When a business bets itself on a bold gamble, with enormous upside but also enormous downside, if the gamble doesn't pay off, the worst thing that happens is that the business goes bankrupt, investors lose some money, employees lose their jobs, and everyone involved eventually moves on.
When a country bets itself on a bold gamble, with enormous upside but also enormous downside, if the gamble doesn't pay off, the worst thing that happens is that the country fails, institutions break down, conflict and violence erupt everywhere, entire populations suffer, and no one has a way out.
Like it or not, the US is going to bet itself on a bold gamble. Bureaucrats, lawmakers, and the courts move too slowly to be able to do anything about it. Indeed, it's already happening. As someone quoted in the OP explains: "Before Congress and the courts can respond, Elon Musk will have rolled up the whole government."
This reminds me of a story i read about in The Power Broker about Robert Moses. He wanted to tear down, i think, the old mayor's mansion or something, but someone got a court order to stop him. The date was set for a few days out. The night before the court date, he leveled the place and then went to court and said, "it's already done. There's no reason for me to be here." and that was it.
Meigs Field airport in Chicago was demolished (well the runway was) overnight by order of Mayor Daley in the 90s during a contentious fight over whether to close it or not. Laws aren’t fast enough to stop someone with the will and power to act quickly.
Elon Musk doesn’t have the authority to overturn programs and spending priorities decided by Congress. And yet he is doing that, for example he "deleted" 18F that build the Direct File site for filing taxes. Then USAID the foreign assistance agency.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Mr. Musk gloated on X at 1:54 a.m. Monday. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
I think that delegating power to government agencies are a lot more complicated than is commonly understood. My surface level understanding is that the agencies run under the executive branch with funding from congress. If that is true, then the chief executive would have the authority to instruct the agency to do nothing and spend no money, but he wouldn’t have the authority to instruct the agency to spend more than authorized by congress. I guess congress will have to garbage collect the funding as a technicality, though there may be a built in mechanism for reallocating underspent budgets.
> If that is true, then the chief executive would have the authority to instruct the agency to do nothing and spend no money
This is called Impoundment, and is illegal. Just ask Nixon.
The Executive branch is actually required to spend as dictated by Congress. There is a portion of spending that is discretionary, but it's a small minority of the Federal budget, and does not include the things currently being targeted.
> Elon Musk doesn’t have the authority to overturn programs and spending priorities decided by Congress. And yet he is doing that, for example he "deleted" 18F that build the Direct File site for filing taxes.
This is the problem I have with all of the commentary on DOGE, it's extremely slippery about what is being paid for by whom and how. The official website for 18F says they are not allocated funding by Congress: https://18f.gsa.gov/about/
> And yet he is doing that, for example he "deleted" 18F that build the Direct File site for filing taxes.
AFAIK, neither 18F nor Direct File were established by statute, both were set up by executive action within existing legal authority. It's not clear to me that terminating either as functions at executive discretion is illegal.
I think civil servants underestimate how many are cheering on the incursion. A large portion if the populace that educated professional class rarely mix with view much of the federal government as paper pushers who declare shoe laces as machine guns, arrest people for improperly packaged lobsters, stop the import of favored trucks like the Hilux, and roll into towns like Waco and pose in pictures of the rubble of children burned alive.
The reasoning musk provides may be untruthful, but it's incredibly persuasive to a winning segment of voters. These articles are meant to be alarm bells, but they end up as delightful entertainment.
You don't think wanting to buy a Toyota Hilux is "relatable"? Or importing lobster tails and getting arrested for it? Or wanting to play with guns? Or watching your family members burned to death without a trial on national TV? What meaning of "relatable" are you using here, and how does it relate to public opinion about the Federal Government?
Sounds like we need a scalpel, not napalm. For every silly/stupid regulation removed, there will be 100 important regulations as collateral. And then we'll see real collateral.
We eliminated most planning and all building codes for owner/builders in my county (granted not federal, but one of the most cited 'written in blood' regulations).
The end result was none of the apocalyptic predictions. People build whatever housing they can afford rather than buying more housing safety at the expense of less healthcare and food, education etc. When we deregulated, people made their own safety calculus and it worked. And it's why I have a home.
> Sixty-five percent of Americans say government efficiency is an issue, but few said they supported DOGE, and fewer than half of those polled support the department’s head. Fifty-two percent of Americans, asked ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration, had an unfavorable view of Musk, while 36% had a favorable view of him, according to the AP-NORC poll released on Jan. 24. And just 29% of Americans said they approved of the creation of DOGE.
