DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus DOGE | Updates etc

Needlessly calling people back into the office isn't going to help that furniture bill, though.

I have nothing to say this isn't true, but as I sit in my 100+ year old building, on a chair that is from the 1990's, and occasionally take breaks to an unclean bathroom that has no paper towels, I remain skeptical.

Oddly enough, though, when it comes to furniture, the biggest red flag is with political/Presidential appointees - and that has been consistent with both parties. Here's the rub: Congress has to be notified of any furniture purchases over a certain threshold (I want to say $10,000 for a specific office). If they aren't notified, it's an Anti-Deficiency Act violation. Congress and the President both have to be notified of any ADA violations as well. So, in either event, Congress has to be aware that those expenditures were made, AND, those expenditures had to have been made with Congress' authorization/appropriation of those funds.

Here's an example of a furniture purchase gone bad from the 2021 ADA Violation compilation:

Agency No.: None Reported Date Reported to GAO: January 14, 2021
Agency: Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD)
Date(s) of Violation(s): Fiscal Years (FYs)
2009, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2017, and 2018
Account(s): Executive Offices,
Management and Administration;
Administrative Support Offices,
Management and Administration;
Community Planning and Development,
Program Office Salaries and Expenses;
and Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity,
Program Office Salaries and Expenses

Amount Reported: $158,850.74

Description: HUD reported that it violated the Antideficiency Act (ADA), 31 U.S.C.
§ 1341(a), in FYs 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2017, and 2018, when it incurred obligations
and expended funds without providing advance congressional notification in violation of
a statutory prohibition.

According to HUD, on a number of occasions, HUD staff made obligations and
expenditures for offices and other spaces assigned to presidentially appointed officials
that were covered by then-applicable advance congressional notification requirements.
HUD reported that advance notification was not given to Congress before making such
obligations and expenditures. HUD noted that the failures to notify Congress occurred
due to a lack of written procedures regarding the statutory notification requirements.
According to HUD, the HUD Office of Inspector General conducted an investigation and
issued a report with respect to office furniture purchased for the Secretary’s dining room
that found no evidence of misconduct and made no recommendations because of
remedial actions proposed by HUD and HUD’s intent to report an ADA violation.2
Additionally, HUD reported that the purchase contract for the Secretary’s dining room
furniture was canceled.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/730/720129.pdf

This was not the only furniture violation for a political/Presidential appointee that year. This also seems to happen every year.

I think the overarching point in me saying this is that I don't want this to turn into another thing where the agencies and departments - especially those working in them - get blamed for that type of expenditure. Those funds are authorized/appropriated by Congress, who has to be made aware of those expenditures, and the actual concrete evidence we see of malfeasance on this front pertains mostly to Presidential/political appointees. As far as that actual figure she is throwing around, and me personally witnessing anything of the sort, I work at the largest single site employer in Ohio, and I have not been in one building anywhere here that has nice - or even new - furniture. If it's happening, I'd be curious as to where.

I don't think the RTO has made a difference in the furniture front, where I work at least. It's been Lord of the Flies scrambling around trying to find any chair that can work. We were already informed by the four star that our budget for facilities and O&M (operation and maintenance) will not be increased from COVID levels.

Where it is crushing us, though, is all the actual office space we've had to lease so that people can have a place to sit and actually work.

What does really suck is that one of my friends who's a Contracting Officer - and a damn good one - is about to lose his position because he accepted a remote package 2 years ago and his time is coming to an end. He has access to a federal facility where he can do work, but they added further stipulations that it now has to be a federal facility within your sub-command. So, if you're USAF Life Cycle Management Center, you can't just work at any USAF location, you have to work at one that is specifically seated to house USAF LCMC. The guidance keeps changing and we have to keep guessing.

I actually think we need to hire ten more people just to interpret that bs -- and therein lies a large part of the problem.

Also, you're funded to the tune of 30 billion per year, why do you think there are no paper towels? No business in the world, or household for that matter, would cut health and hygiene until they were moments from bankruptcy or eviction.

Anything more than "people are saying" would be nice. But for some of you that's all it takes. Depending on who says it of course.

Where did you get $30B per year? What is that funding for?

The reason I ask: it's not the "how much" that's at issue as much as the "for what, exactly?" If you make me king for a day when it comes to efficiency, this is where I really take everything apart. Congress appropriates funds on a per-department/per-agency basis. Every purchase is so particularly limited by the "colors of money" and the fiscal year expirations that there is no room for common sense. It goes all the way from appropriations, to allotments. For instance, if I get an allotted budget for new office chairs, but our desks are all broken, I can't shift the budget funding from buying new office chairs to buying new desks, because I don't have that power. So, enjoy your broken desk, here's a new chair.

It also isn't so much that they cut health or hygiene. It's that they're not increasing it back to pre-COVID levels. When we only had to come in once or twice per week - or when they just catered to all the people who had to be here because they worked in SCIFS - the cleaning schedule and soap/paper towel supply was more appropriate because you had far less people in the buildings. Now that they mandated we all be back 5 days/week, it's no longer appropriate, but they have declined to increase that portion of the budget. I can't give you a firm answer as to why they are declining it. If you want my honest speculation, I believe it's because they want to cultivate more natural attrition. If you go from a telework environment to working in an old, dirty office with poor hygiene (and no applicable OSHA rules), you are more inclined to get natural attrition from the workforce that you are seeking to downsize, with less severance benefits if they leave on their own volition. It seems overly nefarious, but it also makes sense.

