For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread):
1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]
2. Federal spending largely falls into a few categories: taking care of the elderly (36%), defense and veterans (20%), taking care of the poor or disabled (22%), and interest on existing debt (13%). [2] This adds up to 91% of the budget. The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how?
3. The US pays far more for health care (28% of the budget if you include Medicare) and with worse outcomes on average. Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?
4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check?
The reason these questions are not front and center is that the people with money don’t want to talk about them. And, the ensure we are kept busy with cheap gadgets, entertaining tv and movies and enough controversies that don’t matter to last a lifetime.
Alsr, the population is less educated and able to actually think critically about these issues than they used to be.
Citation on that last point? The amount of people I know who were the first in their family to attend college, and sometimes even graduate high school, makes me question that people are measurably less educated.
Education + thinking critically and having educational credentials are not the same thing. At least, there needs to be some justification that they are related.
I believe it's more the critical thinking piece that's the problem. And, perhaps there has not been a decline there, but we're just witnessing an unprecedented cultural and technology-fueled abuse of an existing lack of reasoning ability (expansive reach, bot farms, algorithms, conspiracy theories, etc).
I mean, any actor—including state adversaries—can essentially run military-grade psyops on our population. In a "stable" environment, an inability to think critically is somewhat buffered and fallout is limited. But, in a hostile information space—intent on manipulating subjects for the destruction of their society—it's catastrophic.
Number 3 can’t be overstated. Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe.
Global health insurance plans usually come in two flavors:
1. Global coverage
2. Global coverage excluding United States (for half the monthly premium of the first plan)
The United States in an extreme outlier in terms of cost. This is separate from rationing care. This is separate from even population health (ex. higher obesity rates)
I know of at least one source arguing that in fact, population health (mainly obesity and gun violence) explain upwards of 70% of the difference in healthcare spending between the US and other developed nations.[1] To me, this seems like the most likely explanation because I believe we have pretty similar diagnostics and treatments to other developed countries, and I don't feel like a British doctor would give me any treatment that an American doctor wouldn't, and vice versa. As for the other 30%, I think it's probably due to inefficiencies in the insurance-based payment system and our patents lasting too long making drugs more expensive.
The core question is less about the cuts themselves and more about if we the people are getting what we're paying for.
1) It kinda doesn't matter if it was caused by the pandemic or not, what matters is it needs to be fixed. Cherry-picking "since the 1970s" keeps us in difficult times energy-wise which we've attempted to correct for with more spending. If you go further back, our current ratio is what it was during WWII. Do you currently see federal government production as similar to during WWII, or are we not getting value out of what we're spending?
2) Assuming we all agree with those percentages, there's still an obvious 9% to look into. At these levels, that's real money. Also, certain initiatives are way more destructive than the spending would suggest, e.g. just about everything found out about USAID impacts hearts and minds, which impacts further negatively productive efforts outside the federal government.
3) Of course healthcare is on the list. Single-payer systems have their problems, free market systems have their problems, our current hybrid gets the worst of both. So it needs to be addressed, but perhaps not "first" because the answer here is a total rework, whereas there's plenty of other savings available right now as low hanging fruit.
4) Corporations do not pay corporate tax, their customers and employees do. Why should we burden our productive populous with tax on their income, tax on their workplace before they even get paid, inflation due to government spending, etc? If the argument is that tariffs are passed on to the customer, then corporate tax is definitely passed on to the customer and the employee. Additionally, corporations are not currently benefiting from a healthy workforce (look around), or an educated workforce (steady decline since the DoE was established), or a safe environment (go to SF), or a working transportation system in many cases. Again, are we getting what we're paying for?
Thank you for responding. I'm glad we agreed in principle on #3. I'm afraid we'll have to disagree on the other points though:
1. The claim that spending / GDP is at WWII levels is simply wrong: please take a look at the link in my original comment.
2. 9% isn't nothing, agreed. It does, however, pay for: scientific and other research (mostly medical, then much smaller slice for general science, then a much much smaller slice for everything else); keeping national parks running smoothly; keeping planes in the air; shutting down financial scams; and other wonderful things like that. Like you said, it comes down to what we get for that spending. I think there's bound to be some waste here and there, but I rather like all these things our tax dollars are paying for. Oh, and funny you mention USAID - I rather like the idea of feeding starving children around the world too, with a triple whammy of moral impact, winning hearts and minds in other countries, and putting money into the pockets of US farmers. Would love to hear properly sourced arguments on why USAID is as terrible as you seem to think it is.
4. You forgot about the shareholders. Corporations mostly get taxed on profits, not revenues, so it's hard to see how consumers are part of the equation. (We're not talking about consumption taxes, which tend to be state level anyway.) And employees pay income tax - the only part that the corporation covers is the employer end of payroll taxes. Wikipedia has a nice breakdown and comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
(Yay, thanks to whoever saved the parent post so my thumb exercise wasn't entirely wasted.)
> 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]
That might not be the best metric. Sure it's only "~13%" higher than the running average, but in that 55 year period only 4 years (2008, 2020,2021,2022) had a higher spending to GDP ratio than 2024. Also those years all had ZIRP
1. US GDP estimated GDP in 2024 is $29 trillion. According to your first source, U.S. Federal Spending was 23% of GDP. If that were reduced to the 2014-2019 average of 20%, that would trim $870 billion from federal spending. That seems like good progress toward avoiding a potential debt crisis.
2. Reduce defense overall and make the process of getting money to the needy more efficient.
3. No comment. Healthcare is mess.
4. Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers. I'm in favor of tax reform, but thinking that taxing corporations is a way to stick it to rich people is shortsighted, IMO.
