> To me DOGE is doing something right. Instead of shooting the messenger, discuss the actual findings they already did.
> $110m to find water in Afghanistan
I assume that's the same as the whitehouse.gov [1] talking point:
> Hundreds of millions of dollars to fund “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,” benefiting the Taliban
The source they link for that is a Breitbart article [2] from 2018 and it talks about 20 year old project that ran for 3 years.
> Between 2005 and 2008, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) devoted at least $330 million in funding to failed ADP projects intended to deter farmers and traffickers from cultivating and trafficking opium.
During the $2+ trillion war in Afghanistan, the US government tried to spend $330 million to damage the Taliban's primary source of revenue. It didn't work and the funding stopped in 2008.
The DOGE "proof" of waste is a 7 year old news article talking about a 20 year old program that only ran for 3 years while George W Bush was the president.
That's the only big number in their official statement regarding the waste. They're going 20 years into the past and once you throw out the dubious claim above, the "waste" they're saying exists is a few million dollars. They didn't even put the $8 million Politico thing on whitehouse.gov because it's been debunked too.
A couple million dollars in waste for an organization that distributes about $44 billion [3] in foreign aid every year is a giant nothing burger and American's are eating it up like it's kobe beef.
> everybody attacks the messenger
He's not the messenger. He's the source of the misinformation.
1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/at-usaid-wast...
2. https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/06/21/feds-...
3. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/06/what-the-...
Yeah the opium one is a particularly interesting example of "waste." Most of the complaints are about "woke shit" and usual reactionary talking points or whatever but this one is just a generally widely agreed to be a good idea that didn't work. If "we tried something and it didn't work" is sufficient to justify destroying an entire organization, then oh boy does the entirety of silicon valley need to be shut down. "No project may ever fail" is the polar opposite of "move fast and break things" or Musk's "eliminate all process, re-establish the necessary ones once things break."