Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal, rather than saving money. DOGE was highly effective in harming the entities meant to oversee Musk's companies, stealing information about union organizing and labor complaints, reducing the government's ability to collect taxes, and destroying its regulatory capacity.
Well, for Twitter it's fine. It's a private company, and the shareholders can only blame themselves for the management they put in charge.
(From a broader society point of view, I'm a bit sad that they didn't actually manage to run Twitter into the ground. I think Twitter's a net-negative for humanity. But that's a different topic. People obviously like using it.)
Musk is uniquely stupid and arrogant for refusing to understand very complex systems before making radical changes to them. This behavior directly led to outages at Twitter after he bought it.
It was staffed with walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who knew very little about the departments or the work that they were cutting but enough to assume they knew more than people who had spent their life working there. That requires a special level of arrogance. They went in with the idea that all of these people at this organization are lazy and stupid and so everything they didn’t understand must be a result of one of those things or the other.
I like how in today’s world and especially when it comes to Musk things cannot be as simple as incompetence. It has to be some 4D chess move. Like a reverse Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which might be/maybe/perhaps explained by 4D chess move. It’s like 4chan leaking all over the Internet. And Musk can keep his genius legacy alive.
is it really 4D chess to imagine that a man under investigation by the federal government would desire to benefit from being given express permission to reduce force and efficacy of agencies directly threatening him?
I don't think Musk having bad faith intent shows him to be intelligent, more just greedy and selfish, but I think it's actually more irresponsible to believe that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing
It's not 4D chess to hurt the agencies that regulate and investigate you. It's the opposite of 4D chess. There is no secret plan, not conspiracy theory, no clever chess move.
I don't think that's right - although of course we are speculating about what's happening inside the head of Musk.
Musk strikes me as an juvenile and naive man, precisely the kind of man that would take a hatchet to a complex system while believing he is competently reforming. His experience with taking over Twitter probably reinforced his belief that you can move fast and break organisations and, despite all the moaning from liberals, nothing bad will happen in the end.
So Musk is exactly the man to honestly believe in what he was doing, and he was immersed in a right wing echo chamber, which for 50 years has been talking about government waste.
Don't ascribe to malevolence what can be explained by incompetence.
The idea that he is “stupid” or “naive” while also being the world’s wealthiest man by far needs to die
What he really is is a sociopath who uses the idea of “doing good” to infiltrate systems and setup laws and legal structures that benefit him and his companies
I don’t buy any of the goody-two-shoes “for the sake of humanity” persona and neither should you. But the worst thing you can do is dismiss his sociopathy as naivete or stupidity
This was years in the making. He basically made a $200 million bet on the USG, one that translated into hundreds of billions. This was all calculated, and the veneer of government inefficiency was good enough to mask his actual objectives.
I can say this confidently because that's what I would have done too, and I'm not half as smart as him (given that I haven't built a Paypal or a SpaceX myself). That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done. The upside to doing it that way was just that much massive.
There is a certain class of American that rides the knife edge between credulity and contempt in supporting and accepting the activities and intent of bad actors who pledge to get rid of the things they don't like and they people they detest. They're ever-ready to believe the barest of excuses and to hand-wave the worst excesses in this regard. Today's anti-woke are yesterday's McCarthyists, and history will note the echo.
The selfish kind. Unfortunately that seems to be the end goal of the American dream: "I got mine, fuck you." I can't tell you how many times I heard the "protect my family" argument from people I never thought would vote for that clown.
A strong claim is severely weakened by lack of evidence. In this case, all evidence points to the claim being untrue.
> but ultimately the impact is good or bad doesn't matter at all.
That's essentially a rewording of the above claim and again without evidence.
In fact, it's detrimental for the perpetrators of disruptive actions to attract attention to them/selves when these actions don't achieve their purported benefits.
If they wanted only to simulate activity, they'd have used less damaging to themselves ways to achieve it without inflicting damage to the system. The latter is so important that it excludes accidental or PR-related actions to that end.
Because there wasn't that much to save, compared to the sheer size of the budget? Because it's much easier to destroy than to build, generally? Because it's always been more of an ideological exercise and a revenge vehicle than a real cost-saving venture?
consulting company i work at hired a grip of these people for construction and public land projects. struggle with guilt that our success is the result of capitalizing on incompetence and lies
we certainly charge at least 3x cost for gov to employ them on top of whatever severance they might have received. the work still needs to be done and specific people know how to do it. sort of becoming a staffing agency because theres so much profit in it. makes my stomach sick writing this out
The US is being run by a hostile regime which is intent on destroying wealth, health, stability, and credibility.
The people who have convinced themselves government is evil and taxes are bad are useful idiots. They're being used by others who very much want to destroy the US as a superpower.
Musk is between the two. He's acting to keep his ass out of jail, and he's a True Believer in certain senses.
But ultimately he's disposable, and will be removed when he's no longer useful.
> Unless they thought appearing to be complete morons would distract from their actual mission of stealing all the Federal data they could.
That and the fact that many of the targeted organizations were regulating Musk's companies or even investigating them for serious violations. I don't think that I've seen such a blatant display of conflict of interest quite like this one.
Because it was really about serving red meat to the MAGA base. My relatives in Kentucky cheered because they believed the “all those lazy blacks are getting fired” narrative.
It’s so strange to me as they are deeply religious and some of the kindest folks I know, but also the most racist.
Religiosity, egomaniac libertarians, racists, etc. all suffer from an identity based cognitive bias revolving around their own or groups well being. These tribal members dont think critically about the $symbol related to their own or group identity, and the scary part is, these symbols could be anything and not just define their own ingroup but their opposing outgroup too, like eg. being vegetarian, riding a bicycle or showing broad empathy.
IMO in severe cases it requires serious therapy to teach them to face social media or group gatherings with a different/critical mindset, that naturally comes after some unpleasant disillusionment but is needed before mistakes are made. If your realtive is not treatable, completely shut, you will talk to a brick wall.
I hate to say it but Musk had a point, when he talked about twitter and his attempt "to cure the mind virus" (but as usual, he was clueless or biased). This identity based cognitive bias or identity politics is present on both political sides. The right/conservatives are just more susceptible, thats why religion, racism, libertarianism, etc. are often comorbid.
> I predicted it would net cost money if you did a full accounting. May end up being true.
