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

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.
 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.
--scott