I agree. I actually typed up a whole response to that post (which I vehemently disagreed with, but appreciated nonetheless) but by the time I hit submit it was already dead. Vouching wasn't enough to bring it back. I understand the temperature is running hot, but I hope that at least on HN we can strive to have civil discussions about these issues. I say this even though I am personally quite distraught about the current state of affairs.
Y'all, original poster here - please don't downvote or flag kill responses to this that are good-faith attempts to discuss the issue, even if the response seems misinformed to you. I don't think anyone will change their minds when that happens.
I think these are good reasons why our fiscal picture is not hopeless, but not good arguments agains improving our efficiency:
1. Thank you for linking that graph, it seems to show that our spending is 25% higher than it was in the 1970s as a % of GDP (23 vs 18). But our level of _debt_ is approx 375% higher (as a % of GDP) than it was in the 70s (120% now vs 32% then). That doesn't sound like we are sustaining it well, and tht interest is compounding as we borrow to pay it.
2. The underlying assumption that makes this argument compelling is that every dollar being spent on these noble categories is being done efficiently. What if fixing healthcare costs cut them in half for the same effect? What if there is fraud to cut in the programs for the elderly? We should tighten these and prepare to pay more as we age.
3. Strongly agree and hope to see some action. It seems that fixing the incentives and inefficiencies of the healthcare system is the core mission of RFK Jr., despite all the vaccine FUD.
4. Strongly agree. I wonder if a VAT would be effective for this.
We all know what efficient healthcare systems should look like, there are a dozen countries with lower overall healthcare spend per capita than US with better outcomes. What specific skillset of RFK do you find as compelling evidence they they will be extract higher efficiency similar to these other nations?
Rule of law is what allows us to grow. Acemoglu won a nobel prize showing that institutions cause growth. Destroy institutions and you'll undershoot potential.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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 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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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?
The Musk standing with a chainsaw at CPAC this weekend is the same guy who camped out in Pennsylvania the last week of the election as Trump’s closer. People voted for this because the supposed adults in the room didn’t do their jobs.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 :)
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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?
- 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 ~$1T over 4 years.
Except, these are not mistakes. This is every single Musk's company modus operandi.
Completely made up or inflated numbers, unrealistic timelines etc. Customers or investors buying into it, but if you look under the hood, outside of government subsides and contract, there is pretty much 0 money made from ALL of his businesses.
He's just using the same playbook now, except when people will realize that the 5000$ DOGE checks are bullshit (btw, 5000 x ~150M taxpayers = 750 Billion $...) they may finally wake up.
They won't be able to cut checks unless congress approves. They'll say they will cut checks, get sued and lose. They'll blame the judicial system and it will probably be a pretense to undermine that branch of government.
People aren't voting for what benefits them which means we are now in post policy politics. That means that what matters is the messaging and not the actual things done or the impact of those things on people. This leads to doing things that you have the ability to message the way you want and not doing things that help people. The MAGA crowd figured this out and figured out that angry yelling is the easiest message out there.
This is why democrats lost. They kept trying to have policy discussions about how to run the country along with ways to implement policy tied to impact on people, but that is hard to message. The MAGA crowd just finds things they can yell about. By the time impact happens they just yell about something else, louder and the people being hurt are just ignored.
The discussion about how much money is being saved/spent/etc is basically meaningless in post policy politics. The average person can have a massive drop in life expectancy and quality of life and it won't impact their voting so why does it matter how and where government spending happens? The sound bite is all that people are looking at and because of that DOGE is a huge success for those using it to get what they want.
Keeping Musk’s interests in mind helps clarify what’s going on. Scorching earth and constantly lying is the playbook for dismantling agencies with oversight into the companies he runs and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors (e.g. pulling the ladder up behind him after the DoE’s Tesla loan). The Canada/China tariffs will cripple other automakers who depend on trade while Tesla’s integrated manufacturing chain will leave them immune and provide a massive advantage. I don’t see any reason to put any stock into any motivation DOGE may have toward increasing governmental efficiency, it is a purposeful distraction.
> and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors
Why are government agencies picking winners and losers at all?
> pulling the ladder up behind him after the DoE’s Tesla loan
And no other automaker has ever received a loan from the US government?
> integrated manufacturing chain
Where do the batteries come from?
> it is a purposeful distraction.
Much like the posted article. They want to make the claim that DOGE can't even estimate this properly, while they themselves admit, they can't even estimate this properly. Meanwhile we're two months into the administration and reported errors are being corrected on the website.
I don't feel that this is genuine reporting on an issue. This is disingenuous mud slinging. Which of course, since Hacker News feels slighted by Elon Musks' politics, they're going to eat up uncritically.
>> and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors
> Why are government agencies picking winners and losers at all?
Not sure how you got from my statement about promoting competition to the govt picking winners and losers.
> And no other automaker has ever received a loan from the US government?
My point was that Musk through Doge is trying to make it more difficult for automakers to get loans in the future, after Tesla has already benefitted from them. For some reason you misconstrue my point.
> Where do the batteries come from?
Did a quick search and they are manufactured in plants in China, Nevada and Germany.
Focusing on what’s being cut and whether the cuts are “right” misses the point. The richest man in the world bought himself a department in the US government and now has free will to run amok. Our country has been an oligarchy for a while now, but it was behind the scenes and there was some hope of dialing it back, however slim. Now it’s nakedly out in the open. What if this kind of shit becomes the new normal? We’ve been worried that Trump will become a dictator, but this almost seems worse.
