I don't fault this guy for wanting to join DOGE and make a difference. The fact that he was able to make a few phone calls and actually get hired into an influential position despite having zero background in government, civics, economics, finance etc. should, however, tell you everything you need to know about the department and its brain trust.
I wonder what will happen to all these Signal conversations when the inevitable scandals/lawsuits/inquiries happen. Surely the public will be able to scrutinize them right?
Yeah I find that anecdote incredibly revealing as to the way wealthy people move through political spaces. No offence to the author of the blog post, but he was the CTO of a company that sold video conferencing software—what on Earth would he know about public governance? Pick a random student with a BA in public policy & administration off the graduating class of 2024's honour roll, and I bet they'd do a better job at doing whatever "DOGE" is supposed to do than this guy would.
You don't have to be convinced, but to present an argument -- He knows how to lead a team with disparate skills and motivations towards a complex, poorly defined end-goal. That might sound like corporate B.S., but I truly believe that's a useful skill that not everyone has. Of course I expect he is relatively weak in his understanding of law, the dynamics of different government organizations, etc, but I expect (hope?) they're hiring others to fill in these gaps.
Championship-winning 12th grade soccer captains probably have decent leadership skills, but that doesn't mean they can automatically succeed as M&A advisors at a multinational. We don't need a blitz version of the Peter principle where people skip n-levels at a time.
For those not familiar with the 1960s "Whiz Kids" attempts of "smart people" to use data and statistics to "fix" business and then government/war, there is a nice brief overview of pros/cons/lessons at:
Leading tech for a 250 person startup is surely different than wrangling the vast bureaucracy of the US Government, especially when the author says they didn't want to join Atlassian because they would have to deal with "politics" and "NPC coworkers". TBF DOGE as a non-governmental entity is just going to make bullshit recommendations to Trump and not have to actually deal with the consequences of things they recommend, so maybe it would have been perfect for this guy.
Fully agree. The academia gatekeeping in certain fields hasn’t served us well over the last decade or so.
Fresh ideas from individuals with experience from all walks of life should be entertained. Doesn’t mean they’ll be followed.
Furthermore, DOGE has no actual power administratively, really all they can do is advise. Congress would need to grant them power first. Saagar Enjeti gas a good take on this, he’s pretty well versed in Washington-Speak
The DOGE guys + Executive branch will try to get the Supreme Court to rule that the phrase "take care" in the Constitution means that the President has the power to fire any government employee at any time.
I enjoyed his recent conversation with Lex, but I lost quite a bit of respect for his opinion on politics when he called the Cambridge Analytica scandal nonsense.
For one, who said anything about "first principles thinking"? Elon Musk has a pronounced ideological bias. Anyway, first principles thinking is practically useless when it comes to highly complex systems, because such systems do not behave in self-evident ways. Empirical knowledge is the only thing that gets you anywhere.
Moreover, "DOGE" is not a break from the status quo in any way. Corporate interests have informed governance since long before either of us were born. That, rather than "policy wonks," is the rot at the heart of the government. Forever wars happen because they are extremely profitable for weapons manufacturers, not because warfare is a wonkish policy.
The only novelty "DOGE" brings to the table is the aesthetics of an SF tech startup, which won't help the government any more than it helped WeWork. It'll actually do less: WeWork was taken seriously, at least for a while. "DOGE" is impossible to take seriously.
And yet they're allying with Trump and his Republicans? Republicans are responsible for the most recent US "forever wars", and Trump has threatened to invade various countries Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, publicly proposed annexing Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland, has fired missiles into numerous countries like Syria, assassinated an Iranian general, etc.
And Trump loudly opposes various orgs that are responsible for holding aggressive powers at bay, like how NATO represents a check on Russia's apparent violent expansionism.
Trump's approach to geopolitics seems just as violent as his predecessors but more mercurial and erratic.
I would venture that introducing fresh ideas and technologists with first principles thinking will yield better results.
It could, maybe. Provided the people you appoint have some measure of credibility and integrity. Or at least seem to have some kind understanding of the basic mechanics by which governments (even when reduced to a bare minimum) need to operate.
Elon and Vivek plainly do not fit this description, and that should be screamingly obvious by now.
