DOGE Is Doing the Opposite of Government Auditing

WIRED’s Vittoria Elliot joins Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond to discuss what real government auditors think of DOGE’s work, and what happened during DOGE’s first six weeks.

‘It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE by Vittoria Elliott
Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’ by Makena Kelly, David Gilbert, Vittoria Elliott, Kate Knibbs, Dhruv Mehrotra, Dell Cameron, Tim Marchman, Leah Feiger, and Zoë Schiffer
Donald Trump Held Another Million-Dollar ‘Candlelight’ Dinner—With Elon Musk in Tow by Leah Feiger and Zoë Schiffer

You can follow Katie Drummond on Bluesky at @katie-drummond and Vittoria Elliott on Bluesky at @telliotter. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Katie Drummond: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m WIRED’s Global Editorial Director, Katie Drummond. Today on the show, the difference between DOGE and official federal auditors. I’m joined today by WIRED’s Vittoria Elliott, welcome to Uncanny Valley, Tori.

Vittoria Elliott: Thank you for having me.

Katie Drummond: Happy that you’re here. Now, Tori, you published a story today on WIRED about federal auditors, what they do, what makes their work fundamentally different to what DOGE is doing. And to report this story, you actually spoke to a few federal auditors. So, what does a federal auditor actually do? Because these are real jobs, prior to DOGE infiltrating federal agencies, audits were actually already happening. So, walk us through sort of what that job entails on a daily basis.

Vittoria Elliott: So, I think maybe a lot of people might have forgotten about this because everything has been moving so quickly, but one of the first moves of the new Trump Administration was to fire a bunch of inspector generals, and those are people who actually, their offices actually do these kinds of investigations. So a lot of the audits, for instance, that we think about with government programs, go through the offices of IGs. They have stuff reported to them, and then they get to look into it. So, if you’re in a federal agency and you’re like, this seems to be wrong, you can report that to your agency’s IG, and they can go in and audit that. Audits can also be ordered by Congress if they think there’s some kind of malfeasance or problems. So for instance, there was a big audit of hurricane aid during Hurricane Maria, because there was a lot of stuff that was lost. Auditors spent, I think about 18 months digging into those things. So, there are actually ways to look at particular programs in agencies and assess the spending and assess whether or not these programs are actually doing what they’re meant to be doing. We have a whole system for that. And a lot of times that gets reported to Congress depending on the sensitivity of it. So, maybe if they’re auditing something where we’re looking at stuff that might involve classified or secret information that might not be public, but a lot of times these audits are actually also made public to Congress, you can go find them.

Katie Drummond: Right, available to the public, as opposed to DOGE, despite the claims that Musk and even President Trump have made, that this is a maximally transparent group of people doing this work. We don’t actually know that much about what they’re doing, what they’re finding, and the changes that they’re making, short of journalists like you and so many of your WIRED colleagues and other news organizations obtaining that information and publishing it. Now, I want to back up a little bit because at the heart of all of this is this notion of fraud, of waste, of financial abuse. It’s something that Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed is widespread, pervasive across government agencies that there is fraudulent spending, there is excessive waste happening. There is abuse of financial power, financial authority on the part of these agencies. Now, from what you’ve reported over the last several months and in your role, how valid is that claim to begin with?

Vittoria Elliott: There was a report from the government accountability office that covered the years 2018 to 2022, and that found that there’s actually over $200 billion of waste, fraud, or abuse that happens. So it’s like, it’s not this made up thing, but in the context of a $7 trillion federal budget, that is not what’s breaking the bank. I don’t think anyone, Democrat or Republican, DOGE fan or not, would argue that, hey, that’s a problem that we need to solve. That’s a very valuable thing. But one of the auditors that I spoke to basically said DOGE could go look at the current recommendations from the IGs. They could go look at the current outstanding investigations. They could pick up that work if they are really dedicated to this because there actually are systems, and there actually are reports about this. But from what the auditors I spoke to said, they said that doesn’t really seem to be what DOGE is doing. And one of the other things they said was a lot of auditors would probably be really happy to help them, to offer advice. They’d be happy to work with them, they’d be happy to bring young talent into their teams to sort of make the auditing system more robust. But DOGE is really kind of siloed, it doesn’t seem like they’re really interested in that.

Katie Drummond: Right. Now, speaking of DOGE and the auditors that you spoke to for this story, they certainly didn’t have kind words to say about how DOGE is going about its work. Tell us a little bit more about their impressions of DOGE and their commentary on sort of what is happening under the auspices of this idea that Musk and DOGE are essentially auditing the federal government. What do the actual auditors think about that?