People don't appreciate the role of a working executive branch and government bureaucracy in keeping the nation working, stable and relatively free from unfair practices, no matter how inefficient they may seem. In most cases, they are inefficient and have other problems because they're understaffed.
Because politics is about short term social media hype and not lasting change. Everybody who has ever studied the budget know that social services, debt payment and the military are the budget. Trying to effect any change with a major overall of these, or massive now broad taxes will not solve the problem.
And politically the right can't increase taxes and the can't serously reform social services either. But likely it would lead to that eventially.
So its literally just two parties fighting over trivial social media wins while debt pill and yearly debt upkeeep spending grows.
The intent was never savings. Hackers and Accountants are completely different specialties. If you send in hackers, the intent is obviously to hack, not conduct forensic accounting. (The inverse would also be true of course)
Or smash and delete. If you needed to infiltrate government to cover something up you wouldn’t go straight for it. You would infiltrate many points at once and create chaos and misdirection to obfuscate what you’re really doing.
It seems very little could be saved without an act of Congress.
I recall there was an interview of Bessent early on, on the All in One podcast where they laid out the plan for DOGE to cut 1 trillion. I don't think they even came close to a fraction of that.
Even if removing corruption was an actual goal, the big corrupt whales that do exist were/are just like Elon himself, all well-connected and had already paid their bribes to the current regime, making them untouchable.
Because the whole thing wasn't actually wanted. They just needed some theatre to make it look like they were fulfilling their campaign promise.
Trying to get a government to reduce its spending from within is stupid and naive.
There is no scenario, no matter who is voted in, where government spending goes down. They just talk about it, and then increase spending on the things they like (e.g. the last "big beautiful bill").
This was the primary cause of the Trump-Musk spat: former promised the latter a cost cutting campaign, but it was just a trick, used only to destroy those parts of the government he disliked like USAID, after which he promptly neutered it and signed a massive spending bill, basically having conned him.
If it has actually been wanted - something that's literally impossible unless it was say created through an Article 5 convention - it would have been effective.
doge went in to crack the internal records of huge government silos, in order to leverage the inevitable evidence of wholsale,corruption, nepotism, vice, and illegal political involvments.
and lo and behold, everybody lined up and is doing whatever tumpy says, which will be to hand over, most....but not all, of the stolen money, useing the same mechanisms to move it as before.
I remember people citing the All-In podcast about "you can always cut 10% without affecting things negatively" or something silly like that. Or thinking that $1T/year of cuts is something that's possible without taking out social security and medicare and tons of defense spending.
I can not tell you how much respect I have lost for anybody involved with the All-In podcast. They sold out all credibility for political wins for wanna-be fascists.
These jokers all got lucky, obviously. They can not perform basic analysis of organizations, clearly. What a joke of a result!
PJ O'Rourke had a line in his book "Parliament of Whores" when he, as a layman, ham-fistedly cuts a bunch of stuff from the federal budget, and then just subtracts 10% from it at the end. Probably not the originator, but a quote I think about often.
"Add it all together, and I've cut $282.8 billion, leaving a federal
budget of $950.5 billion, to which I apply O'Rourke's Circumcision Precept: You can take 10 percent off the top of anything. This gives me another
$95 billion in cuts for a grand total of $337.8 billion in budget liposuction."
I have never worked for the government, but have worked in industry that deals with government employees. One thing that is very different in industry than in government budgets is that industry budgets do have that 10% of waste. But the budgets of all government orgs I have seen are incredibly lean, especially on the salary side. The government gets mission-driven folks that are willing to give up income in order to accomplish the things they want in the world. I saw this most clearly at CDC, all the scientists I interacted with could double their salary over night by going to private industry, but they stayed where they were because they were more interested in doing meaningful and impactful work. And when it came to the budgets that CDC used to accomplish scientific work, they were even more frugal and effective than the most penny-pinching academic labs I saw. Industry is awash in waste in comparison to how effective the dollars were that were spent at CDC.
And the CDC work is all pre-competitive work that boosts the efficacy of everything else in the economy. A tiny amount of money that results in so much more economic activity and savings than could be imagined in most private industry. And all the numbers for the public savings on, say, food safety are all clearly laid out in long reports. Reports that nobody at DOGE would ever read because they don't believe than anything good could be produced by people who accept lower salaries for higher impact.
O'Rourke also said “The Republicans are the party that says that government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it,” which I've thought about a lot this year.
I saw first hand the damage that was done by Elon's little purge.
I saw people who were actively trying to make the world better - heal the sick, feed the hungry, and help the unfortunate - blindly struck down from doing those goals by a tiny egotistical mans joke of a initiative.
I will personally never purchase or use anything from any of Elon Musk's companies ever again for the rest of my life and I push others to do the same and share their stories. This selfishness from a man with so much money and yet he only uses it for his own personal gain and to hurt others is disgusting.
2nd law of thermodynamics is what makes destructiveness so costly. It is much easier and cheaper to destroy than to build or rebuild. The Trump administration is devaluing the United States at an alarming rate.
As I understand it, this is to wreck the government oversight on the conduct of the rich and the powerful. They really want to establish a full blown oligarchy. And they managed to convince the poor people that the government is bad for them too.
Systematic of so much clown techbro thought; idiots only see the obvious nicks and problems -- and even occasional absurdity -- in large institutions, and think they can come in fix everything.
It's just an extension of good ol' Chesterton's fence.
If musk, Trump, or any of their allies had any interest in cutting spending, they wouldn't have passed budgets increasing the deficit every chance they've had.
Must got what he wanted: some minor disruption to agencies that regulate him personally, the fear of god put into thousands of federal employees, and ostensibly federal data to help him bust unions.
The side effect of disrupting thousands of normal hard working people's lives it's just icing on the cake for a miserable prick like him, even if he did have to hire most of them back.
But if they could destroy the regulatory state while ALSO doubling the deficit with federal spending on defense, space, and oil, i don't doubt for a second they would do so.
A few comments here touching on "disruption" (especially considering SV's historical mantras about "disruption" and "easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission").
So I think a good renaming is in order: Disruption of Government Efficiency
Slows it down to give them time to catch up, especially in this new tech era.
I read Wired in the 90s, I remember the Libertarian Logic.
The best part is "Oh gee, we might doom society, we should think about these things... hmm. OK, guys, let's keep building it."
Fuck it, let's straight up Stalin it, not just remove restrictions but FORCE these fuckers into slave camps building it all out, industrializing (Siliconizing? LLM-izing?) the future landscape.