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.
DOGE is not stopping specific payments that were voted in by Congress. It is stopping payments and grants where Congress has voted the agency general budget authority with only loose guidelines. For example, the appropriations bill for USAID allocates $3 billion and says basically “use it for foreign development.”
Congress never voted for say DEI programs in Serbia: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14344255/trump-mill.... That would of course never make it through Congress. Some Kamala Harris supporting bureaucrat in USAID made that call, and the new President absolutely can decide to override that.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 in-depth material, which you may or may not want, but all the common questions have been answered many times there.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 accounts related to that one (including, FWIW, https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dangraper) 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 the former was banned immediately and the latter only after we warned 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.
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.
> 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.
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) have been 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 still striking to encounter it.
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 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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not denying that there may be errors, whether potential or observable, in the DOGE work. However, I’d be cautious about using those errors to discredit the broader effort to scrutinize government budget allocations—something the article seems to be doing to support its narrative.
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.
If you're from Europe, much of global politics likely appears either moderate or far-right.
Hacker News leans heavily to the left, and I rarely come across viewpoints that could be considered right-leaning. By right-wing, I mean a focus on 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. These perspectives are rarely represented in discussions here.
> 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.
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?
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.
When reading an article from a politically biased outlet like The New York Times, consider asking yourself the following questions:
- Can you independently verify the accuracy of the data presented?
- If you find inaccuracies:
- 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?
> - 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?
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.
So... they have found out that emotional extortion about unemployed bureaucrats no longer works and have focused their talking points marching orders into "they are dismantling the government, but doing so poorly".
I just want to point out that nytimes.com got $3 million. Your mutated Gell-Mann Amnesia is kicking in. You wouldn't offer this benefit to zero edge or others, the reason you haven't seen them is because you don't want to.
You've never changed policies before? Maybe it's time.
You guys are being 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?
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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 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.
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...
https://archive.is/YSlkm
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For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread):
1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]
2. Federal spending largely falls into a few categories: taking care of the elderly (36%), defense and veterans (20%), taking care of the poor or disabled (22%), and interest on existing debt (13%). [2] This adds up to 91% of the budget. The US population is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow. What do you think should be cut, and how?
3. The US pays far more for health care (28% of the budget if you include Medicare) and with worse outcomes on average. Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?
4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying their fair share to keep the national debt in check?
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DUdb
The reason these questions are not front and center is that the people with money don’t want to talk about them. And, the ensure we are kept busy with cheap gadgets, entertaining tv and movies and enough controversies that don’t matter to last a lifetime.
Alsr, the population is less educated and able to actually think critically about these issues than they used to be.
You don't need their permission to have these conversations.
GP is not talking about permission. It doesn't matter that people can have these conversations if they won’t.
Yes you do, leftist talking point are systematically downranked on X.
Citation on that last point? The amount of people I know who were the first in their family to attend college, and sometimes even graduate high school, makes me question that people are measurably less educated.
Education + thinking critically and having educational credentials are not the same thing. At least, there needs to be some justification that they are related.
I believe it's more the critical thinking piece that's the problem. And, perhaps there has not been a decline there, but we're just witnessing an unprecedented cultural and technology-fueled abuse of an existing lack of reasoning ability (expansive reach, bot farms, algorithms, conspiracy theories, etc).
I mean, any actor—including state adversaries—can essentially run military-grade psyops on our population. In a "stable" environment, an inability to think critically is somewhat buffered and fallout is limited. But, in a hostile information space—intent on manipulating subjects for the destruction of their society—it's catastrophic.
Number 3 can’t be overstated. Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe.
Global health insurance plans usually come in two flavors:
1. Global coverage
2. Global coverage excluding United States (for half the monthly premium of the first plan)
The United States in an extreme outlier in terms of cost. This is separate from rationing care. This is separate from even population health (ex. higher obesity rates)
I know of at least one source arguing that in fact, population health (mainly obesity and gun violence) explain upwards of 70% of the difference in healthcare spending between the US and other developed nations.[1] To me, this seems like the most likely explanation because I believe we have pretty similar diagnostics and treatments to other developed countries, and I don't feel like a British doctor would give me any treatment that an American doctor wouldn't, and vice versa. As for the other 30%, I think it's probably due to inefficiencies in the insurance-based payment system and our patents lasting too long making drugs more expensive.
[1] https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o...
It is very expensive to run the insurance companies, plus all the time the hospitals need to spend to talk/plead with the insurance companies.
When you have the state as a single payer then all those expenses just vanishes.
The core question is less about the cuts themselves and more about if we the people are getting what we're paying for.
1) It kinda doesn't matter if it was caused by the pandemic or not, what matters is it needs to be fixed. Cherry-picking "since the 1970s" keeps us in difficult times energy-wise which we've attempted to correct for with more spending. If you go further back, our current ratio is what it was during WWII. Do you currently see federal government production as similar to during WWII, or are we not getting value out of what we're spending?
2) Assuming we all agree with those percentages, there's still an obvious 9% to look into. At these levels, that's real money. Also, certain initiatives are way more destructive than the spending would suggest, e.g. just about everything found out about USAID impacts hearts and minds, which impacts further negatively productive efforts outside the federal government.
3) Of course healthcare is on the list. Single-payer systems have their problems, free market systems have their problems, our current hybrid gets the worst of both. So it needs to be addressed, but perhaps not "first" because the answer here is a total rework, whereas there's plenty of other savings available right now as low hanging fruit.