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, so to give some context, first off, a regular audit, which involves like five different steps, so there are five steps to an audit. One is where you plan it, you sit down, you say, “This is what we’re looking at, this is the kind of information we’re going to need to go after.” You sort of map out who the stakeholders are, who you’re going to have to interview, because a lot of times they’re going into programs or systems that maybe they don’t fully understand. So, it’s almost a little ethnographic. You got to go in, you got to interview people, you got to be like, “What is your job? What does this connect to? What does this mean inside your system?” You have to do that baseline understanding of getting to know the program or the agency. Then you do the actual field work, which is, you go out, you talk to people. In the case of, for instance, the hurricane stuff, they actually sent auditors, I believe, to Puerto Rico to see what was going on. You go into the systems, you do that kind of human on the ground legwork. Once you’ve done that, they sort of pull all this information together into a report, they sort of do this analysis. They talk to the agencies, they say like, “Hey, these are the problems we found. You have the opportunity to correct these. These are our recommendations.” And then they submit that to the agencies, to Congress, and then they get to follow up. They get to come back and be like, “Hey, we recommended this thing. Did you fix this problem?” There’s a level of accountability for trying to fix that thing. So, there are very clear understandings within the government of what the best practice of this is, and all of these people do that. That takes six to 18 months.

Katie Drummond: Right, I was about to say, that sounds like a very time-consuming and extensive process to understand these systems, understand a certain part of a certain agency. Right? Remembering the federal government is massive. I mean, it’s the largest employer in the country. We’re talking about just huge infrastructure to sort of pick at one little piece of it would be a very time-consuming and sort of labor-intensive process if you are really doing your diligence, as you just outlined.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, and so what the auditors told me is, for instance, a lot of the claims that Musk and DOGE have made about the Social Security Administration, which Musk saying that 150 year olds are receiving social security checks, which our colleague David Gilbert debunked in a really smart piece. Or you know what they’re saying about all this waste, fraud, and abuse within the social security system. Both these auditors said to me what that says to them is that they don’t actually understand the system well enough to identify where the problems are, it seems, because obviously they’re not in contact with DOGE, but they’re sort of reverse engineering maybe how they’re getting these conclusions, is that they’re going in, they don’t necessarily understand the systems. They’re maybe using some form of script or keyword searching to find particular things to surface. But the reality is that it would be impossible for someone coming in from the outside to audit the entire social security system in two to three weeks.

Katie Drummond: Right, which is to be clear, what appears to be happening.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. And the other thing too, is DOGE is not just “auditing” these systems, like going in and looking at stuff. They’re canceling contracts, which also, a lot of these auditors also understand how federal contracting works because so much of the federal government’s work actually goes through contracting, working with people in local areas or outsourcing stuff to the private sector. And one of the things that they really talked about as well, which we didn’t get into so much in the piece, but I thought was super fascinating, is DOGE is specifically saying that it’s saving the American people money, but when you cancel a contract, you’re still responsible because there’s a legal agreement there for paying out part of it, sometimes it’s 10 to 15%. And one of the things they talked about too, is oftentimes when the government buys something, it does it in bulk so they get a discount, because if you’re buying like $2 billion worth of stuff from someone, they’ll give you 5, 10% off. But when you cancel that contract, you’re already paying 10, 15% of what that contract might have had to be anyway to be able to cancel it. And then you’re likely going to need that service again in the future, maybe in a smaller amount, but you’re going to pay more for it, or you’re going to pay more in time or manpower for your own team. A lot of these things that on the surface can look like large amounts of money may actually in the long run, probably not be saving very much money at all. In fact, it might be costing more.

Katie Drummond: Right. When you’re thinking about paying a kill fee, you’re thinking about the time and effort, and to your point, the human resource that would go into renegotiating a contract when you realize, oops, we spent six weeks doing this “audit,” turns out we canceled the contract that we really need, and now we’re back to the negotiation table with this supplier. And all of a sudden the price is 100% of the cost instead of 90% of the cost. Point well taken. Now, on the subject of audits, were there any specific audits that stand out as examples of this process, this sort of federal auditing process happening successfully and leading to a better outcome?

