I don't doubt there is waste in the federal government. I also don't doubt it is largely in programs that tend tend to be lavishly funded, not squeezed to death, so agricultural subsidies, construction projects, and defense. These are programs conservatives love. DOGE is concentrating its "waste, fraud, and abuse cutting" to ideological enemies. In other words, it isn't about finding and cutting waste or fraud; it's about the ideological capture and remolding of government outside of any framework of accountability or democratic input.
A lovely example of their creative approach to their alleged project:
> In another case, DOGE claimed $232 million in savings on a contract providing information technology support to the Social Security Administration. But The Intercept reported that only a sliver of the contract was canceled — a program to let users mark their gender as “X” — bringing the actual savings closer to $560,000.
They lie about what they accomplished, and what they did accomplish was just performative cruelty with negligible effect on the budget.
And honestly it’s been both parties who have been more than happy to pay lip service to the problem but instead of paring things add additional oversight that has no enforcement power so they only add more weight to the bureaucracy with a few reports no one reads to show for. In the face of deficits, they don’t retrench as individuals and private entities have to.
You forget they talk about responsible budgeting when Dems are in office. Talk talk talk. Then they balloon the debt when they're running the show. Sure did talk though...
You have to be blindly partisan to be unable to recognize basic facts about the debt load and that republican governments are responsible for the vast majority of it.
I personally wouldn't want my government run by unchecked people who get the value of something off by three orders of magnitude. In a meritocracy private company someone confusing 8M with 8B is at best put in a closet job. More likely getting fired, and probably getting sued. When Jerome Kerviel was off by 5B he went to prison.
Unchecked means without oversight and without the checks and balances.
The various lawsuits against the actions in the last month alone show a blatant disregard for process and legal procedure.
The media coverage I have seen falls into these 2 categories.
1. Declaration of great success in short one liners. This comes without evidence every time. This comes as tweets or from the administration.
2. When evidence is looked into we see that the numbers fall short, the "alleged" corruption is not corruption at all or the entire claim is a falsehood.
This is exactly right. DOGE deserves no praise. Their goal is not to cut spending to bring money back to the people. Their goal is to gut the government itself and make it ineffective in improving people's lives. They don't actually care whether these departments are "wasteful", and anyone who thinks they do has bought and drunk the snake oil.
destroying institutions is the plan. it's a cynical party. the only time "build" is mentioned is border walls. unfortunately "great" countries aren't BUILT on fear and cynicism.
The Republican plan for the federal government for decades has been to try to kneecap various agencies and departments so fully that they can't function well, go "look how poorly they operate! Time to close it down and let private sector handle it!"
That wouldn't be the goal though, just the means to their end. The goal would have to be shrinking the government, for example, or to move authority out to the private sector.
The entire party is psychos wanting to kneecap departments just to watch them bleed.
I can't recall when government was so enthusiastic about rooting out fraud. I kind of like this, and I want the government to actively pursue fraud and mismanagement. Feels like it always gets buried in some bureaucratic report.
There have been plenty of claims of specific waster and fraud found. The problem is knowing what is actually true and accurate right now. Things have been moving quickly and its become such a political firestorm that it's extremely difficult to find unbiased reporting.
I'd tweak that slightly. I think they should be considered unproven or unsubstantiated, that doesn't make them false.
Assuming they're false because they haven't been nearly immediately proven publicly makes it too easy for those concerns and allegations to be written off and ignored.
Doesn't that apply to all, or nearly all, politicians at the federal level?
Even the names they give major bills are technically a lie, any legislator that supports or votes for it is lying. Campaign speeches and promises are riddled with lies and omissions. Presidents lie while in office.
I don't mean to play whataboutism here. I'm all for calling out lying politicians here, but I'd extend that to everyone that fits the bill.
A potential fact coming from an untrustworthy person isn't immediately false. An untrustworthy person can be right and a trustworthy can be wrong.
The point is that we can't consider a claim true or false. We need evidence to prove it is true, and we can never really prove its false unless we can see all information that could possibly be related to the question.
I don't personally see the government release all information that could possibly be related to any question of fraud or abuse, so we're left either proving it true or considering it unsubstantiated or unproven.
> A potential fact coming from an untrustworthy person isn't immediately false. An untrustworthy person can be right and a trustworthy can be wrong.
An untrustworthy person is trying to convince you of something, and has access and control of all the information to substantiate everything he's saying. Why is anything left unproven? Because he's relying on information asymmetry to confound you. It's the same thing he did with the so-called "Twitter Files", where he selectively leaked one-sided information to spin a narrative. He's doing the same thing with Doge and people are falling for it. Probably the same ones who fell for the "Twitter files".
Proven liars rely on credulous people like yourself to continue operating once their lies are widely known. That's why when such a liar has power, the only rational stance is extreme skepticism until, like I said, an independent verification can be obtained. Otherwise you open yourself to be taken advantage of.
> I don't personally see the government release all information that could possibly be related to any question of fraud or abuse
We're not asking for that kind of a standard. I would be satisfied with releasing the necessary information that would be sufficient in proving specific questions of fraud raised by Musk to the public. Trusted third parties with appropriate clearances can handle sensitive information, and it can be appropriately redacted for public consumption.
> An untrustworthy person is trying to convince you of something, and has access and control of all the information to substantiate everything he's saying. Why is anything left unproven?
Not totally relevant here, but I find it interesting that this description is literally how our legal system works. The prosecutor is trying to convince the jury of something and the prosecutor holds all their potential evidence, deciding for themselves what to deem relevant or exculpatory.
> We're not asking for that kind of a standard. I would be satisfied with releasing the necessary information that would be sufficient in proving specific questions of fraud raised by Musk to the public.
Agreed, that was actually what I meant in the other option I gave - they can prove the claim true by making public limited facts. I only raised that all related information would have to be released if the goal is to prove the claim false, which it sounds like you don't want or expect.
I would fully expect them to eventually release proof of fraud claims, until then I consider them claims of fraud that are so far unproven.
I also would be in favor of rooting out fraud and even closing many of the departments we have today (along with getting rid of the legal authority that allowed them).
When a strongman figure is in charge yelling one thing, though, I do always look in the other direction. Its like a magic show, look where they want to distract you from rather than what they're pointing at.
I'll be very interested to see where this ends up, and a little surprised if its an honest attempt to find fraud and shrink the government or balance the budget.
Unless there's a detailed report about the specific fraud being stopped, there's nothing. So far it seems people are happy to stop "fraud" as in "things they don't like and won't justify". Tweets don't count.
It seems like a reasonable opinion for a voter to agree with things they don't like to be stopped though.
Maybe the voter doesn't actually care about fraud, but why shouldn't they appreciate having fewer of their tax dollars being spent on things they don't even agree with?
It's a short term strategy though. If you go with "doesn't matter if it's true if it benefits me", the next "fraud" to be removed may be yours/you. And someone else will like it too.
I agree that's a bad approach in almost every situation, but it is par for the course. That isn't to say its okay, but there are worse examples of short term strategies to take issue with if that's the concern.
Of course. Democracy does mean we make our bed and then have to sleep in it though.
Assuming we do have a democracy today (I'd argue that's questionable for many reasons), a majority of voters and electoral college representatives voted for Trump.
Trump so far is doing many of the things he said he would do. For better or worse our democracy picked this. If it goes poorly we can only blame ourselves.
> Assuming we do have a democracy today (I'd argue that's questionable for many reasons), a majority of voters and electoral college representatives voted for Trump.
It's not a winner take all system. If a bunch of racists get elected to office, they can't just claim a "mandate" and declare the Civil Right Act null and void by refusing to enforce it. The President enforces all the laws, even the ones his voters don't support. If he wants to change them, he can sign a bill into law, he can veto a bill, but he can't pick and choose to enforce just Republican passed laws.
If a bunch of racists run on such ideas and say that's what they will do, and they win an election what are we supposed to do?
We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system as we don't really believe in the principles of democracy.
Democracy does not mean majority does whatever they want. The Constitution says the majority has to follow the law, even if the law was passed by the people currently in the minority. If they want to change the law they have that power, but they can't just break the law.
Of course, existing laws do limit what that group would do. If they won in sufficient numbers though, laws on the books would allow them to change the laws restricting them.
I'm not saying its a good thing, just how it works. True democracy is a leap of faith, you need to trust that most people are generally good and are generally well intended.
I would printout that they spent a lot of effort to deny they are racists. Even now as they are enacting long term plans their supporters claim it is something else.
Trump did not run on "I will anex canada, make inflation higher, order damm release and slash department of education".
Some parts he run at - he promised to harm trans and he is delivering.
I could have sworn he, or those very closely circled around him, talked specifically about education and the need to reform DoE. I don't remember for sure now, honestly the campaigns feels like years ago already.
He didn't run on annexing Canada, he almost certainly doesn't want to though. Trump is a bully and just likes to play cheap games when negotiating. He raised the idea of making Canada a state while also pushing hard on border issues and tariffs. He was just fainting there to try to gain the upper hand.
Inflation is a joke with him. He's completely contradictory there, though that is pretty common. I don't think Trump understands or cares about inflation, it just polls well. He did run on tariffs though, and any voter didn't understand that leads to inflation can only blame themselves.
If that's true why have a constitution and laws limiting the power of the government? Using your logic, every decision made by the government is fine.
If the majority runs on cancelling democracy itself (e.g. that if they're elected there will be no more elections and they will stay in power), and they gain a small majority, is it fine for them to now cancel all elections in the future?
If a party runs on (say) taking the homes of those that voted for the opposition, do you think that it's fine if they do it if they get in power? Maybe put them in jails or camps?
Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.
> If that's true why have a constitution and laws limiting the power of the government? Using your logic, every decision made by the government is fine.
For sure, laws limiting power are extremely important. My point is simply that if a person or members of a party get elected in numbers to change that, and were clear of their intentions with voters, its totally within Democratic principles for the laws to be changed.
Abe Lincoln changed the laws with regards to slavery. He was elected by popular vote but that meant he went against a sizeable minority of voters and fundamentally changed laws limiting powers and rights. I don't see any problem with that. To be clear, I'm not drawing any comparison directly between Lincoln and any other politician today.
> Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.
Democracy is a political model for how to elect those in charge. The ideals built into the US bill of rights are in addition to democracy, not part of it directly. You can democratically elect a bigot for example, but the election was still democratically held.
> My point is simply that if a person or members of a party get elected in numbers to change that, and were clear of their intentions with voters, its totally within Democratic principles for the laws to be changed.
Not, it's not. If members of a party get elected to remove the ability of their opposition or some of their opposition to vote or cancel the next democratic elections that's in fact undemocratic. Especially in a system like in the US where even without an actual majority of votes you can get the presidency or a majority in the legislative branch.
If a party runs on the platform of ending democracy, and they win a fair election, I don't know of any safety mechanisms in democracy itself that prevent that.
There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.
Ignoring whether we should choose to defend democracy in that scenario (I would), what do you see as the mechanism built into democracy that stops it?
> If a party runs on the platform of ending democracy, and they win a fair election, I don't know of any safety mechanisms in democracy itself that prevent that.
Yes there are, laws requiring super majority, for example, to change, or counter. You even state so yourself:
> There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.
These changes need "enough support", because there is protection built in the system - so a majority is not enough. Other examples of protection are the Judicial branch having the power to cancel illegal legislation, EOs and other government decisions, the President having the power to veto bills. All of these supposedly provide a checks and balances system, although it is of course imperfect, especially with gerrymandering or the way that the Supreme Court is built (in my opinion life tenure is a bad idea, the court itself needs more members, and the way the members are selected is too politically oriented).
> We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system as we don't really believe in the principles of democracy.
If you have a super-majority that supports extremes that's a whole different ball game. You originally talked about "majority", and how that's the be all end all of democracy. For example, in the US, to change the constitution you'd super majority on the Federal level, as well as (IIRC) majority in 75% of the states.
Nonetheless, everything I've stated is of course based on police/army that will listen to the law and act accordingly. If the people with guns/tanks/advanced weapons act in an illegal way and against the system, of course the law is worthless.
Sure, I was a bit loose in my use of the term "majority" earlier though we hadn't come to this level of detail.
My point remains, though. There is a point at which democracy has no guardrails to prevent a democratic overthrow of the system. Call it a majority, super majority, 60% vote, or whatever the system in place decides. With enough support a democratic system can be thrown out in an entirely democratic election.
> We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system
We did not, in fact, pick unlimited democracy, largely because never in the history of the country has there been a trust that giving unlimited power to an unchecked, potentially transitory, majority was a good idea. It's why we have Constitutional limits on government. Its why we have dual sovereignty. It's why we have separation of powers in the federal government. It's why we have staggered elections to the Senate. It's why we tend to add additional Constitutional limits on government over time, not fewer.
The history of American involves a fairly intense, often quite violent, debate about these issues. There is no simple settled comprehensive position on what should be within the scope of majoritarian control and what needs to be kept outside of it (and which method should be used to do that.)
Pretending that there is a simple consensus around unchecked majoritarianism, or that the choice is between unchecked majoritarianism and something radically different from the Constitutionally-limited representative democracy the US has had, misguided if not actually dishonest.
Constitutional limits and our system of checks and balances have nothing directly to do with democracy.
Democracy is a process of how leaders are elected, that's it. How our government is structured, our three branches, etc is not part of democracy - those are details of how we implemented a government of democratically elected officials (well, as democratically as it can be considered in a democratic republic with our electoral college system).
> Constitutional limits and our system of checks and balances have nothing directly to do with democracy.
They have to do with the actual system of government we've chosen in the United States, which is not naive majoritarianism; either that system is a form of democracy (which it would be by the definitions usually used in modern discussions of real political systems), in which case it disproves the premise "We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules", or it is not, and it makes the full argument, "We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system" irrelevant because, in that case, we have already chosen a different system, and wouldn't need to go back to the drawing board simply because we had a problem with naive majoritarianism -- since rejection of that was baked in from the start.
It sounds like we're making the same argument at this point. We aren't really a democracy and we don't want one, in part because from the beginning those in charge have worried about "the mob" and didn't want to actually allow us to vote and have the majority opinion win unchecked.
I don't like trump and have never voted for him, but I would take someone convicted of financial or business ethics crimes over Andrew Jackson (not a felon, but damn he was a bad person).
The "convicted" piece carries a lot of weight here too. Plenty of presidents have done terrible things but were never convicted.
There isn’t anything like the amount of it being promised, and gutting the auditing and staffing for programs is the last thing you’d do if that’s your concern.
For example, Musk lied about social security but the records he mentioned were reported by the SSA IG years before. They concluded there wasn’t much fraud because over 98% of the old records weren’t receiving money (and hadn’t made contributions in over 50 years) and it was noted that cleaning them up would cost significantly more than it could possibly save.
Oh, I’m certain there’s fraud. Now, is there a higher percentage of fraud in what he is cutting—or in what he is leaving behind? That is an open question.
It is not to have a larger/smaller government. The plan is to privatize as much as possible. I mentioned this in another comment: 'Elon has already tweeted "The safety of air travel is a non-partisan matter. SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer"'
I believe the number of air incidents has been 2 a week in the last month.
Any time now the government just will be ready to declare FAA as a disaster of the previous regimes and that Tech industries will be better at running the admin for the aviation sector.
Their stated goals are lower taxes, less regulation, less government presence. What they want bigger is private riches through industry and church. They all believe this, voter and representative.
What part do you think gets built back? Maybe the FBI, when they’re sure it can be weaponized against their enemies.
I wouldn't even begin to guess. This has all moved so quickly that I've yet to find what seems to be a reliable source on what is actually changing.
My point, though, was only that we've so far seen moves to reduce headcount and pause programs. That could be the first step to closing down departments entirely, but it could also be the first step to rebuilding their own version of that department.
For sure, when they say they want to close down departments, I'm sure they don't mean it. I see the insanity of their actions and, I too, find comfort in pretending that there is going to be something stable left afterwards /s/
Interesting, that hasn't been my experience of the Republican party over the last few decades.
I grew up over that time in a very red part of the country.
In the 90s I always heard of the republican party as the party of small government and individual freedoms.
Starting at least with Bush/Cheney that didn't line up. The party seemed to want a larger military budget, increased federal powers, and a stronger executive branch.
Republican voters I knew largely followed that pattern. They didn't want to see departments closed or authority removed from the government. They just wanted their views written into law. Abortion is a great example, the republican party strongly pushed for regulating what individuals could or could not do, very few were arguing that abortion rights were outside the federal government's authority.
Yes but these aren’t “spend more money on the department of X” laws or ideas. Other than military and law enforcement, which I already mentioned. Bush consolidating power under DHS and expanding wiretaps is of course Republican party values.
Bush cut funding for education and pushed it to private schools. He cut antipoverty initiatives and pushed funding to church groups. Cut funding for stem cell research. And of course cut taxes for the rich.
The antiabortion response is to cut funds to anything touching abortion (not, say, provide more support to mothers.) And make way for expanded power over reproductive rights at the state level.
A ban on abortions, in this example, would be codifying the government's legal authority to make such a decision.
That's first order building, there is no need for rebuilding in that scenario.
With regards to the broader DOGE topic, they aren't banning anything yet that I've seen outside of the authority that we already granted the executive branch. I don't necessarily agree with what they're doing, but from the bits and pieces I can pull out of largely political reporting it does seem like they're staying within the bounds of what the executive branch is technically allowed to do.
There will be a legal debate whether there are within the rules to not spend money budgeted by congress. That will come down to an opinion whether the argument that departments are not acting in good faith or reasonably executing their mandate is found by the courts to be reasonable.
Personal freedom, except for things they don't like and except for people they don't like. It was always like that.
That being said, right now there was enough written over years by hard core conservatives and specifically by heritage foundation and in project 2025 to know what they want.
The same people were not to remove abortion protection either, I still remember how everyone and his brother framed that worry as paranoid ... two years before the exact same people did it.
To be fair, we never really had abortion protections. A supreme court ruling isn't law, its precedent. Precedent can be challenged much easier and can be superseded by legislation.
> Their stated goals are lower taxes, less regulation, less government presence.
And if you believe Project 2025, which I do, however the Trump campaign tried to halfheartedly distance itself from them, lower education:
Project 2025 talks of how children finishing school should be looking more to "buying a house and starting a family" than college. Of course, how the average 18 year old with a high school education and single income (because homeschooling is also a very big goal of Project 2025) is meant to buy this house is left as an exercise for the (uneducated) reader. The important thing is less education and more future "Warriors for Christ" (as someone I know on my FB feed calls their children).
I haven't read 2025 so I'm going only off what you have here.
I think a strong argument could be made that an 18 year old with a strong work ethic should be able to get a job that allows them to afford a house in a reasonable timeline.
I don't have any expectation that's actually what 2025 argues, but it would be a good ideal. Why shouldn't a kid out of high school willing to work hard be able to save up for a house and a family in a reasonable amount of time? Should we gate keep that behind college degrees or similar?
I would agree. Just as I believe minimum wage isn't "only applicable to teenagers working part time after school".
But yes, P2025's goal has nothing to do with the wellbeing of said school leaver. They specifically want people to be less educated (easier to manipulate and persuade), and are all about raising as many Christian children as possible to "stack the vote".
This is the recipe for corruption that was eliminated back in the progressive era of the early 20th century. It's what gave us Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed.
Repopulating organizations with loyal stooges is not constructive.
So fire the most competent people (people are placed on probation for 2 years when promoted in the Feds,people being promoted are normally ones you want to keep, and Trump/Elon are blanket firing everyone on probation) because DEI exists?
That's not my argument at all. Firing probationary employees is really the only immediate lever they had, my understanding I'd that other employees are better protected.
Is it the right approach? Definitely not, but that doesn't mean it can't be a step in a better direction. That all depends on your goals and what you want to happen, I couldn't answer that question no matter what.
Probationary employees can more easily be fired for cause. Thousands of employees, including some of the best who had recently been promoted, were given the reason 'poor performance'.
So you are OK with firing the best because 'otherwise it's hard'.
You are OK with breaking the law because 'otherwise it's hard'.
You are OK with lying to people why they are fired because 'otherwise it's hard'.
You just want action and don't care if it's smart action, legal, or fair. That is item 3 on the checklist of fascism.
"The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation."
DEI is merit: the entire point is NOT passing over qualified applicants because they don’t fit a given image. If you look at the people axing DEI programs, note how they’re almost all sons of affluence who aren’t exceptionally qualified.
That's a very gracious description of any DEI program I've had personal experience with.
DEI programs and similar work by focusing more effort on underrepresented groups. By design that puts less focus on overrepresented groups, and splits that focus away from merit all together.
Arguing that everyone should have equal opportunity to succeed is admirable and a great goal to have. I've never seen a DEI program that implements that or stops at that goal though, they need more immediate results and focus instead on helping to select under represented groups into positions to better balance the statistics.
The ones I’ve worked with uniformly focused on making sure that hiring didn’t inadvertently rule people out. This often benefited white people, too: if you’re a vet with a thick southern accent and without a degree, getting the chance to interview is important for being able to demonstrate that you’ve acquired the required skills by other means.
Yes many of them won’t be replaced. Many institutions won’t. Some existing will remain but need to replace the previous regimes loyalists. And create new admins so your current regime maintains after next elections. This is how you establish lasting power.
This isn’t renovating an old house, it’s pouring kerosene around, torching it to collect the insurance money, and saying you might rebuild whatever you miss. They’ve squandered billions of dollars in past investments, incurred massive liabilities, and are making all future work more expensive.
Say you do need the government to actually do something: how much more money are qualified people going to expect when they can’t count on decent working conditions or job security? How much more will every government contract cost when past history of failure to pay has to be priced in? Every federal job supports multiple private sector jobs, and federal spending provided a consistent economic baseline in many parts of the country, too, so that’ll all be happening within a hard recession.
That's the Heritage Foundation christo-fascist plan. Unfortunately they've teamed up with the mad Libertarian wing of the Republicans who turn up in places like HN and complain that all taxation is theft and are ready to burn the country to the ground because they've been so well programmed by propaganda that originally just wanted to build support for a tax cut for the already rich but metastasized into a superpower destroying cult of insanity.
I think most libertarians would agree with the idea that a government should be kept as small as possible while still being able to protect property rights. They're generally capitalists as well, and the primary drivers there are individual choice and property rights.
For one, I never said I myself am libertarian or anarchist.
Your logic here seems circular, but maybe I just misunderstood. It seems reasonable to me that someone who is libertarian and accepts the need for a state but wants it limited to only, or primarily, protecting property rights would admit that its fine to have a government enforce things they like.
If someone takes issue with having a government at all they're left with anarchism as the only choice. That's all well and good, people can have the opinion that a state is never justified. That doesn't mean libertarians can't believe in a form of government with whatever limitations they deem reasonable or worth the risk, though.
'If I break the law the government enforces the law' implies 'I should be able to break the law with no consequence' implies 'libertarianism is anarchist'.
Sure, but where are you getting these quotes and what is the context you plucked them out of?
A libertarian would not argue that laws can be broken without consequence. They would argue what laws should exist and where the governments authority begins and ends, but that is a very different conversation.
An anarchist would argue that laws and governments shouldn't exist, period. They therefore wouldn't argue that laws can be broken without consequence, they would take issue with the presumption that laws should exist in the first place.
Choose not to pay your mortgage. What happens? They take your house. Does that make mortgages theft? No, it doesn't.
What makes something "theft" is that it's an illegitimate taking. The only way you can say that about taxation is to have already defined government as being illegitimate. Then (and only then) taxes are theft.
But if someone hasn't already made "all governments are illegitimate", then arguing that they'll take things from you if you don't pay taxes isn't the convincing argument you seem to think it is.
> Choose not to pay your mortgage. What happens? They take your house. Does that make mortgages theft? No, it doesn't.
You opt-in to having a mortgage and agree to terms.
I'm not aware of such an option for taxes or citizenship. If you are born in on US soil you are made a citizen, including all the legal rights and benefits as well as the tax liability.
Well, if I understand correctly, there was the option of becoming an outlaw - literally someone outside the law, which meant that the protection of the law didn't apply to you. Anyone you met was free to kill you. But you didn't have to pay taxes.
But if you want the protection of what taxes pay for - the rule of law - then you need to pay the taxes.
The plan is not destroying, but taking over. Once the cut narrative is fulfilled, these institutions will regrow with Don King's own people.
Despite DDoS on the wave length, DOGE will not really gain much in the end, the real matter to balance the sheet will come from selling Ukraine which obviously takes some time to materialize.
it takes time and resources to review them one by one, so once the King restaffed these institutions, some of these papers will be back, as long as they are not inconvenient for the King.
That's where the privatization comes in. Elon has already tweeted "The safety of air travel is a non-partisan matter. SpaceX engineers will help make air travel safer"
Why would he pick the safest form of travel to try to improve safety?
The FAA and NTSB have a pretty great track record.
Maybe he's talking about sending SpaceX engineers to Boeing. I don't know whether he's wearing his US gov hat or his private business hat when he wrote that tweet.
he doesn't know what he's talking about, he's just saying things that benefit him... that's the whole gambit, he'll have full self driving ready in 3 years
You aren't going to get far with this community arguing that we should ban nytimes.com. What you (i.e. anyone who cares about this) should do instead is find more substantive, more interesting, and hopefully more neutral articles analyzing the same things, and submit them to HN instead. I can't say I've seen very many of these lately, but presumably some exist.
You guys are much too tendentious about this and it weakens your case. The reason nytimes.com isn't banned on HN is because it produces threads like these, which are obviously good HN material:
Yes, NYT is tendentious on certain topics in its own right, and in some of those cases, it would be good if HN had more neutral reports to discuss. But if users don't submit them, what can we do?
Whatever metric you use to deny certain sources, should be used on this one, but it's not. Especially now that it's proven that they are both ideologically & financially captured. There's no cause here, I am asking you to be consistent. You have changed policies in the past, but now that's not happening?
I thought I just answered this question? Let me try to clarify...
We don't ban domains that regularly produce good material for HN. We do ban domains that are primarily ideological and almost never produce good material for HN. The definition of "good material" is basically "gratifies intellectual curiosity", as mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There are a lot of sites that are strongly political and don't produce any articles that support good HN threads (or only very rarely do). Those we ban, regardless of their political orientation. But if any of them started publishing articles about newly discovered Chopin pieces, or insects relying on sounds made by plants, we'd unban that site. The biggest thing HN needs is more good (for HN) articles.
I'm not sure what policies you're saying we changed in the past?
Is it transparent? Elon got angry when people merely listed the names of some DOGE employees. I still don't think we know the full list of people working under him (and according to court filings, the government claims he isn't even the administrator of DOGE but can't name who is). We also won't be able to get access to DOGE records until well after Trump is out of office [1]. That doesn't sound like maximal transparency to me.
We don't even know what DOGE is and whether Musk is running it. LeagleEagle hasn't a clue[1], the courts are slow at finding out and the Republicans in Congress are useless at what Congress is supposed to do. Musk is overstepping even the powers of the president but I don't see anyone trying to sue him and Trump for treason.
I’m reading a NYT article about outcomes they’ve claimed to create, looks pretty transparent.
There’s lots of things about organizations, especially government orgs, that aren’t public info. Naming the employees would create stochastic terror opportunities, for instance. Individual contributors should be able to work without being harassed or worse.
The management gives the media daily opportunities to ask questions.
1. Perfectly tracking every dollar is more expensive than having some slack in the system. There's an optimal amount, at least from an overall value perspective.
2. We spend too much, and both sides of the aisle repeatedly blocked attempts to curb spending for literal decades while our debt got higher. That's how someone doing something coming in with a hatchet and no plan to build gets cheered instead of booed by a large percentage of the populace.
The problem Americans have with the political system has roots on Webers concept of politics as a vocation.
I am maybe cynical, but I sincerely doubt there's no fraud or corruption in the government spend. Among trillions of dollars of money being spent by people who can easily siphon some off, etc.
Intuitively, there _must_ be some corruption.
I have zero faith that Musk is interested in finding real corruption. He seems to be more interested in changing budget allocations and calling the removed regulations / "woke" things corrupt.
I also think that corruption was within my acceptance tolerance of wastage. _Think_ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but maybe that's all that really matters when it comes to something like this.
It's also a very hard line to draw, in some cases, since you can have the right things happening for the wrong reasons.
If a bill contains funding to help fix a main street in a city that was destroyed by a natural disaster, is that corruption?
What if there's 500 other destroyed main streets and that one got picked?
What if it was destroyed by decades of the local gov't neglecting it?
What if it was included because you directly bribed the person writing the bill?
What if it was included because you did some horse trading and gave them something they wanted in another bill you wrote?
The intent there is not to argue that defining corruption is impossible or futile, but that some people might reasonably argue different sides of whether something was corruption without either side obviously being morally bankrupt.
Hers a PDF detailing some of the audio and photographic professionals that work "down the mine" in the state of the art digitisation facilities that corporations have there:
So why would it be by definition considered waste that a government has employees working on paper records stored in the same place?
There is absolutely no reason to think this is ridiculous. These types of sites exist all over the world. Yet Elon Musk claims it's ridiculous and people now have to defend that claim?
Also why does it matter if it's in an underground ex-mining facility or a basement in Washington? It matters how much does this cost vs a modern computerized system. Instead the big brains over at X act like this is how the entire government works. They found maybe 1 or 2% of waste in USAID? "Shut it all down and lose all the experience and relations built over decades" they don't want efficiency. They want to slash and burn all government departments that aren't enriching billionaires.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is worse than Trump. I’m an immigrant from Bangladesh who is in the country because my dad got a job with USAID. In the Bush era, liberals would have been shocked if we found out USAID spent $29 million under Biden interfering with elections in Bangladesh. https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/foreign-affairs/3744.... Now you mention it and get some neocon nonsense about “American interests.” Truly disgusting.
In the Obama era, you could have told an average liberal about it and they'd ignore it or apologize for it. It's not Trump Derangement Syndrome, it's just an artefact of substantial policy disagreements between parties in terms of foreign policy goals being low historically, and mass media minimizing imperialism.
Buying Greenland, annexing Canada, retaking the Panama Canal, building beachfront resorts in Gaza and squeezing $500B of rare earth minerals out of Ukraine isn't imperialism?
Or does Trump get a pass on what he says he'll do, because it's just trolling to trigger the libs?
Obviously the trolling is different from actually doing. And what the substance of what Trump did with Panama was accuse it of failing to respect the neutrality provisions of the treaty which transferred control of the canal to Panama. And in Ukraine he’s demanding security for hundreds of billions in support we have provided that country. Exercising America’s rights under treaties or demanding compensation for military support is hardly comparable to bankrolling dissident groups in foreign countries.
I'd much rather have a President who says dumb things for attention than a President who actually tries (usually in secret) to destabilize other countries.
Really? 10 years I would have assume the average liberal would have said "Yeah, what else is new? The US has been interfering with other countries since forever. It's a terrible stain on our history and something we should stop.
For some odd reason the average liberal is now arguing for foreign interference by the US. The are using the same neocon talking points the Republicans did 10 years ago - "soft power" and "if we don't do it someone else will".
I’m from Bangladesh and my dad worked his entire career for USAID contractors, since the 1980s. Many of our family friends are career USAID people. My dad can’t be sure but he strongly suspects Trump is correct. USAID was commonly used as a CIA/State Department front in the past. It became more professional in the 1990s, but according to him Samantha Powers heavily politicized the agency. And the US administration has been going crazy about third world countries aligning themselves with Russia.
Well, whats your point? All spy agencies including russian use similar movements to destabilize enemies, it was true during whole cold era. Is this somehow shocking to anybody?
US agencies did much worse things in pursue of eliminating communism, in US and elsewhere.
that's why you fix it, not act like you can just destroy it and what it does. It is also why you think practically and tell us, the voter, how much extra it is costing us over your "new and improved" program. Just lying about it and exaggerating the concern is a sad, sad, disingenuous way of governing. I want fixes and unrelenting attempts at efficiency and not "hur-duh-hur I can make a meme out of this on X and not offer a single solution"
That’s a good example of penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking: they’ve been asking for funding to modernize for most of this century but Congress chooses not to allocate the money. A big contributing factor is that when money is allocated, it’s often directed towards contractors who cost twice as much and have a higher failure rate so congresspeople can say they “shrunk” the government.
The government does plenty of things inefficiently, but DOGE is making such a colossal mess with their rushed, uninformed, and frequently illegal actions that they're causing more problems than they solve. Indiscriminately firing people because they were hired or promoted within the last 2 years is incredibly wasteful. It means getting rid of the people who were most successful. It also means getting rid of people who had very specialized skills or who just went through a very expensive training process.
Also consider how much disruption all of this is causing to the federal workforce and the contractors. People are being forced to upend their lives on very short notice to RTO. They were getting daily emails telling them to quit. It's hard to imagine anyone doing good work when they're scared that some indiscriminate process is going to fire them.
This is a stupid comparison. The government is not a business. "Lower costs by making it shittier" has a completely different implication when people are relying on the work for national defense, public safety, health, income, and other life-and-death matters.
These are public goods. They shouldn't be run on the basis of "make them as crappy as we can get away with to save as much money as possible".
his cuts are max 0.1% of government outlays, yet the MAGAs are acting like it's slash and burn and worshipping at the idol of their cult of personality(ies?) . Anyway it's so obvious to anyway who steps back and turns off the political blinders. Just look at the sheer number of lies coming from Musk and Trump about the "savings" ,about millions of people over 100 getting social security checks, that the few million of probably waste of money USAID was spending is evidence to cut without any other proof the entire USAID organization, even though it's a $50 billion dollar outlay. It's so effing sad that people fall for this, and that our education system is such a failure on probably the most necessary modern skill other than literacy--critical thinking.
