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$350 billion slush fund

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Thank goodness this all happened in a period when revenues were sufficiently greater than expenditures that we had that much wiggle room in the budget. {SARC}

The verdict is in DOGE is a failure

The numbers are in . After expecting $2 trillion in savings ;then revised to $1 trillion ;the DOGE tracker is showing $165 billion as Musk is in his final days before returning to the private sector .

DOGE: Department of Government Efficiency

They have however identified much more fraud and waste than that . It is up to Congress to come to bat . The Constitution is clear . The Appropriations clause gives Congress the power of the purse.

To that end what Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent reported to Congress this week is shocking. All Treasury outlays are supposed to be tied to a Congressional appropriation . What he testified is that 1.5 billion payments (not dollars just the payments )made by Treasury were not stamped with a proper Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) . In other words there was no way to trace if 1/3 of the Treasury payments were proper .

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HINSON: Can you define for the committee today what an improper payment is, and some examples of what you’re seeing — and why these procedures were not already in place before, Mr. Secretary?
BESSENT: Well…it’s a bit mystifying why they weren’t in place. And what we are seeing is that there was a very complacent upper level of management in many departments…across the entire government. What I can say at Treasury is that of the 1.5 billion payments…we send out every year, they are required to have something called a TAS — the Treasury Account Symbol. We discovered that more than one-third — one-third — of those payments did not have a TAS number. So, as the Appropriations Committee, you should be shocked by that because: How can a payment be tracked back to an appropriation? Only through the TAS number. So there was no accountability. So that is why the 450 organizations that sit above Treasury, where Treasury acts as the paymaster, are unable to pass an audit. So, we have cracked down on that. Every payment now requires a TAS number — very simple.
If you’re like me, that has to leave you gobsmacked. Of course, we all knew that there was a lot of waste and inefficiency in the federal government. But the idea that 500 million disbursements per year had no way to be properly tracked or accounted for is beyond mindboggling

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Rep. Hinson Talks Improper Payments with Treasury Secretary Bessent



According to him ;Treasury employees have told him this has gone on for over 2 decades .