DOGE is a complete farce, but I think there's an important to not just write this off as a stage show and the people buying into it as idiots. There are a lot of people who feel that government isn't working for them and so when they see things like "8 million dollars spent on condoms for Palestinians" they're already primed to get angry about it. Musk/DOGE's actions may all be for spectacle, but he's tapping into some very real emotions that he wouldn't be able to tap into if people felt the government was working for them. DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem. Even if Musk and DOGE are completely discredited, if we don't figure out a way to make it so the average citizen feels like they're getting their money's worth from the government, it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain.
Re: this report that USAID was sending condoms to Gaza, that was actually in Gaza, Mozambique (which has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS), not Palestine. Maybe they knew, maybe not. Anyway, I know many people who have been parroting that stat, so it was effective propaganda.
This is straight from Elon's playbook at Twitter. Cherry-pick some things that sounds bad, find a few real bad things, mix those all together and pretend they are equal, then dribble that out to people while feigning outrage/shock.
I'm pretty convinced that he's running a SQL query like `select * from transactions where recipient like '%gaza%'`, grabbing the first item that looks suspicious, doing absolutely no research on what that item actually was, and then typing out the first thoughts he could about it on twitter.
Frankly, something DOGE has shown me is how lazy Musk is. I know he's the CEO of like twenty companies, but if what he's doing with DOGE is any indication, he has absolutely no attention to detail and is completely averse to actually learning or understanding what he's talking about. Like, every effort in DOGE is coming off as decidedly half-assed.
It makes me glad I don't own a Tesla, because I would be terrified to see what kind of corners they cut, and how much of it would end up being completely half-baked and not ready to actually be used. I'm not completely convinced that NASA contracting out to SpaceX is a good idea anymore either.
if people felt the government was working for them
There's two things you need to make people feel the government is working for them:
* good social policies
* adequate education
One of the US parties has been working for decades to sabotage both, and with the help of the media they've successfully managed to deflect all the blame for it. So no, I don't agree that DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem -- unless you mean that the problem is 50 years of consistently undermining the government.
The idea being that if common sense prevails and folks realize what a shit show/farce this DOGE thing is.... the underlying issues that allowed DOGE to exist in the first place will be unsolved.
Any time the government tries to do something for The People, the wealthy and their mouthpieces get a portion of the population to believe the much needed help is actually evil socialism/communism and will destroy their way of life.
America has been propagandized to by the wealthy for a century and this is the end result. The world's richest person reforming the government for profit.
It's vibes based FUD around medicine and government spending from people that have done nothing to look into it but talk in a bar with their friends about it. They have no idea how to articulate what is happening, where we're spending the money, how it scales with other things we spend money on. It's just headlines.
It is absolutely possible to have feelings and still be an idiot for acting on them in certain ways. Someone who "feels" that vaccines are a hoax and they should drink bleach instead is still an idiot despite that feeling. There is also a sort of gray area where a person may act irrationally due to intense feeling in a way that's perhaps excusable (e.g., someone's relative dies and they start smashing things in a fit of grief), but it's still a bad idea. We have to hope that more people are the latter category and will wake up and realize what a mess they've made.
This strikes a chord with me, perhaps because I'm one of the people who "feel that government isn't working for them."
- government spending has been rampant and completely disconnected from available funds
- "shutdown" threats, typically a sign that a red line is being crossed, has been treated as political currency
- funds going from taxpayer (individual and corporations) to government, to be redistributed for an ever-increasing list of grants, programs, and studies
- locked-in mega spending areas of the budget showing plenty of warning signs of unsustainability, with nothing being done to address
Even if DOGE is "all for spectacle," I'm having trouble finding the downsides of DOGE's actions for generations coming after us. But maybe someone could help me understand why they feel differently?
It's not just spectacle. It's destroying government agencies with decades of institutional knowledge on how to run the richest and most powerful country in the world. None of us even know most of what these interconnected institutions do, a lot of which does affect our lives in a very real way.
Sure, a lot of these agencies are doing wasteful things and there is a lot of room for improvement. Meanwhile, it's a slow and humongous beast that's very difficult to reform.
However, thinking that these institutions have no value is a great mistake. So is thinking that a few teenagers can improve things by firing people and dissolving agencies in the course of a few weeks. Needless to say, there is no historical precedent for something like this working.