> The fact that he was able to make a few phone calls and actually get hired into an influential position despite having zero background in government, civics, economics, finance etc. should, however, tell you everything you need to know about the department and its brain trust
I have no interest in defending Elon, but this assessment is unfair. Recall how during the Obama transition, a bunch of Silicon Valley'ers got hired in to help modernize government tech (and doubly so after the disastrous obamacare website rollout). Very few of those people had experience in govt, civics, etc.
You can listen to their own description of their strategy and tactics. It was every different from the contemporary counterpoint. They reformed one system one subsystem at a time by working with the current owners and tech staff and teaching them their approach.
I knew contractors in their wake working at companies that grew out of their work in CMS, such as Ad Hoc (a name of the original team to not be called WHITE HOUSE HOT SHOTS or DOGE or something similarly jarring to thereby take agency away from the people who had to you know do the work once they knew they'd roll off) and Nava as they expanded beyond that one system 5 years later.
Let's see how the braggadocios we'll solve all the problems at once flavor of the moment goes, then judge the healthcare.gov teams.
Crazy idea: work for DOGE but secretly just do whatever the most educated (and compassionate) people on the topic say to do. Don’t let Elon know you’re poisoning his well with good ideas.
A lot of people consider Elon to be highly compassionate (in the balanced sense of taking into consideration second-order effects) and educated (in the non-credentialled sense of being informed).
So comments like your are little more than flamebait.
His actions could reasonably be characterized as motivated for deep care for others, and that includes not just his work on popularizing electric cars and giving humanity better internet connectivity via StarLink, but also his political activism. Of course of all of this is subjective, which is all the more reason to not pretend your view of compassion is the objective irrefutable truth.
My "view of compassion" is the literal definition of the word, yours is deciding that a robber baron with sufficiently sci-fi justifications for union-busting is somehow a compassionate person.
The entire premise of your position is that 1. Successful entrepreneurs are exploiting people, i.e. are robber barons, and 2. being for union-enforced labor relations is compassion, both of which are highly contentious claims that are in no way linked to the conventional definition of "compassion". You're trying to gaslight people with this nonsense, which is typical.
when this went from calling coworkers "NPCs" to "working" for DOGE, to "studying physics" and I'm just going to leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA
To be honest, this video was quite cringe, 50min of repeating the same thing over and over, repeating her opinion, saying ridiculous unsubstantiated things such as: “musk bought twitter because he was annoyed people were saying he was not a physicist “.
Let’s do better and post better content.
she's not wrong though. it's exactly like one the comments says: "It's the intellectual equivalent of the wannabe tough guy staple: "I almost joined the military.""
this part was disturbing. this guy cant run his own life but wants to dictate how others will live and get involved in government. the US is going to have to deal with real consequences from idiots like this.
I think running successful companies and making lots of money like this is just random luck sometimes. how did a person with no ability to introspect, surrounds him self with people that like and cant critically think manage to make so much money.
most of the startup CEOs I've met / worked for are actually comically inept as people lol. often their business success is clearly more luck than they want to admit, and they love to give lectures/post tweets [1] about things they know nothing about (e.g. ever notice how every CEO is also an enthusiastic authority on the future of population growth and space travel and the like? they're all Elon wannabes nowadays)
This is a facile dunk. Economics literature is filled with examples of debt destroying countries’ economies either through hyper inflation or default. Since the US controls its currency, it is very likely to take the inflation route, but if you get enough hawks they might choose to default.
But perhaps people supposedly becoming in charge of material results should in fact at least have a sketch of an actual nuanced understanding of things.
People who watched Europe through the Great Recession and walk away thinking "I guess austerity works" are not people seriously consuming information, they are ideologues.
The US is transitioning from being a dominant superpower to being one in a herd. Saying that the current approach is works is also difficult position to sustain. They probably should try something different.
The basic position is that a government should raise enough taxes to cover its expenses. You can call that ideological and suggest there are superior options if you want to. Maybe there are, a little debt can be a good thing. But to suggest it won't work is a bit out there. It works. It is one of those simple strategies that is too boring to fail.
Also, if the strategy switches from spending more than you earn to less, obviously there will be a period where people are worse off. It is the same with paying back any obligation. Overspending foolishly obviously increases living standards while it is happening - the problem is the part where people no longer fund the debtor and said debtor didn't invest in productive capital. You need an argument that accounts for that to claim austerity fails. It is expected to do worse than the status quo for a while. Saving money isn't much fun on Day 1 either, it can take a decade to pay off.