The insane thing of all this is that the 1% being cut is almost entirely in investments: money for research that drives economic growth, money for the USAID that provides the US influence around the world, cuts to CDC staff that could help mitigate expensive pandemics…the list goes on.
So not only is the DOGE affair not reducing the debt, it is setting the country up for less wealth and more expenses in the future.
> The $2 billion was used for the "decarbonization of homes" in low-income communities and paid for new household appliances, such as water heaters, induction stoves, solar panels, EV chargers, and weatherization, according to an April 2024 press release from Power Forward Communities.
Second, the claim that it was given to Stacey Abrams, from the LinkedIn post cited in the article:
> The coalition includes Rewiring America, Enterprise Community Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), United Way, and Habitat for Humanity International and today, we've applied for $9.5 billion — part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act — to directly fund residential decarbonization and electrification... The application is already supported by 321 partners who have pledged to decarbonize housing units across 46 states and every EPA region. It also includes 156 communities pledging to decarbonize housing units, particularly in low-income and disadvantaged communities, and rural and Tribal communities.
It appears that Stacey Abrams was in some way involved in organizing a coalition of existing nonprofits to apply for congressionally authorized grant money. There is no evidence I can see that she received any of the money or that any other impropriety was involved.
"$2 billion to Stacey Abrams" is a falsehood, even based on the content of the inflammatory Fox News article.
“1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 1012 (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in both American and British English.”
Assuming your general lifestyle when employed is around $100k of expense, the US saving $10m against a $6.9T budget would be the equivalent of you saving $0.14.
Even in the straits you’re in (and I sincerely hope the very best for you), how much effort would you put into saving $0.14? It just doesn’t seem like the best use of effort?
Considering DOGE is ~100 people and the American labor force is 168 million, in your example, I would be willing to expend 0.000000675% of my time and energy to save 14 cents. That’s the difference between saying keep the change or putting it in my pocket.
Before anyone asks, no I don’t round up for the Boys and Girls Club at Taco Bell. I sometimes feel bad about it though.
Correct. No one is denying that Elon loves attention. Everyone knows Elon is really an acronym for 'Elon Loves Ostentatious Notice'. Its GNU'd and everything.
Hold on, what savings? They said they're giving the "$10M" back to the people in the form of cheques.
So instead of them giving that money to Americans to pay for productivity (USAID buying corn from farmers, tens of thousands of employees paid to promote American standing on the global stage, paid to look after parks, paid to monitor fraud in the US financial system, paid to collect taxes, etc).. they want to send those people home and distribute their would-be salaries to every American for free.
> They said they're giving the "$10M" back to the people in the form of cheques.
They have said that 20% will be distributed directly to the population, 20% will be paid to the national debt, and the remaining 60% will simply not be spent.
I think you misunderstand the metaphor. The expenditure, here, isn't the time/attention of 100 people; It's the things that have been cut/defunded and the consequences of the way those changes have been implemented.
500 dollars when you have 10,000 in the bank is equivalent to roughly 200 billion to a governmental budget. The DoED budget last year is about 50 billion , for reference.
I hope that puts some of these plans in perspective. Musk's millions is wandering the street for loose pennies. Trumps plan to dismnantle the DoED is "saving" the equivent of paying some energy bill, while the US is going into more debt to pay rent.
Americans cheered for the gutting of USAID because they thought that spending 25% of the federal budget was too much, and should be around 10% instead.
The actual spend on foreign aid? Under 1%.
Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed. Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.
They are voting based on their opinions without doing additional research. Getting at that opinion via a poll is informative, and letting them research it would actually be counterproductive.
People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering because of the stated causes that money was going to were "woke" and "not America first"
The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.
> We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.
Maybe - maybe - a merry band of lily-white slave-owners born hundreds of years before solar power and social media don't know how best to run a modern government.
And maybe we'd be smarter if our government didn't treat schools as a pipeline to factory work, or as a means to make billions from crippling and predatory student loans. "I love the uneducated", etc.
We have this myth of the founding fathers as wisened, street smart old men. In reality, many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few teenage signatories.
Past a certain point, age has little to do with prudence. There are rational and knowledgable teenagers just as there are middle-aged dullards.
One must also keep in mind that the man of the 18th century achieved the necessary milestones to become a self-sufficient adult by his late teens. He will have already lived a full life at the age his 21st century counterpart crosses the starting line.
Of course. Although being self-sufficient does not mean that you have a fully developed brain and cognition, either.
And absolutely, rational and knowledgeable is certain. But we seem to treat their edicts as the height of infallible perfection in government, and view it as anathema to even suggest ideas that don't precisely align with their statements.
many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few teenage signatories.
really? i tried sourcing this and I can see there were only two in their 20s (26 each) out of 56. no teenage. 2 in 20s, 17 in 30s, 12 in 40s, 9 in 50s, 6 in 60s, and 1 in 70s (well, 70 exact - Benjamin Franklin).
Are we talking about signers of the Declaration of Independence or more broadly.. not sure what Salem has with Declaration or if he's counted as a Founding Father. I'll give you Hamilton though since he was involved and neither did George Washington nor James Madison sign the Declaration but are still counted as Founding Fathers - https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/signers-factsheet
What examples do you have that the modern government is more suited to populism than in the past? I don't think there are any, the frenzy of the masses has never ended well, and ironically just ended up in actual dictators taking power in the end. Social media just inflates the problem even more.
> What examples do you have that the modern government is more suited to populism than in the past?
I made no such claim, but since you mention it, populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people. You can look up any number of stats on that yourself; they're quite clear that we are in a historic low [0].
What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals. I would even say that the more accurate term for them would be the 'colonizing great great great etc grandfathers', which puts things back into perspective a little.
And even so; they explicitly warned that their system wouldn't hold up forever, needed continuous adjustment, and would need some rather extreme 'refreshing' from time to time.
>populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people.
I'm asking in retrospect to the overall well-being on the nation in actual policies and results, not in it's political dominance. As recently as the Cultural Revolution we can see what happens the excesses of the mob are released.
>What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals
Well I think you're attacking a strawman here, there will be situtations where their writings are not so relevant, but this situation of populism very much falls into category where their writings are relevant and specfically designed to anticipate for.
If you don't believe that, well then explain what are your alternative solutions to populism and if they are more poltically viable than what the founders proposed. I suspect if you weigh them all, the founders' ideals will come out on top.
Don't underestimate history, don't think you are really that different from our past. Plato might have lived 2000 years ago, but we still influenced by him today precisely due to the timeless quality of his ideas. Same as the Founders, you might disparage them for slavery that was common at the time, but their sincere devotion to republican ideals were acts of extraordinary moral upstanding that were rare both then and today. That's why we greatly respect them, not just in USA but around the world.
You think republican ideas are "greatly respected" in the USA? And tell me not to underestimate history? ... I think we have been reading very different history books.
Are you familiar with Nicaragua's history? Iran's? Italy, Guatemala, Congo? Chile, Argentina, El Salvador? Brazil, Honduras, Haiti? Bolivia? ...
Internally, are you familiar with the history of gerrymandering? Voter suppression? Disinformation campaigns? The fight against campaign finance reform, or against winner takes all voting? Ballot access laws? Legislative and judicial manipulation against third parties and progressive candidates? Debate exclusion across corporate media, unchallenged smears, media blackouts, expensive lawsuits...
They didn't seem to reckon that against representatives who are sent to reflect the will of that same general public. They are not incentivized to contradict their constituents. In particular they do not have the responsibility to represent the demographic of their losing opponent, and in many ways are encouraged to do exactly the opposite.
It may be the best of all bad plans. But it clearly does not succeed in producing compromises. At the very least it relies on some kind of good will between constituents. When you lose that you no longer have a nation.
“Soft power” and “hegemony” are fake concepts invented by credentialed elites. Americans are properly distrustful of those ideas.
The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.
At the scale of organizations and business, it's probably the most important tool you need to learn if you want to be at all effective. I've never seen a manager who was able to actually "get things done" who didn't skillfully wield soft power. The least effective managers I've worked beside needed to constantly resort to the use of authority and/or bullying to achieve results.
Which also generally pisses off lots of people. Then again some people seem to get a kick out of pissing off others.
It's quite reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic works at larger scales also.
“Soft power” as a term of art used by liberal internationalists is bullshit. It’s just a way to proselytize foreign countries in a way that makes them resentful.
E.g. Biden’s “human rights” push in Bangladesh. How did it help America to undermine the government’s ability to kill Islamists? It didn’t. It simply was ideologically captured Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so.
> Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so
This is a cynical, but accurate definition of soft power: exerting your will using words.
Your argument is all over the place - you call soft power a "fake concept", and then "bullshit", and here, you seem to suggest that it works, but you don't agree with Biden ideologically? So which is it?
No, this is the type of thing that MAGA folks have been fed on their media and social media feeds. They’ve been taught that everything complex in government and in politics and in geopolitics are deep state conspiracies and lies in order for the left to maintain power. They think that what’s going on now is a turn to normalcy and that America was hindered by the policies of the left. They truly believe this stuff. It’s insane how different their world is, they don’t live in the same reality as the “other side”. I’m not sure how to fix this, how do you convince someone of reality when they insist on some hallucinations being real?
If you think "soft power" is a fake concept, you have very little understanding of how American foreign policy actually works in other countries.
For the record, I don't like American foreign policy, and USAID is basically the CIA in disguise. But in terms of furthering America's goal of being the dominant power in the world, it absolutely works, and is _much_ more financially efficient than the cost of military intervention to establish supremacy.
I agree but condemning government budget cuts because USAID seems reactionary. I think the spirit of cutting budget is still overall popular, and is impossible to do painlessly.
Also in the context of federal budget, 1% is a huge number since most of the budget (like social security, interest payments, and Medicaid) is non negotiable.
~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.
I don't understand why the US is forgetting that it isn't alone in the world. Spending a little money on international aid has been exerting American soft power for decades and likely flowed back multiple times in additional trade.
Should China be left alone on the world stage to take over?
USAID is not "international aid". It's an arm of the CIA that uses "international development" as a cover for it's activities.
Look at the role of USAID during the Vietnam War under CORDS. It funded the "strategic hamlet" program which uprooted rural civilians into barb wire enclosures and provided arms and training to militia.
That doesn't sound like international aid.
Look at the Phoenix Program during the same war. It was an intelligence program which sough to identify "VC infrastructure" within rural villages and "capture or kill".
One can argue that such activities are beneficial to the US, but claiming it's soft and cuddly "international aid" for countries in need is just not accurate.
The two are not mutually exclusive, providing HIV assistance or maternal aid both is definitionally international aid while also furthering US interests. If you define international aid as purely unconditional or even counterproductive to self-interest then you'd be hard pressed to find any sort of example, nor would it be a definition I would think many agree with.
>Providing HIV assistance while undermining political stability
You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.
> You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.
I should rephrase that to "political instability with regards to the perspective of locals".
I agree the US is seeking "political stability" with these activities. But it's on US terms which is often in direct opposition to the locals.
And I'd argue my view is not "dubious paranoia". The purpose of USAID is to use development activities as a cover for interference in other country's politics.
A lot of people think they government isn't overspending. They're the bond buyers, who loan the US government money at remarkably low interest rates. That's a true market signal, regardless of what people tell pollsters.
Everyone would love to spend less money on other people's priorities. But as a whole, the bond market thinks the spending is ok, even if no individual will say so.
Of course it's worth noting that the bond market has massively sold off since inflation hit. The counterpoint is that it's arguably just going back to the mean, but nonetheless, it's a fairly historic move.
US yields at the long end (the part of the curve that is sensitive to long-term stagflation and inflation) don't necessarily indicate that participants believe that the spending isn't a problem either. Once yield started to rise, the U.S. massively twisted issuance back to T-Bills, which are short duration and essentially risk-free. Fragility on the long end is being carefully managed.
To some extent, you are seeing some financial repression, ie the shape of the yield curve is being actively managed. This expectation is built into the bond prices as well. If the long end starts to break down, nobody expects the treasury to start issuing even more long bonds. They naturally would expect them to pull back and start issuing more T-Bills and only term out the debt once the market/liquidity can handle it. There is some conversation right now about leverage limits in the banking system/SLR being expanded, so there is more capacity to warehouse the debt on the banking side. That's pushing in the direction of financial repression (where the banks are "incentivized" to shape the curve in a desired way).
0% interest rates were leveraged against the Fed Put, and it's arguable that there is a Treasury Issuance Put that is currently baked in.
I think that the issue is broader than this though. It's about much more than just the inflationary effects of spending. It's an ideological battle as well. As for bonds, there's also the fact that US bonds are a "there is no alternative" asset to some degree. Remember that bond investors got their faces ripped off in the initial rate hike cycle. There's a good parallel to commodity futures prices here, in that prices of commodity futures are terrible indicators of the actual price in the future. There is a distinction between where a market clears and a bet on future prices. It is a somewhat subtle distinction, but it is grossly underappreciated. That said, of course you can isolate the inflation expectation aspect of the bond market and you are probably correct that this indicator does not red flag inflation driven by excess spending. Of course, growth expectations are also fairly healthy. So it's hard to say what it would look like if inflation expectations stayed high and growth expectations started to fall. Then the bond market might look quite a bit different. We haven't seen a true stagflationary market in 50 years.
I think you're on a reasonable track, but this isn't the whole picture. Most international treasury demand is the direct result of trade deficits in dollars.
If you are a bank (or in aggregate a country full of banks) that takes in a bunch of $USD from your business customers selling products internationally in that currency, then you will receive a bunch of dollar deposits. These deposits can't be magically converted into the local currency, they have to be used as dollars somewhere else or traded with someone else who has a currency or commodity that you want for them. Long-term if there is a net surplus(from the other country point of view) of exports to imports, there will be a net surplus of USD as well.
So what to do with those USD? Make some more! Whatever the going rate for T-bills is is likely better than nothing. Treasury bonds are considered a "risk free rate" in the sense that they are approximately as safe as cash under the mattress.
Inflation is a more accurate measure than treasury sales of the reducing trust in our fiscal future. And that signal is lit.
Inflation is about 3%. That's higher than optimal but hardly a crisis. It does not suggest a broad negative judgement.
Those dollars instead seem to be going into the stock market. Too many, I would say, and I think the Fed is making a mistake in trying to lower interest rates. But it does suggest that investors do not anticipate a sudden crisis of the government.
You should look at the CBO's reports on this. Most of the budget is spent maintaining Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. The sleight of hand involved in the idea that the military budget is "most" of the spending is by calling large parts of the government's spending (but none of its military spending) "mandatory," and then slicing up the "discretionary" portion only, most of which is the military.
However, the discretionary part of the budget is less than half the size of the mandatory part of the budget. If the entire discretionary budget were cut to $0, between mandatory spending and interest, there would still be a government deficit.
That sleight-of-hand is how $900 billion of military spending becomes "most of the budget" when the full budget is $4.4 trillion.
I am bad at addition, but I was going from 2023's numbers, which were indeed close to $6.4 trillion, not $4.4 trillion. Mandatory spending alone was $3.8 trillion.
That's because the SS/Medicare are not discretionary which means that those are basically predetermined and not set by Congress every year.
So when we talk about the "budget", what really matters as far as politicians are concerned, is the discretionary part, which they can control (and which in theory voters have some control over through their election of congressmen), and defense takes up at least half of that.
if you take a dollar from government spending, then 60 or 70 cents of that is coming from the bank accounts of retirees, disabled people, and the poor. If you return that dollar as tax cuts, as Trump has proposed, then something like 80 cents go into the bank accounts of the rich.
The discourse of "wasteful government spending" is a smokescreen. It mystifies the basic operation of taking a dollar from a worker, retiree or poor person and giving it to a rich person.
Those are examples of official Biden policies, and it was his prerogative to pursue them of course. But Trump has the prerogative to pursue the opposite of those policies with equal vigor, and the federal workforce should be working just as hard to implement Trump’s policies.
Biden didn't open the border. This is simply a lie. As furious progressives will tell you, Biden deported more people than Trump and tried to get Congress to pass a broadly restrictive immigration reform bill.
"We spend too much" is a political opinion, rather than a statement of fact. Only Congress can change the amount of money spent by the government, so the executive branch's actions are unconstitutional, no matter how large the crowd cheering it on. This is exactly the sort of mob rule that the Founders wanted to prevent.
Depends on the lens. Depending on your tolerance for debt, we can argue that we objectively spend too much. Another lens can be that we don't collect enough taxes and therefore we don't have enough to spend.
Now of course, since the lens isn't objective, we can't say it's an objective statement. And no, we can say that we spend too much and also think Trump is doing illegal stuff.
It’s quite debatable what the founders intended here. Congress has the power to appropriate funds, it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.
Even as a legal matter, the impoundment act only requires rescission notification once it’s clear that the executive won’t use all the money appropriated for a “program.” When Congress is appropriating say $3 billion in a line item for USAID, DOGE can cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession saying USAID won’t use all $3 billion.
Forget the Impoundment Act -- this is a Constitutional issue. The Supreme Court ruled in 1975 that the President is required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which budget authority is provided by the United States Congress. Shuttering USAID, as Trump and Musk have done, goes way beyond mere line item impoundments.
However, they claim that USAID was spending far too much on projects that were not in line with their objectives. Not even Congress can create an agency that is fully autonomous with zero oversight from anyone within the government.
Whether that argument would hold up in court remains to be seen, of course.
That's just one example. Hamas has been receiving funding for years, despite their less than decent track record of using the money for it's intended purpose.
Yeah this was totally debunked, I believe the programs that were said to be "going to terrorists" were actually promoting women's literacy in Afghanistan.
All of these agencies had multiple levels of oversight both within the executive and through congress. Trump eliminated inspectors general positions providing oversight.
The executive branch doesn't get to interpret what spending is in line with the laws passed by Congress.
> Although one commentator characterizes the case's implications as meaning "[t]he president cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment,"[2] the Court majority itself made no categorical constitutional pronouncement about impoundment power but focused on the statute's language and legislative history.
The current SCOTUS majority isn't afraid to overturn 50 year old precedents. Given they overturned Roe v Wade, why not Train v City of New York too?
But they don't strictly speaking have to overturn it, just limit its scope of application somehow. For example, Train was about grants to the states – SCOTUS might rule the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 unconstitutional, and decide that the President has the right in general to impound appropriated funds, but they also might follow Train in carving out an exception to that general right for grants to the states.
I actually think that they would still care. It weirdly feels cathartic to know that we are no longer spending federal taxpayer dollars on “zombie apocalypse preparation classes” no matter how insignificant it is to the budget. What is the best way to eat an elephant?
Agree .. but my point is that people will still care, on principle. Throw in any kind of cut, or esp. a helicopter payment, and the effect would be shock and awe
> it’s not clear as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated funds.
It seemed pretty clear to (now-Supreme Court justice, nominated by Trump) Brett Kavanaugh:
"Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill."
Though to be fair he wrote this in 2013 when a black Democrat was President so maybe now he feels like things are a little bit less clear for... reasons.
>cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession
This is not correct.
The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds. Congress can then decide to accept or reject the recission notice. If rejected, the funds remain appropriated, with whatever conditions Congress set.
The argument could be made that this is a new administration with different priorities, so does not intend to use the previously appropriated funds. But, even then, the spirit of the law (and the Constitution) is such that the new administration would engage in the recission process as if the funds had just been appropriated. So, they would submit a recission notice before taking action.
That is, they would not just do whatever they wanted and inform Congress afterwards.
> The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds.
That’s not what the statute says. 2 U.S.C. 683(a) says:
> Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which it is provided or that such budget authority should be rescinded for fiscal policy or other reasons (including the termination of authorized projects or activities for which budget authority has been provided), or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation for such fiscal year, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress a special message specifying
There must be a determination and it must be with respect to a program. So for example Congress appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations as a single line item. The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process. Then at some point the executive can make a determination how much of the total “program” amount will actually be needed and how much won’t be needed. Only at that point is the recessionary notice required.
Your conclusion directly contradicts the Code you quoted.
From the Code:
>Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required...or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress...
The operative phrase is "Whenever the President determines".
However, your conclusion adds:
>The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process.
The Code says nothing like this, instead, explicitly stating "on determination", not "after action".
This "prior notification" requirement is also both within the letter of the original appropriations process, and the intent of the law overall.
The Impoundment Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the house and unanimous support in the senate. It was a direct rebuke to Nixon deciding he had the presidential authority to not fund programs he didn't like.
It unambiguously affirmed Congress's sole authority over federal spending.
The Constitution clearly gives Congress the authority over federal taxation and spending, and this power is a key check on executive power. If the executive branch could ignore congressional spending decisions, it would effectively render Congress’s "power of the purse" irrelevant.
It's called the Spending Clause, not the Appropriation Clause, for a reason.
As to the rest of your argument: not spending the full $100M congress specifies in 100M Mars Bars for the Air Force because Mars wasn't able to deliver the last 25 million Mars Bars, is not the same thing as "One person decided Mars Bars are Woke so we just stopped paying Mars Candy yesterday."
1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we are upside down at the moment.
2) We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money. They are using employee pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt ceiling.
If you need more money, you can get another job or get a better paying job. You might even take out a loan to start a small business. Raising your income is an alternative to cutting expenses. And taking on debt is actually a useful way to get the benefits of a purchase without having to save up for it first.
>you can get another job or get a better paying job
For an increasing number of people over an increasing period of time, this isn't an option? Do you think people can snap their fingers and materialize a 6-figure tech salary? I just saw two layed off people on linkedin today, that's two more 5+ years experienced professional software devs on the market...
How much tax is enough? The government would, without playing a deduction game, would love to take 20-30% of my income, while having devalued my dollar by 50-100% in the last 5 years. My salary goes half as far.
Being honest, on what should be a great local salary, we can't even afford a starter home, or savings after our monthly grocery bill. The government caused this inflationary Era to devalue the debt, and your suggestion is to take more from families already struggling to stay ahead?
Such a communist. Take from the people at gunpoint, give it to the DC bureuacrats.
It's telling that you didn't even consider that the taxes would come from businesses. The businesses that created the majority of inflation by gouging consumers out and bleeding them dry every tiniest opportunity they legally could.
I mean practically this take is so wrong. If the (US) government is just so hell bent on taxation how the heck did we get to the point where taxes on income went from 90% (~1950) on top bracket to less than 35%? Business tax was (35% 2008) -> 20% (2020).
Empirically in the US in the last 70 years this just never has played out this why. The government did not cause and rarely causes major inflation either at least in this time period. Usually its the economy explodes due to a private industry bubble exploding or natural resources crunch due to foreign governments reducing oil production or pandemics.
Its pretty childish to use communist as a tag line when I qualified the claim you can believe that benefits should not exist but if you do you have to own saying you want to cut benefits for poor people and give a tax break to rich people (at least that is what happens when you cut taxes in a progressive system)
I read about a guy in Turkmenistan who would as a punishment be taxed 20%, and I thought, living in Western Europe or North America is kind of a financial punishment .
> We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money.
All spending is authorised by Congress, isn't it? So how is the debt ceiling any different? No federal programs "have money" short of Congress deciding it.
Right but until Congress raises the debt ceiling, the Executive Branch has an empty wallet and maxed out credit card. Funding doesn’t go out all at once either. Some programs don’t start until later in the year for example. They typically aim to distribute 1/12th of the yearly allowance per month. Sometimes agencies will over spend early and have to be austere later (like FEMA last year).
Appropriations is Congressional and specifics how much an agency will get over the fiscal year.
Apportionment is under the Executive and addresses when and how those funds are made available.
The debt ceiling is entirely artificial, and ought to be unconstitutional. Congress decides how much to spend. Issuing debt when necessary to pay for those allocations is implied.
Everyone is missing the most obvious way to raise revenue: raise taxes.
> We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment
One, DOGE isn't doing anything to cut spending. Every dollar Musk "cuts" that doesn't get Congressional authorisation is just being borrowed from future litigation plus all the time and expense that will eat up.
Two, if DOGE can supercede the Congress than so can the Treasury in issuing new debt. Trump has said he wants to kill the debt limit. He could just try that with an executive order. DOGE is already shredding contracts and blocking lawful payments--we're already jeopardising the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. (Ironically, in a manner similar to how South Africa trashed itself in modern history.)
Musk is stealing data to use for his own gain, and installing back doors so he permanently has control over government. It will take decades to undo the spyware he's installing.
The military is over half of all Fed discretionary spending.
Another huge expense is servicing our debt.
Those are what we should be addressing, not cutting NIH research.
By the way, we do have the ability to issue more debt -- because thankfully our debt is USD denominated and we can simply print more dollars. It's the only way we've survived this long as the world's largest debtor nation.
These are the biggest contributors to undoing Clinton's balanced budget in the 90's:
* Bush Jr Tax Cuts
* Useless Iraq war
* Too Big to Fail Bailouts of Banks
* Trumps tax cuts
* COVID spending
When billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations pay episilon to zero in taxes, maybe they should pay their share. Taxing the rich would solve the problem overnight.
The debt is being paid off when it’s due, every time, as it always has been. If we want to lower the total debt, cutting spending is not the only option. Money that the government spends increases economic activity and in some cases more than pays for itself in returned revenue. Raising taxes that have been lowered or eliminated since the last time we had a surplus (at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency) is step one in getting things under control.
The government's debt is not the same type of thing as household debt. Can you elaborate on how you think they are the same? Do you believe there are not other factors besides just credits being less than debits?
Taking out a loan is okay, in the short term, if you have a plan to pay back your loan using income that you plan to obtain in the future but do not have available right now. THe US national debt has grown so large that the interest payments alone are like 20% of the federal budget, and that doesn't even touch the principal. It has reached pyramid scheme levels of borrowing, and no pyrmaid scheme can last forever. One day, lenders will lose confidence in their ability to get their money back and everything will collpase all at once.
In order to prevent that, the budget must be cut. People must be fired. Promising projects must be discontinued. The question is where to make the cuts and how, because cuts in the wrong places in the wrong way will end up making the problem worse. For me, working in healthcare/science/research, I see the cuts to the NIH spending as a bad cut, because it sacrifices a lot of future revenue from scientific R&D. Same with cutting USAID and losing a ton of soft power that could be used to persuade developing countries to let in American companies. Or firing, say, IRS employees, since they're the ones who actually bring in the revenue. So there are good cuts and there are bad cuts, but the point is that eventually cuts must be made.
Well, I must admit that is true, but I guess that 20% of the annual budget going toward interest feels likean impossibly large fraction to overcome. But yes, theoretically, if GDP grew by 300% in the next year, the debt would shrink proportionately, and I would feel much better about not needing to make any cuts. I suppose my concern is that with the nature of the business cycle, we will run into a recession sooner or later, and when that happens, if GDP and tax revenues both go down for a sustained period, then I would worry that lenders would become hesitant to provide additional funding. But I suppose that would be a complicated situation with many other factors, so maybe I am worrying too much.
"Can't" here is not a statement of fact. First off, the US government can and is paying the interest on the debt.
Second, the debt is denominated in US dollars. If congress were to authorize it, the US government could print money and pay off one hundred percent of the debt in a single day. This would have negative side effects, but it's clear that "can't" is not the correct term.
So saying that too much is being spent is indeed a qualitative assessment, not a fact.
This is a strategy to protect against currency devaluation, but you still need to worry about interest rate risk (as do companies in the public markets, so investing in stocks isn't a sure thing).
Unfortunately, for people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, there's not much to be done besides wait for wages to catch up. And in general, wages don't keep immediate pace with inflation. The net result is that lower-income workers suffer the bulk of the consequences of high inflation.
Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.
Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him in to do something.
The thing about power...it only stays with the people who have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.
This is a silly charade. To actually cut the debt, it requires congress. Not just saving a couple millions dollars and posting on twitter about it. We’ll need to cut Medicare, Medicaid, social security, the military, etc. All the popular stuff that was never easy and will never be easy to cut. We’re not spending 2 trillion per year on condoms.
Won’t wiping all this stuff just lead us into a Great Depression anyway ? I’m not an expert on the topic but my basic understanding was that we (government) just decided we didn’t have any money, so everything just stopped.
Like shutting all this stuff down or radically cutting it back will surely have some dire economic impacts?
Yes. These cuts will set our nation back by decades. Institutions are being destroyed, and with them cultural and institutional knowledge that will never come back.
The government can just print money. So much so that inflation goes crazy and the national debt is pennies. Same with your savings. We have a lot of savers that are old. Wait until they are gone.
Which would probably raise less than a modest wealth tax on billionaires, but we know that will never get traction (even though its an extremely popular policy)
What I don't understand is why they want to cut the debt or the budget. Previous terms have shown that increasing spending and racking up debts isn't leading to loss of polls. Why are Trump and Elon going on this cutting spree instead of doling out tax cuts and increasing pork to their constituents on borrowed money?
Because the Project 2025 plan includes de facto destroying as much of the government as possible to make it easier to replace people with pure cronies.
Do we spend too much? Or do we not take in sufficient revenue?
All these things BTW do have some limited ability to be controlled by the executive (Clinton did layoffs in the 90s, but kept supporting the same federal services). But ultimately most of this stuff is the mandate of congress and can’t just be canceled by executive order.
It is more we believe in magic. We hand out tax breaks like they are candy, cripple the government, and believe some DOGE waving a chainsaw will fix the budget. Extending the Trump tax cuts is estimated to cost $4.6 trillion over ten years.
That's one way to frame it. Alternatively, one could argue we don't tax enough, and that's due to large tax cuts, first under Bush and then under Trump. Now Trump wants more tax cuts.
The people coming in with a hatchet are not planning to reduce spending. They’re planning to use any money saved to fund an enormous tax cut that will primarily benefit the very rich. https://www.courant.com/2025/02/12/congress-budget-tax-cuts/
2 is not a fact in the slightest. The American government is guilty of under-investment in perhaps every area outside of military. The notion of bipartisan climbing public debt is also false. Bill Clinton brought the government into running and Democrats have had consistently better budget responsibility than Republicans, though the reason for this is more that the Dems fund government through taxes where the Republicans fund government through debt to give out tax cuts. The actual levels of spending are not so much changed because it turns out that most of the money spent by government is quite important and you can't just get rid of it.
There are practical limits to the amount of debt a government can take on. Additionally, the government usually collects debt from the wealthy, who then make money back through interest payments. The "fiscal responsibility" of the Democrats is how private individuals actually extract value out of the government. Republicans issue debt, Dems use tax money to pay the interest. I think the wealthy have become more sceptical about the ability of of government to pay back these loans.
There are reasons why both parties allowed the system to remain as it was. I find it's increasingly true that new politicians don't understand the value of the systems they are meant to control. They see Chesterton's Fence and tear it down with abandon. Someone like Trump has no clue why politicians act the way they do. He lies and bullshits and does whatever he wants, and it works in the short term, but the long term effect is disastrous. These people are taking a private equity approach to government. Buy it cheap and load it up with debt, then sell as much as you can and let it crash to zero. This is more looting than governing.
The booing will start when Americans realize what a delicate web of interconnects they live in. It hasn't really sunk in yet, but these "waste" jobs tend to be there for a reason, and this whole project is the ultimate exercise in flattening Chesterton's Fences and seeing what happens.
(I'm reminded of the Golgafrinchans from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They sent their "useless" third of society into space... The folks who did jobs like telephone cleaner or insurance salesman. The remaining two-thirds of the population died from a plague sourced from a dirty telephone.)
GOP has made it it's mission to ensure the federal government doesn't function my entire adult life. They've been working to destroy the middle class since long before I was born. They continue with this mission now and have really turned up the heat. They're currently working to cut taxes for those who make >$360k/year and also eliminate medicaid while INCREASING the deficit by $4.3 trillion.
I've always had the impression that there's a strong right leaning bias on HN. I guess that means there's actually a good spread of opinions? Or maybe it comes across differently from the European perspective.
Regardless the DOGE/Musk stuff touches so much on technical/startup related stuff that it starts to become absurd to paint it as purely political and to say it doesn't belong here. There are very few other forums where people understand the security implications of someone having physical access to a server for example, or where the phrase "move fast and break stuff" is familiar to anyone.
This thread is a great example - there are comments holding the positions you're asking for. Luckily they generally don't seem to be doing so uncritically, but that's what we want from this forum, right?
Why are those comments not good enough in your eyes?
> limited government, free markets, private property, self-ownership, self-defense, and personal responsibility without dependence on collectivism—along with traditional social values and a recognition of natural social hierarchies based on merit and value
Yes those are what I mean as well when I say I find the HN hivemind to be quite far to the right :-) although I of course want to disagree with your phrasing implying that meritocracies are in any way "natural" in the social sphere.
I though there's be a minimum age of 18 to register here?
Put it on a left/right issue if you want, but in reality it is about following the law (which is not happening otherwise Trump's EOs and DOGE actions wouldn't be in court so often) and treating government workers with respect. You really want to side with a felon who pardoned almost all J6ers, even those who caused the death of police officers? You want to side with those who want to kill the investigation against Mayor Adams but might want to restart the investigation at a later point? You want to side with the US president who sides with the Russia autocrat and aggressor Putin? You want to side with the President who clearly has no understanding of how tariffs work but announces them against the neighbouring countries with which he previously negotiated a free trade agreement after breaking the old one?
This seems less like a genuine discussion and more like an emotional appeal bundled with a series of accusations. Laws are challenged in court all the time—that's part of the process, not proof of wrongdoing. As for government workers, respect should be earned, not demanded. And as for siding with someone, politics isn't a simple binary where supporting one action means endorsing everything a person has ever done. If we're going to have a meaningful conversation, it should be based on facts and principles, not just loaded questions.
Reading in various sources, many of those workers did get great performance reviews before the purges that fired them with a one-liner citing their lack of performance. Tell me how any employer doing this is acting with respect?
You were asked for a suggestion of a reasonably neutral media source and your reply was 'your mom' and a deflection to whether HN was a good forum for political discussion, along with your personal take on how left-wing it is.