You can take the position that it will just get a lot worse before it gets better: "destroy everything and build it from scratch". It's often tempting but almost never a good idea, even for software will projects. On the level of a government, this idea is actually insane and I have no doubt that people will find out why, unless they stop breaking things.
The way DOGE is shutting down things is extraconstitutional. They are essentially saying they have the power to shut down Congressionally appointed agencies, which is explicitly against the Constitution. They are creating a situation where in future generations, whatever power comes in can change everything, creating immense instability. Congress is supposed to pass laws, and the Executive is supposed to implement them. They can't choose not to implement them, because it would allow them to declare a valid law null and void. This is known as "impoundment" and it was explicitly made illegal by Congress after Nixon, but the Constitution spells out why the idea is so absurd -- it's not a power the President has.
So what are the downsides of DOGE's actions? They are fully upending the Constitutional order of checks and balances. I personally thought it was an okay system, but really it seems like enough people are willing to ignore it, that the Constitution is effectively suspended.
I feel like what's happening right now is a double leg amputation while all you had to do was to treat the gangrenous toe. Or two parents discussing one's infidelity in front of their 7 years old kid.
Like sure it'll get you somewhere, but what will you break/lose in the process? And what will you gain?
It's not "all for show", I don't think Americans understand how they're unraveling decades of soft power, eroding the trust they were already losing on the international stage, &c.
I think tearing down organizations and infrastructure that do actual good in order to stage this show is a huge downside. The US is going to lose an incredible amount of legitamcy and soft power around the globe.
The administration has presented no plan to meaningfully cut costs, it is just producing propaganda that people eat up without thinking.
It sure seems like a lot of folks want change. I just wish we had used that momentum to build consensus and empower experts to improve things. Instead, the trolls got the attention and are leading us on a snipe hunt while the rich get ready for another tax break.
>I'm one of the people who "feel that government isn't working for them."
In what way is that? I feel that a lot of people who say things like that expect the impossible and don't actually realize how extremely privileged their lives are from all of what a modern society offers them.
it's like saying "stop taking my taxes" and then later wondering why the roads are full of potholes, your tap water is no longer drinkable and your air quality sucks and your life expectancy is down.
oh, but maybe you don't care about any of that, for X reasons; those things may not be important to you, but other things are, like maybe not being swindled by your bank (CFPB) or being able to enjoy visiting a National Park. Or maybe there's nothing that you care about, but there are millions of other people who do care.
I also think the government is inefficient. The median effective tax rate (sales, both halves of FICA, state income, federal income, unemployment, property, gas, "sin" taxes, ...) in the US is in the 40%-50% range, and that's apparently not close to enough to pay for everything. We market ourselves as being a low-tax country, but that's a higher percentage than a median Brit pays (35-45%) and not much lower than Germany (50-60%). France kind of sucks on that front (60-75%), but it's about the worst offender, and at least in those countries you have free healthcare (the cost of which bumps taxes+healthcare to be worse in the US than France even). The US is very expensive if you're not very well-off.
I get that it's more complicated than this, but we went to war back when taxes were 2%. How is it that after 250 years of technological innovation we suddenly need half of everybody's individual output just to keep the country running?
So, what changes has DOGE found? For a couple I agree with (one strongly, one with reservations), my back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that the median American spends $0.50/yr on penny minting and $50/yr on the EPA. I certainly wouldn't mind $50.50/yr in my pocket (nearly double that in equivalent pre-tax wages).
Pennies do seem useless, and I wouldn't even mind going up to quarters or dollars as the minimum divisible currency unit.
The EPA is a tougher call (if the proposal were actually making it more efficient instead of just gutting it and letting corporations run rampant). On the one hand, I'd be willing to pay much more handsomly than that to actually have clean water, clean air, soil near my home without lead or other poisons, .... On the other hand, $10B+/yr is a lot of money for what the EPA does, and I'm still unable to even buy lead and cadmium free dog bowls and coffee mugs without trusting the manufacturer's pinky promise or testing it myself. Somehow, the "don't poison us with things we definitely know are very toxic" directive doesn't apply if you figure out a new shape to mould that poison into. To achieve the same real-world outcomes the EPA has over the last couple decades, you wouldn't need near that much cash.