4) Corporations do not pay corporate tax, their customers and employees do. Why should we burden our productive populous with tax on their income, tax on their workplace before they even get paid, inflation due to government spending, etc? If the argument is that tariffs are passed on to the customer, then corporate tax is definitely passed on to the customer and the employee. Additionally, corporations are not currently benefiting from a healthy workforce (look around), or an educated workforce (steady decline since the DoE was established), or a safe environment (go to SF), or a working transportation system in many cases. Again, are we getting what we're paying for?
Thank you for responding. I'm glad we agreed in principle on #3. I'm afraid we'll have to disagree on the other points though:
1. The claim that spending / GDP is at WWII levels is simply wrong: please take a look at the link in my original comment.
2. 9% isn't nothing, agreed. It does, however, pay for: scientific and other research (mostly medical, then much smaller slice for general science, then a much much smaller slice for everything else); keeping national parks running smoothly; keeping planes in the air; shutting down financial scams; and other wonderful things like that. Like you said, it comes down to what we get for that spending. I think there's bound to be some waste here and there, but I rather like all these things our tax dollars are paying for. Oh, and funny you mention USAID - I rather like the idea of feeding starving children around the world too, with a triple whammy of moral impact, winning hearts and minds in other countries, and putting money into the pockets of US farmers. Would love to hear properly sourced arguments on why USAID is as terrible as you seem to think it is.
4. You forgot about the shareholders. Corporations mostly get taxed on profits, not revenues, so it's hard to see how consumers are part of the equation. (We're not talking about consumption taxes, which tend to be state level anyway.) And employees pay income tax - the only part that the corporation covers is the employer end of payroll taxes. Wikipedia has a nice breakdown and comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
(Yay, thanks to whoever saved the parent post so my thumb exercise wasn't entirely wasted.)
> 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]
That might not be the best metric. Sure it's only "~13%" higher than the running average, but in that 55 year period only 4 years (2008, 2020,2021,2022) had a higher spending to GDP ratio than 2024. Also those years all had ZIRP
ZIRP ?
Ok, Zero Interest Rate Policy
1. US GDP estimated GDP in 2024 is $29 trillion. According to your first source, U.S. Federal Spending was 23% of GDP. If that were reduced to the 2014-2019 average of 20%, that would trim $870 billion from federal spending. That seems like good progress toward avoiding a potential debt crisis.
2. Reduce defense overall and make the process of getting money to the needy more efficient.
3. No comment. Healthcare is mess.
4. Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers. I'm in favor of tax reform, but thinking that taxing corporations is a way to stick it to rich people is shortsighted, IMO.
It doesn't look good for the quality of discussion here if the most substantive response to your questions was flagged & killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143579
I agree. I actually typed up a whole response to that post (which I vehemently disagreed with, but appreciated nonetheless) but by the time I hit submit it was already dead. Vouching wasn't enough to bring it back. I understand the temperature is running hot, but I hope that at least on HN we can strive to have civil discussions about these issues. I say this even though I am personally quite distraught about the current state of affairs.
Since it's still accessible to read, I'd be eager to read your response
EDIT: The response was saved from the dead, yay
Long doesn't equate to substantive.
Edit: I didn't flag it, to be clear.
Sure but parent said "substantive" so since you're implying it's not (but rather just long), I'd like to read why you think it wasn't
> Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block?
I don't understand this question: how can the private companies in the industry be placed on the chopping block? By outlawing them?
Medicare?
FWIW many people who believe that federal spending is out of control would say the same about 1970s.
Where I grew up, federal spending has been out of control since the Spanish American War.
The private industry fraud and overcharging that targets Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense has been long term problem.
There are also outlier issues like being unvaccinated and unhealthy-lifestyles that tax payers are forced to pay for.
I highly doubt DOGE is actually targeting these types of fraud, however.
Y'all, original poster here - please don't downvote or flag kill responses to this that are good-faith attempts to discuss the issue, even if the response seems misinformed to you. I don't think anyone will change their minds when that happens.
I think these are good reasons why our fiscal picture is not hopeless, but not good arguments agains improving our efficiency:
1. Thank you for linking that graph, it seems to show that our spending is 25% higher than it was in the 1970s as a % of GDP (23 vs 18). But our level of _debt_ is approx 375% higher (as a % of GDP) than it was in the 70s (120% now vs 32% then). That doesn't sound like we are sustaining it well, and tht interest is compounding as we borrow to pay it.
2. The underlying assumption that makes this argument compelling is that every dollar being spent on these noble categories is being done efficiently. What if fixing healthcare costs cut them in half for the same effect? What if there is fraud to cut in the programs for the elderly? We should tighten these and prepare to pay more as we age.
3. Strongly agree and hope to see some action. It seems that fixing the incentives and inefficiencies of the healthcare system is the core mission of RFK Jr., despite all the vaccine FUD.
4. Strongly agree. I wonder if a VAT would be effective for this.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
We all know what efficient healthcare systems should look like, there are a dozen countries with lower overall healthcare spend per capita than US with better outcomes. What specific skillset of RFK do you find as compelling evidence they they will be extract higher efficiency similar to these other nations?
1. Yeah, they weren’t good at reigning in spending in the 70s either.
Rule of law is what allows us to grow. Acemoglu won a nobel prize showing that institutions cause growth. Destroy institutions and you'll undershoot potential.
Two points that are often missed:
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.
"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.
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.
This is tantamount to saying that the executive not only has a line-item veto, but that it's non-overridable. Seems wrong.
This planet money article lays out the arguments for both with lots of interesting links to follow. https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/02/18/g-s1-49...
Cutting matters not one bit if Congress doesn't pass tax cuts. Voters don't care about the national debt if they don't see more money coming to them.
