paid out or were
those people simply marked as alive? And if those dollars
were being paid out each month each year, social Security
already has the direct deposit information of the recipients or
the address of record to where the checks were mailed,
so they already know who if anyone committed that fraud.
Where is the discussion from Musk and the various CEOs
on this critical point of analysis. It's one thing to
say twelve million people were marked as alive who weren't
and we've corrected that in the system. It's entirely another
thing to say or imply that up to two hundred
and forty billion dollars a year was going to those
people marked as alive in the system. And if that's
the case, what will be the consequences for those people
that committed that fraud. Despite all of the ludicrous Golden
Fleece Awards style examples now being cited by Doge, there
are major questions that really need to be unpackaged simply
and succinctly, namely, who committed the fraud, how much was
it and what's going to happen to them? Now let's
get a bit more specific, shall we? And until next time,
This is Robert Ian with conquer Change dot com. Thanks Carrie,
thanks for listening to carry Letz's Financial Survival Network, your
solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to
Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network
Speaker 1: Now more than ever,