Even if I agreed with those whole-heartedly though, and even if DOGE finds an extra $2.5k/yr of my taxes being used on things which don't benefit me at all and I'm callous enough to not care about that money's potential impact on others (which looks like a reasonable upper bound given that the strategy seems to be gutting every department that Trump or Musk doesn't like, and those are a drop in the bucket of the federal budget), I still think the cost of DOGE exceeds those gains. Somewhat equivalently, I'd happily pay $2.5k/yr to make a shitshow like this never happen again.
Why though?
The big one is that Musk and Trump have a history of fraud and abuse for personal gain, and their current actions look much more like a dictatorial power grab than evidence that they finally want to do the right thing. Some examples:
1. Which federal agents are being let go? The ones who investigated Trump after he broke countless laws. He's not trying to hide it; he's seeking revenge on people even tangentially related regardless of how much benefit they do or don't have for the country, when he's the one who broke that many bloody laws in the first place. That matches the hypothesis of "vindictive and power hungry" much better than the hypotheses of "making America great again" or "no worse than the status quo."
2. One of the first things Musk did was download the personal details of every US citizen and inject his own code into the treasury. They already (seemingly) have the power to shut down departments on a whim. What purpose does this extra power serve? It's worse than the status quo (explanation already beaten to death on HN here, I won't elaborate), and it doesn't help with the "making America great again" promise. It _does_ give Elon and any unscrupulus programmers (luckily everybody in DOGE passed their background checks with flying colors...) enormous power though.
2a. He's shipping that data off to MSFT to process it with AI. What in the ever living fuck is going on there? It's hard enough to get the DMV or a court to treat you like a person, and we want to throw current-gen AI into the mix? Have you seen Google's customer support? If I have to make a new gmail account and lose historical data then that's unfortunate. If I'm added to one of the list of real, US citizens ICE has "accidentally" deported because of some hairbrained idea to use more AI in the government....
3. Which departments are being shut down? If you need a hint, it's only departments that help ordinary people and hurt large corporations. Picking on the CFPB as an example, DOGE successfully saved the US $0.8B/yr (yayyy!!), a department which in a single maneuver saved US citizens $4B/yr (5 full years of funding, for reference). Is that making America great again? Maybe you like defrauding vulnerable people by adding overdrafts back to their previously non-overdraftable accounts just to fleece them for a few hundred dollars, but that doesn't look like it adheres to either Trump's or DOGE's stated visions. It, instead, looks like a transfer of power from the people to the newly elected Trump and unelected Musk.
4. Trump controls the house, senate, and supreme court right now. He could at least get off his arse and do that power grab the right way. Getting these changes signed into law would make it much harder for future presidents to revert them. That seems like a good thing if you're trying to make the country better (the stated purpose). A flurry of extra-constitutional executive orders, some of which will stick just because they have to work their way through the courts and because of the sheer volume, serves to increase personal power at the expense of the separation of powers in the government.
And so on. I can't point to a single thing being done and say it looks more like protecting the American people than it does creating a new dictatorship. Some of the actions might benefit me (e.g., I'm happy about the penny thing), but not enough by a long shot to overcome the downsides.
Anyone on "the other side" (problems with that framing aside for now) who doesn't understand and accept this is only serving to make the problem worse. This is the result of people's disillusionment with government from both sides of the aisle reaching a boiling point. Anyone could have seen it coming, and anyone who wants to fix it needs to understand where the other side is coming from, and not just paint them as evil stupid idiots.
Compromise. It's essential to peaceful co-existence of a group of humans of any size. At some point along the line, America seems to have lost that quality.
I think not only compromise, but more importantly communication. Like it or not, the other half of the country is also part of the country, and you cannot claim to be in support of the public without covering half of the public. The first line should be consensus, and when consensus isn't possible a carefully balanced compromise should be attempted.
If the left or the right disagree on even language and core cultural issues, they both need to find ways to communicate and evolve that allows for a peaceful coexistence. The notion the other party is a stupid or evil adversary incapable of enlightenment is poisonous, it forbids communication. Even if your adversary is indeed stupid and/or evil, it is far better to talk to them and if not change their mind, explain yourself in a language they understand (that includes a language they don't find outrageous or absurd!), leaving open the door to seeing your point of view. Even if they want to destroy you, it is a much better strategy to show you're not all that bad than escalating or just giving up. Of course, there are always voices that profit from discord, and human nature is perhaps attracted to antagonism. But we shouldn't let that go out of control, for the benefit of everyone.
