Katie Drummond: Yes, despite claims made by Musk and even President Trump, it is a group of people doing the job. We don’t actually understand what they do, what they find, and the changes they make, rather than journalists like you and many of your cable colleagues and other news organizations getting that information and posting it. Now, I want to back up a little bit, because at the heart of all this is the concept of fraud, waste, economic abuse. Elon Musk repeatedly claims that this is universal, with fraudulent spending between government agencies and excessive waste. These institutions abuse their financial power, financial power. Now, based on your reports over the past few months and in your role, how effective is the claim?
Vittoria Elliott: A report from the Government Accountability Office covers 2018-2022 and found that more than $200 billion in waste, fraud or abuse actually occurred. So, it’s not like that, but in the context of a $7 trillion federal budget, it’s not everything is destroying banks. I don’t think anyone, Democrat or Republican, have fans or not, will say, hey, this is the problem we need to solve. That is a very valuable thing. But one of the auditors I spoke to basically said that Doge can take a look at the current recommendations of IGS. They can take a look at the outstanding surveys at present. If they really work on this, they can choose this work because there is actually a system and there are actually reports about this. But, from the auditors I spoke to, they said it doesn’t seem like Doge is doing anything. One other thing they say is that a lot of auditors may be really happy to advise them. They are happy to work with them, and they are happy to bring young talents to their teams to make the audit system stronger. But Doge is indeed a little lonely, and it seems they are not interested in it.
Katie Drummond: Correct. Now, when it comes to Doge and the auditors you talk to for this story, they certainly have no good things about how Doge works. Tell us more about their impression of Doge and the comments that happened under their auspices of the idea that Musk and Doge are essentially auditing the federal government. How do actual auditors view this?
Vittoria Elliott: Yes, there are some regular reviews first, involving five different steps, so there are five steps to review. One is where you plan it, you sit down and say, “This is what we are looking at, this is the kind of information we need to pursue.” You can map out who the stakeholders are and the people you will have to interview because a lot of the time they will go into programs or systems that may not be fully understood. So it’s almost an ethnography. You have to go in, you have to interview people, you have to be like, “What is your job? What is this connected? What does this mean within your system?” You have to have a baseline understanding of understanding the program or agency. Then you do the actual field work, i.e., you go out and talk to people. For example, for the hurricane stuff, I think they actually sent an auditor to Puerto Rico to see what was going on. You go into the system and do this on the ground. After this is done, they concentrate all this information into the report and they do this analysis. They talk to the agency and they are like, “Hey, this is the problem we found. You have a chance to correct these issues. These are our suggestions.” Then they submit it to the agency, Congress, and then follow up. They came back and said, “Hey, we recommended this. Did you solve this problem?” There is a sense of responsibility to try to solve the problem. So the government has a very clear understanding of best practices in government, and all of them do it. This takes six to 18 months.