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, I mean, the reason that I brought up the hurricane one, is because obviously the way that the government has addressed hurricane response, particularly in Puerto Rico because of its status as a territory and not a state, was really, really fraught, right? And that kind of accountability, I mean, government is so slow and grinding and it feels very frustrating to people. And the flip side of it being slow and grinding is that no one’s going to cut off your social security overnight. That would also be a slow and grinding process, hopefully. So, one thing that the auditor sort of spoke about, and actually is something that I’ve talked to some other federal employees who are not featured in this piece about, is their understanding of the government is sort of like the thing that is so frustrating for people is that it is so slow, but part of the reason it’s so slow is because there’s so many measures in place to make sure that you can’t misuse government money. It’s a response to previous audits, to previous investigations, to previous issues. And so, part of the reason that it might take months to get a federal contract, part of the reason it might take months to get cleared for something, is because there’s all these tiny steps in between to make sure that they can’t misappropriate government money. If anything, some of the slow grinding frustration that people express about the government is the response to trying to make sure that there is less ability for waste, fraud, and abuse.

Katie Drummond: It is essentially the system working as it should, and presumably the result, as you say, of years and years of these audits, of these inspections, of this diligence, and this accountability, that has led us to the system that we have. Which yes, is slow and grinding, but again, is designed to prevent fraud and to provide services for the American people. Your example about social security is a great one. I mean, it might be frustrating to wait for your social security benefits to kick in, but the worst case scenario is that someone working with DOGE cancels your social security payments in the back end. And all of a sudden, you spend six months or a year struggling to have them reinstated, right?

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, and again, I don’t think there’s any person who would be like, “Oh, the government’s really efficient and does exactly what it’s supposed to do when it’s supposed to do it.” No, you could definitely make an argument for efficiency on the user end, right? But I think even the term government efficiency, are we using efficiency in the way that you and I might understand it like, this is faster and cleaner and better for us as end user? Or are we using efficiency in like the private equity sense, which is like, this is better at funneling money to private industry and specifically to the people at the top of private industry? Because that’s another form of using efficiency.

Katie Drummond: Well, it sure is. It seems like one that Elon Musk might be familiar with himself. So Tori, Elon Musk has described what DOGE is doing as essentially an audit of government waste, financial abuse across federal agencies. The auditors you spoke to though, didn’t exactly see this DOGE effort as an audit. So, if it’s not an audit, what is it?

Vittoria Elliott: So, I think the hardest thing is that we don’t necessarily know. We do know that they’re trying to get into these systems and cut spending, cut contracts, so I think that’s a big one. But the auditors I spoke to said auditing is sort of seeing what’s in there, providing recommendations. But first and foremost, it seems like they’re going in, they’re making a lot of cuts, and that isn’t necessarily what you do in an audit, especially for things that are services that the government may continue to need in the future, that’s going to move that work probably to the private sector. And secondly, that there’s so much data that the government has, and they both said they couldn’t help but think that the real goal was to have access to that kind of data, whether that’s for training an LLM to replace people or something else, or whether that’s for their own competitive advantage.

Katie Drummond: Right. We are going to take a short break. We’ll be back with Tori Elliott in a minute. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Katie Drummond, WIRED’s Global editorial director. I’m joined by WIRED’s Tori Elliott. Now Tori, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about this incredible feature that WIRED published late last week, and that you shared a byline on, along with several other reporters and editors. Now, the story was a deep dive into the first six weeks of DOGE. The headline on the piece is, Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup,’ great headline. You have been so in the weeds on DOGE for a couple of months now. Thank you, and I’m sorry. But what does this bigger story tell us about DOGE that you think is particularly important?

Vittoria Elliott: So, one of the biggest things that I think the feature really delivers is it helps sort of put these all together in one big picture to help people understand both the timeline of when all these things happened, which basically started the minute that Trump came into office. But also, helps people see how these different things connect together, the way that the takeover at the Office of Personnel Management, which is the government’s HR, and then the takeover of the General Services Administration, which does a lot of its procurement stuff, also deals with its IT systems and property. Sort of like how taking over those agencies via repurposing the US digital service became this hub for everything else that the Trump Administration is doing in the government. And I think when we sort of lay it out in that way, you can see greater patterns, which is the focus on cutting employees, the focus on taking over IT systems, and very specifically the focus really on getting into contracting and payment systems. And in the case of USAID, the worst case scenario of what can happen, which is once someone is in your systems, they can shut your agency down.