We've already bent our "conservative principles" in the name of corporate expediency and fascistic tendencies (who doesn't love a little "public/private" co-operation).
The worst part is, most of these people have no principle and are merely opportunistic rent seekers bent on bending the rules for me, not for thee.
Why would you believe any numbers coming out of DOGE? The entire article is about their clear lies about their own numbers. Posting a number from the DOGE website and believing it is not rational behavior.
Further, there is nothing that will make the US poorer than ending the Fed or fiat money. The US has blown past all other economies in the world because of fiat money and its special status.
> revealed corruption in the NGO's.
No, it absolutely did not. DOGE revealed the corruption of DOGE. It's all political corruption, eliminating the regulators for Musk's empire, cover it up with lies about other things.
> Doge helped a lot of people come to that conclusion, so that's helpful.
The only thing that DOGE convinced people of is that Musk is a fraud. Nobody lost trust in the government because of anything Musk did, nobody thought "Oh I used to think that USAID was good, now I think it's bad!" Musk's popularity has hit rock-bottom, he has ruined some of the most valuable consumer brands in the world.
It's odd to see so many words that are directly contradicted by plain reality. One must be in a very very very deep information bubble to see your post
> It's all political corruption, eliminating the regulators for Musk's empire, cover it up with lies about other things.
I just don't see the world this way, and I don't think my being argumentative about it is healthy for either of us.
> deep information bubble
The same could be said for you. You've left very little room for nuance.
I am not a direct investor in any of his businesses, and my opinions are my own. Musk was and is the largest military contractor, bought and paid for. He's a genius marketer, autistic, and gets his hands dirty on projects technically. He's not an idiot and he is socially awkward. I believe whatever big projects Musk starts are at the urging and partly the direction of the US military.
It seems clear (to me) that Musk is crushing it in most of his businesses. It's clear (to me) that the on again, off again relationship he has with the Trump administration was just pro wrestling kayfabe. It is impossible for me to impute motives to Musk, he says pro-human things and he works (potentially) very anti-human projects. I am apprehensive about everything he has his paws in.
I agree fully on the prosecutions. It's long since time for scoundrels to be frog marched off to jail.
I am of the opinion that there was corruption (waste and fraud and abuse) in pre-doge government. If you think everyone was clean and good, well ... I disagree.
IMO, post-doge things are "better" only because we saw some of the inside of the sausage factory. Nothing got materially any better.
Are you arguing there are no bullshit, make-work government jobs? What a strange thing to bring up, a bit of a slip.
Then again, of course there are good, hard working people in government. Lots of them. Does it need to be said?
Then again, of course there are 0% contribution parasites, evil Machiavellian scoundrels, and power mad bureaucrats in government. Lots of them. Does it need to be said?
"Government can do some good" is, in my opinion, grug philosophy. It assumes people in government are upstanding like they insist they are, have fine intentions and won't be bought or compromised, or have ethical standards that are same as ours.
Perhaps, if reviewing and reducing spending is the goal, it should be an actual earnest effort. One that starts with collecting data, analyzing spending, and making recommendations instead of knee-jerk attempting to cancel things and lay off workers before understanding what they do.
There are also ways to reduce spending or improve spending efficiency without simply cutting spending on existing programs. A major point of spending is on health care, and I have seen analyses that the US spends much more per capita for health care with worse outcomes than some other western countries.
Careful, considered, data-driven healthcare reform that focuses on improved outcomes and reduced costs could make a much bigger impact than whatever it was that DOGE was trying to do.
no, it wasn't even a real effort. A REAL effort would have been to collect what all is being done, and seeing where things should be removed, processes changed, etc. This was a slash and burn.
One thing about being the world reserve currency is that there needs to be enough currency out in the world to circulate. When there's not enough currency of a certain type, people switch to other things. As the world has become much richer, it has a huge demand for US dollars, mostly in the form of T-bills. That's "free money" for the US government to take from others in the world.
The USD as reserve currency has enabled lots of extra spending and growth in the US, in a virtuous cycle of being the reserve currency because the US has the strongest and greatest economy, and then the reserve status increases our economic strength. Over the past 75 years the US spent a huge amount of effort to place itself into such a privileged and lucky position.
There will be some point where the currency might be devalued on the world stage because of spending. But what is happening right now because of Trump is a huge devaluing of the currency because of loss of trust in the US:
The true death spiral will happen when the rest of the world fully loses trust in the US. Right now we are too big to fail, but it doesn't have to be that way if we keep on pulling back from the rest of the world. The biggest losers from this pull back is the US itself, and the enormous economic privilege it gave us.
That big spike in deficit spending came from the initial Trump tax cuts in term one, and it looks like we'll be getting an even bigger spike in deficit spending now in term 2 with even bigger tax cuts for the wealthiest in the US, with zero relief for regular people (except those in real estate.... let me tell you about all the special tax benefits for real estate investors you see when you start doing your taxes as a sole proprietor, whew....)
Anyway, we will have to wait for another Democratic president before there's any addressing the deficit, if history is any guide. We only see deficit reduction under Democratic presidents and massive deficit increases under Republican presidents. But as I started, it remains to be seen if deficits are a bad thing inherently; it's more about the quantity of the deficit and whether we lose power or gain power economically from the deficit. Military spending is mostly "dead" money that does nothing to expand the economy, but research and funding the poor ends up increasing economic activity and growth.
Edit: and destroying small things like USAID greatly lessens trust in the US, and costs us far far more in dollars than we spend on it. And that's ignoring all the good for humanity that feeding starving people does.
Sorry, there are some things that are not true there.
Presidents that had a surplus include Coolidge (R), Truman (D), Eisenhower (R), Johnson (D) and Clinton (D).
Clinton is strong in my memory, he was working with Newt Gingrich’s Republican congress. The two seemed to work well together. Some suggest that Clinton’s stances on gay marriage, immigration, incarceration, etc. give him a right-leaning stance in today’s world.
It is 100% necessary, but without the backing of Congress to enforce the spending cuts and reductions in administrative bloat, the efforts will matter little in the grand scheme of things. Trump himself really didn't get behind the DOGE stuff the way he needed to to influence real lasting change.
