Comment by staunton

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.