Katie Drummond: Which is exactly what happened with that one. Now, this story to me is really, if you’re going to read one story about DOGE, if you can’t keep up with the fire hose, this is the story to read. It really sort of walks audiences and walks readers through in this very step-by-step narrative, exactly what the last six weeks have looked like from within the administration. Now, let’s take listeners inside the machine a little bit, how stories like this come to be. Now, I will caveat by telling everybody that there’s a lot we can’t share about our reporting, there’s a lot that Tori can’t say, but we do share in the piece that you and your colleagues talked to more than 150 people for this story. 150 people. I got a lot of text messages from friends after the story came out being like, “150 people, Katie? What do you have these poor reporters doing all day?” But you guys have been working really, really hard on this reporting. So, tell us about the last few weeks of your life as you have been working to put this feature together. What does that look like, reporting this day in and day out?

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, it feels like a fire hose in my signal inbox. The thing that I notice so much is that a lot of the federal workers that I spoke to, they really just want to be heard. These are people who don’t have big public profiles. When you’re a federal worker, you can’t go be politically involved in the same way. You can’t necessarily go protest or campaign for someone. You can’t hold certain types of financial products, if you’re doing some kind of work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or Treasury or whatever that might regulate that. So, I think most people that we spoke to first and foremost just really wanted to feel heard and felt so confused at how they’d dedicated their lives to this work and suddenly they were the bad guy. And I think there’s an urgency to that. Their lives were changing so quickly, and there was sort of this outpouring of both information and a lot of emotion. So in some ways, I think it has felt very much like having a million close friends going through a breakup at the same time, where you don’t want to leave them on read for too long, because people are taking both professional and emotional risks to talk to us, to be open with us, to tell us what their experience is or what they’re seeing. And I think the biggest thing in how I’ve thought about this is, really trying to be responsive because when people are doing that, it’s nice to know that there’s another person on the other end. So I think there’s this sort of immediacy to being responsive to people, to making sure we’re asking the right questions while also being empathetic, while also being careful. And that I think would be challenging if it was just a few people, but it’s many, many tens of people per each of us. And I think the big thing also is that you never really know where any individual conversation is going to lead, because sometimes people don’t know what they know, like they don’t know if they have important or insightful information. And so treating every conversation like it is both really valuable because someone can make a really offhand comment of like, “Oh, this system normally works this way, and that can be a puzzle piece that can slot into something that someone else on the team is working on.” But also because situations are so fraught right now, treating every conversation like it might be the last time you speak to that person.

Katie Drummond: Right, absolutely. I mean, it’s a tremendous amount of responsibility to bear. And just thinking about how many people you are talking to at any given time, I mean, it’s a lot on one person’s shoulders. Now, nine people share a byline on this story, which is relatively unusual for us at WIRED. And what that means if you’re listening, is that nine journalists contributed reporting and writing to this single feature that we published on WIRED.com last week. So Tori, how do you work as a team to pull that kind of thing together? How do these nine people come together to pull off all of this reporting, all of this writing? Tell us a little bit about that.

Vittoria Elliott: So, this is the moment where we shout out Leah Feiger, Tim Marchman, and Zoe Schiffer, for being the stitchers of things. I feel like me and other people, we just were like, here is the five-page long document of everything we know about the particular things that we’re reporting on. And they really went in and, because they’ve been editing a lot of our pieces and they have this higher level view about where some of our stuff fits with each other, they went in and did that initial stitching across multiple lines of reporting and storytelling. And then there was another document that was slightly shorter but not much shorter, and there’s a lot of cool details that made it into the feature. There’s also a lot of really interesting details that we just kind of couldn’t get in there.

Katie Drummond: Pick one. Is there anything that didn’t make it into that story that you wish had, that you can share?

Vittoria Elliott: Initially we had some interesting stuff in there from a freelancer in South Africa.

Katie Drummond: Oh, wow.

Vittoria Elliott: Who had talked a little bit about the way that when apartheid was in place and the white South African government, the way that they brute force transformed the country. And how growing up in that for someone like Musk, might really inform what you believe a top-down structure of elites in government might be able to do. And I think that was a really interesting perspective, but ultimately, we didn’t get to use it for the piece. And also because it’s I think, hard sometimes to speculate what is in anybody’s head, but I think that kind of context of, where might someone’s reference point be for the kind of decisions that they’re making or how they think the system should work, is really interesting.

Katie Drummond: That is interesting. Now, this feature that we published documented essentially the first six weeks of Musk and DOGE in D.C. inside the federal government. Let’s imagine for a minute, not something journalists are necessarily particularly good at.

Vittoria Elliott: I don’t think it’s that we’re not good at it. I think it’s that we’re very careful about facts.

