This is what I saw most recently: [0]. Whether or not it could be vaguely considered to be congressionally authorized (the executive branch has leeway in the execution of said laws) is more or less irrelevant to whether it's wasteful and/or fraudulent, but it looks like those examples were not documented in law anyway.

I imagine it will be thousands and thousands of examples of "small time corruption" with a few million here and a few tens of millions here that in no sane world should be spent. And for some reason, people prefer to hate billionaires that create wealth when instructed by multimillionaires who siphon wealth from taxpayers but happen to own newspapers.

> You have no reason to believe Elon is either competent, nor independent, nor well-intentioned on any of this.

You could say the last two about anyone, but to deny that Elon is competent, especially coming from an anonymous internet commenter... okay.

[0] https://x.com/ricwe123/status/1887562751364481290

> congressionally approved

You say that like it’s a good thing…

> If DOGE was serious about finding cost savings, they would start with the biggest budget hog, the one that has never once passed an audit in its entire history – the Pentagon.

I imagine that's the goal, but we're literally just a few weeks in and a large amount of the DoD is extremely secretive and difficult to access by the elected government (which is concerning enough as it is). From what I understand they are already moving to downsize the FBI, and the more secretive three letter agencies will hopefully follow.

> Preventing the release of existing supplies of medicine and food to literal starving children in third world countries.

This is really your strongest point, but if you look at the US track record abroad, most of that aid is damage control for wars/coups/etc. started directly or indirectly by the US. Most of those people, and certainly US taxpayers, would be better off with no US influence in the long run. Whether that will actually happen under this administration remains to be seen.

> Gutted NIH and research funding

This is simply factually wrong. The twitter-engagement-bait driven nonsense like the OP in the tweet you linked is just so bad. I only got flagged about this when talking with an acquaintance working on medical research under NIH grants in the US. (I'm not from the US)

What has actually happened is adjustment of what they call the "indirect cost rate". This refers to the portion of funding you're allowed to chalk down to administrative overhead as opposed to direct research expenses.

For example in 2023, of the 35billion in NIH grants, 9billion went to administrative overhead (25%).

The new rule is them capping this to 15%. By the way this rate is around the standard in all private grant foundations.

Here is the primary source of information:

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...

Now, I'm not sure if all the DEI stuff the new government doesn't like comes under "administrative overhead". If it did, it would explain the timing of the announcement. But adjusting indirect cost rates is in general a very normal thing to do, and 25% is very high, even for a prosperous grant system like the NIH.

Here [2] is a university mentioning their negotiated indirect cost rate of 56%(!!!)

For comparison, the NSF from 2010 to 2016 varied their rate only between 16% and 24% [3]. The NIH rates are absurdly high.

News articles such as [1], that directly quote the above primary source and still misconstrue it, deserve jail time.

Also, it is really disingenous to say "cutting funds for cancer research" as if it's directly targeted at cancer research.

Engagement driven media like Twitter, news websites, etc, are truly the devil of the world. And the incentives are rotten, so no matter what Musk says X isn't fixing it in any way.

</rant>

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/02/08/nih-cuts-bi...

[2] https://research.umich.edu/update-on-nih-indirect-cost-rate-...

[3] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-17-576t