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Comment by refurb

9 days ago

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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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    • DOGE should be able to make those arguments themselves. They're also not particularly transparent, so we have to assemble information from various sources.

      They're right now firing all probationary employees at multiple agencies. That is entirely indiscriminate, and almost certainly disruptive to the mission of those agencies.

      The actions at NIH and NSF will likely kill a large portion of the scientific research they used to fund. So unless you consider science in general be a waste I think these broad cuts clearly don't target actual waste and abuse.

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    • The Twitter DOGE account posted a screenshot of where a 'Gender Identity Section' had been removed from a website. Where is the efficiency saving and where was the waste?

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    • USAID, CFPB, 18F (free tax filing), DOJ (lawyers who worked on Trump cases), EPA (halting alternative energy projects), NSF/NIH (funding by keyword search of anything remotely DEI related) etc

      There aren’t any examples so far of stuff that is clearly waste and abuse.

    • USAID.

      If you don't think foreign aid is important for the continued safety of the US then you don't understand soft power and have no business in modern politics.

      Sadly the people in charge fit into this category, except for the ones like Marco Rubio who actually do understand this but have no spine and are willing to overlook this stupidity for a seat at the table.

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    • No. It's on DOGE (and you, since you also claim this) to show that what they cut was waste and abuse, and not the function of the agency they cut.

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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.

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.