John P. Hussman, Ph.D.

1/ A thread and data on Inspectors General, government spending, and “waste, fraud, and abuse.” If you prefer alternate data, at least require it to reflect audit and analysis, and not just opinion, cynicism, simulation, or retracted "receipts" (as much of DOGE’s work has been). 

2/ If one’s goal is to detect waste, fraud, and abuse, your first act in office would not be to expel the independent Inspectors General, who serve as watchdogs against waste, fraud, and abuse. Their latest report includes thousands of investigations and successful prosecutions. 

3/ One might imagine that slashing the number of career civil servants is a great way to save money, the fact is that federal employment as a share of the civilian labor force is near the lowest level in history. The firing spree isn’t to save money. It’s to install loyalists. 

4/ Meanwhile, apart from the massive pandemic response ($3.6T in 2020, $2.1T in 2021-22), federal spending outside of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, as a share of GDP, is actually well below the norm prior to the mid-1990’s. 

5/ Keep in mind most “entitlement” spending is funded by taxes and premiums paid by people who benefit. Medicaid does cover the disabled and the poor, but Social Security tax applies to $176k of income max, and not a dollar of profits or cap gains, even if you’re a billionaire. 

6/ The fact is that the compensation of federal workers amounts to just 4% of the federal budget, and only about 1% of GDP. Meanwhile, the Social Security Administration has administrative expenses of just 0.5%. 

7/ Of course, given the number of disbursements involved in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, a key area of potential waste, fraud and abuse is improper payments. Here’s a summary of that data, including ALL payments under review even if cleared as proper or later recovered 

8/ Separately, the bipartisan Government Accountability Office reports the amount of confirmed fraud identified based on these multiple layers of audit. 

9/ Beyond confirmed fraud are the audit recommendations by the Inspectors General: $75B focused on stronger program integrity and efficient use of funds, about $10B in questioned costs, and about $11B in investigative recoveries in 2023. In all, about 1.4% of the federal budget. 

10/ Worth noting - estimates of larger-scale fraud and abuse have either been disproved and taken off the DOGE website, or reflect assumption-laden simulations that explicitly reject informed input, valid sampling, or data analytics. Garbage in, garbage out. Read the appendices. 

11/ Noise reduction is about drawing a common signal from measurable data. Again, if you prefer alternate data, at least require it to reflect audit and analysis, and not just opinion, cynicism, simulations, uninformed assertions, or retracted "receipts."
https://x.com/dharmatrade/status/1897445881768779984

12/ In 2024, the Inspector General reported ~$72 billion in improper Social Security payments from 2015-2022, $23 billion not yet recovered, of $8.6 trillion total payments during that time. That's a loss of $3.3 billion a year, or 0.27% of total payments
https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/072401.pdf 

13/ Again, if they were serious about eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, they would not have immediately fired all the Inspectors General, whose job it is to detect waste, fraud, and abuse, and make informed recommendations.

That's not the endgame here.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/25/social-security-phones-doge-cuts/