It is not "100%" necessary. Worst case, we just print dollars to pay off the debt. The US Government is not a business in the sense dollars, it's a business in the sense of issuing equity out in the world. And just as a company can print more equity at any time, the US government prints equity, equivalently, by either printing dollars or by issuing Treasury Bills (debt), which are merely more complicated dollars. T-bills are more complicated dollars in two ways 1) they throw off a small amount of interest making them more attractive than regular dollars, 2) their value can be retroactively changed whenever the US changes interest rates. That second point, they dynamic revaluation of previously issued T-bills by interest rate changes, is what gives a lot more monetary control than if we just printed dollars.
But if we are in a situation where there's been a bond investor revolt, and there's nothing else to be done, we just give dollars to everyone as T-bills mature rather than issuing more debt, and we retract from the world stage, and become like other countries in the world.
We are a loooooong ways away from that position, but this presidential administration is behaving so erratically that the US dollar is closer to losing its privileged status than I ever thought possible. It's such irrational, damaging, and erratic behavior going on right now that everything could topple if it continues for much longer.
> We all fall into this trap, thinking we can do better than others.
It took me a while to learn this lesson about complex systems.
First week at a new job? It’s easy to identify all the ways things are done wrong. Six months later you begin to understand why they were done “wrong”.
> First week at a new job? It’s easy to identify all the ways things are done wrong. Six months later you begin to understand why they were done “wrong”.
> We all fall into this trap, thinking we can do better than others.
I do not think we all have the level of hubris required to shit all over large governmental organizations as Musk did. I think maybe even the majority of people would say woah hold up let’s take look at what’s going on before tearing it down.
And of course that’s under the charitable assumption his actions weren’t malicious.
> Elon Musk is a smart salesman but that's about it. He has little deep knowledge in a lot of what he does.
No, I think it's the opposite — he's extremely knowledgeable about engineering and science [1], but quite hopeless at social things. If he was ignorant of technical stuff then SpaceX and Tesla would not have succeeded, and conversely if he was a good salesman he would have foreseen how badly his political actions would hurt Twitter and Tesla.
It's quite foolish to think someone is stupid or ignorant just because you don't agree with their politics.
He's been on public twitter calls before and his engineering knowledge is pathetic. I'm sorry but he's not knowledgeable about engineering or science, he's marketable about those things. People conflate the two often, but one will fall apart like a jenga tower the moment you push it even a little.
And a bunch of out of context quotes from folks that are either buddies with him or don't know shit is not convincing.
Why do you presume they can’t? Musk failed phenomenally to sell DOGE to the public, the President or the Congress. The expectation was that he’d have been better at that.
The way most of our governments are set up, the people in power typically arrive on the backs of the people with money. Elon Musk has a great deal of wealth, so everyone in power is going to listen to him.
Power respects power, ultimately. If you have wealth and power, those in power assume it was earned, because otherwise it's admitting that their own power could be through luck.
I will say that there are a few billionaires out there that do not get respect because everybody else assumes they "got lucky," but it's certainly not many billionaires. And those that people assume "got lucky" have mostly had terrible PR management on their way up, and not bothered to try to clean up their image. I have taken investment from one such billionaire that people would tell me "he got lucky," and though I don't think he got lucky to make his billions, he was also really terrible in his judgement and could not make the switch to investing even in similar industries successfully.
We all knew this would fail. Any leader worth their salt would know massive reorganizations are failures even when they aren’t unconstitutional and worthy of the death penalty.
Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal, rather than saving money. DOGE was highly effective in harming the entities meant to oversee Musk's companies, stealing information about union organizing and labor complaints, reducing the government's ability to collect taxes, and destroying its regulatory capacity.
Or maybe the unelected moronic clown running it went in with a chainsaw like when he took over twitter.
Giving zero f*cks for the massive harm caused or the legality of it.
Well, for Twitter it's fine. It's a private company, and the shareholders can only blame themselves for the management they put in charge.
(From a broader society point of view, I'm a bit sad that they didn't actually manage to run Twitter into the ground. I think Twitter's a net-negative for humanity. But that's a different topic. People obviously like using it.)
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Musk is uniquely stupid and arrogant for refusing to understand very complex systems before making radical changes to them. This behavior directly led to outages at Twitter after he bought it.
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It was staffed with walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who knew very little about the departments or the work that they were cutting but enough to assume they knew more than people who had spent their life working there. That requires a special level of arrogance. They went in with the idea that all of these people at this organization are lazy and stupid and so everything they didn’t understand must be a result of one of those things or the other.
I don't think hanlon's razor applies to billionaires , unless the peter principle holds true all the way to the very top
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The purpose of a system is what it does
I like how in today’s world and especially when it comes to Musk things cannot be as simple as incompetence. It has to be some 4D chess move. Like a reverse Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which might be/maybe/perhaps explained by 4D chess move. It’s like 4chan leaking all over the Internet. And Musk can keep his genius legacy alive.
is it really 4D chess to imagine that a man under investigation by the federal government would desire to benefit from being given express permission to reduce force and efficacy of agencies directly threatening him?
I don't think Musk having bad faith intent shows him to be intelligent, more just greedy and selfish, but I think it's actually more irresponsible to believe that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing
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Just because he is playing 4d chess, doesn't mean he is good at it.
Hanlon's razor is wrong to suggest an either or scenario when it is just as often some mix of stupidity and malice.
Never attribute to blatant corruption, "4D chess move" . There isn't anything sneaky or smart about what Elon pulled here.
It's not 4D chess to hurt the agencies that regulate and investigate you. It's the opposite of 4D chess. There is no secret plan, not conspiracy theory, no clever chess move.
Elon's still pumping his DOGE work and the Cybertruck daily on his X account.
Cybertruck may have a big customer with $100million+ orders, wouldn't count them out:
https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/spacex-buying-unfath...
Big NASA money involved like the earlier bonds the same company bought from SolarCity.
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I really wonder how Musk will fare when the tides turn because they eventually will
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I don't think that's right - although of course we are speculating about what's happening inside the head of Musk.
Musk strikes me as an juvenile and naive man, precisely the kind of man that would take a hatchet to a complex system while believing he is competently reforming. His experience with taking over Twitter probably reinforced his belief that you can move fast and break organisations and, despite all the moaning from liberals, nothing bad will happen in the end.
So Musk is exactly the man to honestly believe in what he was doing, and he was immersed in a right wing echo chamber, which for 50 years has been talking about government waste.
Don't ascribe to malevolence what can be explained by incompetence.
He did so the hyperloop just to stall trains. So there is precedent.
