By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 18, 2025 ~

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) turned 100 years old in 2021. For more than a century it has been doing the work that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been pretending to do, that is, competently root out fraud, waste and abuse in federal government programs without leaving a dangerous trail of chaos that threatens national security, personal privacy and the U.S. Constitution.

If Elon Musk is sincerely interested in efficiency and government savings, why is he duplicating the work of the non-partisan GAO – while doing it in a grossly subpar and deeply conflicted manner?

Thanks to two sitting U.S. Senators, the American people are going to get an investigation by the GAO into exactly what went down when DOGE accessed the U.S. Treasury’s payment system and gained access to highly confidential records of private American citizens. (Yesterday, the Associated Press and multiple media outlets reported that DOGE is about to access taxpayer records and bank records at the IRS.)

On February 12, the GAO confirmed by written letter that it will pursue the request for an investigation made by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee, and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, into how and why DOGE accessed the Treasury’s payment system.

Wall Street On Parade had previously made an inquiry to the GAO as to whether the agency was safe from Elon Musk’s “woodchipper,” given that it was created by Congress and worked for Congress – not the Executive Branch. We received the following response from GAO:

“GAO’s mission is to support Congress in carrying out its constitutional duties and GAO is a legislative branch agency. As the investigative arm of Congress, GAO examines how federal dollars are spent and how federal programs, policies, and operations work.

“By statute, the U.S. Comptroller General and Head of GAO may only be removed by Congress through impeachment or a joint resolution of Congress, after notice and an opportunity for a hearing, and only for specific reasons. GAO employees are not part of the Executive Branch personnel system. By statute, GAO employees are part of GAO’s separate personnel system which provides for the Comptroller General to appoint, assign and remove employees.”

According to the outstanding research and reporting on DOGE at Wired, Musk seems to be more interested in using the DOGE.gov website to generate traffic to his X (formerly Twitter) social medium platform, than he is in conducting himself in a non-conflicted, professional manner.

Last Thursday, Wired reported this:

“A WIRED review of the [DOGE.gov] page’s source code shows that the promotion of Musk’s own platform went deeper than replicating the posts on the homepage. The source code shows that the site’s canonical tags direct search engines to x.com rather than DOGE.gov.

“A canonical tag is a snippet of code that tells search engines what the authoritative version of a website is. It is typically used by sites with multiple pages as a search engine optimization tactic, to avoid their search ranking being diluted.

“In DOGE’s case, however, the code is informing search engines that when people search for content found on DOGE.gov, they should not show those pages in search results, but should instead display the posts on X.”

After Musk promised for days to put DOGE’s “receipts” of savings on the DOGE.gov website, today that page shows $55 billion in savings thus far. The bulk of that appears to be from firing federal workers and canceling building leases, not fraud detection.

New expenditures for the federal government are mounting as a result of DOGE, however, due to the reckless and chaotic manner in which Musk has moved fast and broken laws, according to law professors. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed against Musk and DOGE, which the federal government must now defend in court – perhaps for years – on the taxpayers’ dime.

On February 13, the Attorneys General of 14 states filed a lawsuit against Musk, DOGE and Trump in U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C. In it they wrote:

“Although our constitutional system was designed to prevent the abuses of an 18th century monarch, the instruments of unchecked power are no less dangerous in the hands of a 21st century tech baron. In recent weeks, Defendant Elon Musk, with President Donald J. Trump’s approval, has roamed through the federal government unraveling agencies, accessing sensitive data, and causing mass chaos and confusion for state and local governments, federal employees, and the American people.

“Oblivious to the threat this poses to the nation, President Trump has delegated virtually unchecked authority to Mr. Musk without proper legal authorization from Congress and without meaningful supervision of his activities. As a result, he has transformed a minor position that was formerly responsible for managing government websites into a designated agent of chaos without limitation and in violation of the separation of powers.”

That there is fraud, waste and abuse in federal government programs is not some epiphany handed down from the heavens to Elon Musk and Donald Trump. GAO has been reporting that fact every year for decades.

As recently as April of last year, GAO reported that “annual federal losses due to fraud are estimated to be between $233 billion and $521 billion based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022….”

The GAO report also notes, however, that “The estimated losses represent about 3 to 7 percent of average federal obligations for fiscal years 2018 through 2022” and these fraud losses “are generally in line with fraud estimates” by foreign governments, including studies from the United Kingdom’s Public Sector Fraud Authority.