Why don't you just answer the question instead: what do you consider a reaonably neutral news outlet covering these issues?
You don't seem to understand there are no broader efforts to scrutinize government spending, only keyword searches for "gotcha" DEI terms and a few million in a contract.
DOGE is political theater for rubes, while congress blows out the national debt for their billionaire tax breaks.
You're walking down the street with a billionaire.
A thief approaches, but only robs you.
Would your complaint be that the billionaire should have been robbed too?
Taxation is coercion. Instead of resenting those who manage to keep more of what they earn, consider that billionaires are the ones taking risks, investing, and creating jobs. If anything, the real issue is government waste, not who’s being “robbed” the least. To that extent, what DOGE is doing, at least for the moment, is something positive, regardless of the political spin around it.
You still believe in the trickle-down myth? If you are against equality, that's okay, but at least admit it and allow those who weren't fortunate enough to have wealthy parents (like Musk and Trump) to live a life without worries about health-care, housing and food.
Every rule in our society is upheld with coercion. Even if we had zero taxation, there'd be plenty of other rules that people would be coerced into following. Without a democratic government, the rules that people are forced to follow will be the ones these billionaires choose. I'd bet that those rules are going to be a lot worse for the average person than current levels of taxation.
What we are now seeing is the end result of capitalism. Wealth concentration so bad that a few billionaires can take over and start making their own rules.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
The article is very clear and references the DOGE site.
Your point seems to be that truth depends on packaging the context it’s served in.
This is a classic post-truth move:
Distracting from the substance by debating the style. It’s a diversion, not a logical argument. When truth is pushed to the background in favor of delivery, it’s no longer about facts, but about framing those facts to fit an agenda.
You're suggesting that truth's value hinges on its presentation...A classic post-truth deflection that shifts attention from substance to style. In proper logic, a fact remains true regardless of its packaging.
> - Can you independently verify the accuracy of the data presented?
You can go to the DOGE site and also ask for more transparency. Something
many argue is now impossible since they have write access to government records.
> - Are the errors due to the data itself being wrong, or are the underlying sources unreliable?
> - Do these errors appear to be the result of intentional bias, or are they reasonable mistakes?
> - Ultimately, do these issues undermine the credibility of DOGE as a trustworthy source?
If anyone has been involved in any sort of internal data analytics this is basically what is expected to happen. Data that is used in a new way tends to turn up all sorts of limitations and soft points. Trump, Musk, etc should have been (read: probably were) well aware this was coming; for what it is worth they've surely seen it a few times in business life.
That being said, I doubt it is much of a factor. The strategy of hitting fast & hard is to bypass the unreliable data by triggering screams from the areas that are most important. In some sense, anticipating this revelation is why the strategy is chosen in the first place. Trying to do massive cuts slowly and carefully gets a few months in to the project then crumbles under the weight of unreliable data and analysis paralysis.
> hitting fast & hard is to bypass the unreliable data by triggering screams from the areas that are most important
This works for companies which can risk some debt and restructure and maybe getting better. Worst case they'll go bankrupt. In this case the screams after mistakes will be literal screams of people dying.
Hitting fast & hard is not the legal way to do it. Congress has allocated the money and the President can't just stop spending it. You also ignore the human aspect, firing people in the most disrespectful way, with just single sentences, will hurt the trust in the government as a workplace for a long time. Good government needs good workers who trust the government.
Why is everything about their data access for example also being flagged? Sometimes there is a crossover between tech and politics so there needs to be some slack.
Why not more? The short answer is that avoiding too much repetition is core to HN. For a longer answer, follow the links I posted elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142645 - they'll give you more material on this than you could possibly want to read.
> Sometimes there is a crossover between tech and politics so there needs to be some slack.
That's how we look at it too. For more, see the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142682. These also point to years' worth of explanations (which you may or may not want), but all the common questions have been answered many times there.
Hacker News is not just about tech. There's plenty of discussion about philosophy, science, economics, health, hobbies and trivia.
I doubt we would have much to talk about here if Elon was not deeply involved in this storyline. There's plenty of government stuff that goes on without much to comment on that is Hacker News material.
Hacker News isn't about tech isn't about hackers. Right there in the name. Other systems besides tech systems can be hacked. What's happening with DOGE can be viewed as a hack of one of the biggest systems of all time. And it's ongoing. This article is chronicling part of that hack, and I can't believe the tech minds at HN aren't more interested in it.
I wonder, at the risk of turning HN to a Reddit clone, wouldn't it make sense to at least a have a few simple categories/tags here?
Seems to me most people want to filter HN on "purely tech", "tech-adjacent news" (incl. politics) and "startups/business". Maybe if we had something like 3-5 folders to put content here, everyone would be happier.
Let's not act like you were somehow forced to read the comments to a thread titled "DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes" and whine that it really needs a politics tag so you don't accidentally stumble across it.
What were you expecting, after wading half way through the comments?
I was expecting for these political posts to be treated the same as other political posts, i.e. shut down due to them being off-topic for this site. Alternatively I'd expect the 'no politics' rule (yes, rule) to be either restated as 'Bay Area politics welcome, other politics off-topic' (/s) or 'politics welcome, tag title [politics]' (like PDF's are tagged) or 'politics welcome, thread will be tagged' or something along those lines. What's good for the goose is good for the gander after all.
If you (or anyone) will read some of those and follow some of the links in them, you should get answers to all the common questions about this. If, after that, you have a question that hasn't been answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
(Plus I'd like to know what it is! It's been a while since I've heard a new one.)
I'd be glad if you'd do something about the influx of trolls, like maybe requiring a few submissions before allowing comments. Right now it's easy to create an account and then just post slurs on 30 or 40 threads before getting shadow banned (and those of us who have showdead turned on still get to see it).
I understand you must be upset. But a bunch of us don't care anymore about another country's internal stuff. It's not even worth the schadenfreude. For us it's been a clown show for a very, very long time. Remember weapons of mass destruction? Remember when one side raised the alarm on electronic voting and then 15 years later it was the other side, and then 4 years later back to the first side? Remember the massive bailouts, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street? Remember Epstein? Borderline fascist pro-American exceptionalism Hollywood? Then ultra-woke self hating Hollywood? It's like a bad soap opera where the audience is numb to any further plot twist. Whatever happens, happens. Good luck. But please let us have this last forum not tainted with US politics. I'm sure there's plenty of welcoming threads on reddit, Facebook, X/BlueSky, and even YouTube comments.
Who posted slurs on 30 or 40 threads before getting banned?
If you're talking about the account you mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143257, that account was banned from the day they started posting, and not one of their comments was ever publicly visible.
Yes, 'showdead' means you're signing up to see, among other things, the worst that the internet has to offer. I explained that in my other reply to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143611.
Can you not with these 'give me examples and we'll take a look at it' responses? You know as well as I do that there's a lot of driveby abuse accounts - anyone with Showdead turned on can see as much. Perhaps you could speak to the remedy I proposed instead.
I seem not to have made my point clearly, so I will try again. I'm not asking you for examples so I can "take a look at it". I'm saying that your claim is false.
> Right now it's easy to create an account and then just post slurs on 30 or 40 threads before getting shadow banned
Between community moderation, mods, and software, I believe the vast majority of accounts posting slurs get banned quickly. However, if I'm mistaken and you're right, then HN must be replete with slurs (we are, after all, "doing nothing" about them in your view), and in that case there should be plenty of examples.
That's what I was asking you for. Let's see all these accounts that are "posting slurs on 30 or 40 threads without getting banned". If it's that easy, there ought to be plenty, no?
I'd be surprised if you could find even one. I'm aware of only one in the last few months, and that was a borderline case because its comments were getting killed for other reasons.
So far, the only account you've mentioned [1] is one that we banned on the day it started posting, none of whose comments ever made it out of the [dead] state. In other words, a counterexample. If you're going to make huge claims, I imagine most readers would want to see examples that illustrate your claim, not ones that contradict it.
I am not making a huge claim, the omnipresence of abusive trolls is obvious to anyone who uses HN regularly. I don't plan on wasting hours doing firebase API calls to build a case you will handwave away.
It'd be nice if you responded to the suggestion that imposing more friction would shift some of the burden onto the trolls instead of the regular users. Currently they are able to keep posting even after being 'banned'. You're not even forcing them to go through the minimal effort of creating another account.
I have 'showdead' enabled because people often make valuable contributions that get flagged or hidden, and which I would miss otherwise. Since I have it on, I also see that abusive trolling from brand new accounts is very common. If you were actually banning them, then they wouldn't be able to keep posting and would be forced to set up new accounts.
Ok. How they can both be omnipresent and yet take hours to find, I guess we can leave as an exercise for the reader. Here's a simpler point:
> the omnipresence of abusive trolls is obvious to anyone who uses HN regularly
If that were the case, I'd be hearing about nothing else—the inbox would be dominated by it. But you're the only person saying this that I know of.
> If you were actually banning them, then they wouldn't be able to keep posting
You're changing the meaning of the word 'banned' to something other than the one it has had on HN for 18 years. That's fine in a Humpty Dumpty way (using the word to mean whatever you choose it to mean), but it makes your comments on this confusing, and I'm going to keep using the word to mean what it has always meant here.
By that standard definition, all the accounts you're talking about are already banned. The vast majority of readers see none of those comments—you see them only because you turned on the 'showdead' setting in your profile. You dislike many comments that show up when you do that, and want us to change HN so you can turn on 'showdead' but not see as many bad comments.
I explained why HN works this way (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143611), but you don't like that design and want us to change it. Specifically, you want us to (1) block banned accounts from posting at all, and (2) make it harder to create a new account on HN, so trolls find it harder to create new accounts to troll with.
That's my understanding of your argument, and you're welcome to correct me if I misread it.
Since you said you wanted my response, here it is: we're not going to do that, for several reasons:
(1) I don't want to make HN less accessible to new users. Older users often want us to add barriers for newcomers. I believe that would be a mistake. The risk to HN of failing to attract new legit users is higher than any benefit of making it harder to join.
This cost would be highest in the case of legit new users—who are inclined to bail when they encounter friction—and lowest in the case of serial trolls, who know better than anyone how to get around restrictions. Such a restriction would be least effective on the worst commenters and most effective at blocking good ones, like a chemotherapy drug that goes easier on cancer cells and is most toxic on healthy cells.
It's particularly important that new users (or existing ones who want to comment anonymously) who have unique expertise or experience about a topic be able to sign up and comment immediately. Some of HN's best-ever comments have been of that kind.
(2) The existing design—allowing banned accounts to keep posting but making their posts default-invisible, and then allowing any user to turn on a setting to read them—works remarkably well. (I get that you disagree with this, but you asked for my response, so bear with me.) If it didn't, we'd be flooded with complaints about it, and we aren't.
Not that it's perfect. Users sometimes forget that they turned on 'showdead' in their profile, and thus that they signed up to see all comments by banned accounts. In such cases we get emails saying "I can't believe that you condone accounts which post trash like <link>. How can they not be banned?" Then I have to explain that no, we don't condone it, yes the account is banned, and they (the emailer) must have 'showdead' turned on in their profile, since that's the only way they could be seeing those posts.
This is bad, but it doesn't happen often enough to fundamentally change the design—especially since these users typically respond by saying "well that's a relief! I forgot I had turned on that setting. Thanks!"
Your complaint is different: you haven't forgotten that you turned 's...
(1) I don't want to make HN less accessible to new users. Older users often want us to add barriers for newcomers. I believe that would be a mistake. The risk to HN of failing to attract new legit users is higher than any benefit of making it harder to join.
Reasonable, but this already happens - new users aren't able to downvote or flag until they've accumulated a certain amount of karma. I don't see how asking people to make 3 or 5 submissions before gaining commenting privileges would be a big hindrance.
This cost would be highest in the case of legit new users—who are inclined to bail when they encounter friction—and lowest in the case of serial trolls, who know better than anyone how to get around restrictions.
Why have an email address requirement at all then? Correspondingly, why not reveal the emails of serial trolls so they can be screened out on in other places, so that abuse results in a loss of privacy? The fact that trolls know ways to get around friction doesn't mean it's not time-consuming.
Also this seems kinda panglossian in that it assumes HN is mostly running optimally. It doesn't consider the large number of people who don't want to join HN because they perceive it as a forum where toxic behavior is semi-tolerated.
It's particularly important that new users (or existing ones who want to comment anonymously) who have unique expertise or experience about a topic be able to sign up and comment immediately. Some of HN's best-ever comments have been of that kind.
This is a valid point, but I question the urgency. It would be equally easy for people to post anonymously on a blog and submit that.
Your complaint is different: you haven't forgotten that you turned 'showdead' on, and you understand it fine—you just don't like having to see so much garbage when you do turn it on. And I agree—who would? A lot of what's in there is sewage, the worst that the internet has to offer.
But you signed up for this when you turned on 'showdead'—that's the 'contract', so to speak. You don't like this and want us to change it, but you're the only person asking for this. Everyone else who turns on 'showdead' understands that that's what they signed up for, save for the few who (as I just described) forgot that they did it and need a refresher.
It's not that I mind seeing it as such - I regularly deal with far worse in other contexts. What I question is why you let people keep doing it, as opposed to just burning their accounts. Yes, it's easy for trolls to set up a new account, but even easier to keep using the one they have. Not disincentivinzg the behavior means you'll get mroe.
(3) The 'showdead' system is critical to community trust on HN. [...] I realize that you feel differently—you don't want to see everything—but this is definitely not how most users who turn on 'showdead' feel.
This is not my position.
(4) The problem of serial trolls is not one we can ever solve [...] then we work on strengthening the immune system. What we don't do is try to replace the immune system with a different one, because the risks of doing that would be higher—the cure could be worse than the disease. There are other risks that actually do threaten the health and survival of this community. Those are the ones we need to focus on and put resources into addressing.
I can't really evaluate this as it's so vague.
(5) There have been times in the past when we have added barriers, and the result was scandal and fiasco. I'm thinking, for example, of pg's old "pending comments" design, which led to outrage, accusations of elitism, and so on. I'm not saying this is the same as what you're proposing, but it's in the same ballpark, and it's a ballpark where we've had bad results in the past, leaving me inclined to avoid it.
> I don't see how asking people to make 3 or 5 submissions before gaining commenting privileges would be a big hindrance.
Someone like Alan Kay or Peter Norvig (to pick real examples) is not going to jump through hoops to comment here. They're going to hit that barrier and bail. Ditto for project creators and article authors, who show up to respond to comments about their work. Ditto for legit throwaway accounts, when someone has relevant information that they need not to post under their regular identity.
> I can't really evaluate this as it's so vague.
You're suggesting a fundamental design change. That is too risky, the gain is dubious, and we have more pressing things to worry about.
> you don't impose any penalty at all on serial abusers
Well, now we're in a cycle and I need to raise an exception. Obviously we impose a penalty on serial abusers: we ban them.
From my perspective, writing comments on Hacker News and posting submissions are completely different skills.
When there's a topic on Hacker News that I'm knowledgeable about or that sparks my curiosity, I know how to write a comment. It's a skill I've built up from all of the other internet forums I've participated in.
On the other hand, the primary place where I learn about news that would be an interesting submission to Hacker News is... Hacker News. There's also a fair amount of randomness to what is ranked as a good submission. If I had to find 3-5 quality submissions before I could post on Hacker News, there's no way I would be involved in the community.
The comments are also the primary value add of Hacker News for many users, myself included. Sights like Stack Exchange might have a much higher barrier to commenting, but in those cases the central way users interact with the site is something else (questions and answers for Stack Exchange).
If past experience is any guide, then (1) it's a fluctuation, albeit a large one, (2) it will pass, and (3) it would be a mistake to change the design of the site at one of these moments.
>> Whenever there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), the flood of submissions about it quickly exhausts HN's capacity to host substantive discussions. That goes double when a topic is divisive and enraging, like you-know-who is.
I thought you-know-who was defeated? Are the Death Eaters assembling again?
US debt is 124% of GDP. That's not as high as UK debt after WWII, 270%, which impoverished the country that had been at the top of the world. But combined with an aging population that has more people than ever hailing from the historically low-achievement global south, you can expect some standard of living adjustment to occur. Your grandparents had a house by your age, and the economic ability to raise a family. You get to slave for an apartment and a wife who works for another man. Historically, there were names for that economic arrangement and the class of people who were condemned to it.
That Trump I and Biden did not have an effort like DOGE (which does not have Congressional support and therefore should not yet be enough to give serious people hope) shows how fundamentally unserious both of those administrations were. I hope that Musk can find a way to make it successful somehow. But if he does, it will break 1000x the number of eggs that you've seen him breaking so far.
I love this reply. It's lots of serious words about the debt, and it ignores that Trump and the R party are currently trying to balloon the debt for their tax breaks.
Could you please stop using HN primarily for political battle? You've been doing this a ton lately, as well as breaking the site guidelines in other ways. Regardless of how right you are or feel you are, this is not what HN is for, and we end up banning accounts that keep doing it (regardless of what their politics happen to be).
> You can't throw an accusation like this with further substantiation
That's fair! But I don't know which part you mean—the "doing a ton of political battle" part, or the "breaking the site guidelines in other ways" part? I'm going to assume the latter because the former seems obvious.
If that's what you're asking about, these are the comments I was referring to:
Inflation and the US bond market will quickly sort this out. It is going to be beautiful and terrifying at the same time, the same way a cosmic collision is.
Almost every presidency has taken more or less responisble effors to minimize spending. But they werent aimed at people who had prosecuted those in power, targetted at regulation agencies for the president's oligarch cronies, racially targetted, or driven by outsiders with no experience:
Initiated under President Jimmy Carter in 1977, Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) required agencies to justify their budgets from scratch rather than just adjusting from the previous year.
President Ronald Reagan pushed for privatization, deregulation, and reduced federal spending.
The Grace Commission (1982-1984), led by businessman J. Peter Grace, was tasked with identifying inefficiencies in government.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton launched the National Performance Review (later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government), led by Vice President Al Gore.
The NPR aimed to make government "work better and cost less" by cutting red tape, streamlining bureaucracy, and increasing customer service.
Key successes included shifting more government services online, consolidating purchasing, and reducing federal workforce size.
Launched by President George W. Bush in 2001, the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) focused on:
Strategic management of human capital
Competitive sourcing (increasing private-sector competition for government contracts)
Financial performance improvements
E-Government expansion (improving federal websites and online services)
Budget and performance integration
2010s: DATA Act & Digital Transformation
President Barack Obama signed the DATA Act (2014), which aimed to improve transparency and accountability in government spending.
Obama also created the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and 18F, teams dedicated to modernizing government technology.
The Trump administration’s PMA (2018) emphasized IT modernization, data transparency, and a shift to "shared services", where multiple agencies use the same administrative systems.
The Biden administration has continued these efforts, focusing on AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation, as well as improving citizen-facing services like healthcare and tax processing.
I think impartial observers have not spent time in actual government bureaucracy. Basically everything will seem like “they’re cutting something important!” Or “they’re stopping critical research!” because every government contract needs justification; so naturally they will all sound good. The data and accounting itself is such bad quality in all cases that it is impossible to be perfect at this; there are entire industries dedicated to simply analyzing and tracking contracts and spending. None of them are above ~90% accurate. Many “analysts” born over the last couple weeks are talking about things they know nothing about; for example measuring savings off calls on BPAs or IDIQs is silly because a call = spent money. You cannot save money you have already spent, but you can stop the vehicle.
I’m not saying DOGE is definitively good or even that they are going to actually accomplish their mission (probably their cuts will become a piggy bank that gets raided by OTA’s at the end of the fiscal year). But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
What is on paper for government contracts is totally different from reality. Most of these programs accomplish nothing, are totally un-utilized, filled with employees who literally do not show up to work.
I could write a novel with examples but here are some notable anecdotes:
- Once, I built an intelligence solution for a large-ish intelligence program within a civil agency. After 6 months it was not used once but cost the government a cool ~12M$. Only after a full year did the program leadership finally take a look and discover, wait a second, none of these people have worked more than a week total in the past year. Only half got laid off, the rest are still gainfully employed elsewhere in the government. Many such cases!
- I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!
- Dozens of cases of the government spending on “XYZ tool” that sounds super critical. In reality they are paying $12M for a postgres database and an extremely basic data entry UI on top. Also, I can’t believe I am about to defend Sharepoint, but realistically something like tracking 10 SIM cards can go in an excel spreadsheet and doesn’t need a $12M “inventory tool.”
- Many cases of projects investigating bird flu in depth and tracking its spread as early as 2022. You would think this is critical with bird flu being a thing right now; however none of these $20M+ contracts have accomplished much at all.
You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same. The only way to go from GS-12 to GS-13 to GS-14 to GS-15 is just to spend recklessly. They are experts at justifying their budget and navigating internal hierarchies. However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.
(Disclaimer: “government” above refers to civil, exclusive of DoD)
- new age defense tech companies band together pretty tightly
- you can cut 10 Palantir contracts and save $200M but then you’re stuck with the existing tools (Sharepoint+PowerBI or Salesforce+Accenture) that are usually super shitty and 1-2B$ contracts vehicles for SI
- Palantir actually has really low revenue, as recent as 4 years ago they would have often qualified as a Small Business
- if you cut down entire lines of effort, sweep out the legs from under an entire program, lay off bureaucrats, etc. you can stop more stab wounds and stem bleeding; this is an okay step 1
Ironically the easiest way to quickly fix the deficit is actually to spend money. Most government employees are contractors because a GS-15 can earn maybe 150k while a contractor translating to only a GS-13 can earn 200k while their agency charges the government 600k a head. So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed. Then you can cancel all the PWS contracts. By napkin math this would account for a cool ~$1T over 4 years.
> So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed.
Why on Earth would anyone go work for an organization that thinks it's ok to "layoff 90%" under the assumption that they're all under-performing? And you're making a huge assumption by saying there's zero risk. Laying off 90% of the original air traffic controllers presents zero risk? The intelligence services? Law enforcement? The military? Payroll accounts for around 3% of the Federal budget. Layoffs aren't going to fix our spending problem.
And this completely ignores the fact that's it's illegal to fire most of these people without cause. They're going to sue and they're going to win. And we'll end up paying them salaries to have not worked for however long those lawsuits take.
Very nice examples, but why then doesn't DOGE go through every project? Why did Trump end all DEI contracts, why cause the disruption by freezing all outgoing money, why fire the Inspector Generals that are inspecting their agencies for waste, why fire all probationary workers, and why the fuck do they want to mess with the IRS, the one agency that brings money in at a very successful rate?
Clearly no one at Musk's DOGE has spent time in actual government bureaucracy.
These are good questions that are easy to answer once you’ve spent time in gov:
- it is very hard to go thru every project and generally not worth it, it seems like they are sorting by contract vehicle size. there are 120k+ contracts spit out by the government every fiscal year alone so this is a monumental effort
- the DEI programs are probably a PR thing, generally speaking though they accomplish essentially nothing; I would probably go further though and roll up any program staffed by less than 10 people, then furlough 20% of the workforce under the larger program
- not all outgoing money has been frozen, idk how this rumor got started, it’s very specific and generally just foreign aid. this is part of trump’s campaign promise so while I don’t agree with it and it is probably going to shatter US hegemony, it is also what people voted for. the government is still spending tons of money, we are still doing more in depth tracking but it seems like only a 3-4% decrease overall
- the OIGs deserve to be fired they have not been able to stem any underlying issues for years, the outrage here is all manufactured. let me ask you this, if you hired an accountant and for the last 10 years they can neither tell you how much money you are spending nor find savings, are you going to keep that accountant?
- the IRS is not really efficient! first of all a majority of their audits are on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. yes of course the top 20% are still overrepresented correctly, but they are actually losing money for every audit they conduct on the bottom 80%. estimates are around 0.96$ per dollar with ~6k$ per audit, so they’d save $240 per audit they skip on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. it’s true they recover 6$ on average for every dollar spent on the top 20% which cost averages out to a little over 3$ recovered per dollar; however this is actually not much money, around $30B a year total. for such a massive agency and mission they do a pretty terrible job, and is very warranting of disruption
People are being gaslit into thinking the government is efficient; in reality it is endlessly bloated.
DEI is not just a PR thing, it forces employers to look at places for candidates they haven't looked before. Not surprising that white women are those who benefit the most from DEI. Even one JD Vance, as a military veteran, profited from a DEI program at Yale https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/feb/19/ask-politifac...
The IGs have be fired in a very specific way that involves informing Congress. It was not done correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
Cardell Richardson was in office since only May, don't know about you, but I'd give a new IG a year to get his ship running smoother. But looking at his picture I see why he was fired...
Regarding the IRS, well then we can expect that from now on only the rich people will get audited?
Government contract vehicles are not binding, call orders are but can also be cancelled and provisions are made for doing so. You’re pointing to one hyper specific example of cuts as frozen spending; it is easy to confirm billions have been spent in the last week alone. There is also a case to be made for malicious compliance in many cases with cuts. It sucks these farmers aren’t getting paid, but this is not an uncommon occurrence and if they truly are owed money they will eventually be receipted or they will be able to sue under FAR provisions.
Firing IGs without notice isn’t great but if Congress has an issue with it they are free to take it up. I’m not sure why that is relevant to whether or not IGs should be fired.
Cardell was an IG for literally two decades. This is like saying a SWE at Facebook for 20 years who now works in Meta’s VR division has only been a SWE for 1 year.
OIG at Department of State especially, among all OIGs, deserves mass layoffs. The track record of that office is the absolute worst.
It is also typical for SES to get rotated out and replaced during any new administration. 1-2 years in office is totally fair game as not many make it past 3.
Regarding the IRS, that’s a campaign promise Trump made and seems to be keen on with his ERS plans. However I doubt it will come to fruition or have meaningful impact, the IRS is hard to disrupt due to longstanding relationships with Congress.
> not all outgoing money has been frozen, idk how this rumor got started, it’s very specific and generally just foreign aid
No, that's absolutely not true. My partner is the accounting manager for a university. All their access to federal funding was turned off for a couple of days, and several grants (which they could draw from and get overnight) have not shown up in several weeks (specifically there are some that even remotely hint at DEI, that the university now expects will never be fulfilled).
Given that education funding dwarfs foreign aid and is affected, it would seem inaccurate to label it as "generally foreign aid".
The other point is just because a contract or award is on usaspending.gov doesn't mean the funds are flowing - that was my point, my partner's school has many awards that previously they could draw from at will, and receive money overnight. They've attempted to draw from many of them now, and the funds just ... aren't being transferred.
That was part of the furore, "we have agreements and obligations in place and you're just refusing to fund them", it's not about the existence of the awards in the first place.
You really think that reducing IRS funding will reduce audits on the bottom 80%, and not the top 20%? If you're going to go around telling people they've been gaslit (using a straw man, I might add), you might want to check your own biases first.
Yes! The IRS budget has nearly doubled in the last decade, primarily to increase their workforce and use manpower to focus on shotgunning low-yield audits.
High-income audits are difficult to conduct. To increase receipts, it is far easier to just conduct more easy, low-yield audits. This is the optimization they are making, and in service of their mission (maximizing revenue) it is technically correct.
Instead of picking your favorite logical fallacy to throw at me, you can go look this stuff up yourself to confirm.
Something like 130,000 voters voting the other way would have changed the election.
However unlike in 2016, a strong plurality voted Trump - 2 million more than voted for Harris. Had Harris won the popular vote that argument might have meant something.
Not sure how true this is and I guess it is moot at this point (except as far as thinking how to ensure all legal votes are counted in the future):
https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/
"Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes. And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million."
Which makes it insane that such massive disruption can happen as a result. When the result is balanced on a knife edge, the outcome ought to reflect that, instead of swinging dramatically one way or the other. I don’t know how you design a system like that, but this is nuts.
The US was the first modern democracy, since then we’ve learned how to make better ones (proportional representation parliamentary systems), but the US system is just stable enough to keep limping along.
A similar number removed citizenship from all Brits in 2016.
A few hundred votes slipped the US election in 2000 and caused the invasion of Iraq.
You tackle this by having societal norms and strong institutions. The internet broke that. The concentration of wealth broke that. The unprecedented algorithmic manipulation broke that.
Brexit was especially wild. At least the US has the excuse that the law says we do it this way. To make such a drastic change based on a simple majority in a nonbinding referendum is really out there.
That isn't how elections work. You can't assume that all voters in non-swing states would never change their vote.
You could say the same thing about a popular vote where a candidate wins by 10 votes - "oh, our entire system is decided by 10 voters? how unfair"
For the US election, votes in other states resulted in a situation where only 5 were swing states. If those voters in non-swing states voted differently in enough numbers, then there wouldn't be just 5 swing states.
Look at any of the elections in the past 40-50 years and you can clearly see that which states are "swing states" and which aren't changes over time.
Trimming down a bureaucracy is a good example of Gall's Law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."
The usual reason for this is simply dependencies. At some point in time, somebody took a working system, had some extra budget, and then invented a process that took the existing system as an input and produced some marginally useful work. But then next year, the new process was part of the working system, and they had more budget, and they added more roles and processes based on its output. Now you can't take it away: regardless of how marginally useful it was last year, everything built on top of it will fail. That $10M contract with one user might have just one user, but that one user might be the crucial communication link that determines the budget for a 1000-person department. You might even have a contract with zero users, but without auditing the inner workings of the whole department, how do you know it has zero users and won't just break everything when you terminate it?
It's only cuttable because DEI is not the actual budget line item. Think of it like this 'program gets a budget of $10M' and the people that run it decide the best way to implement that program includes $8M of DEI training. They can instead decide to spend $0 on DEI and the full budget on payroll. This is simply changing the priority of what was effectively an HR function to actual productivity functions.
All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people across the world in business class for a few meetings they could do remotely without problem. I'm pretty sure everyone could come with many anecdotes of waste in the private sector. I also worked in the public sector (not in the US) and frankly, I think it was pretty efficient. Most employees were competent and weren't paid very well.
The problem with reducing costs with a heavy hand is that you will cut things which are actually useful. And probably, the saving will be very little compared to the overall budget. I think DOGE is primarily a demagogical operation.
I see this take a lot in this thread, I think people do not comprehend the scale.
Your company sends people in business class needlessly, ok. The government sends people in private jets needlessly -- there are dozens of separate aviation programs just within Dept. of State each with their own planes and contracts to staff and supply those planes. We have hundreds of posts around the world, many people are getting to those mainly on charters, private legs, or in the contractor case, business class tickets billed at 2x rate under T&L.
This is just one specific example; it applies across the board, when the government spends it is on an exponentially different scale to commercial. A single database will easily cost them 5M$ -- that is ~10x the cash moved on the floor of a major casino during a busy night.
> I also worked in the public sector (not in the US)
Yes, key phrase not in the US. As a comparison, the largest spending item in our budget is Medicaid -- ineffective healthcare that applies to less than 20% of our population. We spend 4x more on Medicaid somehow than the UK spends on the entirety of the NHS.
Well do remember that you have 5x the population of the UK, and the NHS is effectively limited to about 20% of our population given that our "ambitious" target is to get the delay between referral and treatment down "only" 18 weeks in most cases. About 10% of the population is on an NHS waiting list as we speak, which should be pretty much everyone that needs it.
Medicaid applies blanket to less than 20% of the population while providing less coverage and having worse outcomes than the NHS.
I picked the NHS because it serves the same size population (70M) while having more coverage and better outcomes.
Having lived in the UK yeah the waiting times suck, I went to a doctor actively bleeding out with an infection and they gave me a dressing and said to wait 3 months for a surgeon. That’s insane but the same outcome people on Medicaid will get in the US.
In the above anecdote I just flew back to the US the next day and was treated and “cured” 4 hours after landing. But, I did that on private insurance, not Medicaid. When americans shit on the NHS they are comparing it to their private insurance, not to the state funded healthcare options (Medicaid/Medicare).
How does that compare to the scale of the federal government as a whole?
Federal revenue in one year is more than the market cap of the most valuable US company. It’s an enormous organization. If waste is as a similar level proportionally, it’ll be similarly enormous. Is it actually more than that?
Large private sector companies operate on a 30% profit margin and have exponentially lower capex and opex compared to the federal government.
The federal government with exponentially higher revenue that exceeds the entire market cap of these valuable companies actually runs a deficit while predominantly providing inferior services in competing categories; while having insanely high opex and capex.
This inefficiency passes everywhere, including to their contractors — because of all the random shit, compliance, regulations in government contracting, the average margin is somehow only 10-30%. They charge often 3-100x the price of a good or service when provided to the private sector yet make 3x >less< profit.
The scope of the inefficiency is unimaginable, something we must absolutely not accept under any circumstances if we want to have a future as a country that does not involve being a permanent debtor to other economies.
Contractors aren't allowed to have excessive margins or profits because that would be gouging... so they inflate the number of necessary staff so that their capped overhead costs deliver the amount of profit they want.
>>All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people across the world in business class for a few meetings they could do remotely without problem.
The difference is that businesses that are inefficient are wasting revenue, and eventually go bust. There is no self-correcting mechanism for government.
There technically is because the interest on the deficit alone is about to exceed total defense spending, over time we will eventually just become a debt slave society paying to other economies.
But practically the self correcting mechanism is democracy, our elected officials have been failing us. Like it or hate it, DOGE has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else conbined incl 5 other agencies over the last 20 years. The reaction from the bureaucracy and political machine should tell you everything you need to know about our prospects in the absence of DOGE.
Actually exit polls say that most people who voted for Trump did so because they thought he would lower grocery prices, not because they thought he would make the government more efficient. So far grocery prices have risen significantly under his administration.