If we're wrong about something, it's to our profit to learn from an adversary. This is the main lesson I think we should be taking -- even if being wrong is painful or sometimes isolating. Also logically, don't isolate those who think a little differently from your cultural heterodoxy, for the case they might have good reasons you just don't understand yet.
I think the old customs of being, and of course appearing, respectful were in part norms created for this. By behaving respectfully you're showing a willingness to learn and be wrong. By shouting, offending and imposing your opinion you're demonstrating you might be closed to other possibilities even if they are wrong, sometimes for very misguided reasons like ego, pride, or power. It's clearly then particularly important to act respectfully with those who are your adversaries or with whom you disagree (since perhaps you'll be more inclined to hear those who you already mostly agree with).
In summary: communication, compromise and respect.
The real question is when does something break that causes near-universal outrage. Unless something breaks in the near-term that most people care about, nothing will change.
The flip side is that if dismantling a federal agency doesn’t break anything, and doesn’t cause near universal outrage, perhaps the federal agency can/should be dismantled at least temporarily?
Obviously a dangerous game to play, but it’s always safer to do nothing and sink slowly than to start ripping apart the hull at sea in order to fix the leaks. Both strategies have nonzero danger.
The numbers they claim to save are like trying to turn your household budget around by cutting out a weekly latte.
If you really want to make big financial changes, you need a lot more income, or cut serious costs - like a car payment or downsize your house. In the case of DOGE, I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
If they do cut $2T, there will be a huge recession — worldwide impact, but potentially has EU and China (and India?) all trading more with each other than at present, so plausibly results in China having a larger nominal GDP after the dust settles.
I kinda expect the senators to prevent it, but we will see.
> I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
Have you considered that they are going after the low-hanging fruit, getting in "reps & sets" before they attack programs that have vastly greater inertia and potentially bi-partisan support? DoD and healthcare cover a ton of jobs, and might actually trigger pushback from Congress, in ways that annihilating the CIA's propaganda arm (which is basically a handful of overpaid bougie Dem-leaning "journalists") doesn't.
They are doing tremendous damage for something that is supposed to be a stage show. Among everything they've done over the past three weeks, HUD is being gutted as we speak and the company a friend works at lost $100 million in contracts practically overnight.
Its an inverse Robin Hood attack. Take from the poor to give to the rich. The middle class is about to get moved from business class to coach.
https://www.rawstory.com/gop-budget-2671154997/
First- Many of the cuts haven't been legally conducted and, rather, represent waste themselves as they are going to disrupt activities and create litigation. So we, the people, will pay at least as much and have less productive results and have to pay for legal fees.
Second- Federal contracts are usually bid on the free market. There's an RFP, bidders, and the best fit wins. It's usually lowest cost while meeting requirements. I'm not sure why selling to the government is not a "real customer."
Third- It's reductive and inflammatory to say that not detailing out the contracts were for was because you would have seen it as wasteful corrupt spending. How would the prior commenter have even known what you see as wasteful and corrupt?
> Without knowing what your friend's contacts were for, though, I can't tell if that's $100 million in waste that was cut, or not.
The reason we can't tell if what is being cut is waste or not is because the ones doing the cutting are not being transparent and have no accountability.
It isn't an audit if it's just Elon saying "Good" or "Bad" at each thing he looks at and then sometimes posting on the social media site he owns that he "Found a bad one!"
it may be a stage show, but it has real consequences. A huge number of NIH grants awards have not gone out. Already, I am facing a 15% shortfall in my budget from a grant that was all set to be awarded. This is not tenable kind of behavior form a major institution, and DOGE dog and pony show disgusts me.
DOGE is a complete farce, but I think there's an important to not just write this off as a stage show and the people buying into it as idiots. There are a lot of people who feel that government isn't working for them and so when they see things like "8 million dollars spent on condoms for Palestinians" they're already primed to get angry about it. Musk/DOGE's actions may all be for spectacle, but he's tapping into some very real emotions that he wouldn't be able to tap into if people felt the government was working for them. DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem. Even if Musk and DOGE are completely discredited, if we don't figure out a way to make it so the average citizen feels like they're getting their money's worth from the government, it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain.
Re: this report that USAID was sending condoms to Gaza, that was actually in Gaza, Mozambique (which has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS), not Palestine. Maybe they knew, maybe not. Anyway, I know many people who have been parroting that stat, so it was effective propaganda.
