Re: “Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ Missile Shield Expected To Cost $500 Billion”

On Mon, 26 May 2025 13:12:20 -0400 (EDT), kludge@panix.com (Scott
Dorsey) wrote:

Paul S Person  <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:

1. DOGE famously marked a very large number of records "deceased"
because of the age of SSN-holder. This may have clarified some things.
Sadly, the SSA was not sending payments to them.

>
In a lot of cases, those records were listed as having a birthday of
May 20, 1875, and this was used by some of the DOGE folks to claim great
and massive fraud.  Unfortunately this happens to be the beginning of
epoch for ANSI COBOL format dates, and it's normally used as a semaphore
to indicate a missing date.

IIRC, part of the explanation is that /we didn't have computers in the
1930s/ and a lot of deaths /were not reported to SSA/. And possibly
not even the State. IIRC, these records are generally kept at the
/county/ level.

Not that someone shouldn't investigate why dates were missing, but that
response is different than the response that was created.
>
I am certainly in favor of having independent third-party auditors look
over government systems in search of waste.  But first of all they need
to be actually independent, and secondly they need to understand the
systems they are looking at.

Absolutely. It is /never/ a bad idea to give a gummint agency a wedgie
now and again.

IIRC, a recent headline suggested that DOGE's new procedure found two
-- count them, two! -- cases of fraudulent applications whilst
backlogging 600,000 of them.

IOW, like most if not all studies of this sort of thing, catching the
fraudsters is /far/ more expensive than just paying out the money.
That is, tolerating a low level of fraud is more efficient than trying
to stamp it all out.

Of course, if that attitude is adopted, then a more regular schedule
of agency wedgies is needed. Just to be sure the fraud is still
minimal.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"