As far as I know there is no evidence that there was a program to destabilize bangladesh that doge cut, that appears to be another case of doge not really understanding what it was cutting. But if you have a credible reference on that which isn't just saying "Elon said so", I'd love to see it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump started mailing checks to people just before the midterms. I remember a documentary before election day where many gladly people remembered receiving stimulus checks just because Trump demanded they were sent in his name. They’ll forget about the wounds he’ll cause, as long as they receive a bandaid with his face on it.
They already have spoke about passing on the savings by sending out $5000 cheques. A small price to pay for gutting your healthcare benefits and social security :)
Coalitions are built by uniting various factions and their interests. Cutting the administrative state is #9 on Trump’s platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. Just because it wasn’t the top reason doesn’t mean it wasn’t part of the platform that people voted for.
For example, I don’t personally care for RFK. I’m the opposite of an anti-vaxxer, I think the government should vaccinate you in your sleep. But he was part of the pitch and MAHA was part of the coalition and I voted for the platform and was happy to see him confirmed. That’s how political coalitions work.
If Newsom explicitly runs on X, Y, and Z, and you vote for him for X and Y, I think it’s fair to say that you’re at least acquiescing to Z in return for forming a majority coalition.
It would of course be better if you stuck to known facts instead of rumors from anonymous people on X. But even if misuse of USAID money comes to light, which I’m sure there is, wouldn’t it be better to understand al the facts, and change course if need be?
The tactic right now seems to be to cause as much chaos as possible, to find and point to one silver lining and then to move on as quickly as possible. Ignoring all the irreparable harm caused along the way.
There will never be another opportunity to fix this stuff in my lifetime. It’s the sort of thing we read about in history books in the 1990s about what the CIA/State Department did decades before, and we assumed they weren’t still doing the same things. The Bangladesh thing happens to be what irks me for obvious reasons. But the civil service is full of ideologues who push various unpopular policies (e.g. racial preferences, foreign intervention, increased immigration) regardless of who wins the election. It was a miracle that Musk got into the position he’s in now and he needs to gut these agencies now because they’re won’t be another chance.
Social security and Medicare payments will continue to be made. That’s the essential stuff. Everything else can tolerate some disruption.
Maybe they will fix some of the stuff. Hard disagree here, chaos doesn't mean change for the better but there is at least some chance.
Did you ever consider what you and everybody else will lose by allowing all this to happen in such ways? One random example from the sea of examples - US within a month lost all the international respect it ever built after WWI lets say. I mean all of it, and its not coming back anytime soon.
Now its a fat bully who kicks kids randomly including former friends, chokes them from all lunch money and some more. Literally China looks like our new best buddy from European perspective. Once we move to their ways of working and their financial flows, petrodollar will never ever be the same power projection it once was. And you know what China has to do to achieve all this soft power win? Absolutely nothing, just sit back and enjoy the view of an orange man have his mental fits and petty vengeful fights on all sides (apart from russia obviously, they were always great friends to US and its democracy).
> Did you ever consider what you and everybody else will lose by allowing all this to happen in such ways? One random example from the sea of examples - US within a month lost all the international respect it ever built after WWI lets say.
What international respect? People in my corner of the world are quite happy about Trump revealing the U.S. meddling in south Asian affairs. Liberal internationalism is deeply unpopular outside Western Europe, because it generally invokes America meddling in the internal affairs of Asian and middle eastern countries.
Also, Americans clearly don’t care about “international respect”—in the sense you’re talking about it. Your example is the archetype of the problem: you have government filled with liberal internationalists who have particular values that don’t reflect the electorate. Most democrats don’t care about American hegemony—they just like Obamacare. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous Iraq War, most Republican voters want to turn inward and close the border.
But somehow the internationalists
have burrowed into the federal government and you can’t get rid of them. Similarly, support for increasing immigration has never been over 34% but somehow immigration keeps increasing. Affirmative action keeps being resurrected and renamed. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get these people out of the government.
US is meddling everywhere it can, no continent was ever spared, same goes for Russia or China (albeit this is very soft so far). Anybody surprised by this has some gigantic gaps in history lessons and just ignores whats happening in the world, those organisations were out in plain sight for decades.
What respect? All its relevant allies - whole Europe, Canada. Half a billion of wealthy democracy aligned folks in Europe and Canada. Remove them and most of the remaining world doesnt share at all core values with what we call western democracies. Those wont ever be long term allies.
China seems very happy with his moves, so is India with current government. And thats about it for important players. I did expect him to be friendly towards russia but speed and intensity of his ass kissing and ignoring basic facts is quite something. But somebody ignoring his own constitution from Day 1 can't be expected to deliver much.
> One random example from the sea of examples - US within a month lost all the international respect it ever built after WWI lets say. I mean all of it, and its not coming back anytime soon.
In 2003 the USA invaded Iraq because the "intelligence community" made up claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, resulting in the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and 4,700 coalition troops; and the rise of ISIS. You think Trump's actions in the past month are worse than that?
To our allies, yes and without a doubt. Maybe if we had invaded an ally based on questionable intelligence. But now, the US is siding with dictators and oligarchs and against Canada, Mexico, EU, England, Japan, South Korea. If you don't see that as worse or didn't know it was happening, you should re-evaluate your news sources. The oligarchs aren't your buddies and you're not going to be one.
I don’t think most people in Australia are really paying that much attention to what is happening in the US. And the fact remains that Australia needs the US and doesn’t really have any other real option. Our immediate neighbours are either even weaker than we are (New Zealand) or too culturally different to make a military alliance a viable option (Indonesia). The average Australian isn’t willing to incur the risk or cost of “going it alone” on national security. The UK is too far away to help us. The US is far away too, but the US retains an ability to project power globally which the UK has largely lost.
And if the polls are right, we are going to elect Dutton as our next PM, who even though he occasionally criticises Trump, on the whole is closer to Trump than our current government is.
Even my teenage kids hate the US now because of how Trump talks about Nato and that’s just because of how they talk in their War Thunder teams. Cozying up to Russia will do that for you. And they already didn’t respect the US because of how the government treats its own citizens.
It’s very hard to gain respect. It’s very easily lost.
Here's what the "adults" in Congress are doing now:
"The newly released House GOP resolution proposes a $4 trillion debt ceiling increase while allocating $4.5 trillion in new deficits for the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee."
Even if DOGE finds $29 billion in waste, it would essentially be a rounding error compared to those numbers.
By what calculus is that money "going back" to taxpayers? It looks like we're going even further into debt to issue massive tax cuts to corporations along with some scraps to throw at the base. Most of those millions will be skimmed by the elites while we the people get a far less functional federal government in exchange.
Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016 by breaking from party orthodoxy in opposing entitlement reform. Then he was president for four years and didn’t touch medicare or social security. So yes, I’m going to trust that over the same people who told me in 2016 that there would be Muslim internment camps.
Trump did nothing but increase taxes on the poor and decreased them for the rich in his first term because he had no plan. Now the plan is project 2025, which he pretended to not be aware of or have anything to do with, so not sure why you would trust anything he says.
Russell Vought, Project 2025 architect and now head of OMB: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected… When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down… We want to put them in trauma.”
This is almost the definition of a dysfunctional workplace. The best you can hope for with this kind of organization is that it barely keeps limping along. (Of course, we already know that Republicans want to “drown [the federal government] in a bathtub,” so I imagine the trauma will only get worse.)
>Who are the “right people” who would’ve flagged and stopped $29 million in usaid funds going to destabilized the government in Bangladesh, or DEI projects in Serbia?
Congressional representatives. You can share what you know with your representative and ask they investigate. Congress regularly calls in bureaucrats to talk about budgets. If your case bears out, ask your members of Congress to propose amendments to the next budget cutting or fixing bad programs. And representatives very often add amendments targeting specific programs, or even sponsor such bills. We don't often hear about them because they're not sexy enough for news.
The goals toward which we spend tax dollars must be debated by representatives of the people. The executive branch will then be told the goals, the structure, the controls, and the budget. If the executive agrees, they sign the bill. Afterwards, the executive's power is in deciding who will carry out the goals and how to adapt to the situation on the ground while staying within the boundaries of the law. If the law is too restrictive, the executive can talk to Congress.
What must not happen is an executive deciding to ignore a law voted on by the majority of Congress and signed by a president. That's not an executive power, that's just an unconstitutional power grab. If we allow that, there's basically no point to Congress.
But Congress never voted on funding dissidents in Bangladesh or DEI in Serbia. The process you’re describing isn’t how these grants were made in the first pace. Congress passed broad appropriations bills, such as allocating $3 billion for implementing the foreign assistance act of 1961. Additionally, USAID got $5.7 billion in “untied” money last year: https://www.devex.com/news/money-matters-how-usaid-got-billi...
The specific grants Trump is freezing were determined by the executive itself. They can be cancelled by the executive too. At some point, of course, Trump will need to seek recession under the impoundment act if USAID isn’t going to use its full appropriation. But in the meantime it’s totally within his authority to cancel specific grants that were decided by the executive in the first place.
I would strongly recommend listening to Rory Stewart's commentary in the first half of this podcast about the function and role of USAID as an expression of soft power.
I have never heard of Rory Stewart. My family came to this country because of USAID and my dad worked for USAID contractors his whole career. Probably 2/3 of the people at my family's Thanksgivings work for USAID and/or World Bank. Whatever "soft power" is projected by USAID is because of stuff like PEPFAR. But Samantha Powers--who my dad hates--shredded that good will by getting USAID involved in "democracy." Why would countries like India and Bangladesh ever trust USAID again after finding out USAID was funding political movements in their countries? It confirms what half the world already thinks about America: busybodies that meddle in other countries' internal affairs.
I'm from Australia lol the US constantly interferes in our country directly and indirectly. 'Busybody that meddles' is a pretty soft term for it, I would call it aggressively destablises its allies.
If you take away the premise that the US is doing something good, like for PEPFAR, then what is left? A gun wielding maniacal imperial power that you have no reason to deal or treat with. This is bad for the US and bad for the world
Exactly. They exploit people like the one you’re responding to as mouthpieces for their broader campaign against the institutions that regulate their businesses. As long as they can claim they’ve stopped some money from being “wasted,” these people will look the other way and let them operate unchecked.
Trump and Musk are both petty, vindictive, greedy, and narcissistic billionaires, known for grifting, deception, abuse, and ruthless behavior. How can anyone trust them?
None of the existing cuts target deregulating SpaceX/Tesla, and the proposed regulatory cuts affect everything across the board and not just Musk's companies.
When it comes to deregulation, we can pretend like this is new, or we can have an honest discussion and acknowledge deregulation in various forms has been a key component of the Conservative, Libertarian, and Liberal platforms for decades. Recently even the Socialist platform has adopted deregulation for key industries like housing and infrastructure.
You can both hate Musk and Trump (as both are demonstrably all of the things you said above) and acknowledge that ultimately what they are doing is the best progress we have had on this front in 20+ years. Regardless of how many bureaucrats parade on media claiming otherwise, we must not forget that the government is and has historically been incredibly inefficient, reckless with spending, and filled with endless waste. This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!
We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_. It is not perfect, nor is it optimal, but it is far better than the last 5 attempts.
The only thing that seems to bind you and Musk is your disgust for bureaucracy. How you can conclude the many conflicts of interests Musk has will not benefit him or his companies is beyond me. He did nothing to gain our trust. Most people wouldn’t even let him watch their kids, and you trust him with your whole country.
> This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!
No it wasn’t.
> We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_.
This is like an arsonist setting fire to your house and saying we finally have a chance to renovate.
Almost all of it would be related to military contracts and spending
As large as social security is, I'm sure there's some efficiencies to be gained too, but the military industrial complex is THE defacto leader in greed and wastefulness
But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them. You can't tell me they're competent after that big of a screw up.
If you look seriously you will find military contracts and spending usually achieves something and is in many cases very difficult to decrease.
It has become somewhat of a pattern for politicians to yell about defense spending, get elected, look under the covers and do an immediate 180 in favor of defense spending.
On the other hand you can cut around 70% of the civil government immediately with no impact on our country. Social Security would not be my first choice though!
> But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them
They did not -- this is simple malicious compliance. This is a really well documented phenomenon and I am hoping this situation draws more public attention to it! Whenever faced with cuts, our govt bureaucracy reacts by cutting something visible to create a PR disaster and force back cuts -- the common saying is "firemen and teachers first" and this is often referred to as "Washington Monument Syndrome."
Except in this case the victims happened to be essential to maintaining the security of the United States' nuclear weapons stockpile.
Surely their evil, bureaucratic bosses just did it for show to score political points though, right?
>Whenever faced with cuts, our govt bureaucracy reacts by cutting something visible to create a PR disaster and force back cuts
Cite one credible source saying this is in fact what happened recently with NNSA and I might believe you.
The preponderance of evidence recently does not support this, what with it being widely reported that ill-suited unqualified personnel have been presiding over these cuts across all agencies, at a scale and speed which is unprecedented.
By the same logic the GAO, OIG's, OMB, and GSA are all government employees, presenting an even more immediate and direct conflict of interest.
BTW SpaceX is a fairly tiny government contractor -- big ones like Accenture and other consulting firms have previously audited spending including their own contracts.
I don’t know, maybe not the richest man on earth who also happens to have massive conflicts of interest, calls respected people he disagrees with “retards” and is clearly losing his grip on his sanity. I mean that’s just my dumb take, though. What do you think?
There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.
It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution? We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, and the last person to make headway here was Bill Clinton -- who proposed an even more callous approach to cuts.
Yes, DOGE is being raked over the coals but only 77k federal employees have taken their severance package. Clinton also famously proposed majority cuts to the federal workforce.
Trump is getting flack for breaking the law. Clinton’s layoffs were done with Congress which avoided all of the concerns about impoundment or other unapproved changes to their directed spending, they spent months planning first to avoid doing the cycle we’re seeing now where they ask people to come back after telling them they were fired, and they worked with the unions.
- they weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing
- it was a measured, thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.
- most importantly, 3/4 of those were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended.
- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut to the rich
- lastly, there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned
So basically night and day compared to what is happening now.
Defense spending gets audited frequently, the audits just end in failure. This is primarily due to massive lines in their budget that are totally classified, but also they do lose track of resources. Until recently they did not even know how many warfighters they had!
That being said, at the very least basically everything they do moves towards some outcome. Most folks in the military are incredibly mission-driven. Plus, all their big contracts (50M$+) get regular hearings from Congress.
The same cannot be said for civil at all, they have little to no oversight, everyone is buddy-buddy so internal audits often border on fraud, there are many billion dollar contracts that have never gone thru Congressional approval.
If you want to really lose your shit, you should look up how OTA contract vehicles function. Literally just "trust me bro" spending, and for some reason rampant in civil.
Defense is not only auditable but is regularly audited; publicly by GAO and CBO, and internally by their OIG: https://www.dodig.mil
> they spend the most by far
This is not true and for some reason a common myth that is easily disproven; defense spending is only 13% of the budget, the 54% number people keep throwing around is discretionary spending and not relevant as we should be looking at the entire budget.
DOGE is literally just sorting by percent of budget; Medicaid is 22%, SSA is 20%, interest on our deficit by itself is 11% and on track to exceed our entire defense budget.
> The only reason we have a deficit is because GOP keeps cutting taxes for millionaires.
I mean, the math does not check out at all. We can expect losses of revenue from cuts to be around the same as receipts from audits done by the IRS; we know this number to be only around ~50B$ a year. You are being gaslit into thinking the problem is your fellow citizens not paying more in taxes, when anyone going into government can tell you they are reckless with spending.
Just to put things in perspective, Medicaid is hardly an actual healthcare program as it applies to less than 20% of our population. However it somehow(?) costs more than 4x as much as the entire NHS.
Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.
> Sounds like a good argument for [properly-administered] single-payer, universal healthcare.
The opposite right now! The US government is SO bad at managing healthcare, that they are somehow making the NHS look great.
We need to get our bureaucracy and spending under control. Then definitely yes, government funded healthcare, we can have a system closer to Australia in efficacy.
This is a tangent to this thread but I think in practice we will probably end up with something closer to the Swiss hybrid system.
I wish I was optimistic as you. Only problem is, I highly doubt any savings realized from spending cuts will materialize in the form of better healthcare.
Regulatory capture is rampant, and then there's that whole pesky issue of growing unchecked authoritarianism that has a good chance of not aligning with the will of the people.
Yeah I can understand the sentiment. I’m being optimistic primarily because the alternative is to accept that our economy is going to eventually go bust and turn us into a debtor society to foreign economies.
The building is on fire, closing your eyes or clinging to a bottle of water are both valid reactions!
> Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.
They might both cover ~70M, but the NHS population has a median age of ~41, for Medicare it's ~71. The US health system is expensive, but NHS vs Medicare cost is not really a valid comparison with such drastically different demographics.
Doesn’t help the situation when you the very senators entrusted to run the legislative branch of government were the ones in charge of organizations that defrauded Medicaid and Medicare for billions of dollars. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott
Perhaps we should be barking up the tree of the private medical-insurance complex which is the real problem when it comes to healthcare costs.
Yes Congress cannot be trusted, that is why I am not complaining like many in this thread about the methods of achieving cuts or executive overreach — this is the best chance we have had in years to get anything done.
The only real way you can reform the government purely from the confines of the system is turning over around 70% of the legislative branch, I do not see that happening in any future.
I have to respectfully disagree - turning over basically unlimited power to reshape the entire bureaucracy to an unelected person isn’t the way to do it either. It’s not a binary choice.
Recently medicaid overtook defense. You're right, but medicaid shouldn't exist and is a symptom of the larger forced government inefficiency that is the health insurance system.
People also claim that social security is a great portion of spending, but it's fully funded through income tax and even more solvent since covid killed so many of it's recipients.
The problem with the military spending is on Congress, because they set the defense budget, not the White House (and certainly not DOGE).
But defense doesn't get cut because it props up a huge infrastructure across many states. No senator wants to be the ones to vote to cut that in their state.
The US economy is built, to some degree, on the military-industry complex, especially since we offshored all the other manufacturing.
GAO, civil OIG's, OMB, CBO, GSA, DoD OIG, Treasury OIG -- none have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years. This was a bipartisan, consensus take 3 months ago.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. At most our debt is mildly concerning its not some sort of catastrophe unless we do something stupid tp sabotage ourselves(see DODGE) and most of the debt is owned by americans not foreigners. Also China owns less US debt then Japan. UK owns nearly as much as China and Canada is fifth. UK Japan and Canada are close allies, or were they might not be after Trump is done.
If someone wanted to make an actual good faith effort to make goverment more effecient going over the reports would be the first thing you would do instead of attacking theae agencies.
If someone wanted to randomly
cut departments that might object to illegal and corrupt actions the administration might take, or ones that once said nice things about minorites or just so you could stuff the fired positions with incompent cronies (or hire your freinds as contractors) then it would look a lot like DODGE
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/14/politics/corruption-justi...
> Since Inauguration Day, the Justice Department has paused all investigations into corporate foreign bribery, curtailed enforcement of a foreign agent registration law and deemphasized the criminal prosecutions of Russian oligarchs. And senior administration officials have considered eliminating the Department’s Public Integrity Section, which investigates and prosecutes alleged misconduct by federal, state and local public officials.
>It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution?
For starters, these people are in fact idiots. They randomly fired people at NNSA with virtually no warning. What the fuck? [0]
In response to your point: Why throw USDS in the trash? That was a great example of an effective, agile non-partisan tech workforce. [1]
Now federal workers are having to submit to political loyalty tests. [2]
Perhaps their true intentions here aren't really cost savings, if that isn't blatantly obvious already.
>We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, ...
That's like trying to cure cancer with cancer, but on the face of it and not in some clever cutting-edge way.
Actual solutions? Take highly effective organizations and copy them. USDS and JSOC come to mind.
I don't buy it. Shucks, we've exhausted every other method—therefore, the solution here is to hand over the reigns to immature, extremely low caliber people with conflicts of interest that are absolutely massive [3], and whose motivations are questionable at best?
Yeah, no thanks. I dislike government waste and inefficiency as much as the next person, but using the guise of cost cutting to rapidly install loyalists at critical power junctures isn't a good thing. Never mind the flagrant disregard for the law that's taking place as this is all unfolding.
> There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.
People are acting like I'm making outlandish claims, you can literally just google this! If you are going to go down a rabbit hole I recommend USASpending, which consumes ATOM from FPDS and so is very close to source-of-truth.
It isn't particularly correct to say that these agencies have the same purpose. They do similar things, but each has its own remit.
You could maybe instead say that they should be under the same roof, rather than being independent entities. But I don't think this is itself evidence that any of them have been ineffective. Having read some of their reports, OMB and CBO are not ineffective on face value.
(I also don't think any of this is really about curbing government spending.)
I’m confused. USASpending looks to be source-of-truth as you say, so how has the US federal government failed in tracking spending when said source-of-truth is supplied by them?
Skimming OiG audit reports, they appear comprehensive and detailed. How has the government failed in auditing if these audits exist?
Where is the 20 years of failure to audit and track spending you mentioned? I’m not sure what you expect me to google.
Wait, you’re alleging Bill Clinton downsized the government by measures more callous than randomly firing workers, forcing them to en masse justify their positions to an unelected billionaire? I was alive then and I don’t remember any of that. Citation needed.
And he actually did manage to balance the budget. Too bad that didn’t last long under Bush.
> None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.
Citation needed. They do their jobs, problem is politians also do theirs. Making sure military doesnt cut spending in their district even if military leaders think a base or tank factory is not needed.
Its easy to say this is wrong and these people are idiots because thats the case. Actually I wont even say theyre all idiots theyre just malicous and dont care about the damagr they cause. This isnt some sort of careful attempt to make goverment work better. Its axing random groups because they once said something positive about minorities or necause they prosecute political corruption or because they can install their own cronies or outsource it to their company
Lets talk about Clinton's cuts to the federal workforce and compare them to what's happening now.
- 3/4 of those cut were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended
- large swaths of gov employees weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing (the long-term effects of which are yet to be felt)
- it was a more thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.
- there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned
- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut primarily benefiting the wealthy
There's really no comparison with what is happening now.
I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work” like that. They had teams and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a normal startup. I’ve never seen such bureaucratic waste anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them about it, and they shrugged it off by noting, “We are way more efficient than our competitors.”
I’m not defending DOGE’s specifics or competence here, but do we need to clean house? Absolutely, yes.
That's why I like where I am. We usually work in really lean teams. One person in each role. And usually we're making a physical product so that's one mechanical, one electrical, one sideways, etc. Has its downsides but I don't feel like we're wasteful.
Yeah, if you're actually interested in government efficiency, Ro Khanna has been advocating for significant cuts to the federal budget in a way that actually improves efficiency.
Good. We need a lot more representatives genuinely interested in eliminating government waste. Because the graft is real regardless of political party.
I love the narrative that some how “startups are efficient”.
I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired.
I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more successful prior to acquisition.
So yeah , sorry, startups can be extremely inefficient too.
I’ve also worked for some of the biggest tech companies or have friends that work there now, including Meta, they are extremely wasteful in nearly all cases. They just make a lot of money. Probably like the collective United States.
The moral of my story is that efficiency isn’t necessarily profitable, desired or even required.
In my opinion DOGE is telling stories to distract and achieve other ends. Last I hear most of Musks companies actively received government welfare :)
absolutely startups can be inefficient but government projects are at a wholly different order of magnitude. Some startups will crush $20M and then die, and yet the best ones, such as facebook, return 100,000x ROI on that same $20 mil. Govt projects will crush $200M, deliver nothing and then go to recompete so another vendor can have a turn.
sell your stock then if you are a shareholder, it's up 225% on 5yr chart, 1525% since IPO, and has risen to a $1.7T mkt cap since the $13M Series A at $100M Post in 2005. That's a 100,000x ROI on the A if I did the math right, forgive me there are a lot of zeros to keep track of
More people need to internalize that moral. Efficiency is an optimization after you are achieving a goal. It is not the goal. Unless you are not looking to do new things, maybe?
This can be seen in every resource consumption ever. We get far more out of any single input now than was ever achievable in the past.
I don’t mind startups wasting money unless I’m a seed investor with a vested interest. We all have a vested interest in the way government allocates or misallocates funds. That’s one difference.
The other, as someone else pointed out, is a matter of scale.
did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison. So when I see USAID or whatever with some bleeding heart mission statement, all i can think of is how many vendors are siphoning off that money while paying lip service to the culture war theme of the year, like a drug lord making sure to be seen at church every every Sunday. It’s not a question of, like, is it one third fraud or half fraud. There is absolutely no accountability and there is not a single competitive aspect about these projects. At no point whatsoever is there a credible attempt to deliver on promises made. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does and what that program I saw does is let about 150 people bill about $100 per hour to the government. All you have to do, to collect your $800 per day, is report that your jira ticket is taking more story points than expected due to technical debt, and make sure your MS Teams stays green from 8 to 6 (buy a mouse wiggler)!
You might find this Washington Monthly article interesting as it echoes your point:
"Fire the Contractors"
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/05/fire-the-contractor...
"Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it. ... That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine ... have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."
And it's like 10 to 1 of contractors vs civilians that work for the gov. You'll find a hell of a lot of casual corruption there too -- companies bribing the civilians who select contracts to pick them. It cuts across public & defense spending.
i honestly could not find any root cause analysis in that article that i agree with. it is not a problem of “too few bureaucrats”, it is that the contract procurement process is not competitive, nor is literally any other process on the government side, including meta processes like the bureaucrat hiring and selection process. the entire govt side system top to bottom has evolved in a world where money does not matter and the contractors have simply evolved to the constraints of that interface to get at the money the way a plant grows towards the sun.
... i actually considered becoming a "civil servant" after this experience to try to help (on either the govt side or private side), but I could not see a viable way to actually make a difference, even a small one. Everything is so jammed up and deadlocked with outrageous anti-competitive regulation —go learn what is "IDIQ" "SPARC" "8(a) STARS II" "GSA IT Schedule 70"—that it's not actually possible for a startup to bid these contracts without partnering with the 800 lb gorillas and therefore becoming a part of the thing that you are trying to destroy. "Disruption does not come from within"
Because of the existence of [1] FedRAMP and other compliance initiatives that are blanket applied to everything even though 90% of SaaS contracts do NOT need it, and [2] past performance being predominantly the #1 factor for evaluation, contracting itself is an enforced oligopoly.
You need to be a big-ish company to enter, and will have to kiss the feet of existing oligarchs.
Contractors are hired by civil servants, these are not independent things.
I don’t think DOGE will fix this because the solution is easy but very counterintuitive — we would need around 30% raises to all federal employees at GS-12 and higher, to match market rates.
Right now they cannot hire civil servants that are skilled due to being unable to compete on comp; instead they have to reach to private sector, which will charge them 600 a head, while paying each contractor 200. Because GS only affords 120-130 for those positions, it becomes necessary to reach for contractors.
PWS contracts are the biggest suck on budget; eg there are more PWS contractors manning what would normally be FTE positions at Dept of State than total FTEs.
Unfortunately, it is so backwards to actually spend more and raise payscales to save money that I don’t think DOGE will land there as a strategy.
Yes, I maintain anyone who has spent any measure of time in govcon will come to the same conclusion. Our government is endlessly wasteful -- this was a universal, bipartisan take 3 months ago but now people are getting successfully gaslit into believing every dollar the government spends is efficient and critical.
But firing a bunch of government employees doesn't fix this problem. Where there is waste, it mostly comes in the form of contractors bilking the government, not the government employees themselves.
Is DOGE going after the private sector and their bilking of the government?
Who do you think hires contractors and puts out contracts?
The only way to get promoted at and above gs-12 is to amass reports and budget authority. The wasteful spending is not handed down mandatory by congress, it is conducted using budget authority afforded to federal employees.
If you lay off 70% of federal employees especially those in gs-12 to 15 range, you could probably easily cut 70% of discretionary spending with literally no negative impact.
You will never see them reduce their budgets because it reduces their political power; look up “Washington Monument Syndrome” for how they have evaded cuts for the last two decades.
Congress wants to _increase_ the defense budget by $150B instead of decreasing it. You could gut as many employees as you want, and that money is still going to be spent somehow.
The only way to reduce 70% of the discretionary spending is for Congress to reduce the discretionary budget by 70%.
> I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts.
As an aside, you're actually making the argument that we need more federal employees. The push to privatize everything has led to higher costs and more abuse. So DOGE is currently doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
"You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same."
This x100. For all those lambasting the public sector, understand that its flaws are not because of the 'public' part, but because of the size of the organization.
Private sector organization's inefficiency, fraud and waste also scales directly with their size.
I will raise you a more direct analogy, let's imagine you have a deep wound in your arm and are actively bleeding out.
There are 5 doctors who you have paid to treat you; they came, performed some tests, confirmed you are wounded, but don't know how to patch you up.
DOGE comes along and says well, what if we amputate the arm and cauterize it?
This will stop the bleeding, but you will lose an arm. That sucks, there is probably a method to treat you to stop the bleeding and prevent the loss of an arm, but nobody has figured it out and you are going to run out of blood.
You have to add in that you've been told for 20 years that you are bleeding to death and you need to take drastic measures, and the guy who is telling you to cut off your arm now plans to sell you a replacement for a profit.
That analogy doesn't work because there is no "to death" for governments unless they go fully bankrupt. For the US government, that's practically unthinkable at this stage.
If we're going with the medical analogy, we've been rubbing all kinds of creams and taking all kinds of pills for a funky looking mold on our arm. There's some malignant growth, but operating may damage one's ability to use their hand, so treatments are used to keep the growth in check. Treatments aren't cheap, sometimes they don't work or cause side effects and need changing, and often you end up driving an hour for a five minute check-up.
There are risky solutions, such as operating and hoping you can still use your hand afterwards, that will cost time and effort and hopefully reduce the illness in your body afterwards, but the risks have as of yet been deemed higher than the reward.
DOGE is cutting off the arm, slicing it up in parts, and checking for every individual clump of cells if they're necessary or not, before trying to put them back. You're losing a lot of blood and you may need decades of surgery to get your functioning hand back, but all of the bad parts have been removed at least.
> However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.
Reading your comment I saw so many similarities to any large organisation which I worked for that I can't help but think it's simply on the same level.
Hell, my first internship was 100% budget filler and, in line with my role, I was useless.
Regarding inefficiency: I'm a contractor for a large organisation and have been for over three years now.
My contract is up in a few months and by that time I will have a total of four years of cancelled projects under my belt. At least one of them started out as an Excel sheet and in truth could have remained so.
I say govt politics is so much worse because it is not like, a handful of people trying to get ahead by spending a lot, it is almost all of them.
They're also vicious, many times I have been cussed out by bureaucrats over stupid things like css padding on a table. There are lines that don't get crossed in corporate politics, none of those lines exist in government.
There are NO LINES that aren't crossed on corporate politics. Verbal abuse, illogical decisions based on vibes, favoritism or just plain stupidity are common in companies not listed and not rare on those that are.
The majority of things illegal in governments are business as usual in the private sector. Want to take a kickback of a supplier? Perfectly fine and normal on non large corporations. Still happens on those.
Because you had luck with your career is not representative of overall corporate behaviour. I worked as a third party seeing lots of large companies as clients. The amount of BS is outstanding and awe inspiring.
Makes you think that waste is a universally emergent issue which gets worse with the size of an entity. Not making any distinction between governmental or corporate structures.
Everybody cries when the government raises taxes. Yet, when corporations increase prices despite not having higher cost, we just accept it as "business as usual".
As corporations rival the power of nations more and more, some people should rethink their attitude to public and private enterprise.
> As corporations rival the power of nations more and more
See: British East India Company. I don't really have a relevant point to make here but corporations being more powerful than countries actually seems to be the default state that has already been dealt with somewhat, rather than a novel growing problem.
True that. There are plenty of historical companies which have absolutely dominated politics. "Standard Oil" being another example.
What's different in our time, is that it is not just one company, but a whole range of mega-companies (Particularly in technology). It has changed from a few powerful and malicious actors to a systematic problem, fueled by the dynamics of the financial markets and passive investment.
In theory, competing firms keep each other honest. In reality, the managers care more about their petty kingdoms than the health of the corporate empire. If theirs goes bankrupt, they use their skills to build a new fiefdom elsewhere.
I worked with the government as a contractor for a while and saw a lot of waste and inefficiency. My brother in law works for a bank and what he describes sounds a lot like what I saw at the government: crazy amounts spent on contractors to do stupid or trivial things, massive hardware and software purchases never used, LOTS of consultants consultants consultants, lots of unnecessary travel, people hired to do no work, failed IT projects, wasteful disposal of working equipment, etc. It all sounds exactly the same.
I've talked to a lot of people who have worked for other huge companies and the stories are similar. When I worked for the Fed there were people there who had worked for GM, Boeing, etc. and a few said the Fed was actually more efficient than some of those.
Has anyone ever worked for a very large (several billion annual spend or more) entity that was anywhere near as efficient as a startup or SMB?
This is why small startups can beat enormous companies. From what I've seen, comparatively, startups can at times be thousands of times as cost-efficient. But as startups grow they become less efficient. I've seen this too. It's incredibly hard to maintain efficiency as things scale for a very long list of reasons.
Look, beyond unobjectionable facts that the government wastes money, that money isn't completely wasted: some percentage eventually becomes salaries for Americans (the rest in some rich person's pockets). For example, all the USAID jobs that are now gone.
There are now billions-USD-worth fewer jobs in the American economy.
There are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers.
Administrative spending is also not that high, the majority of savings are in contracts. This is related to jobs because every employee you lay off, is one less person who can spend millions of dollars.
So in practice, there are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers and being sent abroad. And only some millions-USD-worth fewer jobs.
This is not true, unless a tax cut is actually passed which lowers taxes for the poor. (And the poorest already aren’t paying that much in tax. And FICA wouldn’t get cut, since that money doesn’t fund what doge covers.)
