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I can understand that there's arguments that can be made as to why payments would be automatically approved, sure, but then it begs the question: why is the government paying "payment approval officers"? Couldn't the process just assume these are automatically approved? Why is someone in the loop if their job is to pass along paper?
Why indeed. I highly recommend that people on this forum read Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson. I see a lot of people who are confused by what Musk does and it would help them to not be confused.
Musk's whole method of improving systems is to break into the parts of the system that others gloss over.
For example, at Tesla, they bought a machine to do something. The machine is really slow. So Musk asks the guy running the machine why it is so slow. Guy doesn't know. Musk asks for it to be speed up. The guy doesn't know how. So he finds someone who does know. They open up the machine and speed it up +300%. It doesn't work. They dial it down to +200%. Now it works and the throughput is 3x what it was before.
99.9% of people would have treated the machine like a black box. And that's what people are doing here with the government. No one really knows how the government works, even our resident lawyers. It's far too complicated. So they treat it like a black box. Congress appropriates money. The Treasury spends it.
Okay, but like, who, actually spends it? Who signs the checks? Who is the actual person who processes the payment?
I am virtually certain that Musk's process here will uncover a bunch of fraud and waste. And that's why some people are so desperate to stop it.
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