> On government inefficiency, 81% of Republicans identified it as a major issue. However, only 58% of Republicans said they supported DOGE. With Democrats, 55% saw government inefficiency as a problem, but only 11% are in favor of DOGE. Those numbers are 61% and 20%, respectively, with independents. Six in 10 respondents went on to say they disapprove of billionaires advising the president. Just 20% of Republicans said they thought policy advice from billionaires was a good thing, while 44% did not find the idea to be positive or negative, the poll found.
A lot of those same people are going to questioning where the various government services they utilize have gone, or why they are no longer allowed to be in a union, or why do the worker protections they were accustomed to no longer exist, or why their drinking water isn't safe, or why there is a measles outbreak, or why can't I use the free tax filing system that my taxes paid for and saved them money, or why the amount of smog and noxious chemicals has increased exponentially, or, or, or, ...
Ignorance is bliss. Or at least it is until your child grows a third arm, and you spend an hour a day boiling your water for safety.
The punchline is that after all is set and done these people will still believe the lies Trump and Musk give to them. Just shift blame to something else, have that common enemy, bring up some of the ”positives” you’ve done and they are just as hooked, if not more so.
A private, unelected individual is dismantling the US government from the inside. Congress is doing nothing about it. This is one of the wildest things I've seen in my life.
> Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NOTUS that even though what Elon Musk is doing is unconstitutional — “nobody should bellyache about that.”
> He added: “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense. But it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”
Where a given topic, point, issue, or argument is frequently made, and especially (but not only) where it is of limited veracity (or as Frankfurter and Brandolini brand it, bullshit), the latter's asymmetry law argues for an effective and low-cost countermeasure, or for context to be supplied readily.
Copy-pasta issues and bullshit justify copy-pasta responses.
The flags and admonition here should be reversed.
(This of course doesn't apply to all copy-pasta, and bogus copy-pasta is of course strongly deprecated.)
My autistic kid and my whole family rely on Medicaid while we have no income. Is it worth my kid not having their necessary treatments to save a few thousand bucks? Any MAGA want to answer me as to why this is a good thing? I served America for a decade in the military and now I’ll lose my home and medical coverage and my son will back slide and probably never recover. I’m also a disabled veteran, so when do they cut those benefits? Will I lose the money I currently use to pay for food, too?
Tell me, was this worth it to own the libs? I want to yell at you MAGA folks but I don’t want to get banned here, so I’m being as nice as possible but I really hate you guys right now.
Edit: instead of pressing downvote why don’t you cowards speak?
Having worked financial management in federal govt and private sector there is far far far more graft, outright theft and corruption, and incredible waste in the private sector than the public sector.
Pretty much this. I too have done both private sector and government. People think government is more wasteful than private because it's public. When government wastes a few million some unneeded program the details are just an FOIA request away. Oftentimes it's already published somewhere if you know where to look.
That (even a publicly traded one) business wasting millions on a Salesforce rollout that never gains traction and gets quietly abandoned? Odds are no one not directly involved knows. And the exec pushing it gets promoted.
In a past job, my company lost track of tens of thousands of servers. They were racked up, powered up, sitting at a PXE boot screen for almost 5 years before someone noticed them sitting idle. They were storage nodes with pci-e flash storage (very expensive at the time), so I'm sure it was in the high 10's of millions of Capex that was completely wasted, and I'm sure at least a million in opex for the datacenter space and power and all that jazz for the 5 years. By the time they were noticed, they were EOL and "recycled" (aka sold off to used server resellers).
I totally buy that Public is way more efficient then Private companies overall.
I fail to see how anyone can look at a treasury line item and determine if it's waste or not. This isn't the way to reduce waste. This is a way to reduce spending regardless of how efficient it is or isn't. Entirely different goal.
Do you have any evidence to substantiate that fairly radical claim? Because literally every Google result on every subject seems to indicate you are incorrect.
I wouldn’t worry about it yet, at some point they’re going to impact the same population who showed up for J6; those folks are highly motivated under the right circumstances, and were unconditionally pardoned.
It’s hard not to worry, my kid’s life depends on Medicaid. I’d he doesn’t have therapy, he will not become a functioning adult, if that’s even possible anyways. As an adult, he’ll have even less protections than as a child with autism, especially in the “anti-DEI” world. Not sure why everyone is saying not to worry, in the face of this type of action by musk.
I’m not saying not to worry out of nihilism or lack of empathy, but of emotional health for you as the situation develops. Will it be fine? Lots of options available still to resolve this.
