Comment by refurb
9 days ago
The question is - are they fundamentally altering the function of government agencies.
I think you can get the answer from what they post. Cutting $400M in external contracts for a $10B agencies isn’t cutting major functions of the agency.
To be fair, the guy I was responding to got flagged so you probably can’t see it. This wasn’t really our argument, and would look more like moving the goalposts.
To have the argument anyways, I looked back through their posts back to jan 20, and there’s really no information about most of the cuts. I presume that the few things they highlight, eg equity programs or whatever, are the worse of the worst that they could find, cause isn’t that what they’d show us? They could be cutting basically anything behind the scenes, and they themselves may not have a good idea what they’re cutting. As of jan 31st, they claimed to have cut 1-1.2 billion dollars overall. I assume that number is much higher now. Why would I trust that, while fumbling around looking at payment descriptions, one of Musk’s techbro zoomers didn’t hamper or cripple an important function of one of these departments? Where can I find the in-depth information on every cut?
Oh, they already killed some of the best education research already: https://goodscience.substack.com/p/inexplicable-cuts-at-the-...
The cut down full government agencies. Also, Chesterton's fence and second-order effects.