The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues its work ferreting out crazy programs in foreign countries using US tax dollars for ‘cultural services” and ‘DEI operas” and it is working hard on the homeland fixing processes and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.
DOGE also put out the call to the general public looking for help. If you know of something that should be looking into as far reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, along with any helpful insights or “awesome ideas”, send a direct message to the relevant DOGE affiliates (found on the Affiliates tab of the DOGE website). More affiliates are being added over time.
DOGE efforts in recent days has shown results over many categories of spending and agencies.
Financial Management - There are currently 47 distinct financial management systems across 24 agencies. There are instances of disparate systems occurring even within the same agency (e.g. Homeland Security has 6 separate systems, Treasury has 5, etc.). Sometimes, to transfer data between systems, paper is printed from one and manually entered into another. A large consolidation effort has begun, which will lead to cost savings and operational simplicity.
Social Security - After 11 weeks, Social Security has finished a major cleanup initiative: ~12.3M individuals aged 120+ have now been marked as deceased. Some complex cases remain, such as individuals with 2+ different birth dates on file. These will be investigated in a follow-up effort.
Phone Lines – How many unused phone lines does the average American have that they still pay for? We guess essentially none. Not so across the federal government. DOGE found one instance where of the 1048 phone lines for an agency, 198 (19%) were either unused or duplicated. OPM cancelled these lines (took 1 hour), resulting in ~$100k/yr in savings. Since OPM is ~0.1% of the federal government, this suggests that ~$100M/yr is wasted on unused lines.
The Department of Labor currently has 16,800 licenses for phone lines, but, in the last 30 days only 4,000 were used (24%). DOL is canceling the unused lines, which will result in > $500k/yr in savings.
Voter Fraud – Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Customs, with the help of DOGE, just rolled out a new update to its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to help eliminate voter fraud. The program provides a single, reliable source for verifying immigration status and U.S. citizenship.
Louisiana is the first state to use the new DOGE voter list maintenance database. By using the information now made available to the states at no cost, they can check voter lists to ensure that only eligible Louisiana citizens are registered to vote
Medicare Advantage Overbilling - DOGE said, “Great work by Dr. Oz!” Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began cracking down on overbilling by Medicare Advantage plans. The government is 7 years behind on its required audits of these plans, but will now catch up on all audits by the end of this year. These audits should result in billions of taxpayer dollars returned to the Treasury, as various reports estimate MA overbilling at between $17B and $43B per year.