Still looking for the people on hn who eight months ago said that this would be a good thing to come out and admit not only that they were wrong, but the model of the world and their way of absorbing info that led them to such a conclusion is also wrong. Looking at you, geohot.
> If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
And maybe (just maybe) raise your voice in _actionable_ support for dismantling the complexes these money ghouls use to wage war against you and regular society.
Peaceful protests, calling your reps, voting, and donating to organizations that have lawyers in the courts and lobbyists on Washington repping your interests are all super helpful relatively low effort steps that have impact when done en masse.
People keep saying this. But the fact is it doesn’t matter.
Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district. Most people aren’t.
And then we have the Supreme Court giving the President unlimited power.
and yet the center of political power oscillates – with real consequences – every two and four years... coincidentally around the time we have elections!
> I've not seen any of these actions make a measurable difference in the last 10 years
I've literally gotten language I drafted written into state and, twice now, federal law.
If you pick a hot-button issue, no, you probably won't move your elected. But on issues they didn't even consider to be on their plate? You can get attention. (Better yet if you can convince them you have other motivated voters beside you.)
That is an issue, but it's important to signal to those paying attention that the resistance is there and to not give up.
We've entered Civil War II and I fear it will have to get much worse before there's any chance of turning things around. Regardless we can never give up.
The invasion of the Capitol, to overturn an election that they claim was fraudulent, followed by the pardoning of the invaders, is kind of a doozy. It suggests that one side or the other (or possibly both) is rejecting democracy and willing to use violence when they don't get the result they want. Not just the individuals involved, but the tens of millions who supported pardoning them.
Or alternatively, they were in fact correct, and tens of millions on the other side subverted democracy, at least temporarily (and would surely do so again if not prevented).
Either way, it sounds like you've millions of people each convinced that millions of others are about to start a civil war. Which sounds like it makes that war practically unavoidable.
It seems sometimes that they have mapped out how things are going to play out years in advance and are ready. After all what is the American government but just a group of fellow countrymen with all the data and resources?
The military preemptively deployed to multiple US cities isn't a great sign.
Generally speaking, we don't deploy our military in peacetime. So unless there's a natural disaster in Chicago or D.C. right now, there aren't but so many conclusions to draw...
It is the act of supporting DOGE after the dumb implementation (e.g. 1/28/2025 Fork in the Road letter) that would concern me (which I think a16z has continued to do).
In my opinion, Elon Musk approached DOGE all wrong because he is used to running companies where payroll is the #1 expense, and cutting workers is how he has always cut costs at his previous companies when they were strapped for cash (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla). He did’t realize that the US Government is mostly an insurance company, so cutting office staff is a drop in the bucket. A tragedy of his own juvenile ignorance.
Should be obvious. If you want a smaller government, you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide. Venture capital / private equity / etc. owned companies will stand in line to get those contracts.
And with deregulations, "move fast and break things" startups can move even faster.
What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd. They enjoy social freedoms which the current gov. would rather see go away...so, talk about selling their soul to the devil.
There are quite a few socially liberal VCs, perhaps even most. But there are also more libertarians, which is quite common among those who make fortunes managing money rather than building things.
> What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd
Silicon Valley has had a monarchist element for at least a decade now. I've been commenting on it for a while. It masked itself in the language of libertarianism. (Note: not all libertarians are monarchists.) But 2024 outed them (Andreessen, Musk, the All In crowd, et cetera) for the bastards that they are.
I mean it was barely masked. They dropped mentions of the dark enlightenment like name dropping Curtis yarvin/mencius moldbug pretty frequently if you listened to their talks.
Sam Harris is the only intellectual in that space that I know of who was repulsed by their actual views and pulled back but maybe there are others.
The libertarian party itself got taken over by a less sophisticated group of these guys in a Mises Caucus mask from a coup orchestrated by the overstock.com ceo in 2022
Privatization of those functions results in the government paying consultants more than they would pay staff, with less institutional knowledge, and far less efficiency than if the functions were directly in the government.
Generally, the government doesn't do things that private industry could do on their own. There are specific times where this isn't true. For example, there were small commuter buses in San Francisco for a while that the existing MUNI service could not accomplish. But these are quite rare!
