English → Persian transcript

What did DOGE teach you, if you learned one thing? Well, it was like a very interesting side quest, you know, because I got to see a lot of the workings of the government. And, you know, there's been quite a few efficiencies. I mean, some of them are very basic efficiencies,

like just adding in requirements for federal payments that any given payment must have an assigned congressional payment code and a comment field with something in it that's more than nothing. Like, that trivial-seeming change, my guess is, probably saves $100 billion or even $200 billion a year.

Because there are massive numbers of payments that were going out with no congressional payment code and with nothing in the comment field, which makes auditing the payments impossible. So they have to say, like, why can the Defense Department, or now the Department of War, why can it not pass an audit?

It's because the information is not there. The information necessary to pass an audit does not exist, is the issue. So a bunch of things that DOGE did were just very common sense things that would be normal for any organization that cared about financial responsibility. That's most of what was done.

And it's still going on, by the way. DOGE is still happening. But it turns out when you stop fraudulent and wasteful payments, the fraudsters don't confess to this. They actually start yelling all sorts of nonsense that you're stopping essential payments to needy people.

But actually, you're not. You know, we get this thing like saying, oh, you've got to send this thing for whatever. It would be like, this is going to children in Africa. And I'm like, yeah, but then why are the wiring instructions

for Deloitte and Tuchin in Washington, D.C.? Because that's not Africa. So can you please connect us with the recipients of this money in Africa? And then there gets silence. Like, okay, we just want to literally talk to the recipients.

That's it. And then we're like, oh, no, it turns out for some reason we can't talk to them. We're like, well, we're not going to send the money unless we can talk to the recipients and confirm they will actually get it. But fraudsters necessarily will come up with a very sympathetic argument.

They're not going to say, give us the money for fraud. That's not going to be what they say, obviously. They're going to try to make these sympathetic-sounding arguments that are false. They're going to start an NGO, and then? Yeah, they're going to see NGOs.

It's going to be like the Save the Baby Pandas NGO, which is like, who doesn't want to save the baby pandas? They're adorable. But then it turns out no pandas are being saved in this thing. It's just corruption, essentially.

And you're like, well, can you send us a picture of the panda? They're like, no, okay. Well, how do we know it's going to the pandas then? That's all I'm saying.