It harkens me back to the day when Chuck Hagel made us do "Furlough Fridays" in 2013. They had the money to pay us to work on Fridays, but it was a way to put financial pressure on us to utilize us as PR pawns against the TEA Party demand for budget cuts.

Also, when it comes to the ridiculous single expenditures, like the ones in that Ingram tweet, you can almost always trace those back to Congressionally directed expenditures. Personal story, without giving away too much details, VERY early in my career, I worked on an aircraft platform and we were directed to spend tens of millions to test the utilization of a sensor on that aircraft. The more I became involved in the program, the less I understood why we were doing it. I asked the Program Manager why the hell we were doing it, because it didn't make sense to use that sensor on the subject aircraft. He said that it was a "Congressional add" effort where MegaCorp lobbied for Congressman and Senator So-and-so for my agency to spend money on this project. I can just imagine how that headline would read now, though: "Dawglover05 and his agency spent tens of millions on wholly unnecessary project!" So I take the fall and Congress is like "Yeah, can you believe the waste this agency has!?!?" (wink-wink). I'd be willing to bet my stock portfolio that the "solar powered picnic table" was in that same vein.

Bait. And. Switch.

Oh, and the Defense Budget is expected to increate to around $1T...so there's that...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-drastically-drops-doge-112308234.html

Elon Musk drastically drops DOGE’s savings goal from $2 trillion to $150 billion for the year

Musk had previously projected savings as high as $1 trillion. · Fortune · Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
Beatrice Nolan
Fri, April 11, 2025 at 6:23 AM CDT 3 min read

Elon Musk appeared to dramatically lower DOGE's savings goal, projecting $150 billion for the year—far short of his earlier trillion-dollar claims. However, questions remain about the savings claimed by the team with critics pointing to inflated numbers, retracted claims, and a growing list of controversial cuts.

Elon Musk has said DOGE is drastically scaling back its savings aims. In a cabinet meeting on Thursday, Musk told Trump the group expected to slash $150 billion from the federal budget over the fiscal year, which runs from the beginning of October 2025 to the end of September 2026.

“I’m excited to announce that we anticipate savings in ’26 from reduction of waste and fraud by $150 billion,” Musk told Trump in the meeting. The world's richest man said these cuts "will actually result in better services for the American people."

Musk, who has emerged as the public face of the DOGE team, had previously projected savings as high as $1 trillion. Earlier, during campaign trail appearances, Musk floated an eye-popping $2 trillion figure.

According to DOGE's website, which tracks canceled contracts, grants, and leases and publicly displays a sample, the team has already saved an estimated $150 billion. It's unclear if Musk meant to say the $150 billion was the final goal or just what the team had already found.

The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune's request for comment, however, an official told the New York Times the $1 trillion figure was still "the goal."

Trump praised the team's efforts during the cabinet meeting, telling Musk: "Your people are fantastic. In fact, hopefully, they will stay around for the long haul."

Musk's role at the White House is due to come to an end in May. He's classed as a special government employee and is nearing the end of his 130 period in the federal government. The White House has said Musk intends to leave when his time runs out.

DOGE's website has been full of errors

DOGE's website has been plagued with errors and miscalculations, making it hard to know if the team's top-line figure of $150 billion can be trusted.

According to DOGE’s website, the savings are a combination of “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud, and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

However, the team has deleted several contracts from its wall of receipts after reports undermined some of their claims. In one case, DOGE had to revise its largest contract down from $8 billion to $8 million after the contract’s vendor explained that the $8 billion listed on its procurement record was likely a clerical error.

One of the largest savings highlighted on the DOGE "wall of receipts" is a $1.9 billion figure, attributed to the cancellation of a Treasury Department contract with Centennial Technologies. However, the company previously told The New York Times that the deal had already been scrapped during the Biden administration—long before DOGE existed. After media coverage, the savings claim was briefly taken down, according to ABC, but has since reappeared. (Centennial Technologies did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.)

In addition, DOGE staff quietly removed more than 1,000 contract cancellations from its records last month, wiping out about $4 billion in previously reported savings.

Musk has claimed DOGE's efforts are "maximally transparent" but the team only published around a third of the cuts they've made, making a more thorough analysis more difficult.

Some of DOGE's cuts and agency closures have been controversial, such as the shutdown of USAID and proposed changes to social security. Experts have warned that DOGE's plans for the social security administration are essentially a 'backdoor' way to cut payments.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This is what it looks like when you base what you claim to be doing on "waste and fraud" and put people in charge of it that care only about reaching a stated goal rather than actually addressing waste and fraud. On top of that they are not qualified for the job. This is a job for forensic accountants who have been educated to do exactly this. That's why we are seeing the mess we see now.

Trump has always stood for one thing and one thing only, what’s good for Donald Trump. I can’t believe MAGA dolts can’t see that.