Get Rid of the Bastards

The recent exposure of the corruption of USAID and the US Social Security system has shocked much of the world. But it should not have. Waste, fraud, incompetence and corruption are what governments do.

As you have probably heard, US President Donald Trump has created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and put Elon Musk at its helm. DOGE has been auditing US federal government agencies and reporting the findings to the public.

The revelations have been explosive.

When investigating the social security system, DOGE firstly asked how many people are receiving benefits? Somehow, 394 million people are. That’s 100% of the US population, plus at least 60 million people who do not exist.

DOGE then queried the age of recipients. There were 12.5 million people over the age of 120 and 2800 over the age of 200.

The expenditure by USAID was almost more alarming: $2m for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala; $1.5m for LGBT inclusion in Serbian workplaces. Multiple $100m for cultivating poppies (opium) in Afghanistan. $47K for a transgender opera in Columbia. And many more hundreds of millions of dollars being washed through international NGOs for regime change, political interference and propaganda (ie “news” organisations, including in Australia).

Basically, the conspiracy theorists were right. Again.

But none of this should have been surprising. Only eight years ago, Dr Mark Skidmore at Michigan State University led a study which found $21 trillion missing from just two US federal agencies: the Department of Housing and Department of Defence. The study involved simply totalling up all the “unsupported journal voucher adjustments” in public financial reports. These ‘adjustment’ transactions were used when the department could not account for where the money went.

The result of two agencies losing more than the entire US federal government debt (at the time), was the creation of SFFAS 56. This is an accounting standard that permits federal agencies to modify or omit financial information in public reports for “national security”. In other words, the government allowed itself to commit fraud if releasing truthful information would reveal its fraud.

This type of government behaviour is not unique to the US. If anyone was to take a microscope to Australian government spending, I expect they would find similar types of waste, fraud, corruption and incompetence.

My personal experiences - as insignificant, anecdotal and inconclusive as they may be - fit the thesis that finding government waste is no harder than looking in any direction, at anything.

For example, a decade ago I applied for an innovation grant to help develop a software system. A few weeks later I received a furious phone call from the office administering the grants, asking what the hell I was doing by applying? They eventually explained that, contrary to the public instructions, the grant application needed to be submitted by a 3rd party company. I later learned from a wealthy tech entrepreneur that he had been receiving around $2m per year from this grant program, despite doing nothing innovative at all. The company that filed the applications was made up of former staff from the grant office, and they took 50% of the grant as their “fee”. They could get money for any tech business with sufficient turnover to hide the activity.

Another example: the former CTO of Brisbane City Council once revealed to me that he had 150 programmers on his staff but he did not know who they were, or what they were working on. For reference, a team of 150 programmers would make for one of the largest domestic software development companies in Australia. He could not fire them because the systems were so poor he did not know who they were.

I could write 100 articles with shocking stories of government corruption, incompetence and waste that my clients and I have experienced first hand. I have forgotten more stories of government misdeeds than I have positive examples of government achievement.

Governments will always wind up corrupt. The more power in the hands of government, the more incentive is given to power-hungry psychopaths and narcissists to gain control of that power. Good people will be destroyed by the lies of people unburdened by conscience or morality. Even the power to police government incentivises the usurping and controlling of that power.

This is why it is no surprise that the US government - the most powerful government in the world - is enormously corrupt. As Elon Musk described it, the US government is not like an apple with a worm in it. It is a giant ball of worms. There is no good left.

The only way to prevent the power of government being misused is to not make that power available at all. Libertarianism is the only political philosophy that recognises this fact and recommends the only rational, workable solution: minimal to no government. Get rid of the bastards.