A good economics education would let someone be specific about what they think the problem is. What year will the US default on its debt? How much money needs to be cut from the budget to avoid that? To what extent will those cuts slow down the economy and be self-defeating?
If he arms himself with the right mathematical tools, he might just discover that the default he’s expecting is actually not imminent.
To me the elephant in the room is the cost of servicing the debt.
Even if the US has a bunch of runway before shit actually hits the fan, 2024 saw over a trillion dollars servicing the debt. That could be funding a lot of government programs instead.
Seems not ideal, but also not terrible. We have much less of a hole to dig our way out of than we did in the 1990s. Certainly doesn’t look like a crisis. The recent jump seems entirely caused by the response to the Covid crisis and not really a structural problem.
This is insane. Most countries are in debt and there's nothing wrong with that unless it becomes too high. Choosing to default is a choice with no benifits that would crash the world economy for no reason and permanently hobble the country
A default would be a silly thing on a national scale. You'd essentially reset your debt and piss off a lot of foreign powers, but the economy would continue working as before, since you'd immediately print a whole bunch of new (virtual) money. Chances are a great deal of countries will just go along with it to not grind their own economies into pieces when they suddenly can't buy/sell from/to the US any more.
This is assuming you never get to the stage of hyperinflation, but you can probably just print a whole bunch of new physical currency as well.
I have a few degrees in economics. You have absolutely zero idea what you're talking about if you think a US default would have the economy "continue working as before". A US default would make the 08 financial crisis look like a lemonade stand going out of business. This way of thinking is so dangerous because you people don't know what you don't know. Musk and the tech bros are playing Russian roulette with all of our livelihoods.
Yeah, parent comment is scary - glad you called it out. Although I don't have an economics degree, I do a lot of bond future trading on the side and am in fairly good tune with the bond market/how their yields work. The effect on the bond yields alone if the US defaulted would be disastrous.
“I have a few degrees in economics” is an appeal to authority, and a laughable one at that. Economists are historians that tricked themselves into thinking that overfitted models of the past predict the future.
2008 was obvious in retrospect but the government that is full of economists did nothing to stop it. They lauded things like Clinton getting the govt to back housing loans because there is “a school” of economics that claims that’s better than the “other school” of economics that is focused on the moral hazard.
a country debt is not like household or business debt. the only way US can default on its debt is if a bunch of idiots in washington DC decide to do so.
You don't have to have a PhD in macroeconomics to have useful policy insights.
For example, I wish someone could convince my city to stop planting a specific high maintenance tree on my street that constantly clog sewers and crushes cars.
Policy is far from perfect and there is plenty of room for improvement.
Assuming that you are correct, you have observed (a) one or more problems (b) a proximal cause of the problem(s) (c) a potential solution. Congratulations!
None of that can be said for making a facile observation about US government spending.
I can think of dozens of similar examples from my local government where entrenched local incentives or disinterest lead to completely wasteful outcomes. All of my friends in government have stories of egregious waste, 8-9 digit programs where not even the people working on them think they are effective.
I think the salient observation is that there are abundant opportunities for improvement and cost saving if there is a stakeholder that actually cares about cost savings.
You've already started from a couple of assumptions that I don't believe are true.
> there are abundant opportunities for improvement and cost saving if there is a stakeholder that actually cares about cost savings.
This fails to explain why private corporations (which presumably have from one to millions of stakeholders that care about cost saving) would waste millions of dollars. The idea that "for profit" organizations have some builtin magic trick that means that they improve and save money in ways that other sorts of organizations cannot is just demonstrably untrue.
What is true, of course, is that no matter what the type of organization, if there are people who care about and are empowered to meaningfully tackle waste and inefficiency, then things can improve. And this happens, both in government and non-governmental organizations. You don't hear about it much, for broadly the same reason you don't hear about for-profit organizations wasting money: it just isn't news.
The second assumption that I think you're making is that "wasteful outcomes" are by definition a bad thing. The problem is that government often is tasked with tackling problems where wasteful outcomes are a more or less builtin part of the way things get done, and we accept that (sometimes) because the full cost (not just financial cost) of trying to reduce waste is higher than the waste itself. A typical example: yes, there's no doubt that some government benefits go to people who are not eligible for them. However, the task of identifying all those people has many costs, both direct and indirect. The whole system becomes massively more invasive of everyone's lives when one of its prime directives is "make sure that not one cent goes to some not entitled to it". So most societies accept that there will be a level of waste, which is made up for by the benefits of treating things as if they are closer to a universal benefit.
