Comment by fabian2k
8 days ago
For some reason quite a number of people seem to believe the purpoted goals of DOGE, removing waste and increasing efficiency of the government.
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.
> whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction
This is why DOGE is staffed with young people.
It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
Step 1. Destroy the old.
Step 2. Build the new.
Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
So, you have ignorant people breaking things, congratulating themselves on how quickly they're making progress... and then hit Step 2. And realize it's hard. And get bored. And so just, not.
Thus in the end, you're left with a broken pile of what came before, and nothing new to replace it.
You are being too kind to those young people. One doesn't need experience of bricklaying to see that building a house takes a lot longer than bulldozing it.
Anyone doing this kind of work is not merely ignorant.
> One doesn't need experience of bricklaying to see that building a house takes a lot longer than bulldozing it.
The experience of bricklaying will help you think about the future times when you'll have to lay the bricks. Without that experience you may not ever consider those times, especially in a scenario which has you excited about what you are currently doing.
This meshes well with the established policies of the Republican party, which is to campaign on how badly the Government runs, promise to fix it, get into office, then break the Government more, then run back to your constituency and say "I can't believe how bad the Government is, get me back in there so I can keep working on it."
They’ve long abandoned the pretense of fixing anything, and have gotten a lot of buy in from their base to just torch stuff and leave it in ruins.
Unfortunately (for all of us, including for their base) this isn’t actually what people want or need, except the ideologues pushing it with a clear understanding of the expected outcomes. The base just infers that the ruin of these “inefficient” programs is a noble end in itself, because their supposed inefficiency is the problem with the programs themselves.
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Fuck, that sounds familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds
I wonder if the DOGE kids will be also sent off to the countryside once they're not useful anymore...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sent-down_youth
That's what happened to Vivek.
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This is the classic 3 step plan.
Step 1. Destroy the old
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!
"Build the new" doesn't even seem to be on the table at this point. There's no proposals to replace any of this. At least not public anyway, we know they are replacing all of this with for-profit scams.
Step 1. Destroy the government
Step 2. See? The government doesn't work! Just like we said!
Step 3. "Fix" the problems created from Step 1
Step 4. MAGA eventually realizes the swamp was enlarged and made worse, not drained
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> Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
And also that the steps here should be reversed. Sure if you are tearing down a building you destroy before creating, but systems aren't buildings. If you are going to create a new system to run the cash registers for your business you don't tear out the old one and worry about building the new one later. First you have the replacement ready THEN remove the old one.
> It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
> Step 1. Destroy the old.
> Step 2. Build the new.
Feels very 'cultural revolution'-y
It befuddles me too. My understanding is that government spending is approved by congress and that all organizations except the Pentagon have passed their audits. This is not to say that there isn't _some_ waste, fraud and abuse in between the cracks, but any large expense is approved by Congress and the executive can't unilaterally override those spending choices.
FYI, the Marines have passed two audits so far: https://www.marines.mil/News/Press-Releases/Press-Release-Di...
They were even able to account for all their crayons! PT belts on the other hand...
Color me surprised. But good on them!
Crayons were accounted as food supplies? /s
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Congress approves the annual budget for each department, it's not micromanaging how it's spent
What exactly do you think a budget is?
There's a reason the federal budget is several inches of very thin paper. The budget spells out how much money gets spent for various purposes, programs, projects, etc. Of course they don't specify the kind of paperclips the FAA buys. But they will approve or modify the FAA's budget plan which includes $X for office supplies, $Y for an upgrade to the FAA's network equipment in a branch office, $Z for upgrading some nav beacons, and so on.
The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
It certainly can't stop issuing payments for existing obligations, and it especially can't take money back, which M did a day or two ago to NYC because he read a tweet that said NYC was spending money housing migrants in "luxury hotels", which shockingly turned out to be nonsense...
That's why all of this DOGE crap is such theatrical nonsense. Congress, representing their state's interests and the interests of those who live in their district, via two separate branches, approves all the budgets.