When you are in charge of US government reform, incompetence IS malice.
You don't get to claim incompetence while being one of the richest people alive.
The idea that he is “stupid” or “naive” while also being the world’s wealthiest man by far needs to die
What he really is is a sociopath who uses the idea of “doing good” to infiltrate systems and setup laws and legal structures that benefit him and his companies
I don’t buy any of the goody-two-shoes “for the sake of humanity” persona and neither should you. But the worst thing you can do is dismiss his sociopathy as naivete or stupidity
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You underestimate Musk too much.
This was years in the making. He basically made a $200 million bet on the USG, one that translated into hundreds of billions. This was all calculated, and the veneer of government inefficiency was good enough to mask his actual objectives.
I can say this confidently because that's what I would have done too, and I'm not half as smart as him (given that I haven't built a Paypal or a SpaceX myself). That's what anyone in such a privileged position would have done. The upside to doing it that way was just that much massive.
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There is a certain class of American that rides the knife edge between credulity and contempt in supporting and accepting the activities and intent of bad actors who pledge to get rid of the things they don't like and they people they detest. They're ever-ready to believe the barest of excuses and to hand-wave the worst excesses in this regard. Today's anti-woke are yesterday's McCarthyists, and history will note the echo.
> There is a certain class of American
The selfish kind. Unfortunately that seems to be the end goal of the American dream: "I got mine, fuck you." I can't tell you how many times I heard the "protect my family" argument from people I never thought would vote for that clown.
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This is the right take
This is disturbing.
They actually had competence at something..?
Disregarding the state, all data protection rules, and running amock; yes they are competent maligners.
the goal is to keep attention.
maybe disrupting things badly is more preferable as that gets more attention, but ultimately the impact is good or bad doesn't matter at all.
> the goal is to keep attention.
A strong claim is severely weakened by lack of evidence. In this case, all evidence points to the claim being untrue.
> but ultimately the impact is good or bad doesn't matter at all.
That's essentially a rewording of the above claim and again without evidence.
In fact, it's detrimental for the perpetrators of disruptive actions to attract attention to them/selves when these actions don't achieve their purported benefits.
If they wanted only to simulate activity, they'd have used less damaging to themselves ways to achieve it without inflicting damage to the system. The latter is so important that it excludes accidental or PR-related actions to that end.
> Perhaps because disrupting things was the actual goal
It surprises me if anyone thought anything different. I mean, how could you think anything else if yo know what group of cronies there people are?
It's like Americans forgot all about what was wrong with the Rockefeller-era oligarchy. Even the MAGA slogan is just a copy from back then.
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Because there wasn't that much to save, compared to the sheer size of the budget? Because it's much easier to destroy than to build, generally? Because it's always been more of an ideological exercise and a revenge vehicle than a real cost-saving venture?
Many of the people they cut were able to negotiate a full year severance, then were hired back as contractors effectively earning double pay.
consulting company i work at hired a grip of these people for construction and public land projects. struggle with guilt that our success is the result of capitalizing on incompetence and lies
we certainly charge at least 3x cost for gov to employ them on top of whatever severance they might have received. the work still needs to be done and specific people know how to do it. sort of becoming a staffing agency because theres so much profit in it. makes my stomach sick writing this out
If you're seeing that much money, imagine how much is flowing to the big preexisting staffing firms...
Almost enough to make you think that gutting then offering employees back at higher cost and pocketing part of the difference was the goal.
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Good for them.
Not so good for taxpayers.
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They will also be paying somewhere around 50k a year soon for heath insurance because contractors don't get benefits. Fun!
I work in state government and while contractors don’t get benefits that FTEs receive, they are usually paid close to double in salary.
That sounds like something DOGE should investigate as corrupt
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I don’t buy that it was ever aimed at saving any more than RFK is about running a competent health dept
The US is being run by a hostile regime which is intent on destroying wealth, health, stability, and credibility.
The people who have convinced themselves government is evil and taxes are bad are useful idiots. They're being used by others who very much want to destroy the US as a superpower.
Musk is between the two. He's acting to keep his ass out of jail, and he's a True Believer in certain senses.
But ultimately he's disposable, and will be removed when he's no longer useful.
Evidence? You can’t make outlandish claims and don’t back it up
Because of the sheer idiocy of all involved.
There was no plan, no thought process behind any of the cuts.
Unless they thought appearing to be complete morons would distract from their actual mission of stealing all the Federal data they could.
The whole operation of black hats need to be investigated.
> Unless they thought appearing to be complete morons would distract from their actual mission of stealing all the Federal data they could.
That and the fact that many of the targeted organizations were regulating Musk's companies or even investigating them for serious violations. I don't think that I've seen such a blatant display of conflict of interest quite like this one.
The goal was to disrupt government bureaucracy. Saving money was never the real objective, even though it was marketed that way.
Anyone who knows how to use Excel understands that entitlements and defense are the biggest issue (60%) when it comes to government spending.
On top of that 60% is ~13% on net interest payments.
Because it was really about serving red meat to the MAGA base. My relatives in Kentucky cheered because they believed the “all those lazy blacks are getting fired” narrative. It’s so strange to me as they are deeply religious and some of the kindest folks I know, but also the most racist.
Some religious people play their kind persona at church, to excuse the unkind persona in other situations.
Religiosity, egomaniac libertarians, racists, etc. all suffer from an identity based cognitive bias revolving around their own or groups well being. These tribal members dont think critically about the $symbol related to their own or group identity, and the scary part is, these symbols could be anything and not just define their own ingroup but their opposing outgroup too, like eg. being vegetarian, riding a bicycle or showing broad empathy.
IMO in severe cases it requires serious therapy to teach them to face social media or group gatherings with a different/critical mindset, that naturally comes after some unpleasant disillusionment but is needed before mistakes are made. If your realtive is not treatable, completely shut, you will talk to a brick wall.
I hate to say it but Musk had a point, when he talked about twitter and his attempt "to cure the mind virus" (but as usual, he was clueless or biased). This identity based cognitive bias or identity politics is present on both political sides. The right/conservatives are just more susceptible, thats why religion, racism, libertarianism, etc. are often comorbid.
Seemed like it was more about an ideological purge and possibly exfiltrating data than saving money.
I predicted it would net cost money if you did a full accounting. May end up being true.
> I predicted it would net cost money if you did a full accounting. May end up being true.
