Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley.

I'm Wired's global editorial director, Katie Drummond.

Today on the show, the difference between Doge and official federal auditors.

I'm joined today by Wired's Vittoria Elliott.

Welcome to Uncanny Valley, Tori.

Thank you for having me.

Happy that you're here.

Now, Tori, you published a story today on Wired about federal auditors,

what they do, what makes their work fundamentally different to what Doge is doing. And to report

this story, you actually spoke to a few federal auditors. So what does a federal auditor actually do?

Because these are real jobs prior to Doge, infiltrating federal agencies.

Audits were actually already happening.

So walk us through sort of what that job entails on a daily basis.

So I think maybe a lot of people might have forgotten about this because everything has

been moving so quickly.

But one of the first moves of the new Trump administration was to fire a bunch of inspector generals. And those

are people who actually, their offices actually do these kinds of investigations. So a lot of the

audits, for instance, that we think about with government programs go through the office of IGs.

They have stuff reported to them and then they get to look into it.

So, you know, if you're in a federal agency and you're like, this seems to be wrong, you can report that to your agency's IG, and they can go in and audit that.

Audits can also be ordered by Congress if they think there's some kind of malfeasance or problems.

So, for instance, there was a big audit of hurricane aid during Hurricane Maria

...