Comment by pclowes
1 day ago
This is interesting but very much lacking in details, it needs exact examples. I really feel for the workers at USDS. I was an engineer during the Elon Twitter acquisition and saw the thoughtless destruction first-hand.
However, the burn-it-all down approach does have some merit that critics of Elon/DOGE never admit to. How do they propose you carefully untangle the knots of fractal bureaucracy at speed and produce results if not by just cutting them off? The previous approaches of a special committee etc. just add a another fractal and yet another process.
Sometimes I feel the critics would be content if nothing was ever accomplished, if nothing ever changed, as long as thoughtful meetings were conducted and stakeholders were consulted. There is a very real layer of inertia that needs to be punched through, velocity has merit all its own.
I am very concerned about the possible outcomes of DOGE overall but business as usual just means the US goes bankrupt slowly with all the correct protocols observed. I am glad the inertia is being punctured.
>>>> the knots of fractal bureaucracy
Just being triggered by this phrase, the ideas that business as usual is unsustainable, and that the bureaucracy is unworkable, are articles of faith.
Prolonged deficit spending is by definition not sustainable.
We have been doing that for about 25 years but can’t continue indefinitely. Especially not with higher interest rates.
Government has objectively gotten worse despite massive tax revenue and is involved in a lot of endeavors that are well outside its scope IMO.
As just one of many examples: Just try to build a house pretty much anywhere and you will encounter fractal bureaucracy. This is during a nationwide housing shortage and many societal ills can be directly linked to housing costs!
Our national debt looks like a hockey-stick: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
And we spend about as much money on the debt as our entire bloated defense budget!
I was going to say 40 years, which is roughly when the Reagan administration gave up on promising to control the size of government. There's a question of when unsustainability has gone on for long enough to be regarded as perpetual.
The housing supply in my locale exploded during the run-up to the 2008 crash. Acres and acres of land got turned into spec neighborhoods. There were multiple hi-rise condominium towers going up within eyeshot of my house. In fact, my dad remarked presciently: "Condominium construction is a traditional indicator of the end of a housing cycle."
1 reply →
Federal agencies and civil servants didn’t create the deficits. Federal agencies don’t pass laws, they interpret the laws and set policies to meet the requirements of the implementation of the laws.
If you want to change how the government works, you need to change laws. Yes, government can be more efficient and effective, but blaming and firing civil servants is just scapegoating.
It would be like blaming contractors because you can’t build a house where you want, or hate the architect’s design or feel limited by zoning laws or construction codes.
The problems you identify are with the lawmakers, not the law implementers.
So why are Republicans pushing for tax cuts and increasing the debt ceiling by 4 trillion?
It’s not about the deficit.
> I was an engineer during the Elon Twitter acquisition and saw the thoughtless destruction first-hand.
I don't know. I'm not a fan of Elon, and never really used Twitter. The popular opinion was that firing most of the workforce, Twitter would go down. That it needed god knows how many SREs to keep running.
Then Elon fired everyone and Twitter didn't go down. What was destroyed?
Did it not go down? Because twitter.com now seems to redirect to a porn site, and the forum therein is more and more indistinguishable from 4chan.
The business was destroyed. Like, they had finally become profitable before the acquisition. If Elon had fired less people on the business side and kept up the illusion of brand safety for advertisers, then they'd now be pretty profitable, even with no growth.
Budgets are defined by the president and approved by congress; both are republicans controled. Why not turn off the tap in the traditional way instead of all this chaos?
They should be able to tell the departments their budgets getting cut and let the distributed leaders and experts evaluate the detailed logistics of how to manage the resulting budget in their own department. Elon going like by line in the US budget is like my CFO looking at my micro-service’s memory allocation, just seems silly.
Leaders should be setting high level goals and budgets and those on the ground can make the necessary adjustments to make them match.