When I read about cuts to welfare and security, I'm usually angered against those who implement such cuts (I'm Italian, but this still stands whether it's us, eu, italy...).
Reading your comment, I just felt very sad. It's like you lived a reverse American dream.
I feel sorry for you. Feeling powerless it's a shitty feeling, especially if you have done everything right
Your dire predictions are a little premature. If we take them at their word, they're looking to reduce waste, and there's little reason to believe that treatment for autism falls into that category. Does anyone believe that there is no corruption or waste between the time of funding and delivery to a patient? Any dollars saved, and any efficiency gained, should be a net positive, no?
Honest people don't flagrantly break laws. It would be foolish to take these people at their word when we live in an extremely transparent democracy where the effectiveness of these programs was trivial to gather data on until a week ago when these hooligans took it offline.
Read about autism treatment in red states. I’m not going from no evidence here, I’ve been deep into all the cracks, in trying to get my son from level 2 support up to a functioning human, I know what’s at stake and what each political party has actually done in their spheres of influence and I’m horrified at the things Republicans say about autism and care for autistic people. I don’t trust trump or musk as far as I can throw them tired together on this topic, and even if their word is to be accepted the downright reckless way they’ve been doing things is evidence enough that they don’t care about the damage they do.
Yes, I agree that they're taking the SV approach of "move fast and break things". They believe that government is severely broken, and this is their chance to reform it in significant ways. But obviously that's little comfort to you, if you get caught up in any breakage.
What I wish is that the Democrats had heard the plea of so many working class Americans, who were basically saying the same thing as you. "Your policies, (like mass immigration), make me fearful for the future, and I don't know how I will survive, or thrive". It was the dismissal of their fears, often with derision and insults, that pushed so many of them into the arms of Trump.
I have seen precious little reason to give Elon the benefit of the doubt on literally any topic. If he told me the sky was blue, I'd check for myself. The sheer breadth of things he's lied about over the past decade (from patently absurd release timelines, to promises of charity, to the cave sub fiasco, to the events of his own son's death) leaves me terrified of his access this week.
I think it's safe to assume that's where things are headed slowly. After the treasury situation, I think its more than fair to assume they aren't going to be only bloat or operating in good faith when their stance is to get rid of the systems entirely.
Remember when he bought twitter and gutted it? Child safty department was cut to the bone and they barely got away without any legal issues. Numerous core services failed leaving twitter/x barely operating for days. And this was with the tenured professionals keeping things running, now he seems to be using a bunch of people with under 5 years experience in the work force let alone in these sectors/technology.
Nothing says "sincere, well intentioned audit" quite like a billionaire gloating on social media about shutting down entire departments over the weekend whilst his staff of 7 interns with no auditing experience demand access to everyone's data on the basis they're the United States Digital Service...
“Entitlement” means “life dependent” I guess, so they should be afraid! Smashing things with a hammer isn’t an audit, I audited medical device manufacturing processes from time to time in the past and this isn’t an audit. Audits are for asking questions and then you take those answers and write a report. After the report you make a plan of action and then there are approvals and change management. Once that’s done, you make the changes and then have a period of time where you more closely watch and increase inspections and audits to ensure everything is going as planned, that’s called validation.
You don’t rush into offices, take them over, kick out senior employees, make charges to a system you don’t understand, and cut funding for whole departments at large. That’s not auditing, that’s more like a coup.
I'm sorry you're having to worry about this and I just want to encourage you to continue to speak out about your plight if your worries about Medicaid turn into reality. The only way for people to actually understand why the government needs to backstop folks is if the folks who are being backstopped communicate their experiences. At least then people can make more educated decisions on what they're voting for.
And at the risk of being that guy on the internet, one of the things that could be beneficial is making sure you have all of your documentation in order to prove that Medicaid for you and your family should not be interrupted. I'm 99.9% sure that Medicaid is not going anywhere, but I do think there is going to be a tremendous amount of scrutiny on enrollment and aggressive attempts to cut costs. Fair or not, the people who are organized, and can show proof of their situation, are going to be in a better position to argue their case than those who are incapable of getting organized. That includes making sure you download any statements or info from government websites because it's possible (likely?) some of those may go offline.
For other folks reading this, I'm making no political statement here. I'm taking the parent at face value, expressing sympathy and trying to be as helpful as an internet commenter can be (of course that's not very helpful).
No it’s very helpful to say those things, thank you. One of the most important things in this kind of situation is documentation.
