The one big opportunity to do that is defence and it is the one that Republicans, particularly, treat as a sacred cow.

Social Security is already extremely efficient in that the cost of moving money around is minimal.

Medicare and Medicaid are also more efficient than the private sector.

Is government perfect? Hell no. But in the really big picture the big and rising areas of civilian expenditure are not where the inefficiencies lie.

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?).

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html

A 10% increase in administration efficiency would shave of $700 million.

But regardless, a 10% improvement in efficiency, in one government program, potentially saves almost $1B.

That seems quite striking to me when you think about all the US government programs.

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.

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.

Nothing has changed yet. No plans have been rolled out.

We could wait and see what the plan is before claiming it's a failure already?

The poster said no such thing.

Thus my question seems like a pretty good rephrasing.

If someone says: "I think DOGE is BS", they're not saying: "I think any and all efforts to improve goverment efficiency are BS."

Sometimes, the thing a person says is the thing they mean to say. You're clearly creating a strawman.

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.

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.

The very definition of DOGE is government efficiency.

So please explain why a team focused on efficiency is not the same as a focus o. government efficiency.