There are plenty of other examples of this in different domains where the government operates.
>This fails to explain why private corporations (which presumably have from one to millions of stakeholders that care about cost saving) would waste millions of dollars.
Of course it fails to explain something was wasnt talking about. I wasn't offering an explanation of private corporation waste. were you under that impression I dont think it exists?
I have a 50 million dollar project right now for a private corporation that I think is a waste, despite being the being the one to create and lead it. I'm doing it for short sighted reasons. My boss thinks it will make him look good, I expect a promotion out of it, and we will both be gone when it is cancelled with absolutely nothing to show for it.
This also happens in government. As a taxpayer, I dont want to pay it. I love the idea of someone looking out for waste and even counter productive spending.
>The second assumption that I think you're making is that "wasteful outcomes" are by definition a bad thing...
Please don't strawman me and put words in my mouth. are you arguing against points I didn't make.
My point is that true waste, however you want to define it, exists, and can be improved. Are you claiming there is no room for improvement?
> I wasn't offering an explanation of private corporation waste. were you under that impression I dont think it exists?
Earlier you had said:
> .... if there is a stakeholder that actually cares about cost savings.
which tends to be short-hand these days for "in the context of a for-profit company where people actually care about this stuff". I accept that you may not have meant it that way.
> Are you claiming there is no room for improvement?
Certainly not. But starting with the claim that a gigantic percentage of US federal government spending is wasted (as the whole DOGE thing starts with) is almost certainly not the way to find actual improvements.
>which tends to be short-hand these days for "in the context of a for-profit company where people actually care about this stuff". I accept that you may not have meant it that way.
Are you think of shareholders instead of stakeholders? Either way, that was not my intention. In terms government, there are lots of ways to introduce new stakeholders with different incentives. These can be inter-agency review, or as simple as a government employee who's job it is to save money, and gets promoted based on that.
>Certainly not. But starting with the claim that a gigantic percentage of US federal government spending is wasted (as the whole DOGE thing starts with) is almost certainly not the way to find actual improvements.
Not everything in a comment in a thread on HN is about the comment that immediately preceded it. This particular subthread has featured the so-called DOGE quite significantly, and that is how we've ended up talking about efficiency, waste, improvements. DOGE is the embodiment of the claim I'm describing, and that's not directly related to anything you've said.
I don't fucking understand these people. They built a startup of questionable value which can be replicated with open source software, which is debatable if it even solves real world problem, somehow got a huge payday from freely printed VC money, and now they made it their life's calling to fire a bunch of people who don't make that money even it they worked for 10k years, but their livelihoods depend on getting paid.
Not just him, but the other 'smart people' who he mentions in the post who also work at DOGE (for like the 4 weeks he can dedicate his brilliance to solving the worlds burning issues, sorry world, if it takes longer than that).
Wouldn't this be the equivalent of telling someone "before you try and build a business, try to take some business courses and learn how business works. Perhaps even an MBA".
Most of the business is in the not-numbers stuff. If DOGE is specifically trying to fix the numbers, then it's far more important that they specifically are experts in numbers.
Not quite, because a successful business could be as simple as a lemonade stand. Government finance, on the other hand, is an exceptionally delicate game of safely maximizing spending to stimulate economic growth (and therefore future tax revenue).
Interestingly, China, who does capitalism better than the west, is not very concerned about short term voter happiness or placating special interest groups. So it's not a given that government spending must be constrained by historical assumptions, or that that model is even optimal.
I'd say many of the moves towards autocracy in the west are pointing in that direction, for better or worse.
That’s actually just categorically wrong and frankly easy to find out. First of all the one that jumps to mind is AOC, but also just in general apparently econ is the third most popular study for congress members, behind politics and law.
My state rep lives (more or less) across the street from me. He wins because he gets things done and is generally a nice and honest person. His educational background as a lawyer doesn't seem to enter into the reasons why any of us vote for him.
My congressional rep and our two senators - I couldn't even begin to tell you their educational backgrounds. I can tell you about their policy positions (and in one case, their abject failure to actually do anything related to them), and a little bit about their personal history.
I’d have to know your district to give you more details but I promise you there’s hundreds of positions across America in elections that get filled by people with a matching background college education. At the very least I can point to judges who have legal backgrounds.