This is straight from Elon's playbook at Twitter. Cherry-pick some things that sounds bad, find a few real bad things, mix those all together and pretend they are equal, then dribble that out to people while feigning outrage/shock.
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I'm pretty convinced that he's running a SQL query like `select * from transactions where recipient like '%gaza%'`, grabbing the first item that looks suspicious, doing absolutely no research on what that item actually was, and then typing out the first thoughts he could about it on twitter.
Frankly, something DOGE has shown me is how lazy Musk is. I know he's the CEO of like twenty companies, but if what he's doing with DOGE is any indication, he has absolutely no attention to detail and is completely averse to actually learning or understanding what he's talking about. Like, every effort in DOGE is coming off as decidedly half-assed.
It makes me glad I don't own a Tesla, because I would be terrified to see what kind of corners they cut, and how much of it would end up being completely half-baked and not ready to actually be used. I'm not completely convinced that NASA contracting out to SpaceX is a good idea anymore either.
if people felt the government was working for them
There's two things you need to make people feel the government is working for them:
* good social policies
* adequate education
One of the US parties has been working for decades to sabotage both, and with the help of the media they've successfully managed to deflect all the blame for it. So no, I don't agree that DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem -- unless you mean that the problem is 50 years of consistently undermining the government.
Since 1993 there were 20 blue years and 12 red years.
Why wasn't it fixed?
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"... it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain." Someone just did ...
> even if DOGE and musk are discredited.
The idea being that if common sense prevails and folks realize what a shit show/farce this DOGE thing is.... the underlying issues that allowed DOGE to exist in the first place will be unsolved.
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Any time the government tries to do something for The People, the wealthy and their mouthpieces get a portion of the population to believe the much needed help is actually evil socialism/communism and will destroy their way of life.
America has been propagandized to by the wealthy for a century and this is the end result. The world's richest person reforming the government for profit.
It's vibes based FUD around medicine and government spending from people that have done nothing to look into it but talk in a bar with their friends about it. They have no idea how to articulate what is happening, where we're spending the money, how it scales with other things we spend money on. It's just headlines.
> ... it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain.
This is quite literally what is happening.
It is absolutely possible to have feelings and still be an idiot for acting on them in certain ways. Someone who "feels" that vaccines are a hoax and they should drink bleach instead is still an idiot despite that feeling. There is also a sort of gray area where a person may act irrationally due to intense feeling in a way that's perhaps excusable (e.g., someone's relative dies and they start smashing things in a fit of grief), but it's still a bad idea. We have to hope that more people are the latter category and will wake up and realize what a mess they've made.
This strikes a chord with me, perhaps because I'm one of the people who "feel that government isn't working for them."
- government spending has been rampant and completely disconnected from available funds
- "shutdown" threats, typically a sign that a red line is being crossed, has been treated as political currency
- funds going from taxpayer (individual and corporations) to government, to be redistributed for an ever-increasing list of grants, programs, and studies
- locked-in mega spending areas of the budget showing plenty of warning signs of unsustainability, with nothing being done to address
Even if DOGE is "all for spectacle," I'm having trouble finding the downsides of DOGE's actions for generations coming after us. But maybe someone could help me understand why they feel differently?
It's not just spectacle. It's destroying government agencies with decades of institutional knowledge on how to run the richest and most powerful country in the world. None of us even know most of what these interconnected institutions do, a lot of which does affect our lives in a very real way.
Sure, a lot of these agencies are doing wasteful things and there is a lot of room for improvement. Meanwhile, it's a slow and humongous beast that's very difficult to reform.
However, thinking that these institutions have no value is a great mistake. So is thinking that a few teenagers can improve things by firing people and dissolving agencies in the course of a few weeks. Needless to say, there is no historical precedent for something like this working.
You can take the position that it will just get a lot worse before it gets better: "destroy everything and build it from scratch". It's often tempting but almost never a good idea, even for software will projects. On the level of a government, this idea is actually insane and I have no doubt that people will find out why, unless they stop breaking things.
The way DOGE is shutting down things is extraconstitutional. They are essentially saying they have the power to shut down Congressionally appointed agencies, which is explicitly against the Constitution. They are creating a situation where in future generations, whatever power comes in can change everything, creating immense instability. Congress is supposed to pass laws, and the Executive is supposed to implement them. They can't choose not to implement them, because it would allow them to declare a valid law null and void. This is known as "impoundment" and it was explicitly made illegal by Congress after Nixon, but the Constitution spells out why the idea is so absurd -- it's not a power the President has.
