Comment by goalieca
2 months ago
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.
DOGE is BS.
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.
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>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.
> DOGE is BS.
Are you suggesting there is no possible way to make the government more efficient in a way that reduces costs by some significant amount?
That seems like an extreme statement.
There are no politically viable ways to make the US government significantly more efficient in a way that would leave government services unaffected.
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.
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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.
That is a straw man, and an ugly one at that.
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.
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> 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.)
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> 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 ?
A lot of those examples are just meaningless without context and some are clearly framed in a way to make them sound ridiculous.
NIH funding on addiction research seems pretty relevant given what's going on in the US?
But the way they write it it's "injecting dogs with cocaine" or "giving cocaine to lonely mice". Very funny I guess?
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US federal budget expenditures in 2023 were a little over six trillion dollars.
Eighty million dollars isn’t even sufficient to count as a rounding error in that context.
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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.
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