I guess my anger and rage is also because not only is my family dependent on Medicaid but most of the families I know at my kid’s therapy center are on it. I am not just being personally affected but this affects so many in my community locally and as autism affected families. It’s enraging that the SV break things fast approach is being used for something that affects tens of millions of people and who rely on it for their literal lives in most cases, and some folks here are cheering it on!
One important point to understand the speed at which these actions are happening..
As the deadline for the current tax breaks draws near, there is increasing urgency around the administration push to extend and potentially expand these benefits, particularly for billionaires ;-)
Despite having the political upper hand through control of both the House and the Senate, there is a significant obstacle: The massive federal deficit.
To make these tax cuts feasible, the administration would need to offset the cost by cutting government spending. Unfortunately, much of that spending goes toward social programs, meaning millions of Americans who rely on government support could be adversely affected.
It's a shame the needed tax raises are not in discussion.
So he gets in office and gives the office to an AI overlord to hasten AI taking jobs and first target is the federal government.
Im not understanding how this will help Americans, their jobs, livelihoods and the economy? Not trying to be political just confused by elect me and America will be more prosperous. How will it when the worry of AI taking jobs is right here at our feet, being done so at the federal level and being expedited by a guy who has more money then whatever.
80 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadWhen a country bets itself on a bold gamble, with enormous upside but also enormous downside, if the gamble doesn't pay off, the worst thing that happens is that the country fails, institutions break down, conflict and violence erupt everywhere, entire populations suffer, and no one has a way out.
Like it or not, the US is going to bet itself on a bold gamble. Bureaucrats, lawmakers, and the courts move too slowly to be able to do anything about it. Indeed, it's already happening. As someone quoted in the OP explains: "Before Congress and the courts can respond, Elon Musk will have rolled up the whole government."
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Mr. Musk gloated on X at 1:54 a.m. Monday. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
This is called Impoundment, and is illegal. Just ask Nixon.
The Executive branch is actually required to spend as dictated by Congress. There is a portion of spending that is discretionary, but it's a small minority of the Federal budget, and does not include the things currently being targeted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_...
This is the problem I have with all of the commentary on DOGE, it's extremely slippery about what is being paid for by whom and how. The official website for 18F says they are not allocated funding by Congress: https://18f.gsa.gov/about/
AFAIK, neither 18F nor Direct File were established by statute, both were set up by executive action within existing legal authority. It's not clear to me that terminating either as functions at executive discretion is illegal.
The reasoning musk provides may be untruthful, but it's incredibly persuasive to a winning segment of voters. These articles are meant to be alarm bells, but they end up as delightful entertainment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NFA/comments/n4dpm7/the_atf_outlawe...
https://ideatransfuser.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/from-lobster...
https://fourwheelinsider.com/toyota-hilux-united-states/
You can't possibly be unaware of the Waco mass killing if you are confusing the US electorate with the general public.
On Waco: I do not see how this fits in with the others.
I am not able to rightly apprehend what sort of confusion of ideas could give voice to such an utterance.
You linked the shoelace restriction. That seems like an obvious example of "silly/stupid".
By collateral, death. Most regulations are written in blood. Tearing out a bunch of Chesterton fence regulations will result in death.
The end result was none of the apocalyptic predictions. People build whatever housing they can afford rather than buying more housing safety at the expense of less healthcare and food, education etc. When we deregulated, people made their own safety calculus and it worked. And it's why I have a home.
If you don't want this info on the internet, would you please send it to my email?
hruvulum@gmail.com
Like y'all know that is not normal.
> Sixty-five percent of Americans say government efficiency is an issue, but few said they supported DOGE, and fewer than half of those polled support the department’s head. Fifty-two percent of Americans, asked ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration, had an unfavorable view of Musk, while 36% had a favorable view of him, according to the AP-NORC poll released on Jan. 24. And just 29% of Americans said they approved of the creation of DOGE.
> On government inefficiency, 81% of Republicans identified it as a major issue. However, only 58% of Republicans said they supported DOGE. With Democrats, 55% saw government inefficiency as a problem, but only 11% are in favor of DOGE. Those numbers are 61% and 20%, respectively, with independents. Six in 10 respondents went on to say they disapprove of billionaires advising the president. Just 20% of Republicans said they thought policy advice from billionaires was a good thing, while 44% did not find the idea to be positive or negative, the poll found.
Ignorance is bliss. Or at least it is until your child grows a third arm, and you spend an hour a day boiling your water for safety.
More on other forms of moderation, mostly automatic, recently by dang (HN's public moderator) at length: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011>.
If you feel a story is inappropriately flagged, email the mods to request disabling flags at hn@ycombinator.com.