No matter what T and M say, no federal agency can just willy-nilly decide to spend money it's allocated by congress on other stuff.
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It had approved the budget for USAID which was slashed wholesale.
That's not true. At all.
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This is a good example of what I mean. There is no evidence that DOGE is acting on actual fraud and abuse, that is immediately obvious if you consider how broad most of their actions are. And unless you think that the federal government should essentially not exist at all I don't think you can declare all this just "waste".
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I mainly see a ton of likely Chesterton's Fences.
Or unintended 2nd order effects.
Who knows if the final outcome will be an improvement but it resembles fixing a TV by dropping it from a height and hoping.
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Everything they’ve been cutting so far has been ideological (DEI USAID and other agencies that are“run by Marxists”) or retribution (DOJ lawyers getting sacked) or self-serving (EPA CFPB).
The only example of waste are the 150 yr old SA recipients. Sure that happens (we’ve been hearing about “welfare queens” for decades) but certainly not something new the DOGE “uncovered “.
And why are we entrusting a bunch of young engineers to identify fraud? They might be qualified to refactor and streamline computer systems but are certainly not qualified to determine what is “legitimate “ spending and what is not.
Most people consider anything they don't like to be a waste of public funds. After all, they pay for the government through taxes, so it should serve only their needs. People in America do not view the government as a source for public good, but merely a piggy bank from which they should be able to extract funds. Just look at the student loan forgiveness crowd. I'm perfectly happy paying my dues, but a lot of people have decided that they want the government to give them a load of free money instead of using it for something productive.
Many countries don't have this boat anchor named "student loan" at all, so maybe the lesson here is that indenturing your people who actually want to study shouldn't be a must?
It's not a must.
Whether you're right or not is beside the argument he/she made, which I think is pretty strong: that many Americans think anything government does that doesn't directly benefit them is a waste. Personally I find this to be somewhat more true among folks who identify as conservatives but I also hear plenty of self-identified moderates and liberals complaining about the expenditure of tax dollars when it comes to the military and foreign influence or tax policy as it pertains to corporations and high earners.
Why not? Student loans are a good protection against brain drain. If you offer free university, there's a likelihood that people will take you up on it then move out of the country, thus wasting the money invested in educating that person. A student loan guarantees a good return on investment for people you educate. Admittedly, America solves this problem by charging income tax for citizens living abroad, but a loan is better in my view since you can't rescind it like you could a citizenship. I actually think the concept of student loans should be extended down to primary education. I also think it would be good to institute a similar system for medical debt.
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I have seen some people who are undeniably very smart get drawn into this line of thinking.
If saving money was the goal surely there's be discussion akin to "let's cut the military budget". That's how you'd know they're serious. But as it stands it is clearly just an ideological axe grinder.
(I should note I'm not American, just watching bemused from the sidelines)
The current GOP plans for the budget and tax cut will increase the deficit by 4T.
No one is serious about “saving money”. It’s just to justify the corporate tax cut.
On top of the $8 trillion in debt needed for the last round of billionaire tax cuts and unaccountable PPP helicopter money Trump spent last time around.
The way we know they're not serious is they're already planning to cut taxes taxes on the rich and corporations. There's no savings to be had, they plan to spend everything they cut on themselves, and another $3T beyond that.
Or cutting the budget for cgi roadsters in orbit.
And, currently, firing everyone without just-cause protections (probationary workers, as well the contractor workforce - nearly equal in size to federal employees.)
The great american problem is that American bureaucracy is broken. Whether it's lottery systems for hiking in national parks, fixing roads, healthcare, or hiring across federal employers, all of these require a functioning bureaucracy and there is not one. And so what do Americans do? The left complains the bureaucracy is broken and the right complains the bureaucracy exists. There is little room left for ever fixing the bureaucracy in this situation. It leaves lots of room for people to grab power and change things unilaterally to their own benefit.