Why are we setting the bar at the poor? 65% of americans live paycheck to paycheck yet pay 20-30% in income tax alone.
John Doe working in sales with three kids will lose his home if he misses a few paychecks. He drives a 2009 Toyota Camry and only buys things on clearance. Why should 20 cents of every dollar he makes go towards a bureaucratic machine that accomplishes very little? Why should 1 cent on every dollar he makes go towards funding mandatory charity and foreign aid, why should 5 cents of every dollar go towards a federal jobs program? It is easy to talk about things in isolation when we look at individual impact on budget or only look at the poor, but empathy based arguments fall flat when that same empathy is not extended towards the american workers funding this. Keep in mind we had an Industrial Revolution and fought two world wars without income tax on 90% of Americans!
FICA and payroll tax is the ultimate evil and should at the bare minimum be rolled into graduated income tax, but I digress.
> But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
It's also absolutely true that private companies are endlessly wasteful. I've worked for four large companies now, and the waste is mind boggling. I think what upsets people about government is that tax dollars are used to fund it, but I would claim from my own observation that beyond a certain size any kind of organization is filled with waste.
I'll point out, though, that there are areas of government that have been studied and found to be very efficient, and have high levels of satisfaction. It's been quite a while now, but I recall around ~2006-2007 an academic study came out which was originally intended to look only at private insurers. As they designed the study they realized that given the size of Medicare they should also include Medicare as part of the study.
What they found:
- A much much higher percentage of the money going into Medicare goes toward patient care than in any of the private insurers. Like low single digit percentages of overhead vs. 10-25% overhead in the case of the private insurers.
- Customer satisfaction from dealing with the bureaucracy (claim processing) of Medicare was much higher than customer satisfaction with the private insurers.
- Patient satisfaction with the care they were receiving from Medicare was as high or higher than the private insurers.
It’s still worth looking and finding that stuff out (carefully and transparently). There’s only been token attempts at a meta analysis of gov efficiency in the past. GWB created a small version of DOGE with almost the same mandate that never really did anything notable because it was small and never ambitious (it also still exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_Gene...).
Most large wasteful private organizations are often the ones who get comfortable in their existing market, employees get hardened in their ways, and eventually are threatened by changes in the market and competition and die off. There is no competitive pressure on gov agencies. It’s almost always a one way street after an agency gets formed that it continues as is indefinitely with only occasional changes in leadership. The number of agencies (>400 federally in US) only increases. Congress rarely looks backwards with spending, they only challenge demands for new spending plans to expand agencies. Otherwise budgets only go up with new line items as US tax revenue forever increases each year.
But those big wins were rare. It’s mostly small stuff like during Biden admin they banned single use plastic and reducing food waste. No one has ever really done large scale data analysis on spending and made it a major priority across the federal government in recent history.
I didn’t say they never did anything I’m saying the big wins were rare. Your own link says the $100B number was aggregate since it started in the Obama admin. That’s over a decade ago.
The US federal gov spends almost $
7 trillion a year. I’m sure they can find a whole lot more than a few billion here and there each year.
I also don’t know why it’s so controversial to want the gov to spend money wisely and make efficiency a core value. It’s funny what people will defend because the current people doing it are controversial and unprofessional so the whole idea gets dismissed. I’m not a political extremist like that, I just think it could and should be done better and done right.
> I also don’t know why it’s so controversial to want the gov to spend money wisely and make efficiency a core value
This is a rank and disgusting assumption, and should show anyone else reading this how dmix isn't an honest participant in this discussion.
It's not controversial that an administration is trying to spend money wisely, but that isn't what is going on here. Firing NNSB staff because you don't know what the NNSB does isn't trying for efficiency, it's pure and utter stupidity.
Now time for my assumptions: I don't know why it's so controversial to want the government to act with care, diligence, and common fucking sense when nuclear energy or weapons are involved. Why don't you care about nuclear safety, dmix?
> I also don’t know why it’s so controversial to want the gov to spend money wisely and make efficiency a core value.
It’s not. Consider that people who do believe in efficiency might be upset about political purges which increase inefficiency being conducted under the guise of efficiency – for example, illegally breaking contracts or firing people will cost more and cutting things which are useful (the vast majority of what DOGE has done) is not only failing to deliver savings but also throwing out the past investment. Research funding and cuts to researchers are a great example: an NIH, NASA, EPA, etc. scientist represents millions of dollars in training even if they’re “just” a probationary hire. Firing them to save 0.00000002% of the federal budget means giving up the money which was already invested in them and the programs they support.
Similarly, people who actually study government efficiency often highlight the high cost of reducing unnecessary spending. For example, we could try to drive down the number of Social Security payments sent to people who are dead but decades of auditors have found that would be a massive _increase_ of inefficiency because the vast majority of payments are legitimate and it would require a huge number of people to validate each one, not to mention the mission failure and costs of falsely denying payments when that process fails (old people are allowed to live in remote areas or not pick up the phone, and you’ll hear from their congressional representatives if you decide that means they’re not a real person or dead).
There are ways to improve efficiency considerably but none of them are easy and most will require legal changes by Congress.
getting close to two days without a response, dmix. Are you sure you aren't a coward? Even worse, an internet coward who can't even account for their nonsense?
Maybe you wanna make some trash claims about 150 year olds collecting social security checks? Just looking for efficiency....
Yes DOGE would be much better as an independent agency created by Congress with all the controls that comes with it. It’s inherently a bit toothless as an executive advisory council without further increasing executive power which is dangerous.
So far firings were mostly just from the subset of executive agencies they directly control, for ex USAID is legal because it wasn't create by legislative branch like the hundreds of other agencies. They can only fire probationary employees in those, with the exception of 'with cause' firing - a newer executive power as of 2020 supreme court ruling.
But I don't think employment is the primary waste issue. Federal employment has grown relatively slowly compared to local and state administration.
Which is why my point was about doing macro spending analysis. Most of the waste is in gov cost-plus contracts/procurement (feds outsource everything which is why employment hasn't grown much), how agencies operate (large duplication, old systems, etc), and more generally the unwieldy 1000 page congressional budgets no one reads.
> it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
It's equally insane to me that people think the private sector is somehow efficient. The amount of resources used to feed profit alone are a huge waste.
Private is not 100% efficient but it is much more efficient because if you don't make a profit you no longer exist. A government program can't go broke. Government programs simply get money with zero effect on their budget or revenue if they execute poorly or well. That's why removing an 'optional' HR role like DEI that does not actual produce anything measurable is slow hanging fruit. You are reducing cost and the result will not actually effect the outcome. It's an unnecessary ideological add-on, not a function. It's like removing the training on how to use a coffee machine in an office that doesn't drink coffee.
Hmmm, A few corporations come to mind that are considered too big to fail (banks a decade and half ago, intel atm,...). Seems like they have aquired government-like powers :D
Second point. Nuclear safety inspectors don't produce anything, they just cost us. Lets call them red tape. Simply fire all of them, energy costs will go down and nothing will happen in short term. But somewhere down the line a president will be asked how the hell they thought that running nuclear reactors without safety inspectors was a good idea.
Now, I honestly don't know if DEI is useful in the long run or not, but because you see it as ideological add-on makes me think that you know even less.
People can make anything seem like its ideological (vaccines, wearing masks, climate change,...), but usually that just mean they don't know what they are talking about.
Too big to fail was a joke, they should have made them sell their assets or ownership to other companies and shareholders who would cover the losses. Not one person who owned the company before should have been allowed to remain owning anything, without additional paid in capital. Anything related to safety, social security and veterans benefits, was/is mentioned specifically as exempt to the cuts/payment pauses from what I've seen.
The private sector is indeed filled with lots of inefficiencies, but due to the profit motive and presence of competition, there’s massive incentives to correct those inefficiencies slowly over time. You'll make more profit doing so!
Hence, the private sector is constantly self correcting itself and becoming more efficient via creative destruction. You can just look at the numbers, even the Chinese Communist Party understand this. Turns out the profit motive combined with competitive instincts of humans results in a consistently greater good.
Not sure you’re aware, but the government doesn’t do that. Hence why the US is massively indebted. Unfortunately the US debtors aren’t doing so great these days so it can’t continue even at current rates. Instead of DOGE they should have named it “The department of not finding the level of US debt that leads to currency debasement and collapse.”
I never thought I’d need to explain the elementary school 101 of why communism is bad and why debt is not endless on HN but apparently this place is turning into Reddit.
>>The private sector is indeed filled with lots of inefficiencies, but due to the profit motive and presence of competition, there’s massive incentives to correct those inefficiencies slowly over time. You'll make more profit doing so!
Instead of correcting inefficiencies it's more profitable for private sector to:
1. merge/acquire competition, create monopoly,
2. lobby government for monopoly status (ISPs)/protection from competition with tarrifs (automakers)/...
3. sue competition out of business
4. aggressively use patents,...
Also found it funny that someone starts post with 'red herring' and ends with 'educating' parent post about communism :D
I did not understand his post as 'all profit is waste', this is what he said:
>>The amount of resources used to feed profit alone are a huge waste.
I believe that this can sometimes be true. For example, lets say that CEO want to raise profits by 20% by end of fiscal year and uses 50% more resources for that compared to current resource/profit use.
This might be good idea for CEO, if his bonus is tied to profit, but for company it might be better to develop business that is going to bring more profit / resource spent a few years down the line.
I think both government and private sector have waste. It's just that reason for waste is different, and it doesn't make sense to compere them directly. Also, combating waste should be done differently in private vs public sector.
This is simple. Look at Medicare Advantage plans versus traditional Medicare. The same amount of care costs 23% _extra_ using Medicare Advantage. How is this more efficient? It's not.
Do you expect that contracts with Palantir will be under any scrutiny? Do you really think Peter Thiel would have supported this administration if that was at all a risk?
Lots of Americans think the government needs to be more efficient. Very few Americans think the way to do that is closing national parks, cutting veteran healthcare, and firing the nuclear security workforce. It is easy to be pro spending reform but still be unhappy with DOGE's body of work thus far.
I don’t know that Palantir will be under scrutiny but they are a really tiny government contractor. I would love to see the defense primes + big consulting firms like Accenture be on the chopping board.
On an absolute scale, DOGE is not performing well and it makes sense so many are upset with their performance. On a relative scale to past attempts and the 5 existing agencies that exist to audit and reduce spending, DOGE is like a unicorn and that’s why many with experience are silently cheering them on.
They have not gotten far but have gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.
Bringing up Palantir is funny to me. I don’t know enough gossip on Musk and Thiel’s relationship, but if I did I would bet it would solely determine the outcome of a hypothetical DOGE investigation into Palantir contracts. It seems from a sibling comment I’m not alone. If we’re right, DOGE isn’t going to eliminate government waste and corruption, just move it around.
We’re not gaslit into thinking everything was fine with government spending, we’re angry that this is how they’re going to “fix” it.
I think for many people, this is the first exposure to audits and spending reduction in govt. So judging on an absolute scale, yeah DOGE is not doing a great job.
Judging on a relative scale to past attempts and the existing 5(!) agencies with the sole purpose of auditing and reducing spending, DOGE looks amazing and has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.
It is an immensely difficult undertaking and the bureaucracy will struggle, writhe, and set fire to everything around it before it can be put down. We should hope that DOGE is just getting started and picking up momentum rather than having settled.
So what you're saying is that "waste reduction" is such a holy goal that the means justify the ends? Not matter the consequences, no matter the outcomes, no matter the harm.
I think that's where we fundemtally disagree, not to mention your blindness to their stated ideological ulterior motives. Thr Project 2025 document explicitly states it's goal of ultimately replacing federal workers with its cadres that work towards to it's political project.
I'd like to be proven wrong but I have a feeling all of this will never provide any cost benefits to those that aren't the rich. Even if they somehow manage to reduce the taxes on the avg joe, a big if, the Joe will pay for it in other tangible ways. I.e. I don't think it's waste being eliminated but projects the administration disagrees or wants to privatize. Can you address these concerns?
> the bureaucracy will struggle, writhe, and set fire to everything around it before it can be put down
Convenient way to blame "the bureaucracy" for every problem that DOGE creates. Are you open to the possibility that DOGE will cause more problems than it fixes?
USGS seemed like it was mostly worthwhile stuff when I was there, just operating on outdated technologies and under budget cycles and patterns that incentivized goofy behaviors because saving money in even the simplest of ways could only lead to budgets being cut in unconstructive ways.
For example, imagine there's a budget of $5k and it's assuming that you'll replace a computer with part of it.
But you don't actually need to replace your computer until after the fiscal year.
But if you wait, the next budget will just think whatever you didn't spend can be cut, not that you deferred a cost for slightly longer.
Similarly, even if you have budget for something you need at the start of a fiscal year, everyone is afraid of blowing budget before the end of the fiscal year... So many expenses get deferred until things are close enough to the fiscal boundary that everyone starts worrying about not spending instead...
Yes, well documented phenomenon — the government spends more between July-September than the rest of the year combined. Conversely spends very little in December and January.
Not me but another contractor got a phone call the last day of the fiscal year and was told essentially “hey we have an extra 5M$ in the budget we need to spend, can you make something up and we will just give you the money for a random pilot.”
> I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!
Just to back up this point: This is 100% my experience when I was an employee for them (disclaimer: 3-4 year tenure, some number of years ago). Everything we built was marketed as this brilliant, cutting edge, leading AI ML tech, and what we were actually building was React CRUD apps with 0 users, with a heavy focus on "making the UI feel like Minority Report / feel futuristic", etc.
It's not Skynet, it's a contracting company with a great design and marketing team.
I think people would react viscerally if they knew Shyam blasphemed himself as Jesus, literally appointed 12 apostles, and held a last supper-like meeting with a long ass conference table.
Doing consultancy for the government, I agree with your assessment. Yet, it is fairly unrelated to what DOGE is doing.
1. Streamlining and simplification is good. Trimming can come with harsh cuts. But what we witness is arbitrary destruction. Otherwise Musk wouldn't try to reinstate nuclear inspectors they just fired.
2. Efficiency is not the goal. Neutralization of governmental power is. And with less governmental power, corporate power will fill the gaps.
3. Ideology is the driving engine. Talking points of "Anti Woke/DEI" or "no work from home" sounds appealing one half of the people, but carries no substance beyond it. In fact, these terms are misused and retooled as weapons (such as getting rid of "woke" generals).
4. If you want more efficiency, you must make investments. No company or state entity has ever become more efficient just by cutting cost. Slashing budgets only cost you more money in the medium/long run.
5. Transparency is good. It holds people accountable and allows for better decisions. But one of the few purposes of these acts seem to bring are to bring chaos. In chaos, the stronger will win. It is the opposite of transparency.
Could you help clarify something for me? When I looked into the federal workforce, just looking at raw numbers without much insight about the "inside", it doesn't seem particularly bloated or wasteful to me: it runs at ~5% of the federal budget and at 2mil people it is about 0.5% of the population.
It looks like you and some other commenters, however, are discussing government contracts, which are projects and programs paid for the government but implemented by third-party contractors. Is that correct?
Yes, they are correlated
; contracts are created with budget authority afforded to federal employees. Essentially the only way to get promoted is to amass reports and budget, and use it in some way.
So it’s basically like this: yes, the federal government creates jobs and the cost of those jobs directly is only 5% of the budget. However the real cost of those jobs is in spending, in terms of opportunities they champion, which essentially amounts to all discretionary spending conducted by the federal government — ~30% of the budget.
I don't think the complaint is that all government spending is good or that cutting waste would be bad. The objection is that they're not cutting the kinds of things you're talking about and their approach seems fundamentally unlikely to do so.
Finding things like solutions nobody is using or systems that are far more complicated than they need to be is worthwhile if you're goal is removing waste and increasing efficiency. But it also takes in-depth analysis by people who understand the context. You're definitely not finding it with just raw budget access and first principles from people with little relevant experience. Same goes for employees. There are definitely poor performers or people doing unnecessary things, but you're not dealing with those cases if your approach is just to fire all the new employees.
It's not that this approach is an imperfect solution to a legitimate problem, it's not a solution to the problem at all. Instead, it's basically about redefining a hard problem (identifying and addressing waste and inefficiency) into an easy problem (have less stuff) and then trying to solve that one. Which is great if your goal is to declare victory, but it doesn't actually address the original problem of efficiency.
I find it frustrating because I agree with you that the government is absolutely not perfectly efficient and it would be great if there was a concerted effort to improve the situation. But not only is that not what's happening, this approach seems likely to make things worse given that random chaos and disruption are generally the enemies of efficiency and it seems likely all this will make it harder for the government to attract or retain the best, most efficient employees.
It's criticizing the self-proclamed god elon musk. It's unofficially forbidden here to criticize a few people (elon musk, sam altman, etc), and asslickers are flagging such threads.
This topic is by far the most-discussed right now, and the opinions you favor (to judge by this post at least) are by far the most-expressed. Yet somehow it still ends up feeling as if they are forbidden! I call this the "nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded" theory of HN threads (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
The phenomenon isn't as paradoxical as it seems (it has a fairly simple explanation), but it's striking to encounter.
Since I just recently asked you to stop posting unsubstantive flamebait and you've continued to do it non-stop, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
p.s. I suppose I'd better add that (1) no, this has nothing to do with your political views, and (2) yes, we ban accounts who are doing the same thing with different politics. Oh and (3) yes, if other accounts keep doing this after we ask them to stop, we'll end up banning them as well.
> no, this has nothing to do with your political views
Who believes that at this point? Speak up.
> Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
If you want to order me to tolerate the fascism apologists has been having a field day on this site since over a month, you have to say that to my face. You do not have the personal capital or credibility to say "please". You made your bed, you sided with the anonymous, hooded executioners; we heard it the first time, now STFU already! And I'll speak my mind throttled to the showdead crowd, and if you make that impossible, of course I'll make new accounts. I'll make fake websites to have fake emails at JUST to not take orders from you.
Sure their posts are hidden now, but why are they able to post at all? Why is anyone able to post like this? It's not good for the site, but it's endemic. Equating opinionated and acerbic comments like the one above with flamebait while saying and doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior makes no sense, and is not good for HN.
> Maybe you should be focusing more effort on users like this one, who has been posing nothing but abuse for a month
That account has been banned since the day it was created. Its comments have never been anything but [dead]. That's the maximum penalty that exists on HN. Several other accounts related to that one are also banned. This is standard.
(For readers who don't have "showdead" turned on in their profile: the account anigbrowl mentioned has been posting things like "Shut up, $SLUR", "Fuck off, $SLUR", and worse. They are banned and all their comments are killed automatically. This means that no one sees them unless they turn the 'showdead' setting on in their profile. Any user is welcome to turn that setting on, but please don't forget that if you do, you're signing up to see the worst that the internet has to offer on HN.)
Banned accounts can continue to post, but their comments are killed by default. Why? Because otherwise they'd just create new accounts and pick up where they left off. Since new accounts are unbanned at first, there would be a time lag before we could catch those and ban them again. In the meantime, more abusive posts would get through.
In other words, allowing banned accounts to post (but making their posts default-invisible) is the way to minimize their effect on a large open forum like HN, where there's no barrier to creating accounts. Attempting to restrict them further would just end up exposing more people to the abusive posts.
HN would have ceased to exist long ago if we were "doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior", so I was a little taken aback at your assumption there.
I agree, of course, that 13_9_7_7_5_18's posts were worse than computerthings's. That's why we banned the former immediately, and the latter only after warning them (many warnings, actually, if you count previous accounts that we banned) and only after they'd broken the site guidelines many times.
In other words, allowing banned accounts to post (but making their posts default-invisible) is the way to minimize their effect on a large open forum like HN, where there's no barrier to creating accounts. Attempting to restrict them further would just end up exposing more people to the abusive posts.
But maybe there should be some friction to creating accounts, like requiring a few worthwhile submissions before granting commenting privileges (which is already how it works with downvoting and flagging), or revealing the email addresses of persistently abusive accounts. Just wiping he accounts and forcing them to create new ones increases the friction, which lowers the incentive to keep doing it.
HN would have ceased to exist long ago if we were "doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior", so I'm a little taken aback at your assumption that we were doing nothing about these.
But you're not, really. Shadowbanning abuse accounts with a keyword filter is the weakest possible response, and that's why there's an endless influx of them. Since you can't really impose consequences (because usage is anonymous, any email address will do and VPNs make it impossible to track abusers), there should be some more friction to make casual abuse a less attractive pastime.
> Banned accounts can continue to post, but their comments are killed by default. Why? Because otherwise they'd just create new accounts and pick up where they left off. Since new accounts are unbanned at first, there would be a time lag before we could catch those and ban them again. In the meantime, more abusive posts would get through.
This whole place only stands up because of dang. Someday (too) soon, AI moderators will be all we have to keep the peace in our forums... and dang is our most precious training resource. I'm grateful he's so transparent in explaining his process.
Frankly, this doesn’t matter. What matters is that an unofficial agency of the executive branch is deciding unilaterally - with no oversight - to stop payments that were voted on by Congress. Even if Musk and team were geniuses and doing brilliant work, it would be outside the rule of law.
People already knew Trump was incompetent, other people just called it "Trump Derangement Syndrome."
People already knew Musk was incompetent, other people just called it "Musk Derangement Syndrome"
People were saying DOGE was full of incompetents prior to this, simply judging by their methods (or lack thereof.) They were dismissed as partisans, or using whatever thought-terminating cliche they have on hand.
Knowing this doesn't mean a thing, no one is doing anything about it.
Congress is well within its rights to delegate such authority.
That would of course never make it through Congress.
Counselor, you know better than to beg the question like that. It's disappointing to see such an intelligent person resort to such fallacious arguments.
> Congress is well within its rights to delegate such authority.
Right, Congress told the executive “here’s three billion dollars, spend it on foreign development.” That means the executive decides how that money will be spent. It is entirely within its rights to cancel particular grants. Though eventually it will have to seek rescission as to the $3 billion if it doesn’t use all the money. That’s a long ways away.
And I’m quite confident I’m not going out on a limb when I say line items for “DEI in Serbia” would never make it through congress.
Yes, the executive branch can decide how that money is spent. But it was intended to be spent. DOGE is simply arbitraging the recission period for political capital.
And I’m quite confident I’m not going out on a limb when I say line items for “DEI in Serbia” would never make it through congress.
Why not? You might (or might not) recall the US became heavily involved in a war in the Balkans 30 years ago the point of carrying out an extensive bombing campaign. To the extent that the US has an interest in that region being peaceful and the countries there staying or becoming more aligned with US geopolitical and economic interests, a small subsidy to that end may make strategic sense.
Bombing, peacekeeping, and reconstruction costs for the Balkan war ran into the tens of billions. A few million a year to nurture a more pluralistic civil society in the region (and thereby increase trade flows with the US) seems cheap by comparison.
If DOGE is going to spend the USAID-allocated billions on some other foreign development aid, they are saving zero money. Their claims of cost saving contradict a defense that they aren’t violating the spending laws passed by Congress.
This feels willfully ignorant. They're not talking about reallocating USAID's budget, they're talking about shutting it down entirely to save money. This is not compatible with claims that they are merely overriding where the money goes.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadI'll try.
I bet back in the day you were eating babies.
Fun!
I don't doubt there is waste in the federal government. I also don't doubt it is largely in programs that tend tend to be lavishly funded, not squeezed to death, so agricultural subsidies, construction projects, and defense. These are programs conservatives love. DOGE is concentrating its "waste, fraud, and abuse cutting" to ideological enemies. In other words, it isn't about finding and cutting waste or fraud; it's about the ideological capture and remolding of government outside of any framework of accountability or democratic input.
A lovely example of their creative approach to their alleged project:
> In another case, DOGE claimed $232 million in savings on a contract providing information technology support to the Social Security Administration. But The Intercept reported that only a sliver of the contract was canceled — a program to let users mark their gender as “X” — bringing the actual savings closer to $560,000.
They lie about what they accomplished, and what they did accomplish was just performative cruelty with negligible effect on the budget.
Nor for Trump whose lifetime history is to make debt go up and then fail upwards.
He used inflation to hide the issue in the price of everything else on top of that.
Or the .01% class who own the debt could get burned. Sometimes that happens when you make a bad bet, you know?
And I know that when inequality reaches these sorts of levels, heads have a tendency to roll.
One way or another, some form of jubilee is gonna be necessary for a sustainable future.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/technology/dogecoin-bitco...
The various lawsuits against the actions in the last month alone show a blatant disregard for process and legal procedure.
The media coverage I have seen falls into these 2 categories. 1. Declaration of great success in short one liners. This comes without evidence every time. This comes as tweets or from the administration. 2. When evidence is looked into we see that the numbers fall short, the "alleged" corruption is not corruption at all or the entire claim is a falsehood.
- many of the organizations cut certainly have done evil which the average American would not support.
- I do not expect Trump to do less evil. I expect him simply to command it more directly.
In their own words what it is about:
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
We may not end up with a smaller government, just a different one.
The entire party is psychos wanting to kneecap departments just to watch them bleed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
For you, is it the chart of 100+ aged in Social Security and the lies that Mosk et all push about Social Security?
There were the boring "bureaucratic reports" about this issue, which shows there was no fraud. https://apnews.com/article/social-security-payments-deceased...
Don't let reality bring you down tho!
Assuming they're false because they haven't been nearly immediately proven publicly makes it too easy for those concerns and allegations to be written off and ignored.
It's fair to treat everything they say in this realm as a lie until proven otherwise, or until they work to build a modicum of trust.
Even the names they give major bills are technically a lie, any legislator that supports or votes for it is lying. Campaign speeches and promises are riddled with lies and omissions. Presidents lie while in office.
I don't mean to play whataboutism here. I'm all for calling out lying politicians here, but I'd extend that to everyone that fits the bill.
The point is that we can't consider a claim true or false. We need evidence to prove it is true, and we can never really prove its false unless we can see all information that could possibly be related to the question.
I don't personally see the government release all information that could possibly be related to any question of fraud or abuse, so we're left either proving it true or considering it unsubstantiated or unproven.
An untrustworthy person is trying to convince you of something, and has access and control of all the information to substantiate everything he's saying. Why is anything left unproven? Because he's relying on information asymmetry to confound you. It's the same thing he did with the so-called "Twitter Files", where he selectively leaked one-sided information to spin a narrative. He's doing the same thing with Doge and people are falling for it. Probably the same ones who fell for the "Twitter files".
Proven liars rely on credulous people like yourself to continue operating once their lies are widely known. That's why when such a liar has power, the only rational stance is extreme skepticism until, like I said, an independent verification can be obtained. Otherwise you open yourself to be taken advantage of.
> I don't personally see the government release all information that could possibly be related to any question of fraud or abuse
We're not asking for that kind of a standard. I would be satisfied with releasing the necessary information that would be sufficient in proving specific questions of fraud raised by Musk to the public. Trusted third parties with appropriate clearances can handle sensitive information, and it can be appropriately redacted for public consumption.
Not totally relevant here, but I find it interesting that this description is literally how our legal system works. The prosecutor is trying to convince the jury of something and the prosecutor holds all their potential evidence, deciding for themselves what to deem relevant or exculpatory.
> We're not asking for that kind of a standard. I would be satisfied with releasing the necessary information that would be sufficient in proving specific questions of fraud raised by Musk to the public.
Agreed, that was actually what I meant in the other option I gave - they can prove the claim true by making public limited facts. I only raised that all related information would have to be released if the goal is to prove the claim false, which it sounds like you don't want or expect.
I would fully expect them to eventually release proof of fraud claims, until then I consider them claims of fraud that are so far unproven.
How long would you wait for them to provide this evidence before deciding they are trying to hoodwink you by withholding it?
When a strongman figure is in charge yelling one thing, though, I do always look in the other direction. Its like a magic show, look where they want to distract you from rather than what they're pointing at.
I'll be very interested to see where this ends up, and a little surprised if its an honest attempt to find fraud and shrink the government or balance the budget.
Maybe the voter doesn't actually care about fraud, but why shouldn't they appreciate having fewer of their tax dollars being spent on things they don't even agree with?
I agree that's a bad approach in almost every situation, but it is par for the course. That isn't to say its okay, but there are worse examples of short term strategies to take issue with if that's the concern.
Democracy doesn’t mean we all agree.
Assuming we do have a democracy today (I'd argue that's questionable for many reasons), a majority of voters and electoral college representatives voted for Trump.
Trump so far is doing many of the things he said he would do. For better or worse our democracy picked this. If it goes poorly we can only blame ourselves.
It's not a winner take all system. If a bunch of racists get elected to office, they can't just claim a "mandate" and declare the Civil Right Act null and void by refusing to enforce it. The President enforces all the laws, even the ones his voters don't support. If he wants to change them, he can sign a bill into law, he can veto a bill, but he can't pick and choose to enforce just Republican passed laws.
We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system as we don't really believe in the principles of democracy.
I'm not saying its a good thing, just how it works. True democracy is a leap of faith, you need to trust that most people are generally good and are generally well intended.
Trump did not run on "I will anex canada, make inflation higher, order damm release and slash department of education".
Some parts he run at - he promised to harm trans and he is delivering.
He didn't run on annexing Canada, he almost certainly doesn't want to though. Trump is a bully and just likes to play cheap games when negotiating. He raised the idea of making Canada a state while also pushing hard on border issues and tariffs. He was just fainting there to try to gain the upper hand.
Inflation is a joke with him. He's completely contradictory there, though that is pretty common. I don't think Trump understands or cares about inflation, it just polls well. He did run on tariffs though, and any voter didn't understand that leads to inflation can only blame themselves.
If the majority runs on cancelling democracy itself (e.g. that if they're elected there will be no more elections and they will stay in power), and they gain a small majority, is it fine for them to now cancel all elections in the future?
If a party runs on (say) taking the homes of those that voted for the opposition, do you think that it's fine if they do it if they get in power? Maybe put them in jails or camps?
Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.
For sure, laws limiting power are extremely important. My point is simply that if a person or members of a party get elected in numbers to change that, and were clear of their intentions with voters, its totally within Democratic principles for the laws to be changed.
Abe Lincoln changed the laws with regards to slavery. He was elected by popular vote but that meant he went against a sizeable minority of voters and fundamentally changed laws limiting powers and rights. I don't see any problem with that. To be clear, I'm not drawing any comparison directly between Lincoln and any other politician today.
> Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about protection of minorities, different rights like free speech or property rights, free trial and other things. There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts, legislative branches etc.
Democracy is a political model for how to elect those in charge. The ideals built into the US bill of rights are in addition to democracy, not part of it directly. You can democratically elect a bigot for example, but the election was still democratically held.
Not, it's not. If members of a party get elected to remove the ability of their opposition or some of their opposition to vote or cancel the next democratic elections that's in fact undemocratic. Especially in a system like in the US where even without an actual majority of votes you can get the presidency or a majority in the legislative branch.
There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.
Ignoring whether we should choose to defend democracy in that scenario (I would), what do you see as the mechanism built into democracy that stops it?
Yes there are, laws requiring super majority, for example, to change, or counter. You even state so yourself:
> There are existing laws that limit powers, but with enough support and legislative seats that can all be changed.
These changes need "enough support", because there is protection built in the system - so a majority is not enough. Other examples of protection are the Judicial branch having the power to cancel illegal legislation, EOs and other government decisions, the President having the power to veto bills. All of these supposedly provide a checks and balances system, although it is of course imperfect, especially with gerrymandering or the way that the Supreme Court is built (in my opinion life tenure is a bad idea, the court itself needs more members, and the way the members are selected is too politically oriented).
> We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system as we don't really believe in the principles of democracy.
If you have a super-majority that supports extremes that's a whole different ball game. You originally talked about "majority", and how that's the be all end all of democracy. For example, in the US, to change the constitution you'd super majority on the Federal level, as well as (IIRC) majority in 75% of the states.
Nonetheless, everything I've stated is of course based on police/army that will listen to the law and act accordingly. If the people with guns/tanks/advanced weapons act in an illegal way and against the system, of course the law is worthless.
My point remains, though. There is a point at which democracy has no guardrails to prevent a democratic overthrow of the system. Call it a majority, super majority, 60% vote, or whatever the system in place decides. With enough support a democratic system can be thrown out in an entirely democratic election.
We did not, in fact, pick unlimited democracy, largely because never in the history of the country has there been a trust that giving unlimited power to an unchecked, potentially transitory, majority was a good idea. It's why we have Constitutional limits on government. Its why we have dual sovereignty. It's why we have separation of powers in the federal government. It's why we have staggered elections to the Senate. It's why we tend to add additional Constitutional limits on government over time, not fewer.
The history of American involves a fairly intense, often quite violent, debate about these issues. There is no simple settled comprehensive position on what should be within the scope of majoritarian control and what needs to be kept outside of it (and which method should be used to do that.)
Pretending that there is a simple consensus around unchecked majoritarianism, or that the choice is between unchecked majoritarianism and something radically different from the Constitutionally-limited representative democracy the US has had, misguided if not actually dishonest.
Democracy is a process of how leaders are elected, that's it. How our government is structured, our three branches, etc is not part of democracy - those are details of how we implemented a government of democratically elected officials (well, as democratically as it can be considered in a democratic republic with our electoral college system).
They have to do with the actual system of government we've chosen in the United States, which is not naive majoritarianism; either that system is a form of democracy (which it would be by the definitions usually used in modern discussions of real political systems), in which case it disproves the premise "We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules", or it is not, and it makes the full argument, "We either believe in democracy and accept that means majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a different system" irrelevant because, in that case, we have already chosen a different system, and wouldn't need to go back to the drawing board simply because we had a problem with naive majoritarianism -- since rejection of that was baked in from the start.
Trump doesn't see that as a likely outcome.
The "convicted" piece carries a lot of weight here too. Plenty of presidents have done terrible things but were never convicted.
