Sam Corcos

FRAUD IS THE NEW DOPE PART 1: NYC Clerks Caught Undercover Processing EBT Cards For Drug & Alcohol Purchases As “EBT Cash” & “EBT Food” “The [EBT] Cash Can Use it. 100%.” "I did EBT Food." “You're gonna be chilling with the aliens [Getting So High].”

Standing by our principles back in 2021, and not caving to the woke mob, remains one of the proudest achievements in my career. And you don't forget the (very) few who came forward to help. Thank you again, @pmarca (and @tobi and @patrickc) 🙏

@zachware @cremieuxrecueil @cremieuxrecueil working on it 😅

@cremieuxrecueil cc @SamCorcos

It's actually insane that I still have to physically mail forms to the IRS all the time. I fill out the form online on the IRS website, then I have to print it, mail it, and they scan it in for record-keeping. There's obvious opportunity for optimization here!

The United States of America will NEVER be a communist country.

Treasury stopped nearly $100 million in taxpayer money from going to dead people trib.al/Udeo0aQ

@shl Interesting idea! Could implement a client-side filter / Chrome extension. Not quite as good, but might be good enough.

@SamCorcos Haven’t seen anything that solves this, but should be possible at least client-side

Is there a way for me to just directly tell the X algorithm what I want to see? I have my `AGENTS.md` file for my coding tools which I fill in with a lot of information on my preferences and it generally stays aligned with those preferences. I'd love to just be able to write in plain text that just directly tells the X algorithm what I want to see. Mine would be something like: > I want to stay engaged with tech twitter and the startup world. I like seeing new tools that become available, like new AI models, new postgres extensions, or other tools that I might use in my workflow. Surface smart people that I don't follow. Less rage bait and less news. I like seeing what the people I'm following are up to. I also work at Treasury and IRS, so anything related to what we're working on I'd like to see more of. @Austen @shl you're the most active people I know on X -- is that a thing?

More data for you @traestephens and @joshdcaplan - only 7% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30; 44% is 50+ years old. @USTechForce and earlycareers.gov are geared toward getting great early career talent into government - come serve your country for a few years and kickstart your career by working on the world's most challenging, high-scale and innovative problems.

MASSIVE EBT & CHARITY FRAUD EXPOSED: Immigrants Are Openly Buying Food with Food Stamps and Collecting It from Charities, Then Shipping It Overseas to Sell for Profit In Lawrence, Massachusetts, a whistleblower revealed a welfare scam that the Dominican community has been running for over a decade. Here is how it works: Dominican immigrants buy food with EBT cards or take it for free from food banks. They then load it into shipping barrels and send it to the Dominican Republic, where it is sold for profit in local bodegas. We tracked the entire pipeline, from corner stores in Massachusetts to shipping hubs in New York to bodegas in Santo Domingo that are stocked with food paid for by the American taxpayer. We are prepared to share our findings with any legitimate investigative body. @JDVance

@spencerpratt They are traitors, plain and simple

🚨 Here is the full 53 minutes of my crew and I exposing New York fraud, we uncovered over $190,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters use the elderly and needy to commit fraud through adult and personal home care scams in NYC. Your tax dollars are paying for elderly Koreans and Chinese to play ping pong and do tai chi, while the fraudsters give $ kickbacks to those who enroll. Like it and share this video, the fraud must STOP. We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for fraudsters to steal from our pockets. These fraudsters have been able to defraud American taxpayers for years without any pushback from the public and politicians. Time is up. EXPOSE IT ALL AND END THE FRAUD.

We promised big changes. The scoreboard says @CMSGov is delivering. 💰$42 BILLION in Medicare savings from preventing fraud, waste, and abuse in FY 2025 🏦More than $22 saved for every $1 invested in program integrity efforts 🚨Nearly 70% of total savings came from prevention-first actions CMS and our program integrity team continue to stay one step ahead of fraudsters. The War on Fraud continues.

Happy Birthday, America! 🇺🇸 The greatest birthday gift is here—Trump Accounts are officially LIVE! Open your account today, invite family to contribute, and get ready to Jumpstart the American Dream when the markets open on Monday.