American bureaucracy is not broken (but is in the process of being destroyed). Claiming that it is broken is easy rhetoric for charlatans and backed up by a few cherry picked examples.
yeah, the claim that the bureaucracy is the thing that is broken-- can we look at a few things?
Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?
Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.
Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.
And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.
So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.
Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.
This all sounds like examples of how the bureaucracy is broken. I suppose a better way to say it is the bureaucracy is unable to respond in any sort of effective way to the problems it is meant to solve because there are far too many people who have the option to change the rules whether it's the president, congressional committee, judges, etc.
Lottery for national park access seems like a great idea, way better than putting a price on it.
The American problem, speaking as an American, is the Americans. Their brains are incredibly smooth, and therefore they fear almost nothing. Famine? War? Environmental catastrophe? Societal collapse? Nah. The only thing they fear at all is someone who sounds like they might have a wrinklier brain than them. That's the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e55Z9bBDG9Y
If it was broken before, it's about to be a lot more broken.
Efficiency-wise it is impossible for DOGE to move the needle. That line of reasoning is a smokescreen for destroying government agencies. Maybe they need to be folded, so petition the people. They have the Congress and Senate.
From Reuters:
"But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said the agencies Musk and Trump have targeted to date account for a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget ...
They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with," Holtz-Eakin, who has participated in past tax and spending negotiations in Congress, told Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi...
Writing the post mortem for a two year project after a few weeks seems unserious.
Tackling the “budget” by having an llm screen NSF grants for the word “bias” IS unserious.
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They don't like the NIH, the CDC, or the Human Services part of HHS, that's for sure. Hell, they don't like the NIH so much that they're willing to overlook the fact that the basic biomedical research infrastructure in this country is essentially reliant on it.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/upshot/nih-tr...
They're trying pretty hard to kill a large part of the scientific research happening in the US right now. They're messing with NIH and NSF grants, the cap on indirect costs is likely going to decimate research at universities. And even if some or most of these drastic changes are reversed, the enormous uncertainty they're introducing will likely reduce future investments in scientific fields.
You’re pretty sure Trump likes science? LOL. Please.
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> I’m pretty sure Musk and Trump like science and they reviewed HHS.
Trump and Musk are poised to destroy science research in America. Actual scientists are all scrambling to save their jobs and research.
There's no reason to believe anything they say. Believe only what they do.
They are they are shrinking the government to find ~4T$ for for corporate tax cuts. You can call it legitimate policy but calling it "efficiency" is bit misleading.
That's a good read on the budget proposals the House Republicans are bringing to the table – the aggravating part, though, is that the loss of $4.5T of revenue won't help with the deficit or debt, since the current target for cuts in annual spending are only $1.5T. (Give or take increased defense and national security spending over the next few years.)
https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
> You can call it legitimate policy
Nothing is legitimate about this. Literally everything they are doing is both illegal and completely unconstitutional. They have thrown out the entire rule of law and it is a pure flex of power, a shock-and-awe meltdown that they hope to execute faster than the normal processes can react. They absolutely intend to abolish resistance and they know they can suffer no consequences for it.
Dark times ahead. We're aren't arguing government efficiency or saving money, they are smashing it all.
Yeah even on HN where I would expect above average observational and critical thinking skills, there are plenty of people who don’t see or refuse to see what’s going on. Pretty shocking really.
Because the parts they don't like align with the parts DOGE doesn't like. They agree with dear leader and so all that woke BS is wasteful. This way they will pay lower taxes now because we got rid of all this "waste".
Yeah that's not going to happen. Lower government spending wont lower taxes. That's not what taxes are for.
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So I guess you’re happy with the concept of Redlining[0] and believe that any government spending on either preventing the practice, or undoing the decades worth of damage caused by historical Redlining are simply a waste of government time and money?
That preventing a repeat of the damage done to America cities by the national highway system[1], which was used mechanism to literally segregate American cities is also a waste of time and money.
Most of the US significant racial atrocities committed against its own citizens, where either committed by, or with the direct assistance of, the U.S. government (at both state and federal level).
