This is yet another example of why we desperately need the Department of Government Efficiency.  I realize that my articles about DOGE have caused some confusion in recent weeks, and so let me try to explain.  On the one hand, I have been arguing that we must crack down on  waste, fraud and abuse, but on the other hand I have been arguing that what DOGE is doing is going to cause a great deal of pain.  Some readers think that I have been contradicting myself, but I have not been contradicting myself at all.  There are times when we must do things that are necessary even though we know that they will cause a tremendous amount of pain.  We have piled up the largest mountain of debt in the history of the entire planet, and it really is an existential threat to the future of our nation.  But cutting down the size of the federal government and greatly reducing the flow of cash that is being spewed out of the giant money machine that we call the U.S. Treasury is going to cause immense chaos.  Honestly, I do not know if our society will be able to handle it.

On Monday, DOGE revealed that 4.7 trillion dollars in payments that have come through the U.S. Treasury are basically impossible to trace because they lacked a very important tracking code…

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced Monday that some $4.7 trillion in payments from the Treasury Department were missing a critical tracking code which made tracing the transactions "almost impossible."

The transactions were reportedly missing the Treasury Account Symbol, or TAS, an identification code which links a Treasury payment to a budget line item, according to DOGE, which described the use of such code as a "standard financial process."

"In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible," read an X post from DOGE.