People don't appreciate the role of a working executive branch and government bureaucracy in keeping the nation working, stable and relatively free from unfair practices, no matter how inefficient they may seem. In most cases, they are inefficient and have other problems because they're understaffed.
That's because tech billionaires don't need all of that. They live in a bubble.
It's the same with Trump. Do you think he has ever been inside a grocery store?
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Because politics is about short term social media hype and not lasting change. Everybody who has ever studied the budget know that social services, debt payment and the military are the budget. Trying to effect any change with a major overall of these, or massive now broad taxes will not solve the problem.
And politically the right can't increase taxes and the can't serously reform social services either. But likely it would lead to that eventially.
So its literally just two parties fighting over trivial social media wins while debt pill and yearly debt upkeeep spending grows.
The intent was never savings. Hackers and Accountants are completely different specialties. If you send in hackers, the intent is obviously to hack, not conduct forensic accounting. (The inverse would also be true of course)
It was a smash & grab.
Or smash and delete. If you needed to infiltrate government to cover something up you wouldn’t go straight for it. You would infiltrate many points at once and create chaos and misdirection to obfuscate what you’re really doing.
Backdoors. US government privacy is now compromised at most levels.
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destroying things is extremely easy. there are typically a few ways for something to be working well and countless ways for it to be broken.
It seems very little could be saved without an act of Congress.
I recall there was an interview of Bessent early on, on the All in One podcast where they laid out the plan for DOGE to cut 1 trillion. I don't think they even came close to a fraction of that.
Even if removing corruption was an actual goal, the big corrupt whales that do exist were/are just like Elon himself, all well-connected and had already paid their bribes to the current regime, making them untouchable.
Politics ensures that nobody will know what was actually saved and lost.
Because the whole thing wasn't actually wanted. They just needed some theatre to make it look like they were fulfilling their campaign promise.
Trying to get a government to reduce its spending from within is stupid and naive.
There is no scenario, no matter who is voted in, where government spending goes down. They just talk about it, and then increase spending on the things they like (e.g. the last "big beautiful bill").
This was the primary cause of the Trump-Musk spat: former promised the latter a cost cutting campaign, but it was just a trick, used only to destroy those parts of the government he disliked like USAID, after which he promptly neutered it and signed a massive spending bill, basically having conned him.
If it has actually been wanted - something that's literally impossible unless it was say created through an Article 5 convention - it would have been effective.
doge went in to crack the internal records of huge government silos, in order to leverage the inevitable evidence of wholsale,corruption, nepotism, vice, and illegal political involvments. and lo and behold, everybody lined up and is doing whatever tumpy says, which will be to hand over, most....but not all, of the stolen money, useing the same mechanisms to move it as before.
I remember people citing the All-In podcast about "you can always cut 10% without affecting things negatively" or something silly like that. Or thinking that $1T/year of cuts is something that's possible without taking out social security and medicare and tons of defense spending.
I can not tell you how much respect I have lost for anybody involved with the All-In podcast. They sold out all credibility for political wins for wanna-be fascists.
These jokers all got lucky, obviously. They can not perform basic analysis of organizations, clearly. What a joke of a result!
PJ O'Rourke had a line in his book "Parliament of Whores" when he, as a layman, ham-fistedly cuts a bunch of stuff from the federal budget, and then just subtracts 10% from it at the end. Probably not the originator, but a quote I think about often.
"Add it all together, and I've cut $282.8 billion, leaving a federal budget of $950.5 billion, to which I apply O'Rourke's Circumcision Precept: You can take 10 percent off the top of anything. This gives me another $95 billion in cuts for a grand total of $337.8 billion in budget liposuction."
Parliament of Whores, page 103.
I have never worked for the government, but have worked in industry that deals with government employees. One thing that is very different in industry than in government budgets is that industry budgets do have that 10% of waste. But the budgets of all government orgs I have seen are incredibly lean, especially on the salary side. The government gets mission-driven folks that are willing to give up income in order to accomplish the things they want in the world. I saw this most clearly at CDC, all the scientists I interacted with could double their salary over night by going to private industry, but they stayed where they were because they were more interested in doing meaningful and impactful work. And when it came to the budgets that CDC used to accomplish scientific work, they were even more frugal and effective than the most penny-pinching academic labs I saw. Industry is awash in waste in comparison to how effective the dollars were that were spent at CDC.
And the CDC work is all pre-competitive work that boosts the efficacy of everything else in the economy. A tiny amount of money that results in so much more economic activity and savings than could be imagined in most private industry. And all the numbers for the public savings on, say, food safety are all clearly laid out in long reports. Reports that nobody at DOGE would ever read because they don't believe than anything good could be produced by people who accept lower salaries for higher impact.
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O'Rourke also said “The Republicans are the party that says that government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it,” which I've thought about a lot this year.
I saw first hand the damage that was done by Elon's little purge. I saw people who were actively trying to make the world better - heal the sick, feed the hungry, and help the unfortunate - blindly struck down from doing those goals by a tiny egotistical mans joke of a initiative.
I will personally never purchase or use anything from any of Elon Musk's companies ever again for the rest of my life and I push others to do the same and share their stories. This selfishness from a man with so much money and yet he only uses it for his own personal gain and to hurt others is disgusting.
“If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences—and infer the motivation.”
― Carl Jung
Because what they wanted was to "disrupt" and "saving" wasn't what they wanted.
Evil people, corruption, and very stupid voters.
Hubris, greed, corruption and contempt for four.
2nd law of thermodynamics is what makes destructiveness so costly. It is much easier and cheaper to destroy than to build or rebuild. The Trump administration is devaluing the United States at an alarming rate.
As I understand it, this is to wreck the government oversight on the conduct of the rich and the powerful. They really want to establish a full blown oligarchy. And they managed to convince the poor people that the government is bad for them too.
Immune systems of all interested triggered.
Systematic of so much clown techbro thought; idiots only see the obvious nicks and problems -- and even occasional absurdity -- in large institutions, and think they can come in fix everything.
It's just an extension of good ol' Chesterton's fence.
Because that was the point.
If musk, Trump, or any of their allies had any interest in cutting spending, they wouldn't have passed budgets increasing the deficit every chance they've had.
Must got what he wanted: some minor disruption to agencies that regulate him personally, the fear of god put into thousands of federal employees, and ostensibly federal data to help him bust unions.
