Comment by enraged_camel
8 days ago
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?
Can we at least agree that NGOs like Chelsea Clinton's Difficult to Verify Third World Orphan Feeding Service should be audited?
The argument from the right, which I have not seen anyone on the left address directly, is that a very large portion of government spending is laundered to well connected people by way of contracts to NGOs and other kinds of organizations where there is little or no verification that the money is actually being used as claimed. Often tax filings reveal that by its own admission, the organization in question is spending nearly all the money on overhead like travel and administration. Combine this with the fact that so many people go into government jobs with modest salaries but come out being worth 10s of millions of dollars and I have a hard time believing that anything but a wrecking ball is going to fix the system.
We are adding trillions to the national debt every year so we don't have money to waste.
Many politicians go into office promising reforms but until very recently it was always just slight nibbling around the edges, if anything.
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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.
That's the problem, there is no amount of money that separates something "appropriated by congress" or "slush funding in USAID". USAID was given 50B a year, can spend it on ANYTHING it wants, there is no further congressional approval required. I do think we need to get back to a point where a congressmen needs to approve each check over 10k.
Heck, it would at least give them something to do, and feel the money roll and make their choices in Congress mean something again.
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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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I'd love to have those answers too but it seems like DOGE doesn't care about transparency as much as they claim to want that. Elon keeps touting open source and transparency but the transparency is only in the form of poorly researched, cherry picked tweets from him which are often false. I could actually get behind DOGE if they were properly publishing all the financials of the agencies that they're auditing and programs that they're cutting. Without that, it's completely unaccountable.
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Who is the "they" you're talking about? Assuming you mean "the establishment executive branch agencies", it's not like you're getting that answer from Trump and Musk either.
We have no idea what they're actually cutting, whether that $100M would have gone to something genuinely useful, or if it was going to some wasteful project.
Well, we do sorta find out, when we hear about a single mother being unable to provide food for her children because she's capriciously and arbitrarily lost her SNAP benefits.
DOGE is a train wreck, and like in any train wreck, a lot of innocent people get hurt, and no one knows what's going on in the midst of the chaos.
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They could've done the advisory role investigating and proposing improvements with a normal review process as promised instead of just going in there and being a bull in every china shop smashing things up regardless of whether or not it's useful.
Instead, you're getting to debate whether or not something was a good idea after it was already destroyed.
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Oh, have Doge actually provided anything of substance of where the money is going?
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