Yes, that was covered a while back by Planet Money I think when interviewing one former DOGE worker. It turns out there are different lists of people, in different formats, maintained by different departments, for different purposes. What happens is, one group comes up with a list of people who are supposedly ripping the govt off. They send that list to another department, who comes back and says, no, some of those people are supposed to get benefits, some of these forms were just filed incorrectly, some records are out of date, some ancient database has a short integer that rolls over, etc.
Like any complex bureaucratic process, there will be errors, and they know that, so there are checks to correct those errors. And you need a lot of people (with a lot of tribal, historic, or contextual knowledge) to deal with that complexity. But you don't hear that full story. You hear a sound bite of a partial truth selectively repeated by people who want to pass off a specific narrative.
Another way to think about it: think of the oldest legacy computer system at a company you're aware of. Now realize the US government has computers going back to 1965, and paper records from way, way before then.
Like any complex bureaucratic process, there will be errors, and they know that, so there are checks to correct those errors. And you need a lot of people (with a lot of tribal, historic, or contextual knowledge) to deal with that complexity. But you don't hear that full story. You hear a sound bite of a partial truth selectively repeated by people who want to pass off a specific narrative.
Another way to think about it: think of the oldest legacy computer system at a company you're aware of. Now realize the US government has computers going back to 1965, and paper records from way, way before then.