There probably a good discussion to be had on how much should be spent on DEI efforts. But the idea that spending zero really doesn’t make much sense, we know what the consequences of allowing the U.S. government to become entirely occupied by white men. Ultimately a monoculture of people results in a monoculture of ideas, and monocultures never last, something comes along finding some critical weakness that common to every agent in the monoculture, and utterly destroys the organism (in the case of the U.S. government, that might be Trump and Musk). DEI is strategically important because diverse systems are more robust, produce better ideas, and are better capable of surviving extreme shocks. All attributes people should want in their government.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-...
Don’t say “I’m avoiding any biases” with one breath and “I don’t want the gov to spend a dollar on DEI and don’t try to convince me otherwise” with the other. Seems you don’t understand what “bias” means.
A disappointingly high number of people think "DEI" means "choosing unqualified women/PoC over qualified white men".
The reality is that DEI is a campaign to get people aware of implicit bias. It's been proven time and time again that resumes with a name like "Shaniqua" are more likely to be rejected over one with a "John" even when all the qualifications are the same.
But now, of course, with the current political climate, if you're a woman or PoC, you have to be a perfect worker. If you make any kind of mistake, you'll be accused of being a DEI hire.
I suspect we're gonna start seeing this XKCD linked more often over the next 4 years: https://xkcd.com/385/
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Cutting DEI is blatantly and explicitly political. They can do that, within the laws and regulation that apply (this part is arguably something they don't follow). But it's not fraud or abuse, this is just "stuff they don't like".
They're cutting a lot more than that, this has been all over the media. One example would be biomedical research via NIH/NSF. This is not just DEI (in whatever overly broad and vague definition they use), but a lot more.
So maybe they're cutting a lot of other things and just highlighting the DEI stuff in order to draw attention away from the non-DEI stuff? I could believe that though I doubt anyone has done an analysis of the proportions yet.
What about this argument people are making in this thread that they're not actually doing any real cutting because they're not Congress? That seems like a stretch.
How is getting rid of USAID and CFPB, cutting back on the EPA and firing anyone at the DOJ who had anything to do with Trumps cases, related to DEI?
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No, if I was deaf my views on this would still be the same. I would still think that "DEI" as an idea is not something the federal government should spend money on.
I would also still support the ADA and its enforcement.
These two ideas are not in conflict. No one is trying to strip the legal rights of deaf people, nor will it happen. That is a straw man/hyperbole.
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I’m no Trump supporter by any means but I think this kind of comment must alienate Trump supporters and contribute to polarization around the topic rather than reasoned exchange. If you really want to oppose Trump I think your purpose is better served with respectful speech. I realize the anger many people feel must make respectful speech a challenge. But I also think that the rise of polarization on social media is one of the reasons we have gotten to the place we are today.
Go watch five minutes of Fox News and then ask yourself if treating the other side civilly is going to help.
Reasoned speech only works with people who are acting in good faith, and they aren’t.
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Strongly disagree. Respectful discourse requires reciprocity and from Trump himself down to his supporters, that's deliberately absent in MAGA. The whole project is about dominating and putting down other people - and has been since day one - and only appealing to comity as a defensive or deflection tactic. With such a long track record of bad faith, it's foolish to engage with other postures than suspicion.
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If you kill everyone on earth, you technically stopped humans dying from climate change events, but I doubt it's the right way
While obviously true, I don't see what that has to do with anything.
The intent of my comment was not to claim that what Musk and co. are doing is good, or that it's bad. It was to point out precisely why the claims in the post I replied to will not convince anyone who is not already convinced.
If the poster I replied to just wanted to vent, fine. But if they wanted to persuade someone on the fence, they have provided nothing towards that.
Nothing, that is, besides the standard appeal to emotion that infests almost all such arguments (on both sides) and is effective on human brains for all the wrong reasons.
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This assumes every government is as intransigent as the one you have experience with.