A pair of DOGE bros want access to IRS data to check for benefit cheating:
Kliger and Corcos, according to records obtained by The Post, specifically mentioned investigating eligibility and fraud within student loan and grant programs and SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps, which serves nearly 42 million Americans.
This would be illegal in eleventy different ways, since tax data is protected under numerous privacy statutes that the IRS takes very seriously. What's more, we already know how much SNAP fraud there is: about $10 billion according to the latest GAO report. This is mostly because states do a poor job of verifying eligibility, not because individuals are deliberately trying to scam the system.
In any case, it's entirely expected that Elon Musk's gang of libertarians would target the relative pittance of improper SNAP payments to poor people while leaving alone a completely legal and legitimate use of IRS data: auditing tax fraud among high-income taxpayers. This could produce hundreds of billions of dollars, but for precisely that reason Republicans have always been furiously dead set against it. Gotta protect their base of rich donors, after all.
"In any case, it's entirely expected that Elon Musk's gang of libertarians would target the relative pittance of improper SNAP payments to poor people while leaving alone a completely legal and legitimate use of IRS data: auditing tax fraud among high-income taxpayers."
Musk and his chaos monkeys always kissed up and kicked down. Now they are doing it on our dime as part of the Trump administration policy.
The rich don’t want freebies for anyone but themselves. To be rich you must be petty, greedy, egotistical, and selfish.
Two cybertrucks parked right next to each other,
https://i.redd.it/5xdmydtiu4me1.jpeg
You do understand your masturbatory focus on an EV truck that from a company allowing him to skip work from does nothing to actually affect him, right?
I understand and jack off to not one part of that.
And let us not forget, some people get food benefits in their SDI. They may be faking their disability for sometimes less than a dollar a day in food benefits!!!!
And just so we can get this straight RIGHT NOW, it is ENTIRELY COINCIDENTAL that the non-White percentage of SNAP recipients is significantly higher than that of high-income taxpayers. But that's just a COINCIDENCE, okay? And it's CERTAINLY not one they want the public to know about, because this is entirely about WELFARE FRAUD and not at all about anything other than WELFARE for UNDESERVING people who shouldn't be getting WELFARE.
(And meanwhile, the plundering and copying of and back-door-ing into the most sensitive and valuable databases of the federal government by a group of youngsters in a group closely affiliated with a billionaire but without even a defined organizational structure goes on unabated...)
“Of the dozens of people I spoke with at the fairgrounds and around Rio Grande City — most of them Republicans or right-leaning independents, but also some who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 before flipping to Trump — I found a handful were indifferent to the cuts. But more often than not, they saw Musk’s enterprise as a necessary rebalancing of a system they believed wasn’t working for them.”
It’s all good, they say. What’s the problem?
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/01/texas-trump-republican-road-trip-00205851
“There’s a lot of people who take advantage, they abuse the system,” Gonzalez told me.
You can’t get these people to feel… anything.
Their absolute lack of empathy stuns me. "Now they know how I feel" is self-pity at it's most maga.
Income Verification is a pain in the ass. We’ve had to do it on two programs in the past couple of years. You can’t just access tax information easily, it takes like a week and there’s a fee. Some services will verify with pay stubs and some will accept participants in other income verified programs without additional verification.
What really sucks is that every program has different income levels so it’s hard to use another program, sometimes you can use Medicaid if the income rules align. Additionally, some programs go by AMI, which is county level, vs state level. It makes for a ton of admin cost because nothing lines up easily and it can’t be automated.
California is working on a universal access portal where you can apply for multiple income qualifying programs with a single verification, I have no idea how close they are to deployment.
Additionally, there’s differences around how assets are treated. Someone on SS or a pension can have an income that qualifies, yet also have considerable assets in the form of savings, real estate, 401k, etc…
There are cases when children have severe health problems, parents can not keep jobs because they have to be 24-7 care givers, and have get on Medicaid to pay for treatments. To qualify, they have to give up all their assets, only work for a limited amount of time, and even be careful taking gifts in order to retain eligibility.
More recently, there was a discussion in a small state that providing care for one person was hugely expensive, so the state should buy the family a house in another (larger/adjacent) state and pay them to live there to save money.
Income verification COULD be easier, but Republicans won't let us have nice things.
If you're a public housing authority you're allowed to use a system called EIV. But if you're not, you can't. It basically checks what your income is so that they can verify that you're telling the truth on your income certification paperwork so that they charge you the correct amount of rent. It does this by checking payroll taxes (presumably as well as other things, but payroll taxes are the easiest).
This system could presumably be made available to every means-tested benefit with ease.
Great idea, the flaw in all those systems is that they rely on payroll data and a good number of people live in a cash income world. Not even bank data helps there.
By law, benefit recipients are subject to higher rates of IRS audits already.
There will always be a few who abuse the system, and that's the excuse to paint everyone with a broad brush. As far as the audits are concerned, the poor typically don't have their own lawyers to fight any charges. And God forbid if they are missing a receipt from 5 years ago. If they could only off-shore their income like the wealthy.
I wish tax data was available for all income tested programs, to ensure validation for all programs. I also wish this data was robustly available for the IRS. Yes, I would like to stop high income tax cheats. I also would like to ensure anti- poverty programs serve those who are really eligible.
Basically, I prefer that government works, instead of selecting which error or fraudsters we ignore....
Gavin Kliger is one of the DOGE employees who has been wrecking USAID and has been exerting overriding control over USAID payments that were supposed to be resumed, but haven't, for which a judge has demanded the government present someone who will attest to the truth and be held responsible, even while the lawyers may be sanctioned for misrepresenting the truth. (He's also the one responsible for attempts to shut down CFPB.)
He's the reason why Marco Rubio is just a figure head. While Rubio makes claims of having power over USAID and restoring critical functions, Kliger has been overriding those decisions. Rubio's facial expression yesterday in the Oval Office, followed by his pathetic social media post, reflects on his official cuck status. Too cowardly to yell out that he was quitting then walking out of that Oval Office debacle to stop JD Vance from fucking over the State Department's work, Rubio's just a tool.
Unions, the time is now to organize a nationwide general strike. Otherwise, soon, you won't have anyone in your union who is employed or you will lose all powers by EO. You're all suckers if you thought Trump was going to stand up for you.
The wrecking crew is positively salivating for a general strike.
Explain.
I'm not talking just federal labor unions. A general national strike would involve *all* unions. If the wrecking crew wants to fire every federal worker on strike, it wouldn't affect managers and supervisors, but they would still unilaterally shut down government indefinitely and kill GDP. All national parks and forests closed indefinitely, permits slowed to a crawl, shit not cleaned.
What is your solution? What better leverage do workers have other than uniting unions nationwide?
They're looking for an excuse to unleash the goon squads; afterwards, if not before, They'll declare a national state of emergency. I thought that was the immediately obvious fork, but may weight the outcome probabilities differently.
Trump definitely looks for opportunity to suppress the population ("being strong"), but he needs a force that he can rely on. It is not obvious he has it now.
He is working on the Army, FBI, maybe other agencies, but it will be some time before he can rely on them.
BTW, did you know that TASS was inside of the Oval Office? The White House must be bugged up the wazoo with how loose security is.
Why? Doesn't Trump have a phone?
You really should distinguish between fraud and error. If a person is receiving benefits to which they are not entitled but without intent to scam the system, that's NOT fraud, it's just error.