>experts in one field [assuming] their skills are transferable
That appears to be the premise of DOGE.
This sentence also killed me:
>working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about
It's not because they're classified. It's because a bunch of unaccountable private citizens are plotting behind closed doors to tear down the government.
It is a mark against our system that someone can get this rich without seeing a problem with all of this. We are told that capitalism makes smart people rich, but it does not appear to filter out gullible people.
Defaulting on the debt is not going to happen but the consequences of avoiding default will not be good.
Of course, DOGE isn't really going to do anything to fix this either. Complete theater that the fixes will low and behold happen to work in the financial interest of those running DOGE.
The young who don't think the debt matters are almost guaranteed at this point to have to deal with US fiscal dominance in their lifetime. That is going to be a brutal lesson in youthful ignorance and stupidity.
How will it be a brutal lesson in youthful ignorance and stupidity when the youth have nearly no political power? We have a full-on gerontocracy and the problem is youthful naivete?
This is so blatantly obvious it hurts. This person lucked out (of course most likely due to talent, opportunity and effort inclusive) in exactly 1 (one) thing and now believes he "can".
He states he learned that hiking without training was dumb and acknowledges it was dangerous. Good. Lesson learned?
No. Still has no clue GOVERNMENT - y'know, the most complicated thing in the world to do right - may be, bear with me here, just a tad bit more complicated than elementary hiking safety training (recall: the very basics of the thing he just learned he should have learned, and risked dying for not learning)
I'm sorry if I'm a bit harsh but god damned if this doesn't sound like a completely clueless person.
He pulled millions from the economy and now wants to work with the oligarchs towards having even less redistribution. He is a small part of the reason why his country is going to s***.
Is this about the impossibility of a government defaulting on its debt if that debt is payable in currency that same government can print? Or is it some stimulus thing?
There is no upper bound on how much debt the US gov can carry as long as they're paying their interest and people still have trust that they will. Its the TRUST part that is at most risk right now.
The limit could depend on a lot of other things. In theory, it's possible that you are paying 100% of revenue on debt service yet still the best option is to take on more debt. This is if you believe that investing the money raised via additional debt provides returns that outweigh the increase in debt service costs. So in that situation, additional debt can even lower the debt service / income ratio.
So this is meant to illustrate that the limit on debt is more a function of the concrete circumstances. In this line of argumentation, debt is not limited by a mathematical formula that just takes GDP and similar statistics as input.
Your analysis leaves out one teeny tiny little thing--the ~6 Trillion dollar federal budget!
If you're paying 100% of revenue on debt service, taking on more debt isn't optional. All other federal outlays must either cease or be funded by new debt. Given current levels of federal spending, that would mean increasing the national debt by ~20% of GDP, per year.
More debt --> higher debt service costs --> even more debt --> even higher debt service costs --> et cetera
Yeah but that’s almost a tautology. This has been true for every government that ended up in hyperinflation (Germany in the 20s, Russia in the 90s, etc. etc.).
Those steering the ship have track records. I don't see anything prejudicial about evaluating the leadership of a government group w.r.t. their previous merits and shortcomings.
The people running it have track records we can assess, and have signaled their goals and in some cases stated them outright. This is simply judgement.
Elon's track record is to consistently succeed spectacularly with things that most people find laughably impossible to do. That's why I don't dismiss this project.
I missed there they stated outright that they're "only interested in enriching themselves and their cronies"?
> > Elon's track record is to consistently succeed spectacularly with things that most people find laughably impossible to do
Entrepreneurship should be about making people's lives better and the measure of such improvement is very hard but could be measured by imagining a company disappear and evaluate the consequences on society.
If Musk companies disappeared tomorrow nothing would substantially change, if you disappeared Microsoft, Google, TMSC, JPMorgan, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco... you'd have civil war within a week.
Having a rocket land on its butt might be technically impressive but so is a 23 minute guitar solo which doesn't push any emotional chord in the listener whereas a 20 seconds note bend by David Gilmour in the right moment of a song brings people to tears.
As of today Musk companies are mostly performance art that you could disappear without any real consequence, that could change in the future but it has been 25 years now, not gonna hold my breath on that.
There are two things rich Republicans hate more than anything in the world: the government spending "their" money on services for ordinary folks, and regulations preventing them from making even more money. This is often dressed up as "libertarianism," but in reality, it's simply worship of money as the ultimate virtue.
