🚨🇺🇸 OPINION: THE GOVERNMENT MADE STEALING SO EASY, A RECIEPT WOULD STOP BILLIONS IN FRAUD
There's a moment in every failing system when someone finally says the quiet part out loud.
This time, it was Elon: "Even requiring a tiny amount of work for fraudulent payments would have a massive positive effect.
That's how insanely awful the level of fraud actually is."
Let that sink in... We've built a public spending apparatus so porous that the mere act of asking for a receipt might save billions.
Across the country, taxpayer dollars flow through programs that require less verification than ordering a pizza.
Ghost daycares collect checks for children who don't exist, shell nonprofits invoice for services never rendered, and welfare fraud rings operate with industrial efficiency while bureaucrats shrug and process the next payment.
The response to DOGE's suggestion: require a receipt, a photo, literally any documentation before releasing funds, reveals how normalized this has become.
We're not talking about sophisticated fraud requiring forensic accountants to uncover, we're talking about schemes that would collapse if someone simply asked "Can you prove this is real?"
When asking for basic documentation is treated as revolutionary rather than obvious, something has gone catastrophically wrong.
Consider what we require of ordinary citizens: file your taxes perfectly or face penalties, document every deduction, save every receipt, prove every claim.
Meanwhile, government programs hand out public money with less scrutiny than a vending machine… the asymmetry is insulting.
Some will argue that adding verification requirements creates barriers for legitimate recipients, but this is where good-faith policy debates belong.
There’s a difference between streamlining access and eliminating all safeguards, as we've sailed past efficiency straight into negligence.
The fraud isn't even sophisticated, which is the most damning part, as these schemes survive not because they're clever, but because nobody's checking.
Elon’s observation cuts through years of bureaucratic excuse-making.
The current system insults both taxpayers funding it and legitimate recipients whose programs get undermined by unchecked abuse.
If asking for a photo is too much friction, we're not serious about governing, we're just pretending while the treasury bleeds out.
Source: elonmusk, DOGE 