They’re very enthusiastic about rooting out. The fraud is still missing, however.
For example, Musk lied about social security but the records he mentioned were reported by the SSA IG years before. They concluded there wasn’t much fraud because over 98% of the old records weren’t receiving money (and hadn’t made contributions in over 50 years) and it was noted that cleaning them up would cost significantly more than it could possibly save.
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
I believe the number of air incidents has been 2 a week in the last month. Any time now the government just will be ready to declare FAA as a disaster of the previous regimes and that Tech industries will be better at running the admin for the aviation sector.
What part do you think gets built back? Maybe the FBI, when they’re sure it can be weaponized against their enemies.
I wouldn't even begin to guess. This has all moved so quickly that I've yet to find what seems to be a reliable source on what is actually changing.
My point, though, was only that we've so far seen moves to reduce headcount and pause programs. That could be the first step to closing down departments entirely, but it could also be the first step to rebuilding their own version of that department.
There’s nothing to suggest they want to rebuild.
I grew up over that time in a very red part of the country.
In the 90s I always heard of the republican party as the party of small government and individual freedoms.
Starting at least with Bush/Cheney that didn't line up. The party seemed to want a larger military budget, increased federal powers, and a stronger executive branch.
Republican voters I knew largely followed that pattern. They didn't want to see departments closed or authority removed from the government. They just wanted their views written into law. Abortion is a great example, the republican party strongly pushed for regulating what individuals could or could not do, very few were arguing that abortion rights were outside the federal government's authority.
Bush cut funding for education and pushed it to private schools. He cut antipoverty initiatives and pushed funding to church groups. Cut funding for stem cell research. And of course cut taxes for the rich.
The antiabortion response is to cut funds to anything touching abortion (not, say, provide more support to mothers.) And make way for expanded power over reproductive rights at the state level.
The voters I know who vote primarily on this issue want a law on the books banning abortions, they don't want to just defund programs.
By no means does that mean I can extend that view to other voters, but I have yet to hear anyone who feels strongly pro-life argue only for defunding.
The question was will they build back, remember? A ban isn’t rebuilding anything.
That's first order building, there is no need for rebuilding in that scenario.
With regards to the broader DOGE topic, they aren't banning anything yet that I've seen outside of the authority that we already granted the executive branch. I don't necessarily agree with what they're doing, but from the bits and pieces I can pull out of largely political reporting it does seem like they're staying within the bounds of what the executive branch is technically allowed to do.
There will be a legal debate whether there are within the rules to not spend money budgeted by congress. That will come down to an opinion whether the argument that departments are not acting in good faith or reasonably executing their mandate is found by the courts to be reasonable.
That being said, right now there was enough written over years by hard core conservatives and specifically by heritage foundation and in project 2025 to know what they want.
The same people were not to remove abortion protection either, I still remember how everyone and his brother framed that worry as paranoid ... two years before the exact same people did it.
https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/two-santa...
And if you believe Project 2025, which I do, however the Trump campaign tried to halfheartedly distance itself from them, lower education:
Project 2025 talks of how children finishing school should be looking more to "buying a house and starting a family" than college. Of course, how the average 18 year old with a high school education and single income (because homeschooling is also a very big goal of Project 2025) is meant to buy this house is left as an exercise for the (uneducated) reader. The important thing is less education and more future "Warriors for Christ" (as someone I know on my FB feed calls their children).
I think a strong argument could be made that an 18 year old with a strong work ethic should be able to get a job that allows them to afford a house in a reasonable timeline.
I don't have any expectation that's actually what 2025 argues, but it would be a good ideal. Why shouldn't a kid out of high school willing to work hard be able to save up for a house and a family in a reasonable amount of time? Should we gate keep that behind college degrees or similar?
But yes, P2025's goal has nothing to do with the wellbeing of said school leaver. They specifically want people to be less educated (easier to manipulate and persuade), and are all about raising as many Christian children as possible to "stack the vote".
Home renovations starts with planing. Then you move property to place where it will be safe. Then you remove only parts you want to change.
What happened to merit? competence?
This is the recipe for corruption that was eliminated back in the progressive era of the early 20th century. It's what gave us Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed.
Repopulating organizations with loyal stooges is not constructive.
To be fair, that's a question driving much of the push back against DEI as well.
Both parties in the US have selectively ignored or called for merit based systems, depending on what suited them for a particular topic.
Is it the right approach? Definitely not, but that doesn't mean it can't be a step in a better direction. That all depends on your goals and what you want to happen, I couldn't answer that question no matter what.
So you are OK with firing the best because 'otherwise it's hard'. You are OK with breaking the law because 'otherwise it's hard'. You are OK with lying to people why they are fired because 'otherwise it's hard'. You just want action and don't care if it's smart action, legal, or fair. That is item 3 on the checklist of fascism.
"The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation."
https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the...
DEI programs and similar work by focusing more effort on underrepresented groups. By design that puts less focus on overrepresented groups, and splits that focus away from merit all together.
Arguing that everyone should have equal opportunity to succeed is admirable and a great goal to have. I've never seen a DEI program that implements that or stops at that goal though, they need more immediate results and focus instead on helping to select under represented groups into positions to better balance the statistics.
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
I don't believe this is what Trump and crew want to do, but if that were the honest goal I don't see what the problem would be.
Say you do need the government to actually do something: how much more money are qualified people going to expect when they can’t count on decent working conditions or job security? How much more will every government contract cost when past history of failure to pay has to be priced in? Every federal job supports multiple private sector jobs, and federal spending provided a consistent economic baseline in many parts of the country, too, so that’ll all be happening within a hard recession.
"You can't force anyone to do anything" and "This bit of property belongs to me, you need to pay me for access to it" are not logically compatible.
I think most libertarians would agree with the idea that a government should be kept as small as possible while still being able to protect property rights. They're generally capitalists as well, and the primary drivers there are individual choice and property rights.
It's a state enforcing something. Which you've just admitted is fine when it enforces something you like.
For one, I never said I myself am libertarian or anarchist.
Your logic here seems circular, but maybe I just misunderstood. It seems reasonable to me that someone who is libertarian and accepts the need for a state but wants it limited to only, or primarily, protecting property rights would admit that its fine to have a government enforce things they like.
If someone takes issue with having a government at all they're left with anarchism as the only choice. That's all well and good, people can have the opinion that a state is never justified. That doesn't mean libertarians can't believe in a form of government with whatever limitations they deem reasonable or worth the risk, though.
A libertarian would not argue that laws can be broken without consequence. They would argue what laws should exist and where the governments authority begins and ends, but that is a very different conversation.
An anarchist would argue that laws and governments shouldn't exist, period. They therefore wouldn't argue that laws can be broken without consequence, they would take issue with the presumption that laws should exist in the first place.
What makes something "theft" is that it's an illegitimate taking. The only way you can say that about taxation is to have already defined government as being illegitimate. Then (and only then) taxes are theft.
But if someone hasn't already made "all governments are illegitimate", then arguing that they'll take things from you if you don't pay taxes isn't the convincing argument you seem to think it is.
You opt-in to having a mortgage and agree to terms.
I'm not aware of such an option for taxes or citizenship. If you are born in on US soil you are made a citizen, including all the legal rights and benefits as well as the tax liability.
But if you want the protection of what taxes pay for - the rule of law - then you need to pay the taxes.
Only an anarchist would argue that governments and taxes, or some other form of funding, shouldn't exist.
The debate between anyone else is where the line should be drawn and what the government should have authority to legislate and then enforce.
Despite DDoS on the wave length, DOGE will not really gain much in the end, the real matter to balance the sheet will come from selling Ukraine which obviously takes some time to materialize.
https://www.police1.com/federal-law-enforcement/national-law...
That's how you make government more efficient: Scrap the brand new fleet you have and buy another brand new fleet.
Its not enough to have a plan to tear down. You need a plan to built too. Not seeing that.
It is so blatent, it's ridiculous.
The FAA and NTSB have a pretty great track record.
Maybe he's talking about sending SpaceX engineers to Boeing. I don't know whether he's wearing his US gov hat or his private business hat when he wrote that tweet.
It's the same hat.
Spam stock tips work - for spammers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26 - Oct 2006
You aren't going to get far with this community arguing that we should ban nytimes.com. What you (i.e. anyone who cares about this) should do instead is find more substantive, more interesting, and hopefully more neutral articles analyzing the same things, and submit them to HN instead. I can't say I've seen very many of these lately, but presumably some exist.
Can you lose your native tongue? (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093360 - Feb 2025 (171 comments)
The legacy of lies in Alzheimer's science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910829 - Feb 2025 (210 comments)
Japan's original decluttering guru (no, not that one) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42742396 - Jan 2025 (63 comments)
How saffron became an American cash crop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42582352 - Jan 2025 (61 comments)
Dungeons and Dragons rolls the dice with new rules about identity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549425 - Dec 2024 (182 comments)
Insects rely on sounds made by vegetation to guide reproduction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42353066 - Dec 2024 (188 comments)
Yes, it ‘looks like a duck,’ but carriers like the new USPS mail truck - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42249545 - Nov 2024 (144 comments)
The Rise of Malört, an Unexpected Midwest princess - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42194355 - Nov 2024 (146 comments)
A 132-Year-Old Message in a Bottle in a Scottish Lighthouse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42179850 - Nov 2024 (55 comments)
A Chopin waltz unearthed after nearly 200 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41961866 - Oct 2024 (130 comments)
Yes, NYT is tendentious on certain topics in its own right, and in some of those cases, it would be good if HN had more neutral reports to discuss. But if users don't submit them, what can we do?
We don't ban domains that regularly produce good material for HN. We do ban domains that are primarily ideological and almost never produce good material for HN. The definition of "good material" is basically "gratifies intellectual curiosity", as mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There are a lot of sites that are strongly political and don't produce any articles that support good HN threads (or only very rarely do). Those we ban, regardless of their political orientation. But if any of them started publishing articles about newly discovered Chopin pieces, or insects relying on sounds made by plants, we'd unban that site. The biggest thing HN needs is more good (for HN) articles.
I'm not sure what policies you're saying we changed in the past?
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/musk-doge-records-public-inf...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihvSwJT0rLU
That would be...interesting... but there is no standing for suing individuals for "treason" as far as I am aware. The inmates run the asylum.
There’s lots of things about organizations, especially government orgs, that aren’t public info. Naming the employees would create stochastic terror opportunities, for instance. Individual contributors should be able to work without being harassed or worse.
The management gives the media daily opportunities to ask questions.
1. Perfectly tracking every dollar is more expensive than having some slack in the system. There's an optimal amount, at least from an overall value perspective.
2. We spend too much, and both sides of the aisle repeatedly blocked attempts to curb spending for literal decades while our debt got higher. That's how someone doing something coming in with a hatchet and no plan to build gets cheered instead of booed by a large percentage of the populace.
The problem Americans have with the political system has roots on Webers concept of politics as a vocation.
Intuitively, there _must_ be some corruption.
I have zero faith that Musk is interested in finding real corruption. He seems to be more interested in changing budget allocations and calling the removed regulations / "woke" things corrupt.
I also think that corruption was within my acceptance tolerance of wastage. _Think_ is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but maybe that's all that really matters when it comes to something like this.
If a bill contains funding to help fix a main street in a city that was destroyed by a natural disaster, is that corruption?
What if there's 500 other destroyed main streets and that one got picked?
What if it was destroyed by decades of the local gov't neglecting it?
What if it was included because you directly bribed the person writing the bill?
What if it was included because you did some horse trading and gave them something they wanted in another bill you wrote?
The intent there is not to argue that defining corruption is impossible or futile, but that some people might reasonably argue different sides of whether something was corruption without either side obviously being morally bankrupt.
https://www.ironmountain.com/services/vital-records-storage
When will this woke madness stop?
https://edge.sitecorecloud.io/ironmountain-c8dd68e9/media/pr...
So why would it be by definition considered waste that a government has employees working on paper records stored in the same place?
There is absolutely no reason to think this is ridiculous. These types of sites exist all over the world. Yet Elon Musk claims it's ridiculous and people now have to defend that claim?
Or does Trump get a pass on what he says he'll do, because it's just trolling to trigger the libs?
The creators of South Park literally made a movie mocking the neocon ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_America:_World_Police
For some odd reason the average liberal is now arguing for foreign interference by the US. The are using the same neocon talking points the Republicans did 10 years ago - "soft power" and "if we don't do it someone else will".
It's wild to sit back and think about.
US agencies did much worse things in pursue of eliminating communism, in US and elsewhere.
Also consider how much disruption all of this is causing to the federal workforce and the contractors. People are being forced to upend their lives on very short notice to RTO. They were getting daily emails telling them to quit. It's hard to imagine anyone doing good work when they're scared that some indiscriminate process is going to fire them.
The primary owner of X disagrees with you.
"We're barely breaking even" [1]
1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-x-growth-22130...
These are public goods. They shouldn't be run on the basis of "make them as crappy as we can get away with to save as much money as possible".
Even if it is more profitable, it's doing a heck of a lot less. The government being 80% less effective would be a very bad outcome here.
So not only is the DOGE affair not reducing the debt, it is setting the country up for less wealth and more expenses in the future.
> The $2 billion was used for the "decarbonization of homes" in low-income communities and paid for new household appliances, such as water heaters, induction stoves, solar panels, EV chargers, and weatherization, according to an April 2024 press release from Power Forward Communities.
Second, the claim that it was given to Stacey Abrams, from the LinkedIn post cited in the article:
> The coalition includes Rewiring America, Enterprise Community Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), United Way, and Habitat for Humanity International and today, we've applied for $9.5 billion — part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act — to directly fund residential decarbonization and electrification... The application is already supported by 321 partners who have pledged to decarbonize housing units across 46 states and every EPA region. It also includes 156 communities pledging to decarbonize housing units, particularly in low-income and disadvantaged communities, and rural and Tribal communities.
It appears that Stacey Abrams was in some way involved in organizing a coalition of existing nonprofits to apply for congressionally authorized grant money. There is no evidence I can see that she received any of the money or that any other impropriety was involved.
"$2 billion to Stacey Abrams" is a falsehood, even based on the content of the inflammatory Fox News article.
Also, I am booing them because all of the doge line items on their website are in the millions, and our debt is trillions.
“1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 1012 (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in both American and British English.”
Even in the straits you’re in (and I sincerely hope the very best for you), how much effort would you put into saving $0.14? It just doesn’t seem like the best use of effort?
Before anyone asks, no I don’t round up for the Boys and Girls Club at Taco Bell. I sometimes feel bad about it though.
So instead of them giving that money to Americans to pay for productivity (USAID buying corn from farmers, tens of thousands of employees paid to promote American standing on the global stage, paid to look after parks, paid to monitor fraud in the US financial system, paid to collect taxes, etc).. they want to send those people home and distribute their would-be salaries to every American for free.
They have said that 20% will be distributed directly to the population, 20% will be paid to the national debt, and the remaining 60% will simply not be spent.
I hope that puts some of these plans in perspective. Musk's millions is wandering the street for loose pennies. Trumps plan to dismnantle the DoED is "saving" the equivent of paying some energy bill, while the US is going into more debt to pay rent.
Edit: and so are a lot of their other efforts
We have since updated it to billion in order to keep pace with the times.
The actual spend on foreign aid? Under 1%.
Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed. Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.
The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every issue.
Maybe - maybe - a merry band of lily-white slave-owners born hundreds of years before solar power and social media don't know how best to run a modern government.
And maybe we'd be smarter if our government didn't treat schools as a pipeline to factory work, or as a means to make billions from crippling and predatory student loans. "I love the uneducated", etc.
One must also keep in mind that the man of the 18th century achieved the necessary milestones to become a self-sufficient adult by his late teens. He will have already lived a full life at the age his 21st century counterpart crosses the starting line.
And absolutely, rational and knowledgeable is certain. But we seem to treat their edicts as the height of infallible perfection in government, and view it as anathema to even suggest ideas that don't precisely align with their statements.
really? i tried sourcing this and I can see there were only two in their 20s (26 each) out of 56. no teenage. 2 in 20s, 17 in 30s, 12 in 40s, 9 in 50s, 6 in 60s, and 1 in 70s (well, 70 exact - Benjamin Franklin).
"As it turns out, many Founding Fathers were younger than 40 years old in 1776 ... more than a dozen of them were 35 or younger."
Peter Salem was the youngest signatory at 16.
Alexander Hamilton, 21. Thomas Lynch, Jr, and Edward Rutledge, 26. George Walton, 27, and Thomas Heyward, Jr, 29.
That being said, I take the National Archives as a more authoritative source than a Slate article!
I made no such claim, but since you mention it, populism thrives when political power is perceived as disconnected to the common people. You can look up any number of stats on that yourself; they're quite clear that we are in a historic low [0].
What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals. I would even say that the more accurate term for them would be the 'colonizing great great great etc grandfathers', which puts things back into perspective a little.
And even so; they explicitly warned that their system wouldn't hold up forever, needed continuous adjustment, and would need some rather extreme 'refreshing' from time to time.
I'm asking in retrospect to the overall well-being on the nation in actual policies and results, not in it's political dominance. As recently as the Cultural Revolution we can see what happens the excesses of the mob are released.
>What I did claim was that the problems and potential of our day couldn't have been foreseen by the 'founding fathers', so it's silly to hold them as _the_ shibboleth of democratic ideals
Well I think you're attacking a strawman here, there will be situtations where their writings are not so relevant, but this situation of populism very much falls into category where their writings are relevant and specfically designed to anticipate for.
If you don't believe that, well then explain what are your alternative solutions to populism and if they are more poltically viable than what the founders proposed. I suspect if you weigh them all, the founders' ideals will come out on top.
Don't underestimate history, don't think you are really that different from our past. Plato might have lived 2000 years ago, but we still influenced by him today precisely due to the timeless quality of his ideas. Same as the Founders, you might disparage them for slavery that was common at the time, but their sincere devotion to republican ideals were acts of extraordinary moral upstanding that were rare both then and today. That's why we greatly respect them, not just in USA but around the world.
Are you familiar with Nicaragua's history? Iran's? Italy, Guatemala, Congo? Chile, Argentina, El Salvador? Brazil, Honduras, Haiti? Bolivia? ...
Internally, are you familiar with the history of gerrymandering? Voter suppression? Disinformation campaigns? The fight against campaign finance reform, or against winner takes all voting? Ballot access laws? Legislative and judicial manipulation against third parties and progressive candidates? Debate exclusion across corporate media, unchallenged smears, media blackouts, expensive lawsuits...
It may be the best of all bad plans. But it clearly does not succeed in producing compromises. At the very least it relies on some kind of good will between constituents. When you lose that you no longer have a nation.
The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.
At the scale of organizations and business, it's probably the most important tool you need to learn if you want to be at all effective. I've never seen a manager who was able to actually "get things done" who didn't skillfully wield soft power. The least effective managers I've worked beside needed to constantly resort to the use of authority and/or bullying to achieve results.
Which also generally pisses off lots of people. Then again some people seem to get a kick out of pissing off others.
It's quite reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic works at larger scales also.
E.g. Biden’s “human rights” push in Bangladesh. How did it help America to undermine the government’s ability to kill Islamists? It didn’t. It simply was ideologically captured Americans wanting to export their value system and use public dollars to do so.
This is a cynical, but accurate definition of soft power: exerting your will using words.
Your argument is all over the place - you call soft power a "fake concept", and then "bullshit", and here, you seem to suggest that it works, but you don't agree with Biden ideologically? So which is it?
I don't know even where to begin. I hope it's trolling.
Soft power and hegemony absolutely played vital roles since the end of WW2. We seem to have forgotten how much everything relied on them.
For the record, I don't like American foreign policy, and USAID is basically the CIA in disguise. But in terms of furthering America's goal of being the dominant power in the world, it absolutely works, and is _much_ more financially efficient than the cost of military intervention to establish supremacy.
Also in the context of federal budget, 1% is a huge number since most of the budget (like social security, interest payments, and Medicaid) is non negotiable.
~30B a year (USAID budget) is enough to make improvements domestically, e.g free college for 10% of students, transportation, housing, etc.
Should China be left alone on the world stage to take over?
if only that's what they would spend it on. Instead, it's going to go to the military.
Look at the role of USAID during the Vietnam War under CORDS. It funded the "strategic hamlet" program which uprooted rural civilians into barb wire enclosures and provided arms and training to militia.
That doesn't sound like international aid.
Look at the Phoenix Program during the same war. It was an intelligence program which sough to identify "VC infrastructure" within rural villages and "capture or kill".
One can argue that such activities are beneficial to the US, but claiming it's soft and cuddly "international aid" for countries in need is just not accurate.
Providing HIV assistance while undermining political stability is a high price for other countries to pay and I'm sure is a net negative for them.
You're taking that as a prior when in reality US FoPo prefers political stability after the Cold War. You need to get a grip here if you're seeing everything through the lens of dubious paranoia, if not just leftist resentment.
I should rephrase that to "political instability with regards to the perspective of locals".
I agree the US is seeking "political stability" with these activities. But it's on US terms which is often in direct opposition to the locals.
And I'd argue my view is not "dubious paranoia". The purpose of USAID is to use development activities as a cover for interference in other country's politics.
Whatever inefficiencies that exist on the civil side are nearly irrelevant.
I have rarely encountered anyone who thinks the government isn't overspending. And nobody ever agrees on how we should be spending the money.
I realize the comment above paints me as a conservative, I assure you I am not.
However, I guess I can at least sympathize with how we got here (DOGE being acceptable).
And from that I blame almost everyone in politics and every person tangentially related to those in politics.
Everyone would love to spend less money on other people's priorities. But as a whole, the bond market thinks the spending is ok, even if no individual will say so.
US yields at the long end (the part of the curve that is sensitive to long-term stagflation and inflation) don't necessarily indicate that participants believe that the spending isn't a problem either. Once yield started to rise, the U.S. massively twisted issuance back to T-Bills, which are short duration and essentially risk-free. Fragility on the long end is being carefully managed.
To some extent, you are seeing some financial repression, ie the shape of the yield curve is being actively managed. This expectation is built into the bond prices as well. If the long end starts to break down, nobody expects the treasury to start issuing even more long bonds. They naturally would expect them to pull back and start issuing more T-Bills and only term out the debt once the market/liquidity can handle it. There is some conversation right now about leverage limits in the banking system/SLR being expanded, so there is more capacity to warehouse the debt on the banking side. That's pushing in the direction of financial repression (where the banks are "incentivized" to shape the curve in a desired way).
0% interest rates were leveraged against the Fed Put, and it's arguable that there is a Treasury Issuance Put that is currently baked in.
I think that the issue is broader than this though. It's about much more than just the inflationary effects of spending. It's an ideological battle as well. As for bonds, there's also the fact that US bonds are a "there is no alternative" asset to some degree. Remember that bond investors got their faces ripped off in the initial rate hike cycle. There's a good parallel to commodity futures prices here, in that prices of commodity futures are terrible indicators of the actual price in the future. There is a distinction between where a market clears and a bet on future prices. It is a somewhat subtle distinction, but it is grossly underappreciated. That said, of course you can isolate the inflation expectation aspect of the bond market and you are probably correct that this indicator does not red flag inflation driven by excess spending. Of course, growth expectations are also fairly healthy. So it's hard to say what it would look like if inflation expectations stayed high and growth expectations started to fall. Then the bond market might look quite a bit different. We haven't seen a true stagflationary market in 50 years.
If you are a bank (or in aggregate a country full of banks) that takes in a bunch of $USD from your business customers selling products internationally in that currency, then you will receive a bunch of dollar deposits. These deposits can't be magically converted into the local currency, they have to be used as dollars somewhere else or traded with someone else who has a currency or commodity that you want for them. Long-term if there is a net surplus(from the other country point of view) of exports to imports, there will be a net surplus of USD as well.
So what to do with those USD? Make some more! Whatever the going rate for T-bills is is likely better than nothing. Treasury bonds are considered a "risk free rate" in the sense that they are approximately as safe as cash under the mattress.
Inflation is a more accurate measure than treasury sales of the reducing trust in our fiscal future. And that signal is lit.
Those dollars instead seem to be going into the stock market. Too many, I would say, and I think the Fed is making a mistake in trying to lower interest rates. But it does suggest that investors do not anticipate a sudden crisis of the government.
However, the discretionary part of the budget is less than half the size of the mandatory part of the budget. If the entire discretionary budget were cut to $0, between mandatory spending and interest, there would still be a government deficit.
That sleight-of-hand is how $900 billion of military spending becomes "most of the budget" when the full budget is $4.4 trillion.
So when we talk about the "budget", what really matters as far as politicians are concerned, is the discretionary part, which they can control (and which in theory voters have some control over through their election of congressmen), and defense takes up at least half of that.
The discourse of "wasteful government spending" is a smokescreen. It mystifies the basic operation of taking a dollar from a worker, retiree or poor person and giving it to a rich person.
2. we may or may not spend enough. what we don't do is collect enough taxes to pay for it, that is the failure.
That it would like get wrong more often than not. No thanks.
Also opening up the border when a majority of Americans have never supported increasing immigration: https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-i.... (The number peaked at 34%.)
Those are examples of official Biden policies, and it was his prerogative to pursue them of course. But Trump has the prerogative to pursue the opposite of those policies with equal vigor, and the federal workforce should be working just as hard to implement Trump’s policies.
Now of course, since the lens isn't objective, we can't say it's an objective statement. And no, we can say that we spend too much and also think Trump is doing illegal stuff.
Even as a legal matter, the impoundment act only requires rescission notification once it’s clear that the executive won’t use all the money appropriated for a “program.” When Congress is appropriating say $3 billion in a line item for USAID, DOGE can cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession saying USAID won’t use all $3 billion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_v._City_of_New_York
Whether that argument would hold up in court remains to be seen, of course.
Most of what I see being complained about can easily fall under socioeconomic development, which is ostensibly one of the objectives.
https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/usg-funding-to-gaza-and-wb-i...
As an example.
This is pre-doge, so of course none of their garbage lies show up. Only the actual oversight by regulators that doge is fking up.
There's more going on than what's in the latest news cycle.
Of course, that particular source is vested in the story, but to call the entire thing "totally debunked" is just willful ignorance.
Their financial statements being given in New Israeli Shekels is a bit of a giveaway.
The executive branch doesn't get to interpret what spending is in line with the laws passed by Congress.
Trump is taking a shit on the US Constitution.
> Although one commentator characterizes the case's implications as meaning "[t]he president cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment,"[2] the Court majority itself made no categorical constitutional pronouncement about impoundment power but focused on the statute's language and legislative history.
But they don't strictly speaking have to overturn it, just limit its scope of application somehow. For example, Train was about grants to the states – SCOTUS might rule the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 unconstitutional, and decide that the President has the right in general to impound appropriated funds, but they also might follow Train in carving out an exception to that general right for grants to the states.
What the past few decades did was push enough people to the point of no longer seeing the value in continuing the illusion.
I am terrified of the long term ramifications here. But again, I do see how we ended up here.
It seemed pretty clear to (now-Supreme Court justice, nominated by Trump) Brett Kavanaugh:
"Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill."
https://casetext.com/case/in-re-aiken-cnty-2
Though to be fair he wrote this in 2013 when a black Democrat was President so maybe now he feels like things are a little bit less clear for... reasons.
This is not correct.
The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use appropriated funds. Congress can then decide to accept or reject the recission notice. If rejected, the funds remain appropriated, with whatever conditions Congress set.
The argument could be made that this is a new administration with different priorities, so does not intend to use the previously appropriated funds. But, even then, the spirit of the law (and the Constitution) is such that the new administration would engage in the recission process as if the funds had just been appropriated. So, they would submit a recission notice before taking action.
That is, they would not just do whatever they wanted and inform Congress afterwards.
That’s not what the statute says. 2 U.S.C. 683(a) says:
> Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required to carry out the full objectives or scope of programs for which it is provided or that such budget authority should be rescinded for fiscal policy or other reasons (including the termination of authorized projects or activities for which budget authority has been provided), or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation for such fiscal year, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress a special message specifying
There must be a determination and it must be with respect to a program. So for example Congress appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations as a single line item. The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process. Then at some point the executive can make a determination how much of the total “program” amount will actually be needed and how much won’t be needed. Only at that point is the recessionary notice required.
From the Code:
>Whenever the President determines that all or part of any budget authority will not be required...or whenever all or part of budget authority provided for only one fiscal year is to be reserved from obligation, the President shall transmit to both Houses of Congress...
The operative phrase is "Whenever the President determines".
However, your conclusion adds:
>The executive is completely within its power to halt discretionary grants or expenditures during the audit process.
The Code says nothing like this, instead, explicitly stating "on determination", not "after action".
This "prior notification" requirement is also both within the letter of the original appropriations process, and the intent of the law overall.
It unambiguously affirmed Congress's sole authority over federal spending.
The Constitution clearly gives Congress the authority over federal taxation and spending, and this power is a key check on executive power. If the executive branch could ignore congressional spending decisions, it would effectively render Congress’s "power of the purse" irrelevant.
It's called the Spending Clause, not the Appropriation Clause, for a reason.
As to the rest of your argument: not spending the full $100M congress specifies in 100M Mars Bars for the Air Force because Mars wasn't able to deliver the last 25 million Mars Bars, is not the same thing as "One person decided Mars Bars are Woke so we just stopped paying Mars Candy yesterday."
1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we are upside down at the moment.
2) We don’t have the ability to issue more debt at the moment. The government has no money. They are using employee pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt ceiling.
If people believe we need what we are spending on, we need to tax the difference. It sucks to pay taxes but we need to do it
For an increasing number of people over an increasing period of time, this isn't an option? Do you think people can snap their fingers and materialize a 6-figure tech salary? I just saw two layed off people on linkedin today, that's two more 5+ years experienced professional software devs on the market...
Being honest, on what should be a great local salary, we can't even afford a starter home, or savings after our monthly grocery bill. The government caused this inflationary Era to devalue the debt, and your suggestion is to take more from families already struggling to stay ahead?
Such a communist. Take from the people at gunpoint, give it to the DC bureuacrats.
Empirically in the US in the last 70 years this just never has played out this why. The government did not cause and rarely causes major inflation either at least in this time period. Usually its the economy explodes due to a private industry bubble exploding or natural resources crunch due to foreign governments reducing oil production or pandemics.
Its pretty childish to use communist as a tag line when I qualified the claim you can believe that benefits should not exist but if you do you have to own saying you want to cut benefits for poor people and give a tax break to rich people (at least that is what happens when you cut taxes in a progressive system)
Mind you, taxed 20%, not 20% extra. Source: https://www.jw.org/en/news/region/turkmenistan/Turkmenistan-...
All spending is authorised by Congress, isn't it? So how is the debt ceiling any different? No federal programs "have money" short of Congress deciding it.
Appropriations is Congressional and specifics how much an agency will get over the fiscal year.
Apportionment is under the Executive and addresses when and how those funds are made available.
They are two distinct things.
Everyone is missing the most obvious way to raise revenue: raise taxes.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
The debt graph caught my eye. I did not expect it to be that stable for so long. I wonder what happened in 1981, impossible to say.
Total federal income was flat after the early 80's recession, then grew by 60%+ over the next decade, despite the Reagan tax cuts, increasing $400B.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFR
Federal spending continued to grow.
That's what happened.
One, DOGE isn't doing anything to cut spending. Every dollar Musk "cuts" that doesn't get Congressional authorisation is just being borrowed from future litigation plus all the time and expense that will eat up.
Two, if DOGE can supercede the Congress than so can the Treasury in issuing new debt. Trump has said he wants to kill the debt limit. He could just try that with an executive order. DOGE is already shredding contracts and blocking lawful payments--we're already jeopardising the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. (Ironically, in a manner similar to how South Africa trashed itself in modern history.)
Another huge expense is servicing our debt.
Those are what we should be addressing, not cutting NIH research.
By the way, we do have the ability to issue more debt -- because thankfully our debt is USD denominated and we can simply print more dollars. It's the only way we've survived this long as the world's largest debtor nation.
* Bush Jr Tax Cuts
* Useless Iraq war
* Too Big to Fail Bailouts of Banks
* Trumps tax cuts
* COVID spending
When billionaires and trillion-dollar corporations pay episilon to zero in taxes, maybe they should pay their share. Taxing the rich would solve the problem overnight.
I suppose no one should ever be able to take a loan.
Of course there are times when loans are great. However, through boom and bust cycles we have perpetually taken out loans.
So, you need to drill down, are the things we are spending on “capital improvements” for a better future or our operating expenses.
Interest? Military? Medicaid/care? Those will be expenses forever.
If you take anti cyclical view of it, when the stock market is at an all time high we should be paying debt, for when we need it later.
I mean things like food, clothing and utilities.
In order to prevent that, the budget must be cut. People must be fired. Promising projects must be discontinued. The question is where to make the cuts and how, because cuts in the wrong places in the wrong way will end up making the problem worse. For me, working in healthcare/science/research, I see the cuts to the NIH spending as a bad cut, because it sacrifices a lot of future revenue from scientific R&D. Same with cutting USAID and losing a ton of soft power that could be used to persuade developing countries to let in American companies. Or firing, say, IRS employees, since they're the ones who actually bring in the revenue. So there are good cuts and there are bad cuts, but the point is that eventually cuts must be made.
This is logically (and in a simple way) false. Incomes could also increase.
"Can't" here is not a statement of fact. First off, the US government can and is paying the interest on the debt.
Second, the debt is denominated in US dollars. If congress were to authorize it, the US government could print money and pay off one hundred percent of the debt in a single day. This would have negative side effects, but it's clear that "can't" is not the correct term.
So saying that too much is being spent is indeed a qualitative assessment, not a fact.
That's not how a reserve currency works. You borrow to fund growth and let inflation take care of the debt.