What sorts of organizations does DOGE want to defund? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the IRS, the Department of Education, Planned Parenthood, PBS and NPR: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindseychoo/2024/11/27/elon-mus.... Nevermind that these make up a tiny portion of the intended 2 trillion in cuts.
Oh, I would not be surprised to see Musk "succeed spectacularly" in this endeavor. But that's because money is power, and Musk has more of it than anyone in the country. I mean, he even bought himself a president! It's difficult to lose when you can just keep throwing cash at the problem.
By the way, nobody is ever going to tell you outright that they're "only interested in enriching themselves and their cronies." An intelligent adult should be able to interpret reality based on available evidence. If you wait for someone to throw off their mask and reveal themselves a cackling villain, you will find yourself an easy mark.
That Forbes article is just a Forbes journalist guessing what DOGE might do, based on things they've mentioned in passing.
Of course that doesn't add up to 2 trillion in cuts!
The Reich article is mostly him making up evil things DOGE might do, and then criticizing them for these imagined plans.
Once DOGE has real plans and proposals I'll be happy to mock them if they don't make sense. I agree their goals sound very difficult, but I've learned that there are always smarter people than me out there. Maybe you can at least agree with that last part :)
I could imagine a world where trying to completely eliminate the deficit in a short amount of time does dramatically more harm than the increase in the debt.
When you name your enlightened government-saving organization after a memecoin you own a mountain of, only bootlickers are going to think you're in it for altruistic reasons.
This is similar to elon's tendency to dump boatloads of money in politics to beat the people he claims are cheating by... dumping boatloads of money in politics.
If he wants any of this to be taken seriously by anyone other than his horde of bootlickers he needs to make "earning people's trust" a priority, even when it's opposed to his own interest. Instead he acts as though he's entitled to the public's trust because (he's sure) he's such a good guy, and he's (he's sure) actually acting in their interest. Doesn't work that way. Trust is earned by listening to people and by taking seriously what you hear from them—not by egoistic paternalism.
Furthermore, these business people constantly talk in terms which reflect basically-wrong beliefs about how money works at a national level. A country is not a company. A dollar spent by a country can return to its coffers as taxes many times over, and this basic fact breaks any analogy between the two.
Because of the messaging, like cutting regulations, entire departments - things that have impact on the entire country and not just a company and its customer base.
I believe, there is certainly a lot of room for improvements in government functions. But I also believe, those improvements are hidden in details and require actual work, other than just slashing funds, regulations or entire departments. Things are how they are for reasons. And those reasons will probably withstand deeper scrutiny, but not populism and conflicts of interest.
The premise is correct, but the trust in the executors is misplaced. One made money via government so there is a certain conflict of interest, another one is an ordinary American businessman with a questionable track record on the edge of ethics. That's right off the bat, on the merits, not even going into the politics.
DOGE is not an official government department, it’s a presidential advisory committee. It’s not going to have taxpayer funding, oversight and no far-reaching powers over other official departments besides shit-stirring and distraction.
Initially only Musk was making a paycheck from DOGE - since you needed a X premium subscription to apply. So its more like applicants were underwriting Musk's paychecks - that's how a true-blue American capitalist operates.
He changed it after some blowback but I have to admit - American businessmen are always cunning.
When the debt surety payments are higher than our national security budget i agree wholeheartedly. We are spending more than we are making and it's growing every year. We cannot continue like this or our surety payments will be higher than all distretionary spending by 2032.
I never understood the hate for Elon, vivek, trump. They aren't perfect people, but i'm really excited about the team he's been able to put together. Like who else has been able to hire every single person who ran against him? David sacs, elon, other extremely smart people....
Other people here seem to act like going to school and doing economics to be at Doge are just so incredibly niave... We need a huge diversity of people.
Despite all of trumps faults, he has built a powerhouse team that trancends party lines.
I think you missed the point of DOGE. This isn't a problem about navigating and optimizing a complex bureaucracy, it's to call out that massive bureaucracy exactly where it comes at a high cost and little, perhaps even negative, value. This is a managerial problem and a political problem at its core. We should all be rooting for them to succeed and table their findings, in plain speak for all the public to see. Then it will be up to the elected officials to act on it.
Cutting funding to the IRS will increase waste; nobody outside of DOGE seems to think that spending more on enforcement will fail to pay for itself by finding more tax fraud. It's not a large leap to infer that at least some of those behind DOGE are doing this to enrich themselves.