The side effect of disrupting thousands of normal hard working people's lives it's just icing on the cake for a miserable prick like him, even if he did have to hire most of them back.
But if they could destroy the regulatory state while ALSO doubling the deficit with federal spending on defense, space, and oil, i don't doubt for a second they would do so.
The disruption was the point — it was all distraction while Trump worked on setting up his second term.
A few comments here touching on "disruption" (especially considering SV's historical mantras about "disruption" and "easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission").
So I think a good renaming is in order: Disruption of Government Efficiency
Slows it down to give them time to catch up, especially in this new tech era.
I read Wired in the 90s, I remember the Libertarian Logic.
The best part is "Oh gee, we might doom society, we should think about these things... hmm. OK, guys, let's keep building it."
Fuck it, let's straight up Stalin it, not just remove restrictions but FORCE these fuckers into slave camps building it all out, industrializing (Siliconizing? LLM-izing?) the future landscape.
We've already bent our "conservative principles" in the name of corporate expediency and fascistic tendencies (who doesn't love a little "public/private" co-operation).
The worst part is, most of these people have no principle and are merely opportunistic rent seekers bent on bending the rules for me, not for thee.
Because it was about Elon musk’s companies getting out of being investigated. His pay off for helping Trump.
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Why would you believe any numbers coming out of DOGE? The entire article is about their clear lies about their own numbers. Posting a number from the DOGE website and believing it is not rational behavior.
Further, there is nothing that will make the US poorer than ending the Fed or fiat money. The US has blown past all other economies in the world because of fiat money and its special status.
> revealed corruption in the NGO's.
No, it absolutely did not. DOGE revealed the corruption of DOGE. It's all political corruption, eliminating the regulators for Musk's empire, cover it up with lies about other things.
> Doge helped a lot of people come to that conclusion, so that's helpful.
The only thing that DOGE convinced people of is that Musk is a fraud. Nobody lost trust in the government because of anything Musk did, nobody thought "Oh I used to think that USAID was good, now I think it's bad!" Musk's popularity has hit rock-bottom, he has ruined some of the most valuable consumer brands in the world.
It's odd to see so many words that are directly contradicted by plain reality. One must be in a very very very deep information bubble to see your post
> It's all political corruption, eliminating the regulators for Musk's empire, cover it up with lies about other things.
I just don't see the world this way, and I don't think my being argumentative about it is healthy for either of us.
> deep information bubble
The same could be said for you. You've left very little room for nuance.
I am not a direct investor in any of his businesses, and my opinions are my own. Musk was and is the largest military contractor, bought and paid for. He's a genius marketer, autistic, and gets his hands dirty on projects technically. He's not an idiot and he is socially awkward. I believe whatever big projects Musk starts are at the urging and partly the direction of the US military.
It seems clear (to me) that Musk is crushing it in most of his businesses. It's clear (to me) that the on again, off again relationship he has with the Trump administration was just pro wrestling kayfabe. It is impossible for me to impute motives to Musk, he says pro-human things and he works (potentially) very anti-human projects. I am apprehensive about everything he has his paws in.
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Where are the prosecutions? Where are the announced investigations into this corruption? They don't exist because the found 'fraud' doesn't exist.
I agree fully on the prosecutions. It's long since time for scoundrels to be frog marched off to jail.
I am of the opinion that there was corruption (waste and fraud and abuse) in pre-doge government. If you think everyone was clean and good, well ... I disagree.
IMO, post-doge things are "better" only because we saw some of the inside of the sausage factory. Nothing got materially any better.
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Pray tell, what corruption did DOGE reveal in the NGOs?
Here's one of the big public hearings in the aftermath. D's got their digs in if that helps encourage you to watch.
https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/public-funds-private-age...
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> Doge dealt well-deserved shocks to the comfy bureaucracy and revealed corruption in the NGO's
Ah, the classic “let’s hurt others because we don’t understand them” routine.
Ever heard of Bullshit Jobs? It describes most of the private sector - maybe look inward rather than outward?
Are you arguing there are no bullshit, make-work government jobs? What a strange thing to bring up, a bit of a slip.
Then again, of course there are good, hard working people in government. Lots of them. Does it need to be said?
Then again, of course there are 0% contribution parasites, evil Machiavellian scoundrels, and power mad bureaucrats in government. Lots of them. Does it need to be said?
"Government can do some good" is, in my opinion, grug philosophy. It assumes people in government are upstanding like they insist they are, have fine intentions and won't be bought or compromised, or have ethical standards that are same as ours.
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Perhaps, if reviewing and reducing spending is the goal, it should be an actual earnest effort. One that starts with collecting data, analyzing spending, and making recommendations instead of knee-jerk attempting to cancel things and lay off workers before understanding what they do.
There are also ways to reduce spending or improve spending efficiency without simply cutting spending on existing programs. A major point of spending is on health care, and I have seen analyses that the US spends much more per capita for health care with worse outcomes than some other western countries.
Careful, considered, data-driven healthcare reform that focuses on improved outcomes and reduced costs could make a much bigger impact than whatever it was that DOGE was trying to do.
> such an effort is necessary
DOGE gave cover for the GOP to blow out our deficit by trillions of dollars. The net effect of the whole system was to massively increase our debt.
I’ll gladly vote for any politician that pledges to cut spending and raise taxes. Democrat or Republican, either is fine.
If I recall, they went after GAO first and cut the people who audit federal agencies for waste and overspending.
no, it wasn't even a real effort. A REAL effort would have been to collect what all is being done, and seeing where things should be removed, processes changed, etc. This was a slash and burn.
Yes because government employees are famously good at judging how to spend taxpayer money.
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> It’s likely tax increases will be needed besides [budget] cuts.
Not just likely. It's certain. But instead, we got tax cuts.
Things that make you go "hmm..."
One thing about being the world reserve currency is that there needs to be enough currency out in the world to circulate. When there's not enough currency of a certain type, people switch to other things. As the world has become much richer, it has a huge demand for US dollars, mostly in the form of T-bills. That's "free money" for the US government to take from others in the world.
The USD as reserve currency has enabled lots of extra spending and growth in the US, in a virtuous cycle of being the reserve currency because the US has the strongest and greatest economy, and then the reserve status increases our economic strength. Over the past 75 years the US spent a huge amount of effort to place itself into such a privileged and lucky position.