Inflation might take care of the debt, but it is terrible for currency holders.
Unfortunately, for people who live paycheck-to-paycheck, there's not much to be done besides wait for wages to catch up. And in general, wages don't keep immediate pace with inflation. The net result is that lower-income workers suffer the bulk of the consequences of high inflation.
Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him in to do something.
The thing about power...it only stays with the people who have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.
It's really not that hard to have that combination, i.e., "authoritarian populism".
Some of the GOP tried to do that a few years ago, and went against Trump.
They were all destroyed.
There's no longer an escape hatch from this.
Like shutting all this stuff down or radically cutting it back will surely have some dire economic impacts?
None of those other events had the same depth of damage going on here. America is dead, and doesn’t know it yet.
The only reason people aren’t saying this everywhere, is because this is unbelievable.
Income tax on everyone earning g less than 360K is going up, plus tariffs which are regressive.
They're also cutting taxes for those earning more than that, the top 5%
https://itep.org/a-distributional-analysis-of-donald-trumps-...
All these things BTW do have some limited ability to be controlled by the executive (Clinton did layoffs in the 90s, but kept supporting the same federal services). But ultimately most of this stuff is the mandate of congress and can’t just be canceled by executive order.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tax-cuts-extension-republ...
Is it about funneling this money into their tax cut? Why not just run up more debt?
There are reasons why both parties allowed the system to remain as it was. I find it's increasingly true that new politicians don't understand the value of the systems they are meant to control. They see Chesterton's Fence and tear it down with abandon. Someone like Trump has no clue why politicians act the way they do. He lies and bullshits and does whatever he wants, and it works in the short term, but the long term effect is disastrous. These people are taking a private equity approach to government. Buy it cheap and load it up with debt, then sell as much as you can and let it crash to zero. This is more looting than governing.
(I'm reminded of the Golgafrinchans from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They sent their "useless" third of society into space... The folks who did jobs like telephone cleaner or insurance salesman. The remaining two-thirds of the population died from a plague sourced from a dirty telephone.)
Regardless the DOGE/Musk stuff touches so much on technical/startup related stuff that it starts to become absurd to paint it as purely political and to say it doesn't belong here. There are very few other forums where people understand the security implications of someone having physical access to a server for example, or where the phrase "move fast and break stuff" is familiar to anyone.
Why are those comments not good enough in your eyes?
Yes those are what I mean as well when I say I find the HN hivemind to be quite far to the right :-) although I of course want to disagree with your phrasing implying that meritocracies are in any way "natural" in the social sphere.
I though there's be a minimum age of 18 to register here?
Put it on a left/right issue if you want, but in reality it is about following the law (which is not happening otherwise Trump's EOs and DOGE actions wouldn't be in court so often) and treating government workers with respect. You really want to side with a felon who pardoned almost all J6ers, even those who caused the death of police officers? You want to side with those who want to kill the investigation against Mayor Adams but might want to restart the investigation at a later point? You want to side with the US president who sides with the Russia autocrat and aggressor Putin? You want to side with the President who clearly has no understanding of how tariffs work but announces them against the neighbouring countries with which he previously negotiated a free trade agreement after breaking the old one?
Why don't you just answer the question instead: what do you consider a reaonably neutral news outlet covering these issues?
DOGE is political theater for rubes, while congress blows out the national debt for their billionaire tax breaks.
A thief approaches, but only robs you.
Would your complaint be that the billionaire should have been robbed too?
Taxation is coercion. Instead of resenting those who manage to keep more of what they earn, consider that billionaires are the ones taking risks, investing, and creating jobs. If anything, the real issue is government waste, not who’s being “robbed” the least. To that extent, what DOGE is doing, at least for the moment, is something positive, regardless of the political spin around it.
What we are now seeing is the end result of capitalism. Wealth concentration so bad that a few billionaires can take over and start making their own rules.
lol
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I agree! They sane-washed Trump for months ahead of the election. So much so they had to address it in an editorial.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/insider/trump-speeches-20...
Your point seems to be that truth depends on packaging the context it’s served in.
This is a classic post-truth move:
Distracting from the substance by debating the style. It’s a diversion, not a logical argument. When truth is pushed to the background in favor of delivery, it’s no longer about facts, but about framing those facts to fit an agenda.
You're suggesting that truth's value hinges on its presentation...A classic post-truth deflection that shifts attention from substance to style. In proper logic, a fact remains true regardless of its packaging.
You can go to the DOGE site and also ask for more transparency. Something many argue is now impossible since they have write access to government records.
> - Are the errors due to the data itself being wrong, or are the underlying sources unreliable?
> - Do these errors appear to be the result of intentional bias, or are they reasonable mistakes?
> - Ultimately, do these issues undermine the credibility of DOGE as a trustworthy source?
The article discusses all this.
That being said, I doubt it is much of a factor. The strategy of hitting fast & hard is to bypass the unreliable data by triggering screams from the areas that are most important. In some sense, anticipating this revelation is why the strategy is chosen in the first place. Trying to do massive cuts slowly and carefully gets a few months in to the project then crumbles under the weight of unreliable data and analysis paralysis.
This works for companies which can risk some debt and restructure and maybe getting better. Worst case they'll go bankrupt. In this case the screams after mistakes will be literal screams of people dying.
DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43112084 - Feb 2025 (1644 comments)
Why not more? The short answer is that avoiding too much repetition is core to HN. For a longer answer, follow the links I posted elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142645 - they'll give you more material on this than you could possibly want to read.
> Sometimes there is a crossover between tech and politics so there needs to be some slack.
That's how we look at it too. For more, see the links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142682. These also point to years' worth of explanations (which you may or may not want), but all the common questions have been answered many times there.
"NOAA scientists refuse to link warming weather to climate change" - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2469442-noaa-scientists...
Is this about Science OR politics OR politics changing science? And can you elaborate why it should not belong here?
I doubt we would have much to talk about here if Elon was not deeply involved in this storyline. There's plenty of government stuff that goes on without much to comment on that is Hacker News material.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134514
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134386
Seems to me most people want to filter HN on "purely tech", "tech-adjacent news" (incl. politics) and "startups/business". Maybe if we had something like 3-5 folders to put content here, everyone would be happier.
What were you expecting, after wading half way through the comments?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130700
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130063
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093299
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051836
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
If you (or anyone) will read some of those and follow some of the links in them, you should get answers to all the common questions about this. If, after that, you have a question that hasn't been answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
(Plus I'd like to know what it is! It's been a while since I've heard a new one.)
Mate, with all due respect, but the first few pages of your recent comments are mostly in US politics threads. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=anigbrowl
I understand you must be upset. But a bunch of us don't care anymore about another country's internal stuff. It's not even worth the schadenfreude. For us it's been a clown show for a very, very long time. Remember weapons of mass destruction? Remember when one side raised the alarm on electronic voting and then 15 years later it was the other side, and then 4 years later back to the first side? Remember the massive bailouts, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street? Remember Epstein? Borderline fascist pro-American exceptionalism Hollywood? Then ultra-woke self hating Hollywood? It's like a bad soap opera where the audience is numb to any further plot twist. Whatever happens, happens. Good luck. But please let us have this last forum not tainted with US politics. I'm sure there's plenty of welcoming threads on reddit, Facebook, X/BlueSky, and even YouTube comments.
Simply not true.
If you're talking about the account you mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143257, that account was banned from the day they started posting, and not one of their comments was ever publicly visible.
Yes, 'showdead' means you're signing up to see, among other things, the worst that the internet has to offer. I explained that in my other reply to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143611.
> Right now it's easy to create an account and then just post slurs on 30 or 40 threads before getting shadow banned
Between community moderation, mods, and software, I believe the vast majority of accounts posting slurs get banned quickly. However, if I'm mistaken and you're right, then HN must be replete with slurs (we are, after all, "doing nothing" about them in your view), and in that case there should be plenty of examples.
That's what I was asking you for. Let's see all these accounts that are "posting slurs on 30 or 40 threads without getting banned". If it's that easy, there ought to be plenty, no?
I'd be surprised if you could find even one. I'm aware of only one in the last few months, and that was a borderline case because its comments were getting killed for other reasons.
So far, the only account you've mentioned [1] is one that we banned on the day it started posting, none of whose comments ever made it out of the [dead] state. In other words, a counterexample. If you're going to make huge claims, I imagine most readers would want to see examples that illustrate your claim, not ones that contradict it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143257
It'd be nice if you responded to the suggestion that imposing more friction would shift some of the burden onto the trolls instead of the regular users. Currently they are able to keep posting even after being 'banned'. You're not even forcing them to go through the minimal effort of creating another account.
I have 'showdead' enabled because people often make valuable contributions that get flagged or hidden, and which I would miss otherwise. Since I have it on, I also see that abusive trolling from brand new accounts is very common. If you were actually banning them, then they wouldn't be able to keep posting and would be forced to set up new accounts.
> the omnipresence of abusive trolls is obvious to anyone who uses HN regularly
If that were the case, I'd be hearing about nothing else—the inbox would be dominated by it. But you're the only person saying this that I know of.
> If you were actually banning them, then they wouldn't be able to keep posting
You're changing the meaning of the word 'banned' to something other than the one it has had on HN for 18 years. That's fine in a Humpty Dumpty way (using the word to mean whatever you choose it to mean), but it makes your comments on this confusing, and I'm going to keep using the word to mean what it has always meant here.
By that standard definition, all the accounts you're talking about are already banned. The vast majority of readers see none of those comments—you see them only because you turned on the 'showdead' setting in your profile. You dislike many comments that show up when you do that, and want us to change HN so you can turn on 'showdead' but not see as many bad comments.
I explained why HN works this way (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143611), but you don't like that design and want us to change it. Specifically, you want us to (1) block banned accounts from posting at all, and (2) make it harder to create a new account on HN, so trolls find it harder to create new accounts to troll with.
That's my understanding of your argument, and you're welcome to correct me if I misread it.
Since you said you wanted my response, here it is: we're not going to do that, for several reasons:
(1) I don't want to make HN less accessible to new users. Older users often want us to add barriers for newcomers. I believe that would be a mistake. The risk to HN of failing to attract new legit users is higher than any benefit of making it harder to join.
This cost would be highest in the case of legit new users—who are inclined to bail when they encounter friction—and lowest in the case of serial trolls, who know better than anyone how to get around restrictions. Such a restriction would be least effective on the worst commenters and most effective at blocking good ones, like a chemotherapy drug that goes easier on cancer cells and is most toxic on healthy cells.
It's particularly important that new users (or existing ones who want to comment anonymously) who have unique expertise or experience about a topic be able to sign up and comment immediately. Some of HN's best-ever comments have been of that kind.
(2) The existing design—allowing banned accounts to keep posting but making their posts default-invisible, and then allowing any user to turn on a setting to read them—works remarkably well. (I get that you disagree with this, but you asked for my response, so bear with me.) If it didn't, we'd be flooded with complaints about it, and we aren't.
Not that it's perfect. Users sometimes forget that they turned on 'showdead' in their profile, and thus that they signed up to see all comments by banned accounts. In such cases we get emails saying "I can't believe that you condone accounts which post trash like <link>. How can they not be banned?" Then I have to explain that no, we don't condone it, yes the account is banned, and they (the emailer) must have 'showdead' turned on in their profile, since that's the only way they could be seeing those posts.
This is bad, but it doesn't happen often enough to fundamentally change the design—especially since these users typically respond by saying "well that's a relief! I forgot I had turned on that setting. Thanks!"
Your complaint is different: you haven't forgotten that you turned 's...
Reasonable, but this already happens - new users aren't able to downvote or flag until they've accumulated a certain amount of karma. I don't see how asking people to make 3 or 5 submissions before gaining commenting privileges would be a big hindrance.
This cost would be highest in the case of legit new users—who are inclined to bail when they encounter friction—and lowest in the case of serial trolls, who know better than anyone how to get around restrictions.
Why have an email address requirement at all then? Correspondingly, why not reveal the emails of serial trolls so they can be screened out on in other places, so that abuse results in a loss of privacy? The fact that trolls know ways to get around friction doesn't mean it's not time-consuming.
Also this seems kinda panglossian in that it assumes HN is mostly running optimally. It doesn't consider the large number of people who don't want to join HN because they perceive it as a forum where toxic behavior is semi-tolerated.
It's particularly important that new users (or existing ones who want to comment anonymously) who have unique expertise or experience about a topic be able to sign up and comment immediately. Some of HN's best-ever comments have been of that kind.
This is a valid point, but I question the urgency. It would be equally easy for people to post anonymously on a blog and submit that.
Your complaint is different: you haven't forgotten that you turned 'showdead' on, and you understand it fine—you just don't like having to see so much garbage when you do turn it on. And I agree—who would? A lot of what's in there is sewage, the worst that the internet has to offer.
But you signed up for this when you turned on 'showdead'—that's the 'contract', so to speak. You don't like this and want us to change it, but you're the only person asking for this. Everyone else who turns on 'showdead' understands that that's what they signed up for, save for the few who (as I just described) forgot that they did it and need a refresher.
It's not that I mind seeing it as such - I regularly deal with far worse in other contexts. What I question is why you let people keep doing it, as opposed to just burning their accounts. Yes, it's easy for trolls to set up a new account, but even easier to keep using the one they have. Not disincentivinzg the behavior means you'll get mroe.
(3) The 'showdead' system is critical to community trust on HN. [...] I realize that you feel differently—you don't want to see everything—but this is definitely not how most users who turn on 'showdead' feel.
This is not my position.
(4) The problem of serial trolls is not one we can ever solve [...] then we work on strengthening the immune system. What we don't do is try to replace the immune system with a different one, because the risks of doing that would be higher—the cure could be worse than the disease. There are other risks that actually do threaten the health and survival of this community. Those are the ones we need to focus on and put resources into addressing.
I can't really evaluate this as it's so vague.
(5) There have been times in the past when we have added barriers, and the result was scandal and fiasco. I'm thinking, for example, of pg's old "pending comments" design, which led to outrage, accusations of elitism, and so on. I'm not saying this is the same as what you're proposing, but it's in the same ballpark, and it's a ballpark where we've had bad results in the past, leaving me inclined to avoid it.
I unders...
Someone like Alan Kay or Peter Norvig (to pick real examples) is not going to jump through hoops to comment here. They're going to hit that barrier and bail. Ditto for project creators and article authors, who show up to respond to comments about their work. Ditto for legit throwaway accounts, when someone has relevant information that they need not to post under their regular identity.
> I can't really evaluate this as it's so vague.
You're suggesting a fundamental design change. That is too risky, the gain is dubious, and we have more pressing things to worry about.
> you don't impose any penalty at all on serial abusers
Well, now we're in a cycle and I need to raise an exception. Obviously we impose a penalty on serial abusers: we ban them.
When there's a topic on Hacker News that I'm knowledgeable about or that sparks my curiosity, I know how to write a comment. It's a skill I've built up from all of the other internet forums I've participated in.
On the other hand, the primary place where I learn about news that would be an interesting submission to Hacker News is... Hacker News. There's also a fair amount of randomness to what is ranked as a good submission. If I had to find 3-5 quality submissions before I could post on Hacker News, there's no way I would be involved in the community.
The comments are also the primary value add of Hacker News for many users, myself included. Sights like Stack Exchange might have a much higher barrier to commenting, but in those cases the central way users interact with the site is something else (questions and answers for Stack Exchange).
I thought you-know-who was defeated? Are the Death Eaters assembling again?
That Trump I and Biden did not have an effort like DOGE (which does not have Congressional support and therefore should not yet be enough to give serious people hope) shows how fundamentally unserious both of those administrations were. I hope that Musk can find a way to make it successful somehow. But if he does, it will break 1000x the number of eggs that you've seen him breaking so far.
Whether you consider yourself either a Democrat or a Republican, this is not a problem that continued party politics can solve.
Facts don't bend to party lines, and I pity those who let political loyalty eclipse objective reasoning.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43141858
You can't throw an accusation like this with further substantiation. I come to respect your difficult work, but this comment is a huge disappointment.
That's fair! But I don't know which part you mean—the "doing a ton of political battle" part, or the "breaking the site guidelines in other ways" part? I'm going to assume the latter because the former seems obvious.
If that's what you're asking about, these are the comments I was referring to:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43138527
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43127613
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43127331
I wouldn't have made that claim without checking it first. Sometimes I include links like that in mod replies, but sometimes there just isn't time.
The main problem, however, is the part about using HN primarily for political battle. That's why I included https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
More importantly, I'm sorry that my comment left you feeling accused. I feel accused a lot as well and I know it doesn't feel good.
Initiated under President Jimmy Carter in 1977, Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) required agencies to justify their budgets from scratch rather than just adjusting from the previous year.
President Ronald Reagan pushed for privatization, deregulation, and reduced federal spending.
The Grace Commission (1982-1984), led by businessman J. Peter Grace, was tasked with identifying inefficiencies in government.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton launched the National Performance Review (later renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government), led by Vice President Al Gore.
The NPR aimed to make government "work better and cost less" by cutting red tape, streamlining bureaucracy, and increasing customer service.
Key successes included shifting more government services online, consolidating purchasing, and reducing federal workforce size.
Launched by President George W. Bush in 2001, the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) focused on:
Strategic management of human capital
Competitive sourcing (increasing private-sector competition for government contracts)
Financial performance improvements
E-Government expansion (improving federal websites and online services)
Budget and performance integration
2010s: DATA Act & Digital Transformation
President Barack Obama signed the DATA Act (2014), which aimed to improve transparency and accountability in government spending.
Obama also created the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and 18F, teams dedicated to modernizing government technology.
The Trump administration’s PMA (2018) emphasized IT modernization, data transparency, and a shift to "shared services", where multiple agencies use the same administrative systems.
The Biden administration has continued these efforts, focusing on AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation, as well as improving citizen-facing services like healthcare and tax processing.
I’m not saying DOGE is definitively good or even that they are going to actually accomplish their mission (probably their cuts will become a piggy bank that gets raided by OTA’s at the end of the fiscal year). But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
What is on paper for government contracts is totally different from reality. Most of these programs accomplish nothing, are totally un-utilized, filled with employees who literally do not show up to work.
I could write a novel with examples but here are some notable anecdotes:
- Once, I built an intelligence solution for a large-ish intelligence program within a civil agency. After 6 months it was not used once but cost the government a cool ~12M$. Only after a full year did the program leadership finally take a look and discover, wait a second, none of these people have worked more than a week total in the past year. Only half got laid off, the rest are still gainfully employed elsewhere in the government. Many such cases!
- I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!
- Dozens of cases of the government spending on “XYZ tool” that sounds super critical. In reality they are paying $12M for a postgres database and an extremely basic data entry UI on top. Also, I can’t believe I am about to defend Sharepoint, but realistically something like tracking 10 SIM cards can go in an excel spreadsheet and doesn’t need a $12M “inventory tool.”
- Many cases of projects investigating bird flu in depth and tracking its spread as early as 2022. You would think this is critical with bird flu being a thing right now; however none of these $20M+ contracts have accomplished much at all.
You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same. The only way to go from GS-12 to GS-13 to GS-14 to GS-15 is just to spend recklessly. They are experts at justifying their budget and navigating internal hierarchies. However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.
(Disclaimer: “government” above refers to civil, exclusive of DoD)
- new age defense tech companies band together pretty tightly
- you can cut 10 Palantir contracts and save $200M but then you’re stuck with the existing tools (Sharepoint+PowerBI or Salesforce+Accenture) that are usually super shitty and 1-2B$ contracts vehicles for SI
- Palantir actually has really low revenue, as recent as 4 years ago they would have often qualified as a Small Business
- if you cut down entire lines of effort, sweep out the legs from under an entire program, lay off bureaucrats, etc. you can stop more stab wounds and stem bleeding; this is an okay step 1
Ironically the easiest way to quickly fix the deficit is actually to spend money. Most government employees are contractors because a GS-15 can earn maybe 150k while a contractor translating to only a GS-13 can earn 200k while their agency charges the government 600k a head. So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed. Then you can cancel all the PWS contracts. By napkin math this would account for a cool ~$1T over 4 years.
Why on Earth would anyone go work for an organization that thinks it's ok to "layoff 90%" under the assumption that they're all under-performing? And you're making a huge assumption by saying there's zero risk. Laying off 90% of the original air traffic controllers presents zero risk? The intelligence services? Law enforcement? The military? Payroll accounts for around 3% of the Federal budget. Layoffs aren't going to fix our spending problem.
And this completely ignores the fact that's it's illegal to fire most of these people without cause. They're going to sue and they're going to win. And we'll end up paying them salaries to have not worked for however long those lawsuits take.
Clearly no one at Musk's DOGE has spent time in actual government bureaucracy.
- it is very hard to go thru every project and generally not worth it, it seems like they are sorting by contract vehicle size. there are 120k+ contracts spit out by the government every fiscal year alone so this is a monumental effort
- the DEI programs are probably a PR thing, generally speaking though they accomplish essentially nothing; I would probably go further though and roll up any program staffed by less than 10 people, then furlough 20% of the workforce under the larger program
- not all outgoing money has been frozen, idk how this rumor got started, it’s very specific and generally just foreign aid. this is part of trump’s campaign promise so while I don’t agree with it and it is probably going to shatter US hegemony, it is also what people voted for. the government is still spending tons of money, we are still doing more in depth tracking but it seems like only a 3-4% decrease overall
- the OIGs deserve to be fired they have not been able to stem any underlying issues for years, the outrage here is all manufactured. let me ask you this, if you hired an accountant and for the last 10 years they can neither tell you how much money you are spending nor find savings, are you going to keep that accountant?
- the IRS is not really efficient! first of all a majority of their audits are on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. yes of course the top 20% are still overrepresented correctly, but they are actually losing money for every audit they conduct on the bottom 80%. estimates are around 0.96$ per dollar with ~6k$ per audit, so they’d save $240 per audit they skip on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. it’s true they recover 6$ on average for every dollar spent on the top 20% which cost averages out to a little over 3$ recovered per dollar; however this is actually not much money, around $30B a year total. for such a massive agency and mission they do a pretty terrible job, and is very warranting of disruption
People are being gaslit into thinking the government is efficient; in reality it is endlessly bloated.
If outgoing money isn't frozen, why do farmers not receive money for the binding contracts why fullfill for the government. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/usda-freezes-farmer-funding...
The IGs have be fired in a very specific way that involves informing Congress. It was not done correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_... Cardell Richardson was in office since only May, don't know about you, but I'd give a new IG a year to get his ship running smoother. But looking at his picture I see why he was fired...
Regarding the IRS, well then we can expect that from now on only the rich people will get audited?
Firing IGs without notice isn’t great but if Congress has an issue with it they are free to take it up. I’m not sure why that is relevant to whether or not IGs should be fired.
Cardell was an IG for literally two decades. This is like saying a SWE at Facebook for 20 years who now works in Meta’s VR division has only been a SWE for 1 year.
OIG at Department of State especially, among all OIGs, deserves mass layoffs. The track record of that office is the absolute worst.
It is also typical for SES to get rotated out and replaced during any new administration. 1-2 years in office is totally fair game as not many make it past 3.
Regarding the IRS, that’s a campaign promise Trump made and seems to be keen on with his ERS plans. However I doubt it will come to fruition or have meaningful impact, the IRS is hard to disrupt due to longstanding relationships with Congress.
No, that's absolutely not true. My partner is the accounting manager for a university. All their access to federal funding was turned off for a couple of days, and several grants (which they could draw from and get overnight) have not shown up in several weeks (specifically there are some that even remotely hint at DEI, that the university now expects will never be fulfilled).
It's not just "foreign aid".
I literally analyze this stuff for work, there is barely a 3-5% contraction in spending.
This is such an insane rumor too because it takes 10 seconds to disprove it: https://www.usaspending.gov/search/?hash=8980ee6820c47f96a19...
The other point is just because a contract or award is on usaspending.gov doesn't mean the funds are flowing - that was my point, my partner's school has many awards that previously they could draw from at will, and receive money overnight. They've attempted to draw from many of them now, and the funds just ... aren't being transferred.
That was part of the furore, "we have agreements and obligations in place and you're just refusing to fund them", it's not about the existence of the awards in the first place.
High-income audits are difficult to conduct. To increase receipts, it is far easier to just conduct more easy, low-yield audits. This is the optimization they are making, and in service of their mission (maximizing revenue) it is technically correct.
Instead of picking your favorite logical fallacy to throw at me, you can go look this stuff up yourself to confirm.
According to this, FTEs are down, and operating costs are only up ~30% compared to 2010. Average cost of collection is down.
And consider the decline in audit rate for millionaires from 2010-2019 described here: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-need-to-rebuil...
I guess the onus is now on you to provide support for your claims.
Those 15k they fired may just be forcing them back to how they were a year ago.
However unlike in 2016, a strong plurality voted Trump - 2 million more than voted for Harris. Had Harris won the popular vote that argument might have meant something.
A few hundred votes slipped the US election in 2000 and caused the invasion of Iraq.
You tackle this by having societal norms and strong institutions. The internet broke that. The concentration of wealth broke that. The unprecedented algorithmic manipulation broke that.
Some love it.
You could say the same thing about a popular vote where a candidate wins by 10 votes - "oh, our entire system is decided by 10 voters? how unfair"
For the US election, votes in other states resulted in a situation where only 5 were swing states. If those voters in non-swing states voted differently in enough numbers, then there wouldn't be just 5 swing states.
Look at any of the elections in the past 40-50 years and you can clearly see that which states are "swing states" and which aren't changes over time.
The usual reason for this is simply dependencies. At some point in time, somebody took a working system, had some extra budget, and then invented a process that took the existing system as an input and produced some marginally useful work. But then next year, the new process was part of the working system, and they had more budget, and they added more roles and processes based on its output. Now you can't take it away: regardless of how marginally useful it was last year, everything built on top of it will fail. That $10M contract with one user might have just one user, but that one user might be the crucial communication link that determines the budget for a 1000-person department. You might even have a contract with zero users, but without auditing the inner workings of the whole department, how do you know it has zero users and won't just break everything when you terminate it?
The problem with reducing costs with a heavy hand is that you will cut things which are actually useful. And probably, the saving will be very little compared to the overall budget. I think DOGE is primarily a demagogical operation.
Your company sends people in business class needlessly, ok. The government sends people in private jets needlessly -- there are dozens of separate aviation programs just within Dept. of State each with their own planes and contracts to staff and supply those planes. We have hundreds of posts around the world, many people are getting to those mainly on charters, private legs, or in the contractor case, business class tickets billed at 2x rate under T&L.
This is just one specific example; it applies across the board, when the government spends it is on an exponentially different scale to commercial. A single database will easily cost them 5M$ -- that is ~10x the cash moved on the floor of a major casino during a busy night.
> I also worked in the public sector (not in the US)
Yes, key phrase not in the US. As a comparison, the largest spending item in our budget is Medicaid -- ineffective healthcare that applies to less than 20% of our population. We spend 4x more on Medicaid somehow than the UK spends on the entirety of the NHS.
I picked the NHS because it serves the same size population (70M) while having more coverage and better outcomes.
Having lived in the UK yeah the waiting times suck, I went to a doctor actively bleeding out with an infection and they gave me a dressing and said to wait 3 months for a surgeon. That’s insane but the same outcome people on Medicaid will get in the US.
In the above anecdote I just flew back to the US the next day and was treated and “cured” 4 hours after landing. But, I did that on private insurance, not Medicaid. When americans shit on the NHS they are comparing it to their private insurance, not to the state funded healthcare options (Medicaid/Medicare).
Federal revenue in one year is more than the market cap of the most valuable US company. It’s an enormous organization. If waste is as a similar level proportionally, it’ll be similarly enormous. Is it actually more than that?
The federal government with exponentially higher revenue that exceeds the entire market cap of these valuable companies actually runs a deficit while predominantly providing inferior services in competing categories; while having insanely high opex and capex.
This inefficiency passes everywhere, including to their contractors — because of all the random shit, compliance, regulations in government contracting, the average margin is somehow only 10-30%. They charge often 3-100x the price of a good or service when provided to the private sector yet make 3x >less< profit.
The scope of the inefficiency is unimaginable, something we must absolutely not accept under any circumstances if we want to have a future as a country that does not involve being a permanent debtor to other economies.
The difference is that businesses that are inefficient are wasting revenue, and eventually go bust. There is no self-correcting mechanism for government.
But practically the self correcting mechanism is democracy, our elected officials have been failing us. Like it or hate it, DOGE has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else conbined incl 5 other agencies over the last 20 years. The reaction from the bureaucracy and political machine should tell you everything you need to know about our prospects in the absence of DOGE.
This is categorically false. 70% of our debt is held by US entities.
Well, a quarter of the population can barely read, so makes sense.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States )
For example, I don’t personally care for RFK. I’m the opposite of an anti-vaxxer, I think the government should vaccinate you in your sleep. But he was part of the pitch and MAHA was part of the coalition and I voted for the platform and was happy to see him confirmed. That’s how political coalitions work.
Then who are you supposed to vote for if you want X and Y but are against Z (but think X or Y is more important than Z)?
The tactic right now seems to be to cause as much chaos as possible, to find and point to one silver lining and then to move on as quickly as possible. Ignoring all the irreparable harm caused along the way.
Social security and Medicare payments will continue to be made. That’s the essential stuff. Everything else can tolerate some disruption.
Did you ever consider what you and everybody else will lose by allowing all this to happen in such ways? One random example from the sea of examples - US within a month lost all the international respect it ever built after WWI lets say. I mean all of it, and its not coming back anytime soon.
Now its a fat bully who kicks kids randomly including former friends, chokes them from all lunch money and some more. Literally China looks like our new best buddy from European perspective. Once we move to their ways of working and their financial flows, petrodollar will never ever be the same power projection it once was. And you know what China has to do to achieve all this soft power win? Absolutely nothing, just sit back and enjoy the view of an orange man have his mental fits and petty vengeful fights on all sides (apart from russia obviously, they were always great friends to US and its democracy).
What international respect? People in my corner of the world are quite happy about Trump revealing the U.S. meddling in south Asian affairs. Liberal internationalism is deeply unpopular outside Western Europe, because it generally invokes America meddling in the internal affairs of Asian and middle eastern countries.
Also, Americans clearly don’t care about “international respect”—in the sense you’re talking about it. Your example is the archetype of the problem: you have government filled with liberal internationalists who have particular values that don’t reflect the electorate. Most democrats don’t care about American hegemony—they just like Obamacare. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous Iraq War, most Republican voters want to turn inward and close the border.
But somehow the internationalists have burrowed into the federal government and you can’t get rid of them. Similarly, support for increasing immigration has never been over 34% but somehow immigration keeps increasing. Affirmative action keeps being resurrected and renamed. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get these people out of the government.
What respect? All its relevant allies - whole Europe, Canada. Half a billion of wealthy democracy aligned folks in Europe and Canada. Remove them and most of the remaining world doesnt share at all core values with what we call western democracies. Those wont ever be long term allies.
China seems very happy with his moves, so is India with current government. And thats about it for important players. I did expect him to be friendly towards russia but speed and intensity of his ass kissing and ignoring basic facts is quite something. But somebody ignoring his own constitution from Day 1 can't be expected to deliver much.
In 2003 the USA invaded Iraq because the "intelligence community" made up claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, resulting in the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and 4,700 coalition troops; and the rise of ISIS. You think Trump's actions in the past month are worse than that?
I don’t think most people in Australia are really paying that much attention to what is happening in the US. And the fact remains that Australia needs the US and doesn’t really have any other real option. Our immediate neighbours are either even weaker than we are (New Zealand) or too culturally different to make a military alliance a viable option (Indonesia). The average Australian isn’t willing to incur the risk or cost of “going it alone” on national security. The UK is too far away to help us. The US is far away too, but the US retains an ability to project power globally which the UK has largely lost.
And if the polls are right, we are going to elect Dutton as our next PM, who even though he occasionally criticises Trump, on the whole is closer to Trump than our current government is.
Even my teenage kids hate the US now because of how Trump talks about Nato and that’s just because of how they talk in their War Thunder teams. Cozying up to Russia will do that for you. And they already didn’t respect the US because of how the government treats its own citizens.
It’s very hard to gain respect. It’s very easily lost.
"The newly released House GOP resolution proposes a $4 trillion debt ceiling increase while allocating $4.5 trillion in new deficits for the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee."
Even if DOGE finds $29 billion in waste, it would essentially be a rounding error compared to those numbers.
This is almost the definition of a dysfunctional workplace. The best you can hope for with this kind of organization is that it barely keeps limping along. (Of course, we already know that Republicans want to “drown [the federal government] in a bathtub,” so I imagine the trauma will only get worse.)
Congressional representatives. You can share what you know with your representative and ask they investigate. Congress regularly calls in bureaucrats to talk about budgets. If your case bears out, ask your members of Congress to propose amendments to the next budget cutting or fixing bad programs. And representatives very often add amendments targeting specific programs, or even sponsor such bills. We don't often hear about them because they're not sexy enough for news.
The goals toward which we spend tax dollars must be debated by representatives of the people. The executive branch will then be told the goals, the structure, the controls, and the budget. If the executive agrees, they sign the bill. Afterwards, the executive's power is in deciding who will carry out the goals and how to adapt to the situation on the ground while staying within the boundaries of the law. If the law is too restrictive, the executive can talk to Congress.
What must not happen is an executive deciding to ignore a law voted on by the majority of Congress and signed by a president. That's not an executive power, that's just an unconstitutional power grab. If we allow that, there's basically no point to Congress.
The specific grants Trump is freezing were determined by the executive itself. They can be cancelled by the executive too. At some point, of course, Trump will need to seek recession under the impoundment act if USAID isn’t going to use its full appropriation. But in the meantime it’s totally within his authority to cancel specific grants that were decided by the executive in the first place.