So what are the downsides of DOGE's actions? They are fully upending the Constitutional order of checks and balances. I personally thought it was an okay system, but really it seems like enough people are willing to ignore it, that the Constitution is effectively suspended.
I feel like what's happening right now is a double leg amputation while all you had to do was to treat the gangrenous toe. Or two parents discussing one's infidelity in front of their 7 years old kid.
Like sure it'll get you somewhere, but what will you break/lose in the process? And what will you gain?
It's not "all for show", I don't think Americans understand how they're unraveling decades of soft power, eroding the trust they were already losing on the international stage, &c.
I think tearing down organizations and infrastructure that do actual good in order to stage this show is a huge downside. The US is going to lose an incredible amount of legitamcy and soft power around the globe.
The administration has presented no plan to meaningfully cut costs, it is just producing propaganda that people eat up without thinking.
It sure seems like a lot of folks want change. I just wish we had used that momentum to build consensus and empower experts to improve things. Instead, the trolls got the attention and are leading us on a snipe hunt while the rich get ready for another tax break.
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>I'm one of the people who "feel that government isn't working for them."
In what way is that? I feel that a lot of people who say things like that expect the impossible and don't actually realize how extremely privileged their lives are from all of what a modern society offers them.
it's like saying "stop taking my taxes" and then later wondering why the roads are full of potholes, your tap water is no longer drinkable and your air quality sucks and your life expectancy is down.
oh, but maybe you don't care about any of that, for X reasons; those things may not be important to you, but other things are, like maybe not being swindled by your bank (CFPB) or being able to enjoy visiting a National Park. Or maybe there's nothing that you care about, but there are millions of other people who do care.
I'm a bit mixed. Here's a smattering of thoughts:
I also think the government is inefficient. The median effective tax rate (sales, both halves of FICA, state income, federal income, unemployment, property, gas, "sin" taxes, ...) in the US is in the 40%-50% range, and that's apparently not close to enough to pay for everything. We market ourselves as being a low-tax country, but that's a higher percentage than a median Brit pays (35-45%) and not much lower than Germany (50-60%). France kind of sucks on that front (60-75%), but it's about the worst offender, and at least in those countries you have free healthcare (the cost of which bumps taxes+healthcare to be worse in the US than France even). The US is very expensive if you're not very well-off.
I get that it's more complicated than this, but we went to war back when taxes were 2%. How is it that after 250 years of technological innovation we suddenly need half of everybody's individual output just to keep the country running?
So, what changes has DOGE found? For a couple I agree with (one strongly, one with reservations), my back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that the median American spends $0.50/yr on penny minting and $50/yr on the EPA. I certainly wouldn't mind $50.50/yr in my pocket (nearly double that in equivalent pre-tax wages).
Pennies do seem useless, and I wouldn't even mind going up to quarters or dollars as the minimum divisible currency unit.
The EPA is a tougher call (if the proposal were actually making it more efficient instead of just gutting it and letting corporations run rampant). On the one hand, I'd be willing to pay much more handsomly than that to actually have clean water, clean air, soil near my home without lead or other poisons, .... On the other hand, $10B+/yr is a lot of money for what the EPA does, and I'm still unable to even buy lead and cadmium free dog bowls and coffee mugs without trusting the manufacturer's pinky promise or testing it myself. Somehow, the "don't poison us with things we definitely know are very toxic" directive doesn't apply if you figure out a new shape to mould that poison into. To achieve the same real-world outcomes the EPA has over the last couple decades, you wouldn't need near that much cash.
Even if I agreed with those whole-heartedly though, and even if DOGE finds an extra $2.5k/yr of my taxes being used on things which don't benefit me at all and I'm callous enough to not care about that money's potential impact on others (which looks like a reasonable upper bound given that the strategy seems to be gutting every department that Trump or Musk doesn't like, and those are a drop in the bucket of the federal budget), I still think the cost of DOGE exceeds those gains. Somewhat equivalently, I'd happily pay $2.5k/yr to make a shitshow like this never happen again.
Why though?