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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_v._City_of_New_York
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.
Can you clarify what USAIDs objectives are and which programs are "far outside those objectives".
Most of what I see being complained about can easily fall under socioeconomic development, which is ostensibly one of the objectives.
From your source:
> 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.
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.
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.
> Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.
It's really not that hard to have that combination, i.e., "authoritarian populism".
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> in debt (that we also can't pay for)
"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.
> To not have the money that you want to spend is, to me, the definition of spending too much.
I suppose no one should ever be able to take a loan.
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.
> eventually cuts must be made.
This is logically (and in a simple way) false. Incomes could also increase.
This is not a simple situation.
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.
A loan implies money will be paid back. What should be cut so the debt can be paid back.
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.
If you're having to take a loan to pay for basic stuff for your family, that means you're either spending too much or earning too little.
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?
So people shouldn't take out a mortgage on a house? Shelter is pretty basic.
"basic stuff" != "mortgage".
I mean things like food, clothing and utilities.
> To not have the money that you want to spend is, to me, the definition of spending too much.
That's not how a reserve currency works. You borrow to fund growth and let inflation take care of the debt.
I keep harping on this - but two points:
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.
I feel funny to say it, but I think we have an income problem, not an expense problem. Republicans just spend money and then cut taxes.
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
One of my least favourite things is paying my credit card bill too :) I wish I could just stop , but we know what happens if we do.
Sovereign debt and personal debt are apples and oranges.
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.
> 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.
They are two distinct things.
None of that has anything whatsoever to do with what DOGE is doing.
So raise the debt ceiling?
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.
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.
or raise taxes.
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?
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.
Firing this many government employees, canceling grants, and imposing tariffs guarantees at least a recession.
Yup. I’ve seen 2 grand disasters like this each worse than the last. Demonitization in India, Brexit, and now this.
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.
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 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/
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.
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The estimate should at least be within an order of magnitude; otherwise, the estimate is pointless.
Also, I am booing them because all of the doge line items on their website are in the millions, and our debt is trillions.
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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.
But you wouldn’t brag about how you took a chainsaw approach to your financial situation after saving those 14 cents now, would you?
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.
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.
If DOGE is paying the salary and benefits of 100 people, the net savings on $10m of cuts may not even be one million.
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.
A trillion is a million millions. A million to a trillion is like a tenth of a cent to a thousand.
That's not true in common English usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion
You might want to reread that page.
“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.”
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.
For those close to the current executive, killing DoEd ultimately is a cultural quest, not a fiscal one.
Edit: and so are a lot of their other efforts
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The old joke used to go: "A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you're talking real money!"
We have since updated it to billion in order to keep pace with the times.
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.
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.
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.
It'd be fantastic if surveys would allow those surveyed to do a minute or two of research before answering or correcting their answer.
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.
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.
How is soft power is a fake concept?
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.
They don't understand it or believe in their misunderstanding of it, so it must be fake.
“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.
Is this comment satire?
It's the most unhinged thing I have read all week, and that's saying something these days.
I don't know even where to begin. I hope it's trolling.
> 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.
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).
Strong points in the face of this inaccurate, politically biased ledger that has revealed zero fraud, corruption or waste.
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.
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.
Zero waste? I haven't been following DOGE but it only took a minute to find an example:
Federal retirement claims are processed by hand by hundreds of workers working in a mineshaft. "The average processing time was 47 to 73 days."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-retirement-mine/
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.
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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".
> Now it's more profitable than ever.
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...
Twitter has 80% less revenue than it's peak in 2022, less than it had in 2014.
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.
Government agencies are not Twitter though and their goal is not maximizing the profit.
Will I need to purchase a blue check mark to vote in the next election?
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.
Was this replaced by a better, more well funded and resourced system? Or was it made worse ?
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"
Physical backup of important documents seems like the opposite of waste.
It's not backup, the forms are processed by hand on paper.
This is absolutely bizarre. It sounds like something out of Portal
Are you telling me that the US Government is storing its data in a data storage facility?
https://www.ironmountain.com/services/vital-records-storage
When will this woke madness stop?
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.
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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.
You're taking the word of a liar as gospel truth, and you're attributing responses to "liberals" from nowhere. Which "liberals"?
It sounds like he knows personally what USAID did in Bangladesh.
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.
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.
Because Obama was fully co-opted by the neocon institutions. If you had told them about it during the Bush era liberals would have been outraged.
The creators of South Park literally made a movie mocking the neocon ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_America:_World_Police
Yes, the Democratic party was coopted by neocons since Bill Clinton. That's the point of my comment, it has nothing to do with Trump.
People aren't just ignoring the imperialism; they're outraged that Trump is shutting it down.
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.
Read the article. It's not just data storage. Hundreds of people actually work there, processing the applications there, by hand, on paper.
The article says they couldn't confirm Musk's claims about the number of employees.
Snopes hasn't confirmed it in 2025 but they did say that in 2014 the Washington Post reported that 600 people worked there.
The facility website says they have roughly 1100 workers there daily, but those aren't all government since other work goes on there too.
So 0.01% of the Federal workforce or so?
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:
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?
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First, what was done with the money:
> 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.
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“Democrat policies” being things like vaccination, education, and consumer protections.
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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.
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2) is questionable. Most of the budget is spent maintaining global hegemony through military dominance.
Whatever inefficiencies that exist on the civil side are nearly irrelevant.
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.
The full budget is $6.9 trillion, not $4.4 trillion.
Without looking it up, what do you think is the military budget in comparison to the whole budget.