.@TrumpAccounts are now live, giving every child a stake in the American Dream from day one thanks to @POTUS. The Trump Accounts app is now updated with the full suite of account capabilities: you can start funding your child’s account, exploring financial education modules, and more. Visit TrumpAccounts.gov and download the official Trump Accounts app to access your child’s account before markets open on Monday.

BREAKING: Justice Clarence Thomas pens a scathing dissent after the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship. Thomas accuses the majority of “repurposing” the 14th Amendment “to protect its own set of preferred rights that the Reconstruction Congress never contemplated and that cannot find support in its text.” “Today, the Court does so again by recognizing a constitutional right to citizenship for the children of all foreign birth tourists and illegal aliens.” “I am not sure that today’s opinion will stand the test of time. The Citizenship Clause ‘added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship.’ Today’s opinion devalues that citizenship.” “I respectfully dissent.”

they did it. the mad lads actually did it. i never talked about my time at DOGE last year because it was so controversial and contentious (remember that?) early last year, @jgebbia recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the "retirement paper" problem. processing a federal retirement took months, and in the extreme retirees could wait up to 6 months for their full pension to arrive. what was the holdup? paper. remember hearing Elon talk about "the mine" in Pennsylvania? we got to visit it. in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone, there were literally acres of file cabinets, as far as the eye could see, storing files detailing federal employees' employment and paystub history. a simple "case" might be only a quarter or half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. one famously took up a whole pallet. each case was hand processed by case workers in cubicles deep underground. they checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly (many weren't), and handled a long tail of complex issues. we'd watch as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the COBOL mainframe built many decades ago. since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review, and additional rounds for complex cases. case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. sometimes it would sit in one place for days, waiting to be picked up. to OPM's credit, they'd done multiple rounds of "digital transformation" spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. there was a big effort in the mid-90s. but the systems were disparate, and it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. there was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the necessary forms — just to be mailed to the mine and stuffed into the paper file. and few federal agencies were even using it. when we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation, delivered by a software contractor. the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn't believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it's clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it's a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned. we fired the vendor and took over the project. they'd been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch. it was around this time I had to go back to new york — i had a new job waiting for me, a four month old, and a wife whose patience was running out. but i got to watch from afar as the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. and now they've fully done it. huge congrats to Joe and the team. @yatshitcray was the hero in the trenches. indefatigable, unrelentingly optimistic, and determined to see this project through. when i recruited him for "ok i can do two, maybe three months", he stuck it out over a year making this project a reality. while the retirement project was under the DOGE banner, it operated different from what you heard from the breathless, negative media — we came in with the attitude of partnering with career OPM employees. we were team members determined to bring our software talents to bear on the problem they've been trying to fix for years, which they hadn't had the resources to solve before. they were wary at first, not sure about us, but they quickly saw how authentic and determined we were to work together toward the same goal. props to Joe for developing those relationships, setting the example of how to collaborate together. what's the end result? lifelong federal employees, veterans, postal carriers get their full pension installments almost immediately. days instead of months. peace of mind for these people to devoted their careers to serving our country. massively streamlined operations inside of OPM. and NO MORE PAPER 🫡🇺🇸

Learn to ship.

Oh yes, I remember that Bond film where the villain decarbonized the auto industry, brought fast internet to everyone on the planet, and helped paralyzed people interact with the world again.

@ClonanBradley The challenge is defining what it means to be "held to an SLA". What's the consequence if you miss it? Cutting funding as a consequence of missing an SLA would just degrade performance even more. It doesn’t create consequences for the people (or vendors) who failed. The hard part is designing accountability into systems built to avoid it at all costs... The government doesn't work like a private company. We've started implementing (internal) SLAs and it's been effective, but it's been like pulling teeth. It's not part of the culture.

@mcuban @SamCorcos the treasury would be a great place to start implementing some of these concepts. Good luck with @USTechForce initiatives!

Have there ever been government SLAs that when not met, trigger the cancellation of the law or rule that created them ? It’s not a bad concept. This law has X years to reach within 80 percent of its goal, of cutting the cost of selected medications by 20 percent. If it is not reach by the Target Time , the law is cancelled. Think of it as the legal equivalent of the Elam Ending in basketball. You have to hit the target score to win