<img attachment="danielle-brian.jpg" align="right" caption="Danielle Brian">The following 22-minute video is an excellent interview by Lee Fang with <a href="https://www.pogo.org/about/people/danielle-brian">Danielle Brian</a> of <a href="https://www.pogo.org/">POGO</a> (Project on Government Oversight) about corruption, waste, and fraud. Whereas you may deem anything the government spends money on that you don't like or approve of as "waste", "fraud" has a legal definition. Somewhere in the middle is "corruption", which is when you're paying far too much for services that you actually want or need. The major sources of corruption are the Pentagon budget and Medicare Advantage. <media href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEd5BRKvW0M" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/BEd5BRKvW0M" source="YouTube" width="560px" author="Lee Fang" caption="Will DOGE Slash the Pentagon Budget?"> So far, she says, DOGE hasn't found any fraud. What they <i>have</i> done is carry out a scattershot demolition of government programs and offices that are the best fraud-fighting ones, so their efforts will have the opposite effect---it will lead to more fraud and corruption, likely funneling money to oligarchs like Musk himself. This is utterly unsurprising. I really like this lady because she sticks to the horrific facts of the situation without wasting any time discussing the characters involved. They don't matter and aren't relevant for an examination of why DOGE purported mission is just that---purported. She says that some of the things that DOGE <i>says</i> are true and there are honestly more than enough problems to tackle, but that <i>they're not tackling those problems.</i> Right idea; wrong solution. It's more likely that DOGE is just a deliberate scam, in which they steal more money for themselves while telling everyone that they're saving money. Instead, what they're doing is to redirect money from Congressionally sanctioned and legalized programs to bullshit like SpaceX. She says, <bq>Waste is one of the places where there has always been an alignment between the parties. But, as you've pointed out, <b>one person's waste is not the same another's.</b> I did take it as a great opportunity for us to be able to testify before Marjorie Taylor Greene's committee and say, yes, these are the places we want to look at them. And <b>we have not at all been encouraged by what Doge has done yet.</b> We did submit suggestions of places where they should be looking, and we're not hearing back from them, but we'll sit down with anyone and say, 'this is what you should be doing.' And I hope, maybe, at some point soon, they learn their lesson that <b>the way they're going about things is likely illegal and, so far, kind of incompetent. And we have a road map that could help them be successful if they wanted to.</b></bq> The <a href="https://www.pogo.org/">POGO</a> (Project on Government Oversight) is well-established and seems like something that should be getting a lot more attention than DOGE.