For example, private industry is never going to fund basic research that is the foundation of the US's wealth and strength, except through taxation. The idea is ludicrous.
We could have private highways, private roads, perhaps, but we would be handing off public decisions to a private company that is almost certainly a monopoly. There are only rare cases where roads and highways are not inherently monopolistic.
SV venture capital is not one type of person, there are both liberal and libertarians among them. The libertarian variety got suckered in by the Dark Enlightenment propaganda and thought they could be the puppetmasters controlling the world with propaganda. They should have looked to what happens to their ilk in places like Russia before backing someone who wants to turn the US into an autocracy like Russia:
>you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide
Most of what DOGE cut was stuff no one wanted or needed in the first place. Just scroll their twitter feed, cutting this stuff shouldn't be termed as "smaller government".
If you take their claims at face value then you might believe that, however, if you look into it even just a little you find that they drastically misrepresented what was cut.
For those curious about a more thoughtful model of government reform--which is still sorely needed--the original US Digital Service team just published a bunch of interviews:
https://usdigitalserviceorigins.org/interviews/
Lyn Alden had a good, terse analysis of why DOGE was unlikely to be effective in this newsletter[0]. The math was simple, the folks behind DOGE must have themselves known that their stated mission was impossible.
It starts with these paragraphs, if you want to seek to it:
"This is the goal of the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. This is an advisory commission rather than an official government department. Musk has famously vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending—roughly 30% of last year’s federal budget.
Although this sounds good on paper, achieving such a target will be quite challenging, given the composition of government spending. Last year, the government spent $6.75 trillion, with $4.1 trillion (61%) classified as mandatory spending."
Classifying some spending as "mandatory" is a ruse to make people ignore the potential for any savings there.
The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything? Paying for things that are ineffective or unnecessary? Would it be better to means test certain benefits so that the government isn't making big social assistance payouts to recipients with a net worth over a million dollars? Is there any Medicare fraud?
The next largest and almost as big is social security, so what happens if we means test that program, or even just get rid of the reverse means testing in the existing program which makes larger payouts to people who made more money?
These things would all reduce "mandatory" spending, potentially by a significant amount, and there is nothing preventing that from happening except for the false insistence that it can't be done.
The problem with means-testing benefits is that it often will cost more to means-test than to just accept nonzero fraud rates past a very minimal point, and there is a significant amount of friction introduced when you add more friction to people who do not have time or energy to spare.
e.g. if I ask you to submit receipts for literally everything that you bought in the last week, in order to give you a $20 stipend weekly, you will probably not bother, even if you could use the $20, and it will probably cost more than $20 to pay me for the time processing that.
I'm not saying there's no waste, but I am saying that the optimal amount of waste to reward is nonzero.
Right, which is why broadly-available old-age insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security work. Everyone pays in their own money, to which they are entitled. So there’s not really any reason to spend that extra $10.
It’s also why “Medicare For All” runs into opposition. It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health care before paying a dime into the system.
That's just status quo bias. Countries with fully socialized healthcare systems make the same "everyone pays taxes and then everyone gets it" argument for including the healthy 22-year-olds and you can make the same "this person doesn't deserve public money" argument for not providing government benefits to people who have their own wealth.
Moreover, it doesn't have anything to do with whether you could modify those programs to cost less money if your primary goal was to lower spending.
It's very easy to make that case: healthcare should be a human right, and our society should provide it to every person to the extent that it can.
We can just decide to make things public services. No one ever says "wait a minute, kids shouldn't be get to use roads for free before paying a dime into the system." It sounds ridiculous! But for some reason, people buy that logic when it comes to healthcare and college.
> It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health
The economic future potential of a healthy 22-year-old is way higher than an aged 68-year-old. I don't think it's very hard at all to make the case we should be spending money on keeping the 22-year-old healthy, in fact I think it's very easy to tilt so far into claiming it's so that you'd be justifiably accused of cruelty ("what if everyone over 70 were tossed into the Soylent Green vats," etc.)
It's quite true that means testing has an efficiency cost. One of the best ways to improve the efficiency of social security would be to convert it into a UBI.