For writing effective emails see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922791>
The decision not to change it is a moderation decision.
The decision not to override it is a moderation decision.
> Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NOTUS that even though what Elon Musk is doing is unconstitutional — “nobody should bellyache about that.” > He added: “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense. But it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”
https://politicalwire.com/2025/02/04/thom-tillis-says-nobody...
Where a given topic, point, issue, or argument is frequently made, and especially (but not only) where it is of limited veracity (or as Frankfurter and Brandolini brand it, bullshit), the latter's asymmetry law argues for an effective and low-cost countermeasure, or for context to be supplied readily.
Copy-pasta issues and bullshit justify copy-pasta responses.
The flags and admonition here should be reversed.
(This of course doesn't apply to all copy-pasta, and bogus copy-pasta is of course strongly deprecated.)
Tell me, was this worth it to own the libs? I want to yell at you MAGA folks but I don’t want to get banned here, so I’m being as nice as possible but I really hate you guys right now.
Edit: instead of pressing downvote why don’t you cowards speak?
That (even a publicly traded one) business wasting millions on a Salesforce rollout that never gains traction and gets quietly abandoned? Odds are no one not directly involved knows. And the exec pushing it gets promoted.
I totally buy that Public is way more efficient then Private companies overall.
Medical coverage: https://www.cbpp.org/research/correcting-seven-myths-about-m...
Education: https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI951123...
Heck, even things like increased funding for the IRS have incredible ROI: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57444
Reading your comment, I just felt very sad. It's like you lived a reverse American dream.
I feel sorry for you. Feeling powerless it's a shitty feeling, especially if you have done everything right
What I wish is that the Democrats had heard the plea of so many working class Americans, who were basically saying the same thing as you. "Your policies, (like mass immigration), make me fearful for the future, and I don't know how I will survive, or thrive". It was the dismissal of their fears, often with derision and insults, that pushed so many of them into the arms of Trump.
Remember when he bought twitter and gutted it? Child safty department was cut to the bone and they barely got away without any legal issues. Numerous core services failed leaving twitter/x barely operating for days. And this was with the tenured professionals keeping things running, now he seems to be using a bunch of people with under 5 years experience in the work force let alone in these sectors/technology.
You don’t rush into offices, take them over, kick out senior employees, make charges to a system you don’t understand, and cut funding for whole departments at large. That’s not auditing, that’s more like a coup.
And at the risk of being that guy on the internet, one of the things that could be beneficial is making sure you have all of your documentation in order to prove that Medicaid for you and your family should not be interrupted. I'm 99.9% sure that Medicaid is not going anywhere, but I do think there is going to be a tremendous amount of scrutiny on enrollment and aggressive attempts to cut costs. Fair or not, the people who are organized, and can show proof of their situation, are going to be in a better position to argue their case than those who are incapable of getting organized. That includes making sure you download any statements or info from government websites because it's possible (likely?) some of those may go offline.
For other folks reading this, I'm making no political statement here. I'm taking the parent at face value, expressing sympathy and trying to be as helpful as an internet commenter can be (of course that's not very helpful).
I guess my anger and rage is also because not only is my family dependent on Medicaid but most of the families I know at my kid’s therapy center are on it. I am not just being personally affected but this affects so many in my community locally and as autism affected families. It’s enraging that the SV break things fast approach is being used for something that affects tens of millions of people and who rely on it for their literal lives in most cases, and some folks here are cheering it on!
As the deadline for the current tax breaks draws near, there is increasing urgency around the administration push to extend and potentially expand these benefits, particularly for billionaires ;-)
Despite having the political upper hand through control of both the House and the Senate, there is a significant obstacle: The massive federal deficit.
To make these tax cuts feasible, the administration would need to offset the cost by cutting government spending. Unfortunately, much of that spending goes toward social programs, meaning millions of Americans who rely on government support could be adversely affected.
It's a shame the needed tax raises are not in discussion.
Im not understanding how this will help Americans, their jobs, livelihoods and the economy? Not trying to be political just confused by elect me and America will be more prosperous. How will it when the worry of AI taking jobs is right here at our feet, being done so at the federal level and being expedited by a guy who has more money then whatever.
I think the key is that parts of America will be more prosperous. For example, the already-prosperous.
* healthy people are able to work and pay taxes
* when people don’t have access to regular care, they end up in the ER when things get really bad. All the rest of us pay the cost of those visits
* access to care (particularly vaccines like flu or covid) means less spread of disease and leas exposure to disease for the rest of us