I think many who are okay with our civil spend may take issue with our military spend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. I can't agree with this. We have AI to raise flags and we have computers to make payment and bookkeeping trivial.
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.
>We have AI to raise flags
That it would like get wrong more often than not. No thanks.
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)
Even if you’re 100% correct, these aren’t the right people and these aren’t the right methods. Completely the opposite actually.
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?
The Musk standing with a chainsaw at CPAC this weekend is the same guy who camped out in Pennsylvania the last week of the election as Trump’s closer. People voted for this because the supposed adults in the room didn’t do their jobs.
>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.
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).
https://youtu.be/O4xHdUOI7ag?si=RPBNdpAiYHuYe7rf
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.
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.
I’d rather have the money going back to taxpayers than being used to fund these programs.
You need me to venmo you $20?
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.
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 :)
Like bribing children with candy.
Well, a quarter of the population can barely read, so makes sense.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States )
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.
So wait, I'm supposed to wish success for everything, say, Gavin Newsom does because I voted for him? Is that how it works?
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?
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.
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 :)
> 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.
"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.
Imagine you know you are sick.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
It’s absurd to say anything is “what people voted for” in a system where only the votes of about 5 out of 50 states matter.
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.
> 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).
It's not just "foreign aid".
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?
Great info thanks! Frustrating that we don't see anyone declaring victory by cutting off Palantir contracts.
It’s probably a lot of things causing that:
- 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 ~$1T over 4 years.
That didn’t happen. Palantir Has not currently lost any contracts. They lost stock value.
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Analyzing this is my job and one of the main functions of the startup I founded!
Except, these are not mistakes. This is every single Musk's company modus operandi.
Completely made up or inflated numbers, unrealistic timelines etc. Customers or investors buying into it, but if you look under the hood, outside of government subsides and contract, there is pretty much 0 money made from ALL of his businesses.
He's just using the same playbook now, except when people will realize that the 5000$ DOGE checks are bullshit (btw, 5000 x ~150M taxpayers = 750 Billion $...) they may finally wake up.
They won't be able to cut checks unless congress approves. They'll say they will cut checks, get sued and lose. They'll blame the judicial system and it will probably be a pretense to undermine that branch of government.
People aren't voting for what benefits them which means we are now in post policy politics. That means that what matters is the messaging and not the actual things done or the impact of those things on people. This leads to doing things that you have the ability to message the way you want and not doing things that help people. The MAGA crowd figured this out and figured out that angry yelling is the easiest message out there.
This is why democrats lost. They kept trying to have policy discussions about how to run the country along with ways to implement policy tied to impact on people, but that is hard to message. The MAGA crowd just finds things they can yell about. By the time impact happens they just yell about something else, louder and the people being hurt are just ignored.
The discussion about how much money is being saved/spent/etc is basically meaningless in post policy politics. The average person can have a massive drop in life expectancy and quality of life and it won't impact their voting so why does it matter how and where government spending happens? The sound bite is all that people are looking at and because of that DOGE is a huge success for those using it to get what they want.
I don’t really see a remedy for this behaviour too. It’s quite horrifying. Like being strapped into a plane heading for the ground.
Keeping Musk’s interests in mind helps clarify what’s going on. Scorching earth and constantly lying is the playbook for dismantling agencies with oversight into the companies he runs and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors (e.g. pulling the ladder up behind him after the DoE’s Tesla loan). The Canada/China tariffs will cripple other automakers who depend on trade while Tesla’s integrated manufacturing chain will leave them immune and provide a massive advantage. I don’t see any reason to put any stock into any motivation DOGE may have toward increasing governmental efficiency, it is a purposeful distraction.
> and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors
Why are government agencies picking winners and losers at all?
> pulling the ladder up behind him after the DoE’s Tesla loan
And no other automaker has ever received a loan from the US government?
> integrated manufacturing chain
Where do the batteries come from?
> it is a purposeful distraction.
Much like the posted article. They want to make the claim that DOGE can't even estimate this properly, while they themselves admit, they can't even estimate this properly. Meanwhile we're two months into the administration and reported errors are being corrected on the website.
I don't feel that this is genuine reporting on an issue. This is disingenuous mud slinging. Which of course, since Hacker News feels slighted by Elon Musks' politics, they're going to eat up uncritically.
Sad what this place has become.
>> and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors > Why are government agencies picking winners and losers at all?
Not sure how you got from my statement about promoting competition to the govt picking winners and losers.
> And no other automaker has ever received a loan from the US government?
My point was that Musk through Doge is trying to make it more difficult for automakers to get loans in the future, after Tesla has already benefitted from them. For some reason you misconstrue my point.
> Where do the batteries come from?
Did a quick search and they are manufactured in plants in China, Nevada and Germany.
Focusing on what’s being cut and whether the cuts are “right” misses the point. The richest man in the world bought himself a department in the US government and now has free will to run amok. Our country has been an oligarchy for a while now, but it was behind the scenes and there was some hope of dialing it back, however slim. Now it’s nakedly out in the open. What if this kind of shit becomes the new normal? We’ve been worried that Trump will become a dictator, but this almost seems worse.
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.
It still matters. In addition to just being criminals, now we know that they are also incompetent.
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.
DOGE is not stopping specific payments that were voted in by Congress. It is stopping payments and grants where Congress has voted the agency general budget authority with only loose guidelines. For example, the appropriations bill for USAID allocates $3 billion and says basically “use it for foreign development.”