Civilian bureaucrats - in fact pretty much all discretionary spending - are line noise in the federal budget.
By far the largest components of spending are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defence.
Cutting social security means that old people get less money in their retirement, no ifs, ands or buts. Good luck with that one.
By American standards, Medicaid and Medicare are pretty efficient. So any cuts are going to mean that either doctors get paid less or fewer health services are provided. Yes, politically, Republicans can get away with cutting Medicaid, but it’s the much smaller piece of
the pie compared to Medicare. Good luck with either one of the options above with Medicare.
As for defence, procurement is a giant money tree for defence contractors, but a large part of the reason why it remains a giant money tree for contractors is that they build plants in every single congressional district there is, so trying to apply some sanity to the defence procurement process is politically untenable. Beyond that, are you going to be the one to tell the Marines they don’t need their own aircraft carriers?
Of course, tanking the American economy by removing a significant chunk of its labor force (undocumented immigrants) and increasing costs (by putting tariffs on things) is just going to make the problem harder by crunching revenue.
The right of politics has forever claimed that they can painlessly cut taxes, and it’s always nonsense.
> DOGE is BS. Civilian bureaucrats - in fact pretty much all discretionary spending - are line noise in the federal budget.
It took me years to understand that this line of reasoning is why Trump won (twice). I noticed in my own job, that whenever someone would propose an moderate but still-obvious improvement, someone else would smack them down saying "that's not the highest priority!" In the end, nothing ever gets fixed.
I think people see Trump as that guy who steamrolls the naysayers and gets shit done.
Now, I disagree that Trump really gets any useful thing done, but I definitely recognize that constant naysaying against any improvement is a real actual problem.
I disagree with this. Here are a few tidy Republican stances:
- Gun violence? Eh. Nothing we can do there. Best to just get used to it. Thoughts and prayers.
- Climate change? Nothing to see there. Drill baby, drill!
- Covid? Best to just ignore it, let it run rampant, let the weak die. No biggie.
- Universal healthcare? It'd totally suck. Wait times. Higher taxes. Pay no attention to the nearly 100 other countries successfully pulling this off.
The Republican Party is the party of maintaining the status-quo, insisting solved problems are unsolvable. Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party's central thesis is: Government is inept. Let's neuter it as much as possible. Many of us see DOGE just as a cringely-named continuation of this mission.
The party Trump ran as a candidate for has spent at least 40 and perhaps 70 years insisting the government is your enemny and government cannot get things done.
The fact that is rather difficult to make changes to the government so that it runs more efficiently and gets better stuff done might - just might - be related to the fact that one of the two major political parties in the USA is absolutely bound to the "fact" that this is not possible.
It's like when an entire slate of candidates running on "elect me for a pure and uninformed outsider take!" get elected to the city council and suddenly you spend a year with council meetings turning into 101 lessons from the city staff on what the fuck the council is responsible for.
>Cutting social security means that old people get less money in their retirement, no ifs, ands or buts. Good luck with that one.
Some ppl collecting SSI have other income over $400k. They won't miss $30k of SSI. The dem's plan was to tax that overage - not even remove it altogether - to maintain SSI, but "they're eating the dogs and cats" won and now the unelected guy who made his fortune on government contracts is in charge of choosing who to cut off from that government money supply.
> in a way that would leave government services unaffected
I’m not sure what “unaffected” means. Do you mean from the end user perspective? Or government employee perspective?
I think people underestimate the overhead associated with many government services. Even thing like social security disability have 30-40% of the money not going to the recipient, it’s going to the administration.
If you were able to improve social security administration efficiency (benefit validation, denial appeal, check mailing costs) by just 10%, you just reduced social the federal budget by a few percentage points. That’s huge.
My own experience with government services is that significant efficiencies could be squeezed out and keep the end user service the same (or better?).
So let's, for the sake of argument, say that there are two hundred similarly sized efficiency savings to be found in the US federal budget.
Congratulations, you just saved 200 billion dollars of expenditure.
The difference between expenditure and revenue in 2023 was 1.7 trillion.
Let me be clear - if money is being spent poorly, that is bad and it should be spent more effectively, or not spent at all. I'm just trying to demonstrate that "waste", at least waste as it is traditionally understood, is almost irrelevant in any attempt to balance the federal budget.