Katie Drummond: We’re very careful, and we’re going to do this very carefully. Let’s imagine another six weeks go by. It’s early May, Tori, and we are working on the second big feature about DOGE. What story do you think WIRED might be telling about DOGE by then? Knowing of course, that this is informed speculation, this is by no means the facts that we like to traffic in.

Vittoria Elliott: Well, I think we’re probably going to have much more emphasis on Social Security Administration, that is according to reporting from our colleagues, Makena Kelly and David Gilbert, that’s where a lot of DOGE operatives are currently concentrated right now. So I think, and Musk has already floated a lot of language around needing to curtail entitlements.

Katie Drummond: Yes.

Vittoria Elliott: So I think social security will probably be the major focal point of whatever next beat there is. I think we’re also going to see, as we’ve already seen, the Trump Administration has talked about really collapsing certain agencies like the Department of Education and USAID, folding them into other agencies. So, I think that we may also be looking at that, the sort of, what does it mean when you have whole agencies established by Congress being consolidated together or into other agencies? And what is that going to mean for things like data privacy? What is that going to mean for their systems? And I think maybe another thing that we’re going to see more of is the use of AI tools by the government. What’s being rolled out, where? Who’s using it? What data is it being trained on? I think all of those questions are going to become more salient as the time goes on. And a lot of DOGE people are what we call special government employees. They are only supposed to have a tenure of around 130 days, which is about six months, which means that those who are doing this first wave of DOGE strike force may be out by June, and there may be a whole new group of people coming in to take their place. So, I think we will also be thinking about who is going to come in, assuming that they abide by these rules and they don’t get extensions or special exceptions or whatever. I think we’re going to be looking more at who’s going to be coming in, what companies they’re coming from. And I think we’ll have a greater sense at that point at the extent to which these private sector connections are now firmly rooted in government.

Katie Drummond: Fascinating, that was an excellent prediction. Thank you. We’re going to take a short break, when we come back, Tori tells you what you need to read on WIRED today. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I’m Katie Drummond, WIRED’s Global Editorial Director. I’m joined by WIRED’s Tori Elliott. Tori, before I let you go, tell our listeners what they absolutely must read on WIRED.com today, other than the stories we talked about in this episode.

Vittoria Elliott: Well, I’m going to do another shameless plug for the politics team.

Katie Drummond: Please do.

Vittoria Elliott: So, we published a story this week by Leah Feiger and Zoe Schiffer about Donald Trump holding another million dollar candlelight dinner at Mar-a-Lago, featuring Elon Musk and I believe what appears to be Shivon Zilis, who is an executive at Neuralink, the brain computer interface company that Musk founded. And Zilis is also the mother of a few of the many of Musk’s children.

Katie Drummond: A few.

Vittoria Elliott: So I think it’s one of those things that, first off, this is extraordinarily early in a presidency to be raising money already. And secondly, particularly with Musk as a backer who is committing tens of millions of dollars to the Trump campaign or to Trump more generally. But I think what we really see is this appropriation of Trump’s time in this way, and it’s pretty concerning because it’s one thing to pay a lot of money to go to a fundraiser for a political candidate, we’re very used to that during campaign season. I think it’s another thing to see that it might become routine because this is the second one that we know of in six weeks. The idea that it might become routine for the president to be hosting dinners where people who can pay a million dollars or more can get a private audience with him.

Katie Drummond: Right, you’re essentially paying to access President Trump and Elon Musk in this scenario. I think worth pointing out two things that stand out to me. One, Trump can’t run for office again.

Vittoria Elliott: Yeah, not yet.

Katie Drummond: Where this money is going is pretty murky. Two, I thought it was really interesting and notable that the first of these dinners WIRED reported on a few weeks ago was actually on the President’s official schedule, this second dinner was not. So it certainly appears as though there is some desire here to fly below the radar in the context of these candlelight dinners. I also hate the fact that candles are involved for some reason, it makes me very uncomfortable. Tori Elliott, thank you so much for joining me today.

Vittoria Elliott: Thank you so much for having me.

Katie Drummond: All right, that’s our show. We will link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with any of us for questions, comments, or show suggestions, write to us at uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. Make sure to check out Thursday’s episode of Uncanny Valley, all about May Musk. Yes, she’s Elon’s mom. This episode was edited by Kyana Moghadam. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode. Pran Bandi is our studio engineer. Jordan Bell is our Executive Producer. Conde Nast’s Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. And I’m Katie Drummond, WIRED’s Global Editorial Director. Goodbye.