There will be some point where the currency might be devalued on the world stage because of spending. But what is happening right now because of Trump is a huge devaluing of the currency because of loss of trust in the US:
https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...
The true death spiral will happen when the rest of the world fully loses trust in the US. Right now we are too big to fail, but it doesn't have to be that way if we keep on pulling back from the rest of the world. The biggest losers from this pull back is the US itself, and the enormous economic privilege it gave us.
That big spike in deficit spending came from the initial Trump tax cuts in term one, and it looks like we'll be getting an even bigger spike in deficit spending now in term 2 with even bigger tax cuts for the wealthiest in the US, with zero relief for regular people (except those in real estate.... let me tell you about all the special tax benefits for real estate investors you see when you start doing your taxes as a sole proprietor, whew....)
Anyway, we will have to wait for another Democratic president before there's any addressing the deficit, if history is any guide. We only see deficit reduction under Democratic presidents and massive deficit increases under Republican presidents. But as I started, it remains to be seen if deficits are a bad thing inherently; it's more about the quantity of the deficit and whether we lose power or gain power economically from the deficit. Military spending is mostly "dead" money that does nothing to expand the economy, but research and funding the poor ends up increasing economic activity and growth.
Edit: and destroying small things like USAID greatly lessens trust in the US, and costs us far far more in dollars than we spend on it. And that's ignoring all the good for humanity that feeding starving people does.
Sorry, there are some things that are not true there.
Presidents that had a surplus include Coolidge (R), Truman (D), Eisenhower (R), Johnson (D) and Clinton (D).
Clinton is strong in my memory, he was working with Newt Gingrich’s Republican congress. The two seemed to work well together. Some suggest that Clinton’s stances on gay marriage, immigration, incarceration, etc. give him a right-leaning stance in today’s world.
It is 100% necessary, but without the backing of Congress to enforce the spending cuts and reductions in administrative bloat, the efforts will matter little in the grand scheme of things. Trump himself really didn't get behind the DOGE stuff the way he needed to to influence real lasting change.
It is not "100%" necessary. Worst case, we just print dollars to pay off the debt. The US Government is not a business in the sense dollars, it's a business in the sense of issuing equity out in the world. And just as a company can print more equity at any time, the US government prints equity, equivalently, by either printing dollars or by issuing Treasury Bills (debt), which are merely more complicated dollars. T-bills are more complicated dollars in two ways 1) they throw off a small amount of interest making them more attractive than regular dollars, 2) their value can be retroactively changed whenever the US changes interest rates. That second point, they dynamic revaluation of previously issued T-bills by interest rate changes, is what gives a lot more monetary control than if we just printed dollars.
But if we are in a situation where there's been a bond investor revolt, and there's nothing else to be done, we just give dollars to everyone as T-bills mature rather than issuing more debt, and we retract from the world stage, and become like other countries in the world.
We are a loooooong ways away from that position, but this presidential administration is behaving so erratically that the US dollar is closer to losing its privileged status than I ever thought possible. It's such irrational, damaging, and erratic behavior going on right now that everything could topple if it continues for much longer.
Biased article behind a paywall.
We all fall into this trap, thinking we can do better than others.
The problem is that Elon Musk has power (in the form of money) and was able to buy his way into the government.
Elon Musk is a smart salesman but that's about it. He has little deep knowledge in a lot of what he does.
> We all fall into this trap, thinking we can do better than others.
It took me a while to learn this lesson about complex systems.
First week at a new job? It’s easy to identify all the ways things are done wrong. Six months later you begin to understand why they were done “wrong”.
Or often: 6 months you realize how hard/expensive it is to correct even if it is wrong.
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> First week at a new job? It’s easy to identify all the ways things are done wrong. Six months later you begin to understand why they were done “wrong”.
https://theknowledge.io/chestertons-fence-explained/
> Six months later you begin to understand why they were done “wrong”.
It is hard to say whether it is really understanding, or just stockholm syndrome of local optimum.
> We all fall into this trap, thinking we can do better than others.
I do not think we all have the level of hubris required to shit all over large governmental organizations as Musk did. I think maybe even the majority of people would say woah hold up let’s take look at what’s going on before tearing it down.
And of course that’s under the charitable assumption his actions weren’t malicious.
> Elon Musk is a smart salesman but that's about it. He has little deep knowledge in a lot of what he does.
No, I think it's the opposite — he's extremely knowledgeable about engineering and science [1], but quite hopeless at social things. If he was ignorant of technical stuff then SpaceX and Tesla would not have succeeded, and conversely if he was a good salesman he would have foreseen how badly his political actions would hurt Twitter and Tesla.
It's quite foolish to think someone is stupid or ignorant just because you don't agree with their politics.
1. see these quotes: https://x.com/yatharthmaan/status/2001313180644266478
He's been on public twitter calls before and his engineering knowledge is pathetic. I'm sorry but he's not knowledgeable about engineering or science, he's marketable about those things. People conflate the two often, but one will fall apart like a jenga tower the moment you push it even a little.
And a bunch of out of context quotes from folks that are either buddies with him or don't know shit is not convincing.
> Elon Musk is a smart salesman but that's about it.
How is it that most people here can see through it, but people in power can't?
> but people in power can't?
Why do you presume they can’t? Musk failed phenomenally to sell DOGE to the public, the President or the Congress. The expectation was that he’d have been better at that.
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The way most of our governments are set up, the people in power typically arrive on the backs of the people with money. Elon Musk has a great deal of wealth, so everyone in power is going to listen to him.
Power respects power, ultimately. If you have wealth and power, those in power assume it was earned, because otherwise it's admitting that their own power could be through luck.
I will say that there are a few billionaires out there that do not get respect because everybody else assumes they "got lucky," but it's certainly not many billionaires. And those that people assume "got lucky" have mostly had terrible PR management on their way up, and not bothered to try to clean up their image. I have taken investment from one such billionaire that people would tell me "he got lucky," and though I don't think he got lucky to make his billions, he was also really terrible in his judgement and could not make the switch to investing even in similar industries successfully.
Money and power are all that matters. Musk is a dipshit but he's a rich and powerful dipshit and that's all that matters
"Why do companies hire consultancies?"
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I'd be interested who here commenting negatively on DOGE actually has skin in the game (an American taxpayer)
Because "government efficiency" is an oxymoron?
We all knew this would fail. Any leader worth their salt would know massive reorganizations are failures even when they aren’t unconstitutional and worthy of the death penalty.