The big one is that Musk and Trump have a history of fraud and abuse for personal gain, and their current actions look much more like a dictatorial power grab than evidence that they finally want to do the right thing. Some examples:
1. Which federal agents are being let go? The ones who investigated Trump after he broke countless laws. He's not trying to hide it; he's seeking revenge on people even tangentially related regardless of how much benefit they do or don't have for the country, when he's the one who broke that many bloody laws in the first place. That matches the hypothesis of "vindictive and power hungry" much better than the hypotheses of "making America great again" or "no worse than the status quo."
2. One of the first things Musk did was download the personal details of every US citizen and inject his own code into the treasury. They already (seemingly) have the power to shut down departments on a whim. What purpose does this extra power serve? It's worse than the status quo (explanation already beaten to death on HN here, I won't elaborate), and it doesn't help with the "making America great again" promise. It _does_ give Elon and any unscrupulus programmers (luckily everybody in DOGE passed their background checks with flying colors...) enormous power though.
2a. He's shipping that data off to MSFT to process it with AI. What in the ever living fuck is going on there? It's hard enough to get the DMV or a court to treat you like a person, and we want to throw current-gen AI into the mix? Have you seen Google's customer support? If I have to make a new gmail account and lose historical data then that's unfortunate. If I'm added to one of the list of real, US citizens ICE has "accidentally" deported because of some hairbrained idea to use more AI in the government....
3. Which departments are being shut down? If you need a hint, it's only departments that help ordinary people and hurt large corporations. Picking on the CFPB as an example, DOGE successfully saved the US $0.8B/yr (yayyy!!), a department which in a single maneuver saved US citizens $4B/yr (5 full years of funding, for reference). Is that making America great again? Maybe you like defrauding vulnerable people by adding overdrafts back to their previously non-overdraftable accounts just to fleece them for a few hundred dollars, but that doesn't look like it adheres to either Trump's or DOGE's stated visions. It, instead, looks like a transfer of power from the people to the newly elected Trump and unelected Musk.
4. Trump controls the house, senate, and supreme court right now. He could at least get off his arse and do that power grab the right way. Getting these changes signed into law would make it much harder for future presidents to revert them. That seems like a good thing if you're trying to make the country better (the stated purpose). A flurry of extra-constitutional executive orders, some of which will stick just because they have to work their way through the courts and because of the sheer volume, serves to increase personal power at the expense of the separation of powers in the government.
And so on. I can't point to a single thing being done and say it looks more like protecting the American people than it does creating a new dictatorship. Some of the actions might benefit me (e.g., I'm happy about the penny thing), but not enough by a long shot to overcome the downsides.
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Anyone on "the other side" (problems with that framing aside for now) who doesn't understand and accept this is only serving to make the problem worse. This is the result of people's disillusionment with government from both sides of the aisle reaching a boiling point. Anyone could have seen it coming, and anyone who wants to fix it needs to understand where the other side is coming from, and not just paint them as evil stupid idiots.
Compromise. It's essential to peaceful co-existence of a group of humans of any size. At some point along the line, America seems to have lost that quality.
> Compromise
The problem is that the republican party has had a "no comprimise" policy for a while. It's like they put the party before the country.
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It would be a lot easier if they weren't so god-dammned stupid and plausibly evil.
I do not feel the need to compromise with "White Power" or "We need to find a way to safely inject bleach".
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I think not only compromise, but more importantly communication. Like it or not, the other half of the country is also part of the country, and you cannot claim to be in support of the public without covering half of the public. The first line should be consensus, and when consensus isn't possible a carefully balanced compromise should be attempted.
If the left or the right disagree on even language and core cultural issues, they both need to find ways to communicate and evolve that allows for a peaceful coexistence. The notion the other party is a stupid or evil adversary incapable of enlightenment is poisonous, it forbids communication. Even if your adversary is indeed stupid and/or evil, it is far better to talk to them and if not change their mind, explain yourself in a language they understand (that includes a language they don't find outrageous or absurd!), leaving open the door to seeing your point of view. Even if they want to destroy you, it is a much better strategy to show you're not all that bad than escalating or just giving up. Of course, there are always voices that profit from discord, and human nature is perhaps attracted to antagonism. But we shouldn't let that go out of control, for the benefit of everyone.
If we're wrong about something, it's to our profit to learn from an adversary. This is the main lesson I think we should be taking -- even if being wrong is painful or sometimes isolating. Also logically, don't isolate those who think a little differently from your cultural heterodoxy, for the case they might have good reasons you just don't understand yet.