There absolutely are, but not all of them are good ideas for other reasons. One of the big things that I think many "run government like a business"-types fail to consider, is that fairness, equitability, checks-and-balances, democratic process, quality of life, etc are often inherently inefficient.
Every system has inefficiencies, including the government.
The fallacy is to assume that businesses inherently have less inefficiencies than government and/or that a government’s cost/benefit equation improves if it’s run as a business. Often, their functions overlap and this can be the case. Automated traffic monitoring is cheaper than having people count cars. But beware privatization that promises efficiency and lower costs—the result is almost always worse services, maintainable debt and in time a government bailout.
Often, their functions do not overlap. The purpose of social security is not to tighten spending as much as possible, it is to improve quality of life as much as possible.
Let me quote you: "Are you suggesting there is no possible way to make the government more efficient in a way that reduces costs by some significant amount?"
But DOGE is basically “make government more efficient”, so they are interchangeable.
Trying to give an analogy like “i don’t like football” and “we should kill all football players” for my statement is pretty disingenuous and a massive strawman itself.
We’re trying to explain to you that they’re NOT interchangeable. What you’re doing is applying a false syllogism, but in question form.
Let me illustrate with an example in a statement form: “A rock can’t fly. You can’t fly, therefore you are a rock”.
You’re saying “A wants to do X. You are criticizing A, so you must object to X being done.” That is making an unjustified leap to your conclusion. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, this is a logic error.
IF you spent a bit of time analyzing your statement you'd realize that the Government doesn't just take money but also give it out.
And not just to employees and benefit receivers but also entrepreneurs and companies.
It's by far the largest single economic actor and statistically speaking given the size of such a large actor it is more likely than not you ended up breaking even as far as quality of life (QOL) when considering all your transactions (in money and services) with the Government.
Given the economic growth measured by GDP in the period 2000-2024 even more likely is that you ended up ahead.
Except in many, if not most, cases a company’s inefficiencies IS your problem. The perfectly informed rational consumer doesn’t exist. We’re forced to buy what’s on the shelves that we can afford, and the water in the pipes and power on the grid. When the businesses collude and price fix and lower the quality of your goods you DO suffer and your only recourse is regulation.
And get out of here with that libertarian “services I don’t use” nonsense.
> Cutting social security means that old people get less money in their retirement, no ifs, ands or buts. Good luck with that one.
But surely that’s the only way out? Figure out some sane taper scheme by age or something. Social security was created when the old people population was a tiny fraction of what it is now, no way it would have ever passed it with today’s numbers. We’ll have to rip off the bandaid or face the consequences.
Taking money from one group of people and giving it to another isn’t “government waste”, though. It’s essentially zero-sum (unless you get way down into the details of the economic effects of how that money gets spent or saved.)
If you had told people when SS was passed that "granny doesn't die of hunger" is "zero sum", you might have needed martial arts skills to avoid the pitchforks coming your way.
And that's not "way down into the details of the economic effects" - it's the raison d'etre of SS.
I’m replying to the parent commenter and giving him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he’s talking only about social security payments which are beyond the essential, and which could “safely” be cut back. I recommend to you to also interpret comments generously before replying.
> By far the largest components of spending are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defence.
Sure..and all hidden waste projects can be fit into those 3 categories. Things like federal funding on hotels for illegal immigrants, including many millions on unused hotel rooms. ~$400 per person per night for illegal aliens. ~$80+ million USD in a few months.
> DOGE is BS.
Basically DOGE is only BS if you think fraud and waste are not BS. Why don't you actually look at the large number of waste projects on https://x.com/DOGE before saying it is BS ?
It is ~42 billion for welfame, $70 billion USD for schooling, $7.5 billion for the uninsured, etc, totaling to around ~150 billion. This is also around the figure confirmed by DOGE.
It would be nice if you can refute the data on facts.
It’s not an official figure. It’s a figure calculated by an anti-immigration “think tank”.
And even taking their numbers as gospel, it’s 1.1% of the federal budget - and it’s not like you can claw back that 1.1% either, because the enforcement mechanisms required to expel and keep illegal immigrants out of
the USA would cost very substantial amounts.
That is transparently not the point of it at all. Musk in particular is a proven self-interested liar and there's no reason to believe his stated intentions here. It's another right wing campaign to dismantle the parts of the state that benefit anyone other than investors.
I’ve got an idea: take some good economics courses so that you learn how government spending actually works.