Like, here's an example: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/2617... (search USAID)
> UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
> Funds Appropriated to the President
> operating expenses
> For necessary expenses to carry out the provisions of section 667 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, $1,743,350,000
I would strongly recommend listening to Rory Stewart's commentary in the first half of this podcast about the function and role of USAID as an expression of soft power.
If you take away the premise that the US is doing something good, like for PEPFAR, then what is left? A gun wielding maniacal imperial power that you have no reason to deal or treat with. This is bad for the US and bad for the world
Trump and Musk are both petty, vindictive, greedy, and narcissistic billionaires, known for grifting, deception, abuse, and ruthless behavior. How can anyone trust them?
When it comes to deregulation, we can pretend like this is new, or we can have an honest discussion and acknowledge deregulation in various forms has been a key component of the Conservative, Libertarian, and Liberal platforms for decades. Recently even the Socialist platform has adopted deregulation for key industries like housing and infrastructure.
You can both hate Musk and Trump (as both are demonstrably all of the things you said above) and acknowledge that ultimately what they are doing is the best progress we have had on this front in 20+ years. Regardless of how many bureaucrats parade on media claiming otherwise, we must not forget that the government is and has historically been incredibly inefficient, reckless with spending, and filled with endless waste. This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!
We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_. It is not perfect, nor is it optimal, but it is far better than the last 5 attempts.
No it wasn’t.
> We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_.
This is like an arsonist setting fire to your house and saying we finally have a chance to renovate.
As large as social security is, I'm sure there's some efficiencies to be gained too, but the military industrial complex is THE defacto leader in greed and wastefulness
But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them. You can't tell me they're competent after that big of a screw up.
It has become somewhat of a pattern for politicians to yell about defense spending, get elected, look under the covers and do an immediate 180 in favor of defense spending.
On the other hand you can cut around 70% of the civil government immediately with no impact on our country. Social Security would not be my first choice though!
> But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them
They did not -- this is simple malicious compliance. This is a really well documented phenomenon and I am hoping this situation draws more public attention to it! Whenever faced with cuts, our govt bureaucracy reacts by cutting something visible to create a PR disaster and force back cuts -- the common saying is "firemen and teachers first" and this is often referred to as "Washington Monument Syndrome."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome
Except in this case the victims happened to be essential to maintaining the security of the United States' nuclear weapons stockpile.
Surely their evil, bureaucratic bosses just did it for show to score political points though, right?
>Whenever faced with cuts, our govt bureaucracy reacts by cutting something visible to create a PR disaster and force back cuts
Cite one credible source saying this is in fact what happened recently with NNSA and I might believe you.
The preponderance of evidence recently does not support this, what with it being widely reported that ill-suited unqualified personnel have been presiding over these cuts across all agencies, at a scale and speed which is unprecedented.
BTW SpaceX is a fairly tiny government contractor -- big ones like Accenture and other consulting firms have previously audited spending including their own contracts.
And sobriety if the CPAC video was anything to go by.
It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution? We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, and the last person to make headway here was Bill Clinton -- who proposed an even more callous approach to cuts.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/feb/06/yes-bill-clin...
- they weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing
- it was a measured, thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.
- most importantly, 3/4 of those were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended.
- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut to the rich
- lastly, there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned
So basically night and day compared to what is happening now.
That being said, at the very least basically everything they do moves towards some outcome. Most folks in the military are incredibly mission-driven. Plus, all their big contracts (50M$+) get regular hearings from Congress.
The same cannot be said for civil at all, they have little to no oversight, everyone is buddy-buddy so internal audits often border on fraud, there are many billion dollar contracts that have never gone thru Congressional approval.
If you want to really lose your shit, you should look up how OTA contract vehicles function. Literally just "trust me bro" spending, and for some reason rampant in civil.
I'm not concerned with government spending. The only reason we have a deficit is because GOP keeps cutting taxes for millionaires.
> they spend the most by far
This is not true and for some reason a common myth that is easily disproven; defense spending is only 13% of the budget, the 54% number people keep throwing around is discretionary spending and not relevant as we should be looking at the entire budget.
DOGE is literally just sorting by percent of budget; Medicaid is 22%, SSA is 20%, interest on our deficit by itself is 11% and on track to exceed our entire defense budget.
> The only reason we have a deficit is because GOP keeps cutting taxes for millionaires.
I mean, the math does not check out at all. We can expect losses of revenue from cuts to be around the same as receipts from audits done by the IRS; we know this number to be only around ~50B$ a year. You are being gaslit into thinking the problem is your fellow citizens not paying more in taxes, when anyone going into government can tell you they are reckless with spending.
Just to put things in perspective, Medicaid is hardly an actual healthcare program as it applies to less than 20% of our population. However it somehow(?) costs more than 4x as much as the entire NHS.
That's still a cool 70 million people.
>However it somehow(?) costs more than 4x as much as the entire NHS.
Sounds like a good argument for [properly-administered] single-payer, universal healthcare.
Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.
> Sounds like a good argument for [properly-administered] single-payer, universal healthcare.
The opposite right now! The US government is SO bad at managing healthcare, that they are somehow making the NHS look great.
We need to get our bureaucracy and spending under control. Then definitely yes, government funded healthcare, we can have a system closer to Australia in efficacy.
This is a tangent to this thread but I think in practice we will probably end up with something closer to the Swiss hybrid system.
I wish I was optimistic as you. Only problem is, I highly doubt any savings realized from spending cuts will materialize in the form of better healthcare.
Regulatory capture is rampant, and then there's that whole pesky issue of growing unchecked authoritarianism that has a good chance of not aligning with the will of the people.
The building is on fire, closing your eyes or clinging to a bottle of water are both valid reactions!
They might both cover ~70M, but the NHS population has a median age of ~41, for Medicare it's ~71. The US health system is expensive, but NHS vs Medicare cost is not really a valid comparison with such drastically different demographics.
Perhaps we should be barking up the tree of the private medical-insurance complex which is the real problem when it comes to healthcare costs.
The only real way you can reform the government purely from the confines of the system is turning over around 70% of the legislative branch, I do not see that happening in any future.
People also claim that social security is a great portion of spending, but it's fully funded through income tax and even more solvent since covid killed so many of it's recipients.
But defense doesn't get cut because it props up a huge infrastructure across many states. No senator wants to be the ones to vote to cut that in their state.
The US economy is built, to some degree, on the military-industry complex, especially since we offshored all the other manufacturing.
That's nonsense.
The current administration doesnt care about waste or corruption. I can think of few things more wasteful or corrupt then "The Wall"
If someone wanted to make an actual good faith effort to make goverment more effecient going over the reports would be the first thing you would do instead of attacking theae agencies.
If someone wanted to randomly cut departments that might object to illegal and corrupt actions the administration might take, or ones that once said nice things about minorites or just so you could stuff the fired positions with incompent cronies (or hire your freinds as contractors) then it would look a lot like DODGE
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/14/politics/corruption-justi... > Since Inauguration Day, the Justice Department has paused all investigations into corporate foreign bribery, curtailed enforcement of a foreign agent registration law and deemphasized the criminal prosecutions of Russian oligarchs. And senior administration officials have considered eliminating the Department’s Public Integrity Section, which investigates and prosecutes alleged misconduct by federal, state and local public officials.
For starters, these people are in fact idiots. They randomly fired people at NNSA with virtually no warning. What the fuck? [0]
In response to your point: Why throw USDS in the trash? That was a great example of an effective, agile non-partisan tech workforce. [1]
Now federal workers are having to submit to political loyalty tests. [2]
Perhaps their true intentions here aren't really cost savings, if that isn't blatantly obvious already.
>We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, ...
That's like trying to cure cancer with cancer, but on the face of it and not in some clever cutting-edge way.
Actual solutions? Take highly effective organizations and copy them. USDS and JSOC come to mind.
I don't buy it. Shucks, we've exhausted every other method—therefore, the solution here is to hand over the reigns to immature, extremely low caliber people with conflicts of interest that are absolutely massive [3], and whose motivations are questionable at best?
Yeah, no thanks. I dislike government waste and inefficiency as much as the next person, but using the guise of cost cutting to rapidly install loyalists at critical power junctures isn't a good thing. Never mind the flagrant disregard for the law that's taking place as this is all unfolding.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298190/nuclear-agency-...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/doge-engineering-director-resign...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/trump-loyalty-white-house-maga-ve...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/elon-musk-com...
Provide proof of this claim please.
People are acting like I'm making outlandish claims, you can literally just google this! If you are going to go down a rabbit hole I recommend USASpending, which consumes ATOM from FPDS and so is very close to source-of-truth.
You could maybe instead say that they should be under the same roof, rather than being independent entities. But I don't think this is itself evidence that any of them have been ineffective. Having read some of their reports, OMB and CBO are not ineffective on face value.
(I also don't think any of this is really about curbing government spending.)
Skimming OiG audit reports, they appear comprehensive and detailed. How has the government failed in auditing if these audits exist?
Where is the 20 years of failure to audit and track spending you mentioned? I’m not sure what you expect me to google.
And he actually did manage to balance the budget. Too bad that didn’t last long under Bush.
Citation needed. They do their jobs, problem is politians also do theirs. Making sure military doesnt cut spending in their district even if military leaders think a base or tank factory is not needed.
Its easy to say this is wrong and these people are idiots because thats the case. Actually I wont even say theyre all idiots theyre just malicous and dont care about the damagr they cause. This isnt some sort of careful attempt to make goverment work better. Its axing random groups because they once said something positive about minorities or necause they prosecute political corruption or because they can install their own cronies or outsource it to their company
- 3/4 of those cut were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended
- large swaths of gov employees weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing (the long-term effects of which are yet to be felt)
- it was a more thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.
- there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned
- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut primarily benefiting the wealthy
There's really no comparison with what is happening now.
I’m not defending DOGE’s specifics or competence here, but do we need to clean house? Absolutely, yes.
I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired.
I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more successful prior to acquisition.
So yeah , sorry, startups can be extremely inefficient too.
I’ve also worked for some of the biggest tech companies or have friends that work there now, including Meta, they are extremely wasteful in nearly all cases. They just make a lot of money. Probably like the collective United States.
The moral of my story is that efficiency isn’t necessarily profitable, desired or even required.
In my opinion DOGE is telling stories to distract and achieve other ends. Last I hear most of Musks companies actively received government welfare :)
Yes, this is very much a Ship of Theseus argument. But, I think that is very apropos?
BTW, we already tried that and it didn't work
This can be seen in every resource consumption ever. We get far more out of any single input now than was ever achievable in the past.
The other, as someone else pointed out, is a matter of scale.
Just a whole department of people who innovated without any of the red tape, in a government setting.
And it's like 10 to 1 of contractors vs civilians that work for the gov. You'll find a hell of a lot of casual corruption there too -- companies bribing the civilians who select contracts to pick them. It cuts across public & defense spending.
You need to be a big-ish company to enter, and will have to kiss the feet of existing oligarchs.
I don’t think DOGE will fix this because the solution is easy but very counterintuitive — we would need around 30% raises to all federal employees at GS-12 and higher, to match market rates.
Right now they cannot hire civil servants that are skilled due to being unable to compete on comp; instead they have to reach to private sector, which will charge them 600 a head, while paying each contractor 200. Because GS only affords 120-130 for those positions, it becomes necessary to reach for contractors.
PWS contracts are the biggest suck on budget; eg there are more PWS contractors manning what would normally be FTE positions at Dept of State than total FTEs.
Unfortunately, it is so backwards to actually spend more and raise payscales to save money that I don’t think DOGE will land there as a strategy.
But firing a bunch of government employees doesn't fix this problem. Where there is waste, it mostly comes in the form of contractors bilking the government, not the government employees themselves.
Is DOGE going after the private sector and their bilking of the government?
The only way to get promoted at and above gs-12 is to amass reports and budget authority. The wasteful spending is not handed down mandatory by congress, it is conducted using budget authority afforded to federal employees.
If you lay off 70% of federal employees especially those in gs-12 to 15 range, you could probably easily cut 70% of discretionary spending with literally no negative impact.
You will never see them reduce their budgets because it reduces their political power; look up “Washington Monument Syndrome” for how they have evaded cuts for the last two decades.
The only way to reduce 70% of the discretionary spending is for Congress to reduce the discretionary budget by 70%.
As an aside, you're actually making the argument that we need more federal employees. The push to privatize everything has led to higher costs and more abuse. So DOGE is currently doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
This x100. For all those lambasting the public sector, understand that its flaws are not because of the 'public' part, but because of the size of the organization.
Private sector organization's inefficiency, fraud and waste also scales directly with their size.
Doge is the one recommending bloodletting and brushing with burning straw.
The issue is rarely that neither side can name the problem but what is claimed to be the reason and therefore the solution.
There are 5 doctors who you have paid to treat you; they came, performed some tests, confirmed you are wounded, but don't know how to patch you up.
DOGE comes along and says well, what if we amputate the arm and cauterize it?
This will stop the bleeding, but you will lose an arm. That sucks, there is probably a method to treat you to stop the bleeding and prevent the loss of an arm, but nobody has figured it out and you are going to run out of blood.
Do you amputate or choose to bleed to death?
If we're going with the medical analogy, we've been rubbing all kinds of creams and taking all kinds of pills for a funky looking mold on our arm. There's some malignant growth, but operating may damage one's ability to use their hand, so treatments are used to keep the growth in check. Treatments aren't cheap, sometimes they don't work or cause side effects and need changing, and often you end up driving an hour for a five minute check-up.
There are risky solutions, such as operating and hoping you can still use your hand afterwards, that will cost time and effort and hopefully reduce the illness in your body afterwards, but the risks have as of yet been deemed higher than the reward.
DOGE is cutting off the arm, slicing it up in parts, and checking for every individual clump of cells if they're necessary or not, before trying to put them back. You're losing a lot of blood and you may need decades of surgery to get your functioning hand back, but all of the bad parts have been removed at least.
At the end you can’t move but still bleed.
Reading your comment I saw so many similarities to any large organisation which I worked for that I can't help but think it's simply on the same level.
Hell, my first internship was 100% budget filler and, in line with my role, I was useless.
Regarding inefficiency: I'm a contractor for a large organisation and have been for over three years now.
My contract is up in a few months and by that time I will have a total of four years of cancelled projects under my belt. At least one of them started out as an Excel sheet and in truth could have remained so.
They're also vicious, many times I have been cussed out by bureaucrats over stupid things like css padding on a table. There are lines that don't get crossed in corporate politics, none of those lines exist in government.
The majority of things illegal in governments are business as usual in the private sector. Want to take a kickback of a supplier? Perfectly fine and normal on non large corporations. Still happens on those.
Because you had luck with your career is not representative of overall corporate behaviour. I worked as a third party seeing lots of large companies as clients. The amount of BS is outstanding and awe inspiring.
Everybody cries when the government raises taxes. Yet, when corporations increase prices despite not having higher cost, we just accept it as "business as usual".
As corporations rival the power of nations more and more, some people should rethink their attitude to public and private enterprise.
See: British East India Company. I don't really have a relevant point to make here but corporations being more powerful than countries actually seems to be the default state that has already been dealt with somewhat, rather than a novel growing problem.
What's different in our time, is that it is not just one company, but a whole range of mega-companies (Particularly in technology). It has changed from a few powerful and malicious actors to a systematic problem, fueled by the dynamics of the financial markets and passive investment.
I've talked to a lot of people who have worked for other huge companies and the stories are similar. When I worked for the Fed there were people there who had worked for GM, Boeing, etc. and a few said the Fed was actually more efficient than some of those.
Has anyone ever worked for a very large (several billion annual spend or more) entity that was anywhere near as efficient as a startup or SMB?
This is why small startups can beat enormous companies. From what I've seen, comparatively, startups can at times be thousands of times as cost-efficient. But as startups grow they become less efficient. I've seen this too. It's incredibly hard to maintain efficiency as things scale for a very long list of reasons.
There are now billions-USD-worth fewer jobs in the American economy.
Administrative spending is also not that high, the majority of savings are in contracts. This is related to jobs because every employee you lay off, is one less person who can spend millions of dollars.
So in practice, there are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers and being sent abroad. And only some millions-USD-worth fewer jobs.
John Doe working in sales with three kids will lose his home if he misses a few paychecks. He drives a 2009 Toyota Camry and only buys things on clearance. Why should 20 cents of every dollar he makes go towards a bureaucratic machine that accomplishes very little? Why should 1 cent on every dollar he makes go towards funding mandatory charity and foreign aid, why should 5 cents of every dollar go towards a federal jobs program? It is easy to talk about things in isolation when we look at individual impact on budget or only look at the poor, but empathy based arguments fall flat when that same empathy is not extended towards the american workers funding this. Keep in mind we had an Industrial Revolution and fought two world wars without income tax on 90% of Americans!
FICA and payroll tax is the ultimate evil and should at the bare minimum be rolled into graduated income tax, but I digress.
It's also absolutely true that private companies are endlessly wasteful. I've worked for four large companies now, and the waste is mind boggling. I think what upsets people about government is that tax dollars are used to fund it, but I would claim from my own observation that beyond a certain size any kind of organization is filled with waste.
I'll point out, though, that there are areas of government that have been studied and found to be very efficient, and have high levels of satisfaction. It's been quite a while now, but I recall around ~2006-2007 an academic study came out which was originally intended to look only at private insurers. As they designed the study they realized that given the size of Medicare they should also include Medicare as part of the study.
What they found:
- A much much higher percentage of the money going into Medicare goes toward patient care than in any of the private insurers. Like low single digit percentages of overhead vs. 10-25% overhead in the case of the private insurers.
- Customer satisfaction from dealing with the bureaucracy (claim processing) of Medicare was much higher than customer satisfaction with the private insurers.
- Patient satisfaction with the care they were receiving from Medicare was as high or higher than the private insurers.
Most large wasteful private organizations are often the ones who get comfortable in their existing market, employees get hardened in their ways, and eventually are threatened by changes in the market and competition and die off. There is no competitive pressure on gov agencies. It’s almost always a one way street after an agency gets formed that it continues as is indefinitely with only occasional changes in leadership. The number of agencies (>400 federally in US) only increases. Congress rarely looks backwards with spending, they only challenge demands for new spending plans to expand agencies. Otherwise budgets only go up with new line items as US tax revenue forever increases each year.
Citation needed. The OMB has been around for a while.
But those big wins were rare. It’s mostly small stuff like during Biden admin they banned single use plastic and reducing food waste. No one has ever really done large scale data analysis on spending and made it a major priority across the federal government in recent history.
Citations needed. I found this with almost zero effort and it seems like the program saved $60 billion over four years: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/briefing-room/2024/...
I feel like your confidence is just ignorance
The US federal gov spends almost $ 7 trillion a year. I’m sure they can find a whole lot more than a few billion here and there each year.
I also don’t know why it’s so controversial to want the gov to spend money wisely and make efficiency a core value. It’s funny what people will defend because the current people doing it are controversial and unprofessional so the whole idea gets dismissed. I’m not a political extremist like that, I just think it could and should be done better and done right.
This is a rank and disgusting assumption, and should show anyone else reading this how dmix isn't an honest participant in this discussion.
It's not controversial that an administration is trying to spend money wisely, but that isn't what is going on here. Firing NNSB staff because you don't know what the NNSB does isn't trying for efficiency, it's pure and utter stupidity.
Now time for my assumptions: I don't know why it's so controversial to want the government to act with care, diligence, and common fucking sense when nuclear energy or weapons are involved. Why don't you care about nuclear safety, dmix?
It’s not. Consider that people who do believe in efficiency might be upset about political purges which increase inefficiency being conducted under the guise of efficiency – for example, illegally breaking contracts or firing people will cost more and cutting things which are useful (the vast majority of what DOGE has done) is not only failing to deliver savings but also throwing out the past investment. Research funding and cuts to researchers are a great example: an NIH, NASA, EPA, etc. scientist represents millions of dollars in training even if they’re “just” a probationary hire. Firing them to save 0.00000002% of the federal budget means giving up the money which was already invested in them and the programs they support.
Similarly, people who actually study government efficiency often highlight the high cost of reducing unnecessary spending. For example, we could try to drive down the number of Social Security payments sent to people who are dead but decades of auditors have found that would be a massive _increase_ of inefficiency because the vast majority of payments are legitimate and it would require a huge number of people to validate each one, not to mention the mission failure and costs of falsely denying payments when that process fails (old people are allowed to live in remote areas or not pick up the phone, and you’ll hear from their congressional representatives if you decide that means they’re not a real person or dead).
There are ways to improve efficiency considerably but none of them are easy and most will require legal changes by Congress.
Maybe you wanna make some trash claims about 150 year olds collecting social security checks? Just looking for efficiency....
Why don't you care about nuclear safety, dmix?
But I don't think employment is the primary waste issue. Federal employment has grown relatively slowly compared to local and state administration.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c4/Go...
Which is why my point was about doing macro spending analysis. Most of the waste is in gov cost-plus contracts/procurement (feds outsource everything which is why employment hasn't grown much), how agencies operate (large duplication, old systems, etc), and more generally the unwieldy 1000 page congressional budgets no one reads.
It's equally insane to me that people think the private sector is somehow efficient. The amount of resources used to feed profit alone are a huge waste.
Second point. Nuclear safety inspectors don't produce anything, they just cost us. Lets call them red tape. Simply fire all of them, energy costs will go down and nothing will happen in short term. But somewhere down the line a president will be asked how the hell they thought that running nuclear reactors without safety inspectors was a good idea.
Now, I honestly don't know if DEI is useful in the long run or not, but because you see it as ideological add-on makes me think that you know even less. People can make anything seem like its ideological (vaccines, wearing masks, climate change,...), but usually that just mean they don't know what they are talking about.
The private sector is indeed filled with lots of inefficiencies, but due to the profit motive and presence of competition, there’s massive incentives to correct those inefficiencies slowly over time. You'll make more profit doing so!
Hence, the private sector is constantly self correcting itself and becoming more efficient via creative destruction. You can just look at the numbers, even the Chinese Communist Party understand this. Turns out the profit motive combined with competitive instincts of humans results in a consistently greater good.
Not sure you’re aware, but the government doesn’t do that. Hence why the US is massively indebted. Unfortunately the US debtors aren’t doing so great these days so it can’t continue even at current rates. Instead of DOGE they should have named it “The department of not finding the level of US debt that leads to currency debasement and collapse.”
I never thought I’d need to explain the elementary school 101 of why communism is bad and why debt is not endless on HN but apparently this place is turning into Reddit.
Instead of correcting inefficiencies it's more profitable for private sector to: 1. merge/acquire competition, create monopoly, 2. lobby government for monopoly status (ISPs)/protection from competition with tarrifs (automakers)/... 3. sue competition out of business 4. aggressively use patents,...
Also found it funny that someone starts post with 'red herring' and ends with 'educating' parent post about communism :D
Basic logic would dictate a response addressing that head-on is not a red herring.
I believe that this can sometimes be true. For example, lets say that CEO want to raise profits by 20% by end of fiscal year and uses 50% more resources for that compared to current resource/profit use. This might be good idea for CEO, if his bonus is tied to profit, but for company it might be better to develop business that is going to bring more profit / resource spent a few years down the line.
I think both government and private sector have waste. It's just that reason for waste is different, and it doesn't make sense to compere them directly. Also, combating waste should be done differently in private vs public sector.
Lots of Americans think the government needs to be more efficient. Very few Americans think the way to do that is closing national parks, cutting veteran healthcare, and firing the nuclear security workforce. It is easy to be pro spending reform but still be unhappy with DOGE's body of work thus far.
I don’t know that Palantir will be under scrutiny but they are a really tiny government contractor. I would love to see the defense primes + big consulting firms like Accenture be on the chopping board.
On an absolute scale, DOGE is not performing well and it makes sense so many are upset with their performance. On a relative scale to past attempts and the 5 existing agencies that exist to audit and reduce spending, DOGE is like a unicorn and that’s why many with experience are silently cheering them on.
They have not gotten far but have gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.
We’re not gaslit into thinking everything was fine with government spending, we’re angry that this is how they’re going to “fix” it.
Judging on a relative scale to past attempts and the existing 5(!) agencies with the sole purpose of auditing and reducing spending, DOGE looks amazing and has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.
It is an immensely difficult undertaking and the bureaucracy will struggle, writhe, and set fire to everything around it before it can be put down. We should hope that DOGE is just getting started and picking up momentum rather than having settled.
Burning down your house because of a leaky faucet I guess is a strategy, but not one I think we should be undertaking.
I think that's where we fundemtally disagree, not to mention your blindness to their stated ideological ulterior motives. Thr Project 2025 document explicitly states it's goal of ultimately replacing federal workers with its cadres that work towards to it's political project.
I'd like to be proven wrong but I have a feeling all of this will never provide any cost benefits to those that aren't the rich. Even if they somehow manage to reduce the taxes on the avg joe, a big if, the Joe will pay for it in other tangible ways. I.e. I don't think it's waste being eliminated but projects the administration disagrees or wants to privatize. Can you address these concerns?
Convenient way to blame "the bureaucracy" for every problem that DOGE creates. Are you open to the possibility that DOGE will cause more problems than it fixes?
For example, imagine there's a budget of $5k and it's assuming that you'll replace a computer with part of it.
But you don't actually need to replace your computer until after the fiscal year.
But if you wait, the next budget will just think whatever you didn't spend can be cut, not that you deferred a cost for slightly longer.
Similarly, even if you have budget for something you need at the start of a fiscal year, everyone is afraid of blowing budget before the end of the fiscal year... So many expenses get deferred until things are close enough to the fiscal boundary that everyone starts worrying about not spending instead...
Not me but another contractor got a phone call the last day of the fiscal year and was told essentially “hey we have an extra 5M$ in the budget we need to spend, can you make something up and we will just give you the money for a random pilot.”
Just to back up this point: This is 100% my experience when I was an employee for them (disclaimer: 3-4 year tenure, some number of years ago). Everything we built was marketed as this brilliant, cutting edge, leading AI ML tech, and what we were actually building was React CRUD apps with 0 users, with a heavy focus on "making the UI feel like Minority Report / feel futuristic", etc.
It's not Skynet, it's a contracting company with a great design and marketing team.
Many such stories
1. Streamlining and simplification is good. Trimming can come with harsh cuts. But what we witness is arbitrary destruction. Otherwise Musk wouldn't try to reinstate nuclear inspectors they just fired.
2. Efficiency is not the goal. Neutralization of governmental power is. And with less governmental power, corporate power will fill the gaps.
3. Ideology is the driving engine. Talking points of "Anti Woke/DEI" or "no work from home" sounds appealing one half of the people, but carries no substance beyond it. In fact, these terms are misused and retooled as weapons (such as getting rid of "woke" generals).
4. If you want more efficiency, you must make investments. No company or state entity has ever become more efficient just by cutting cost. Slashing budgets only cost you more money in the medium/long run.
5. Transparency is good. It holds people accountable and allows for better decisions. But one of the few purposes of these acts seem to bring are to bring chaos. In chaos, the stronger will win. It is the opposite of transparency.
It looks like you and some other commenters, however, are discussing government contracts, which are projects and programs paid for the government but implemented by third-party contractors. Is that correct?
So it’s basically like this: yes, the federal government creates jobs and the cost of those jobs directly is only 5% of the budget. However the real cost of those jobs is in spending, in terms of opportunities they champion, which essentially amounts to all discretionary spending conducted by the federal government — ~30% of the budget.
Finding things like solutions nobody is using or systems that are far more complicated than they need to be is worthwhile if you're goal is removing waste and increasing efficiency. But it also takes in-depth analysis by people who understand the context. You're definitely not finding it with just raw budget access and first principles from people with little relevant experience. Same goes for employees. There are definitely poor performers or people doing unnecessary things, but you're not dealing with those cases if your approach is just to fire all the new employees.
It's not that this approach is an imperfect solution to a legitimate problem, it's not a solution to the problem at all. Instead, it's basically about redefining a hard problem (identifying and addressing waste and inefficiency) into an easy problem (have less stuff) and then trying to solve that one. Which is great if your goal is to declare victory, but it doesn't actually address the original problem of efficiency.
I find it frustrating because I agree with you that the government is absolutely not perfectly efficient and it would be great if there was a concerted effort to improve the situation. But not only is that not what's happening, this approach seems likely to make things worse given that random chaos and disruption are generally the enemies of efficiency and it seems likely all this will make it harder for the government to attract or retain the best, most efficient employees.
The phenomenon isn't as paradoxical as it seems (it has a fairly simple explanation), but it's striking to encounter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. I suppose I'd better add that (1) no, this has nothing to do with your political views, and (2) yes, we ban accounts who are doing the same thing with different politics. Oh and (3) yes, if other accounts keep doing this after we ask them to stop, we'll end up banning them as well.
Macro trends notwithstanding (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), the amount of low-quality nastiness that HN has been hosting lately is a serious problem and we're not going to let it continue.
> no, this has nothing to do with your political views
Who believes that at this point? Speak up.
> Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
If you want to order me to tolerate the fascism apologists has been having a field day on this site since over a month, you have to say that to my face. You do not have the personal capital or credibility to say "please". You made your bed, you sided with the anonymous, hooded executioners; we heard it the first time, now STFU already! And I'll speak my mind throttled to the showdead crowd, and if you make that impossible, of course I'll make new accounts. I'll make fake websites to have fake emails at JUST to not take orders from you.
Maybe you should be focusing more effort on users like this one, who has been posing nothing but abuse for a month: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=13_9_7_7_5_18
Sure their posts are hidden now, but why are they able to post at all? Why is anyone able to post like this? It's not good for the site, but it's endemic. Equating opinionated and acerbic comments like the one above with flamebait while saying and doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior makes no sense, and is not good for HN.
That account has been banned since the day it was created. Its comments have never been anything but [dead]. That's the maximum penalty that exists on HN. Several other accounts related to that one are also banned. This is standard.
(For readers who don't have "showdead" turned on in their profile: the account anigbrowl mentioned has been posting things like "Shut up, $SLUR", "Fuck off, $SLUR", and worse. They are banned and all their comments are killed automatically. This means that no one sees them unless they turn the 'showdead' setting on in their profile. Any user is welcome to turn that setting on, but please don't forget that if you do, you're signing up to see the worst that the internet has to offer on HN.)
Banned accounts can continue to post, but their comments are killed by default. Why? Because otherwise they'd just create new accounts and pick up where they left off. Since new accounts are unbanned at first, there would be a time lag before we could catch those and ban them again. In the meantime, more abusive posts would get through.
In other words, allowing banned accounts to post (but making their posts default-invisible) is the way to minimize their effect on a large open forum like HN, where there's no barrier to creating accounts. Attempting to restrict them further would just end up exposing more people to the abusive posts.
HN would have ceased to exist long ago if we were "doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior", so I was a little taken aback at your assumption there.
I agree, of course, that 13_9_7_7_5_18's posts were worse than computerthings's. That's why we banned the former immediately, and the latter only after warning them (many warnings, actually, if you count previous accounts that we banned) and only after they'd broken the site guidelines many times.
But maybe there should be some friction to creating accounts, like requiring a few worthwhile submissions before granting commenting privileges (which is already how it works with downvoting and flagging), or revealing the email addresses of persistently abusive accounts. Just wiping he accounts and forcing them to create new ones increases the friction, which lowers the incentive to keep doing it.
HN would have ceased to exist long ago if we were "doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior", so I'm a little taken aback at your assumption that we were doing nothing about these.
But you're not, really. Shadowbanning abuse accounts with a keyword filter is the weakest possible response, and that's why there's an endless influx of them. Since you can't really impose consequences (because usage is anonymous, any email address will do and VPNs make it impossible to track abusers), there should be some more friction to make casual abuse a less attractive pastime.
I had no idea this is how bans work on HN and it is a pretty clever moderation strategy -- although it somewhat reminds me of a black mirror episode O_o https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)
If you take a look at the links there, and still have a question that hasn't been answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
so basically without caution or care
or actually evaluating gains vs investments just slash and burn
scorched earth, destroying lives
to save 55 out of 2400 billion?
which might only really be 7 billion "saved" ?
How about the $10 million per month to go play golf?
Or $20 million to watch half the superbowl and leave?
People already knew Musk was incompetent, other people just called it "Musk Derangement Syndrome"
People were saying DOGE was full of incompetents prior to this, simply judging by their methods (or lack thereof.) They were dismissed as partisans, or using whatever thought-terminating cliche they have on hand.
Knowing this doesn't mean a thing, no one is doing anything about it.
That would of course never make it through Congress.
Counselor, you know better than to beg the question like that. It's disappointing to see such an intelligent person resort to such fallacious arguments.
Right, Congress told the executive “here’s three billion dollars, spend it on foreign development.” That means the executive decides how that money will be spent. It is entirely within its rights to cancel particular grants. Though eventually it will have to seek rescission as to the $3 billion if it doesn’t use all the money. That’s a long ways away.
And I’m quite confident I’m not going out on a limb when I say line items for “DEI in Serbia” would never make it through congress.
And I’m quite confident I’m not going out on a limb when I say line items for “DEI in Serbia” would never make it through congress.
Why not? You might (or might not) recall the US became heavily involved in a war in the Balkans 30 years ago the point of carrying out an extensive bombing campaign. To the extent that the US has an interest in that region being peaceful and the countries there staying or becoming more aligned with US geopolitical and economic interests, a small subsidy to that end may make strategic sense.
Bombing, peacekeeping, and reconstruction costs for the Balkan war ran into the tens of billions. A few million a year to nurture a more pluralistic civil society in the region (and thereby increase trade flows with the US) seems cheap by comparison.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/oct/15/balkans https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/usa/partner/s...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/02/politics/usaid-officials-leav...