Congress never voted for say DEI programs in Serbia: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14344255/trump-mill.... That would of course never make it through Congress. Some Kamala Harris supporting bureaucrat in USAID made that call, and the new President absolutely can decide to override that.
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.
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.
These criminals don't care, their goal is to spread FUD then rob the tax payers.
and isn't annual budget $2,400 billion?
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?
Roughly 40 years of hard work of some entities, finally getting somewhere. Worrying and hope it doesn’t further spread to Europe.
Why is this flagged? Even if the comment section isn't up to standards, the article should be relevant to everybody.
I've been posting a lot about this lately. Here are some recent posts:
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.)
This is starting to look like a lost battle. Can we have a "US Politics" filter at least? Thanks.
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).
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.
> I'd be glad if you'd do something about the influx of trolls
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.
Mate, with all due respect, but the first few pages of your recent comments are mostly in US politics threads.
Simply not true.
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Democrats never done anything comparable. So, no. There is no symmetry here.
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.
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Either that or, you know, we want to keep Hacker News about tech. Lots of us don't want /r/politics here.
Posts about this from yesterday, with lots of additional links, if anyone wants to read about how we approach politics on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134514
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134386
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.
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.
Not all—for example, there was a megathread a couple days ago:
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 in-depth material, which you may or may not want, but all the common questions have been answered many times there.
HN isn't just about tech, it's also about hacking. And this article is definitely about hacking.
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.
So would you say a story like this one, ( it's not even worthwhile to post as it would be flagged...)
"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?
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.
That is who all the pro homeschool posts stayed. Or pro Musk posts.
then why is it always the same handful of people saying that
Why is this flagged?
I answered this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142645.
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.
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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.
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 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.
Most of that user's comments seem substantive to me, even if they're not always agreeable.
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.
> 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 accounts related to that one (including, FWIW, https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dangraper) 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 the former was banned immediately and the latter only after we warned 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.
Can I add: being disagreeable is a bigger problem on threads like these than it is on threads with less volatile subjects.
I hope all this is not taking a toll on you. Stay healthy, Dang. You are doing a very good job. You can't make everybody happy.
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.
You also said this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113282 breaks site guidelines. You just call things "flamebait" and that's that.
> 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.
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) have been 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 still striking to encounter it.
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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 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.
You missed the part where they're deleting a ton of scientific papers from government sites.
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.
"U.S. Government Removing EV Chargers From All Federal Buildings Because They Are ‘Not Mission-Critical" - https://electrek.co/2025/02/21/trump-to-shut-down-all-8000-e...
I posted that article yesterday and it was flagged almost immediately
Well seems like a great opportunity to use Tesla chargers and directly increase Tesla revenue using public money.
Nope. King Trump has also ordered all of the government's electric vehicles to be sold/scrapped.
That's how you make government more efficient: Scrap the brand new fleet you have and buy another brand new fleet.
EVs are also literally 4x as efficient as ICE.
Just read that the Justice Department deleted the database tracking federal police misconduct. Good luck USA.
context:
https://www.police1.com/federal-law-enforcement/national-law...
I'm still not sold on this. I can't yet distinguish if the plan is to get rid of institutions or to gut what's their and rebuild it how the want it.
We may not end up with a smaller government, just a different one.
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.
It's called Starve The Beast
All you have to do is read project 2025 and you will know all their plans and reasoning for Stage 1 of fascism
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.
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You do need to be mad, because you need the exact same system to protect your property rights or your entire philosophy falls apart.
"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.
Libertarian isn't anarchist.
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.
I know. That's why "taxes are theft" and "try not paying your taxes and see what happens" is sophomoric bullshit.
It's a state enforcing something. Which you've just admitted is fine when it enforces something you like.
I'm not quite sure what you're arguing here.
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'.
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.
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.
> What part do you think gets built back?
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.
They’ve moved quickly, but this has all been in planning for decades. Their beliefs and motivations are all out there for everyone to see.
There’s nothing to suggest they want to rebuild.
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.
> The antiabortion response is to cut funds to anything touching abortion
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.
That is also not a “spend more money on a department of prolife”type of idea.
The question was will they build back, remember? A ban isn’t rebuilding anything.
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.
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/
> 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?
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.
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Except these people have published that their real agenda is the destruction of the ̶F̶e̶d̶e̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶g̶o̶v̶e̶r̶n̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ administrative state.
"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...
Getting rid of the administrative state sounds honestly like a great goal.
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.
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.
No one except cocaine addicts starts by randomly smashing walls, furniture, computers inside and everything else with a huge hammer.
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.
> repopulate with people loyal to you
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.
> What happened to merit
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Politics is full of short term strategies.
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.
> why shouldn't they appreciate having fewer of their tax dollars being spent on things they don't even agree with?
Democracy doesn’t mean we all agree.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
They aren't rooting out fraud. They have published their intentions over and over.
"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...
What fraud has this "rooted out"?
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!
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.
Therefore, claims of waste and fraud should be assumed false until proven otherwise, and confirmed by an unbiased third party.
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.
A guy with history of lies including false accusation of pedophilia working for a guy who lies constantly are not a duo to be trusted.
Musk et al have been caught lying several times here.
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.
A government run by a convicted felon... It all sounds very shizophrenic.
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.
> I can't recall when government was so enthusiastic about rooting out fraud.
They’re very enthusiastic about rooting out. The fraud is still missing, however.
Do you expect that there isn't fraud in the $4.92T budget, or that it just hasn't been found or proven publicly yet?
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.
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.
If institutions can only be created and never destroyed, how many institutions per person would we end up with?
They can be dismantled. By Congress who created them in the first place and gave the president and his executive only a limited range of powers.