I think the old customs of being, and of course appearing, respectful were in part norms created for this. By behaving respectfully you're showing a willingness to learn and be wrong. By shouting, offending and imposing your opinion you're demonstrating you might be closed to other possibilities even if they are wrong, sometimes for very misguided reasons like ego, pride, or power. It's clearly then particularly important to act respectfully with those who are your adversaries or with whom you disagree (since perhaps you'll be more inclined to hear those who you already mostly agree with).
In summary: communication, compromise and respect.
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The real damage that has already been done is almost certainly incalculable. As just a very small taste:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/doge-as-a-nat...
The real question is when does something break that causes near-universal outrage. Unless something breaks in the near-term that most people care about, nothing will change.
And if it causes near-universal outrage, what then?
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The flip side is that if dismantling a federal agency doesn’t break anything, and doesn’t cause near universal outrage, perhaps the federal agency can/should be dismantled at least temporarily?
Obviously a dangerous game to play, but it’s always safer to do nothing and sink slowly than to start ripping apart the hull at sea in order to fix the leaks. Both strategies have nonzero danger.
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The numbers they claim to save are like trying to turn your household budget around by cutting out a weekly latte.
If you really want to make big financial changes, you need a lot more income, or cut serious costs - like a car payment or downsize your house. In the case of DOGE, I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
If they do cut $2T, there will be a huge recession — worldwide impact, but potentially has EU and China (and India?) all trading more with each other than at present, so plausibly results in China having a larger nominal GDP after the dust settles.
I kinda expect the senators to prevent it, but we will see.
> I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
Have you considered that they are going after the low-hanging fruit, getting in "reps & sets" before they attack programs that have vastly greater inertia and potentially bi-partisan support? DoD and healthcare cover a ton of jobs, and might actually trigger pushback from Congress, in ways that annihilating the CIA's propaganda arm (which is basically a handful of overpaid bougie Dem-leaning "journalists") doesn't.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/wikileaks-usaid-has-been...
If they are small and don’t matter than why will it bother anyone? Let them mess around with their ineffective side project?
The answer is it does matter because it’s funding things both parties have an interest in.
The recent executive order for filling vacancies or whatever basically said doge can't touch dod or dohs.
They are doing tremendous damage for something that is supposed to be a stage show. Among everything they've done over the past three weeks, HUD is being gutted as we speak and the company a friend works at lost $100 million in contracts practically overnight.
Its an inverse Robin Hood attack. Take from the poor to give to the rich. The middle class is about to get moved from business class to coach. https://www.rawstory.com/gop-budget-2671154997/
I agree. My apologies. I didn't mean to diminish the damage they are doing.
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This is /s, right?
First- Many of the cuts haven't been legally conducted and, rather, represent waste themselves as they are going to disrupt activities and create litigation. So we, the people, will pay at least as much and have less productive results and have to pay for legal fees.
Second- Federal contracts are usually bid on the free market. There's an RFP, bidders, and the best fit wins. It's usually lowest cost while meeting requirements. I'm not sure why selling to the government is not a "real customer."
Third- It's reductive and inflammatory to say that not detailing out the contracts were for was because you would have seen it as wasteful corrupt spending. How would the prior commenter have even known what you see as wasteful and corrupt?
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> Without knowing what your friend's contacts were for, though, I can't tell if that's $100 million in waste that was cut, or not.
The reason we can't tell if what is being cut is waste or not is because the ones doing the cutting are not being transparent and have no accountability.
It isn't an audit if it's just Elon saying "Good" or "Bad" at each thing he looks at and then sometimes posting on the social media site he owns that he "Found a bad one!"
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If it’s a $100,000,000 contract then it was appropriated by Congress. Whether or not it’s “waste” is entirely irrelevant.
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$100 million to do what?
HUD is Housing and urban development. So probably something to do with building low income housing and other kinds of city planning.
I saw low income becsuse 100m is pennies for housing. You'll probably get a few neighborhoods if it's brand new housing.
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it may be a stage show, but it has real consequences. A huge number of NIH grants awards have not gone out. Already, I am facing a 15% shortfall in my budget from a grant that was all set to be awarded. This is not tenable kind of behavior form a major institution, and DOGE dog and pony show disgusts me.
YOU HAVE COMMITTED AN ACTUAL CRIME