Comment by dzdt

I think wired nailed it:

"This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable certainty that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things."

"And if you don’t believe in the public good? You sprint through the ruination. You metastasize from agency to agency, leveling the maximum allowable destruction under the law. DOGE’s costly, embarrassing mistakes are a byproduct of reckless nihilism; if artificial intelligence can sell you a pizza, of course it can future-proof the General Services Administration.

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-incompetence-mistakes-featu...

> However, it’s worrying that a system of age-based payouts has such uncertainty in its data.

The data itself may have to be interpreted, which I would classify as 'suboptimal', but seemingly 'normal' for most projects I work with. I often have to join together various tables, remembering to include or exclude specific data via conditional logic. The conditional logic may be context-dependent, and documenting those cases is really key. Why include/exclude specific subsets of data to answer questions XYZ? Have those criteria changed over the years (and if so, why?)

Looking at raw data tables it's often quite easy to come up with ways to show the data to support whatever case you're trying to make.

> 1. The people voted for smaller government, and if the executive doesn’t have the power to reduce the size of its own bureaucracy, then there is no check on ever-expanding government.

Congress specifies the size of most government bodies through its Article 1 power of Appropriation. The Executive's job is to administer what the People's delegates have decided to do. Deciding how much to spend is not the President job, and never has been.

The Republican Congress that was also presumably just elected to reduce government can at any time send legislation to the Republican President that will reduce the size of government; in fact, they are working on a budget bill right now. They are free to restructure government as much as they want, because Congress has been explicitly vested with that power.

A lot of people don't like this, but the Constitution is very clear on this point. It's also quite readable; you can read it yourself and verify that I am not making this up!

If I may:

Their is a huge conflict of ingerest of giving this power to a major economical actor that vastly depends on public investment and under public scrutinity.

Executive should have the audit right and in some measure probably it should be widespread to all citizens up to sensitive data not being leaked. But what good is there to give this power solely to one of the richest and more powerful man in the world? This is crazy.

> 1. The people voted for smaller government […]

The people voted for President and the people voted for Congress. If Congress, who under the US Constitution controls the purse, votes for a level of "X" spending why does the President get to decide to spend <X?

> 6. In general, “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true.

It is not obviously true. Because what you're cutting may be resiliency.

To use a tech analogy: if I have two firewalls in an HA configuration, then decommissioning one to save on support costs will not break things… until the first one goes belly-up and there's no failover.

There's a reasonable argument to be made that more government capacity is actually needed (at least in certain sectors):

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...

The IRS for example would probably do better with more resources:

> That’s one reason that five former commissioners of IRS, Republican and Democrat, have argued eloquently that additional IRS resources would create a fairer tax system. The logic is simple. Fewer resources for the IRS mean reduced enforcement of tax laws. Though the tax code has become more complex, prior to the IRA real resources of the IRS had been cut by about 23 percent from 2010 to 2021.

* https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/cutting-irs-resources-and...

> Congress asked the IRS to report on why it audits the poor more than the affluent. Its response is that it doesn’t have enough money and people to audit the wealthy properly. So it’s not going to.

* https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea...

> But if DOGE can really cut $1 trillion by end of year, it will have positive knock-on effects in the bond market.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the US economy will be affected by $1 trillion less money circulating.

How and why would this produce positive knock-on effects in the bond market?

> The top-line summaries are definitely consistent with “waste.”

Can you give a reference for an analysis of some cancelled contract or program that illustrates your point that it was wasteful spending? I'm looking for something that explains what the contract or program did beyond the 10-word title of the appropriations document saying something like "DEIA Training". (I work for a big private corporation and we also have such training, and I don't think from the corporate perspective its waste; I strongly suspect they attempt to balance the spend on that training to the cost reduction on lawsuit payouts. And especially from the government perspective, harm reduction should also be accounted separately from pure cost considerations.)

With regards to (4), it's been well known for a while that since Social Security doesn't check the payments being made into the program with any sort of scrutiny illegal immigrants can often get away with giving the social security numbers of dead people to their employers. Here's an article from 2024 that mentions the problem.

https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/immigration-social-se...

From a policy perspective making it harder for illegal immigrants to be employed might make it worth cracking down on this. But doing so would cost the government money both by preventing these payments into Social Security that don't have to be paid out and also the cost of the crackdown itself.

So, no third party source.

Every large organization needs reviews/audits to find waste. I think the problem with the 'right' is the idea that because there is waste, then government is evil and we should abolish it.

But, every organization accumulates waste, and then needs to have a review process to make corrections. The whole burn it all down is pretty immature take on leadership.

Every corporation has waste, and bloated salaries, entitlements (the bosses son doesn't do much but has fat salary). Should DOGE go in and cut them also?

I am shocked, and overjoyed, that this post has not been downvoted; well said.

>1. The people voted for smaller government, and if the executive doesn’t have the power to reduce the size of its own bureaucracy, then there is no check on ever-expanding government. The executive must have full authority to examine all data produced by itself.

The people should educate themselves then. The way to reduce the budget is to elect different congresspeople. We did this in the 90s. It sure is funny how insistent all these people are that we can't just do what we've done before. Are they children who didn't live through the deficit hawk era?

2. "Their claim is impossible, but if they did it, that would be great"

4. "However, it’s worrying that a system of age-based payouts has such uncertainty in its data."

SS payouts ARE NOT based on age, but "eligibility", which age is an input to. The government purposely keeps very gentle records on it's citizens because once we saw a country keep really good records on it's people and then Bad Things happened, and also stuff about the mark of the beast. More importantly, the government takes a light touch to data integrity because the data doesn't matter. If you say you are eligible for benefits, the data says no, you can verify your eligibility a lot of ways and the data does not get updated, because we aren't supposed to be a surveillance state like that. If you want to update your records with the government, you can contact the Social Security admin and do it that way. One of the things Social Security pays out for is Ex Spouses, and that includes Abusive Ex Spouses. Your Abusive Ex I'm sure would love if the SS admin had accurate records about where they can find you. This is a legitimate concern that people working in government have had to address regularly.

5. Define significant. "Everyone thinks X" is a stupid heuristic when ONLY 47% of the country can even name the three branches of government. I don't care what Tim or Sasha think of medicare fraud, I care what GAO or an AG say about medicare fraud.

6. “if nothing breaks, you’re not cutting enough” is obviously true. Nope. Sometimes you just cannot recognize the breaks right away. The stricken vessel can keep going for quite some time before fully sinking. Cutting until shit breaks means you have to figure out what else is broken but not obviously so

And all this nonsense is shattered anyway when the basic premise of "Reducing the debt" is horseshit, which you can see from the tax plan being pushed.

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So it was not uncovered by doge? and it is also not simply fraud? „Every year, agency reports posted online document billions in improper payments, which include fraud but also underpayments, duplicate payments, payments to ineligible recipients or for ineligible goods or services.“ (from the article you linked)

I’m happy with a description of a higher standard than, say, a Reddit discussion.

There is widespread fraud in the government. It needs to be addressed. There is widespread inefficiency too.

I think the people in DOGE have the skills and access to address it.

I have no evidence that they are doing so, and some evidence of widespread loyalty tests which, while not identical, remind me of how Stalin came to power.

However, absence if evidence is not evidence of absence, and some evidence is not the same as proof.

I have dozens of explanations which fit the facts, and I don't have any way to determine which, if any, is correct.

If it is too early for them to have uncovered a meaningful understanding about what the contracts/programs/employees are doing, why is it also not too early for the contracts to be cancelled/programs ended/employees fired?