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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.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/musk-doge-records-public-inf...
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihvSwJT0rLU
> but I don't see anyone trying to sue him and Trump for treason
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.
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.
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You can double check everything at doge.gov it’s pretty easy to see the errors they are talking about.
I’m not denying that there may be errors, whether potential or observable, in the DOGE work. However, I’d be cautious about using those errors to discredit the broader effort to scrutinize government budget allocations—something the article seems to be doing to support its narrative.
What is a source that you would approve of?
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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.
If you're from Europe, much of global politics likely appears either moderate or far-right.
Hacker News leans heavily to the left, and I rarely come across viewpoints that could be considered right-leaning. By right-wing, I mean a focus on 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. These perspectives are rarely represented in discussions here.
> 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.
It's rare that I come across a discussion on here that doesn't have multiple comment chains presenting the perspectives you're talking about.
Just look at this thread if you want to change your mind.
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?
> Your mom :)
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.
If the billionaire planned the mugging and kept the money then I damn sure would be pretty pissed
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.
>consider that billionaires are the ones taking risks, investing, and creating jobs
lol
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.
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.
meanwhile over here in reality, the thief was in the employ of the billionaire
> a less biased perspective
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...
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.
When reading an article from a politically biased outlet like The New York Times, consider asking yourself the following questions:
- Can you independently verify the accuracy of the data presented?
- If you find inaccuracies:
> - 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?
The article discusses all this.
Those pesky facts!
We have to find a better strategy, we should discredit the newspaper, because this article is factually correct.
Correct, there's plenty of waste and corruption in the government.
And yet DOGE has found none of it
They are not right wing enough? I guess only X post count as a proof, never someones research.
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Citing the NYT, who has been in bed with Democrats and the whole pseudo-"democracy" Potemkin village for decades?
Yes HN, way to go.
HN has had NYT articles from the beginning:
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.
So... they have found out that emotional extortion about unemployed bureaucrats no longer works and have focused their talking points marching orders into "they are dismantling the government, but doing so poorly".
I just want to point out that nytimes.com got $3 million. Your mutated Gell-Mann Amnesia is kicking in. You wouldn't offer this benefit to zero edge or others, the reason you haven't seen them is because you don't want to.
You've never changed policies before? Maybe it's time.
You guys are being 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:
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?
@scottmcdoge
Its not enough to have a plan to tear down. You need a plan to built too. Not seeing that.
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"
It is so blatent, it's ridiculous.
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.
> his US gov hat or his private business hat
It's the same hat.
Of course it's blatant, why would be try to hide anything about it?
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Another thread getting flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43138522
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 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.
> 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.
That is ridiculous strategy no business that wants to stay in business uses.
and you know it.
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.
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.
Quickly? Countries that get into really serious debt problems more often never seem to come out of the catastrophe. This is generation-ruining stuff.
In fact the reply specifically criticizes Trump I, the administration that passed those tax breaks.
Whether you consider yourself either a Democrat or a Republican, this is not a problem that continued party politics can solve.
I see one side curbing the debt and one side ballooning it... definitely a both sides issue!
> Whether you consider yourself either a Democrat or a Republican,
Facts don't bend to party lines, and I pity those who let political loyalty eclipse objective reasoning.
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).
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've been doing this a ton lately, as well as breaking the site guidelines in other ways.
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.
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 like that the focus is on the issues with the disruptors that have been running for a few weeks, not the egregious spending for decades.
One could agree with the goals of reducing government spending and still argue that "the disruptors" are moving too fast and breaking too many things.
Sure, where are the nytimes articles that praise and highlight the good cuts?
You wanna list those out? So far all I've seen is cutting of body parts to lose weight.
They don't always say negative things, there was positive article praising the success of Elon Musk in promoting Doge-scam:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/technology/dogecoin-bitco...
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And illegally
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.
By unchecked, do you mean appointed by the democratically elected president and under intense media scrutiny ?
Are you seeing evidence that scrutiny is making DOGE more accountable?
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.
don't get fooled by the disruptor narrative, it might very well be just pretentious immaturity
Always was.
Gives me hope that I too one day can benefit from all my psychological flaws
What's wrong with evidence?
People regularly discuss the debt, this is a strawman.
There is a dual point:
- 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.
That egregious spending bears a family resemblance to the malfeasance that cost Trump the 2020 election and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
I bet back in the day you were the complaining about 200000$ toilet seats in Iraq. Now that’s it’s not on your side of politics it’s a fabrication
Both sides for the past decades have been terrible.
It's fun to put thoughts in other people's heads!
I'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.
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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.
Totally agree. I think the debt is at 100k per taxpayer. Either taxes or inflation will have to be used to pay that.
> Either taxes or inflation will have to be used to pay that.
Or the .01% class who own the debt could get burned. Sometimes that happens when you make a bad bet, you know?
Now we have the experts advocating for default... truly mindboggling stupidity.
Well I know this - if the 'smart' option is to have every American born into crippling generational debt, I want no part of it.
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.
Debt goes up during republican goverment and down during democratic one, so anyone who cares for it would not vote for conservatives.
Nor for Trump whose lifetime history is to make debt go up and then fail upwards.
Biden added 1 trillion dollars every 100 days to the debt in the last year. Not in war or recession.
He used inflation to hide the issue in the price of everything else on top of that.
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.
both parties invoked in highly assymetrical situation is getting old.
Who in the Repubs doesn’t like spending? Like maybe three of them?
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...
The trashing of a (hopefully) dying octopus.
hopefully to be replaced by something less rotten