There is a claim floating around by DOGE that the US has a single bank account that is never audited. See Tik Tok link below.
My limited knowledge is that all Government funds have to be appropriated to be spent by agencies and there is not some big slush fund handing out money without any controls as claimed by DOGE.
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Your understanding is generally correct. At this point I don’t understand why any takes Elon at face value anymore.
He is lying, do not believe what he says. In fact, examine the possibility that the exact opposite of what he says may be true.
>There is a claim floating around by DOGE that the US has a single bank account that is never audited
Just lying.
>My limited knowledge is that all Government funds have to be appropriated to be spent by agencies and there is not some big slush fund handing out money without any controls as claimed by DOGE.
Correct.
It’s also important to note that a bank account is not accounting. Just because money is in a single bank account (which it is likely not) is sort of irrelevant because it as no bearing on how funds are accounted for in an organization. A “bank account” is not the same thing as an “account” when discussing accounting.
The US federal government obviously doesn’t have “a bank account.” What bank is the account with? Hope they don’t forget the PIN!
So we’re already in the realm of metaphor when we’re talking about the federal government’s “bank account.” The better metaphor is a power grid. It’s not about a sum of money that is sitting around and can be spent down. It’s about directing flows of money. Money is constantly leaving and entering the US treasury. The employees at the treasury do their best to direct the flows coming in towards where they need to go out, with the difference being made up by debt issuances. And yes, in general the money going out is the result of a rigorous appropriations process. Each spend needs to get “connected to the grid” and is regularly reviewed and disconnected when complete.
Could this system benefit from an outside audit? Maybe. It’s complicated, and there are likely some issues that could be detected by a talented team with sharp eyes. Is there any particular reason to suspect that this system could accommodate massive fraud or abuse simply by dint of being centralized? No.
This is generally true, but taken to an absurd degree by the DOGE team. The Treasury General Account is essentially the checking account for the US Government, with tens to hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in it at any given time, depending on the time of the year and debt issuance activity.
The DOGE team is correct in saying that that the TGA could not pass an audit, because they haven’t for several years now. The GAO (a nonpartisan agency) comes in annually to assess the TGA and has been unable to issue an opinion on the reliability of their financial statements, including the ability to trace sample transactions to determine if they were properly recorded. This is because of the age of Treasury’s IT, and the willingness of other agencies to align with Treasury’s reporting practices (usually due to their own technology issues).
It’s important to note that this is not, by itself, evidence of fraud, waste, and abuse, nor would solving the internal control issues within the TGA necessarily even solve a fraud, waste, and abuse problem if it existed. The failures within the TGA audit are around things like “can you identify all of the transactions associated with this journal entry?” and not “are the transactions associated with this journal entry valid uses of funds?”. I would prefer the TGA was able to pass a control audit, but attacking it doesn’t actually address the issues that DOGE is purported to be focused on.
Edit to add: Taking the analogy from the video, I would say it is like having a bank account that all of your family members can use, with limits in place on how much they can use it (appropriations from Congress). However, if your kid uses the money to buy drugs instead of paying their tuition, you shouldn’t get mad at the bank for letting him take money out.