But that's a very different question than whether it would lower the budget, and we're talking about programs that are paying out a lot more than $20. If doing means testing means you can stop paying $1000+/month to someone who is already a millionaire, that's still a savings even if it adds $20 in overhead. Meanwhile we're already paying the cost of doing the means testing, because we do it in reverse, and removing that would increase efficiency and lower spending.
Moreover, other taxes require keeping track of that stuff regardless. You already have to track the value of your assets for the purposes of capital gains tax and property tax. Doing that calculation to begin with isn't free, but the incremental cost of copying that line from the other tax forms onto the Medicare form would cost far less than it does to pay benefits to people who don't need the money. And it also has an efficiency benefit whenever it isn't a cash payment, since insurance is a moral hazard -- if the government is paying for something then you take it even if you value it at a third of what it costs, whereas if you're paying your own money you don't buy things that cost more than they're worth, so having less insurance coverage for people who could afford to pay out of pocket increases efficiency.
> means you can stop paying $1000+/month to someone who is already a millionaire, that's still a savings even if it adds $20 in overhead.
Only if these hypothetical millionaires you are stopping make up more than 1/50 of the people you are means-testing. You are not only paying for those who fail the means-test, but for all those who are passing it.
> Only if these hypothetical millionaires you are stopping make up more than 1/50 of the people you are means-testing.
Then why don't we use the non-hypothetical numbers? More than 10% of retirees are millionaires and the $1000+ in payments is actually $2000+ on average and even more for the people who made enough money to be millionaires.
One reason those programs are not means tested is because it means that everyone can depend on them. Once they are means-tested to only apply to poor/middle class people, they will begin to be aggressively cut like the other means-tested programs.
Also worth noting net worth "over a million dollars" is not extravagant for a Medicare-age person who did not have a pension, for example. This is basically a median home and $600k in savings. Not poor, but also not likely to be able to pay anything close to rack rate for health insurance for an older person.
The Medicare budget is approximately $1400/month for each person over 65. A completely plausible means testing approach isn't "if you have a million dollars you have to go pay a billion dollars for healthcare" but rather that if you have that much money you have to pay the $1400 to get Medicare. Someone with $600,000 and earning 5% APY would be getting more than that in interest, not including appreciation or imputed rent on the $400,000 house, and would stop having to pay the full rate if their net worth fell below the threshold anyway.
This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits. (Although it would help offset costs to have a lower-risk pool of insureds come into the program, in addition to the other societal benefits.)
> earning 5% APY would be getting more than that in interest
Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
> imputed rent on the $400,000 house
They live in the house, which lowers their monthly expenses to a level where they can pay them using Social Security and the interest from their savings.
Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years. And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
> This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits.
Whether something would have a particular policy outcome and whether you have the votes to pass it are two different things. Moreover, you could obviously require wealthy retirees to pay for Medicare without allowing younger people to do it. Stranger things have happened.
> Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
They do have another way to pay living expenses. They have $600,000+ plus a house, and as soon a they only had $599,999 plus a house they would no longer have to pay the full rate for Medicare.
> Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years.
You can just as easily make the contrary argument. These programs were never funded -- social security started out making payments to people who never paid in and there isn't anywhere near enough in the "trust fund" to make existing payouts. The people paying the taxes to make up the shortfall were too young to be eligible to vote or not even born when those promises were made, so by what right does an older generation have to bind them to a promise it made to itself and then never actually funded?
> And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
How about we do this and trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military so that we can lower the taxes on the secretary to the same rates paid by Warren Buffet?
I’d also add that there’s a powerful benefit to having something like Medicare as a right of citizenship: it builds social cohesion and avoids the stigma which is often attached to social programs. Some landlords go to great lengths to avoid section 8 tenants, for example, and that has a substantial negative cost to society.
How much will the optimization and means testing cost? Will it end up starting an entire division of workers to review and verify? There is no free lunch. This is like optimizing by shaving single digit milliseconds in uploading artifacts for your build time, but 10 minutes is spent somewhere else.
1) You start off saying the mandatory spending is a ruse.
2) You provide no evidence for it.
