Welcome to a new week. Let’s get you caught up. 

President Trump fired the chairman of his Joint Chiefs of Staff and two other senior officers. He was temporarily rebuffed by the Supreme Court in his bid to fire the head of the federal agency that protects government whistleblowers.  

On Saturday, Elon Musk told hundreds of thousands of federal workers by email that they had 48 hours to submit to the Department of Government Efficiency an account of what they accomplished over the past week. 

Efficiency aside, the U.S. government leaks money. Some of that stems from mistakes, but a Government Accountability Office estimate also attributed up to $521 billion in “lost” funds last year to fraud. “At the high end,” write Laurent Belsie and Caitlin Babcock today, “that is about 8%” of what the federal government spent in its last fiscal year.

Enter the fraud audit. Done well, it’s a long, rigorous process: forensic accountants indexing and referencing every number and word. No swapping “billion” for “million” in haste. No falling for code glitches that suggest 150-year-old freeloaders. Best practices matter, our reporting shows. Motives matter, too.