3) You ask some pretty basic (still good) questions that each department already undergoes.
4) You conclude the spending must not be mandatory after all, just by the mere existence of your questions. Almost assuming the worst case answer to each question you raised.
Do you understand this is Seagull budget planning? I am no government defender, but I am consistently flabbergasted by people who think government fraud detection started and ended with DOGE. Do you guys seriously write "Are we paying for unnecessary things" as though it's an insightful question nobody in government has looked into before? Even after we have confirmed DOGE did fuck all and likely made this whole process even worse?
> The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything?
Yeah, it's over paying for private equity vultures who overcharge to extra maximum profit from healthcare. But that's reform that sorely needs to happen by the government reigning in those private companies not to the government. By trying to "drown [the government] in the bathtub" like Norquist advocated, project 2025 asshats are damaging our country.
Some things are mandatory only if you love your neighbor.
> But that's reform that sorely needs to happen by the government reigning in those private companies not to the government.
So the government passes regulations that cause private equity asshats to jack up prices, e.g. by making it infeasible to start new companies to compete with them, and then the government overpays to buy things from them, but this is somehow not the government's doing?
Bad regulations passed at the behest of private asshats are still bad regulations and the solution is still to repeal them.
> Some things are mandatory only if you love your neighbor.
And some things aren't mandatory at all, like having the government overpay for stuff which is nevertheless classified as "mandatory" spending.
Striving for efficiency is laudable, but that wasn't the goal. It was to dismantle institutions that the Oligarchs and their minions wanted to destroy.
I often find myself guilty of not reading the article but only the comments here myself, so in case this is you: Go take the time and read it, even if it's painful.
I read a lot of heavy stuff, but this collection of quotes makes me sick to my stomach.
And even more so: how this inhumane, perverted treatment of fellow human beings, regardless of whether you fantasize/reason that DOGE does net good for the planet, finds no mention yet in the comments here, at all. To add to that, these are people who have spent much of their life in public service, for the benefit of society.
To be honest, I don't even know what is worse; the quotes, or that.
Even if you don’t give a f*ck about decency, it is simply irrational to do it like that if it were about cost cutting. The only goal of this can be to create trauma and more violence, like one person in the article rightfully quotes. This is to provoke people into violence, plain and simple.
“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
These people do not believe in America as it exists or the promise of what it could be. They hate us and they want to destroy what we have to create something fundamentally different.
I don't know who this person is, but I looked up the quote. The quote you've cherry-picked is complaining that the left has been especially violent this political season. He says the right is winning and will continue to win bloodlessly if the left cuts out the political violence. Here's where I found it: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kevin_Roberts_(political_strat...
Political violence against disagreeable people is disturbing and I wish you would condemn it.
I think it's hard to make a case that the left is meaningfully more violent, even weighing in stuff like riots/arson/looting (and it's not actually fair to pin all that on the left, when we know so much is opportunistic and only loosely ideology-driven).
But you can't name an act of violence committed by someone on the left recently? Not one?
> “The vibe they gave was ‘So, what is it that you do here?’ and ‘Why can’t AI do that?’” —TTS worker
From what I've read, this particular group of children naively thinks "AI" can and should do everything. As in, they think it's literally magic and have no clue how it or computing works. I remember reading about how one was asking on twitter how to use AI to convert word processor documents between formats, when that's a simple classic computing task. I'm afraid the next generation is going to think the only tool they need is a sledgehammer.
> I often find myself guilty of not reading the article but only the comments here myself, so in case this is you: Go take the time and read it, even if it's painful.
The problem isn't that we need another document showing how terrible these people are.
The problem is that we don't have people proposing effective, concrete steps to stop them.
Judging from many of the comments here and in other threads, it seems like no document is actually making people see how terrible these people are. Not even here of all places, where one could assume a decent capacity to rational thought. They either don't want to see the violence, or cannot see it, or condone or even support it. Which doesn't make rational sense, since it only leads to more violence, which I doubt can seriously be the end goal, to escalate us into extinction. You don't even need to bring morals into it or care about anyone else than your own peers. It just doesn't make any sense other than self-harm.
I still feel like people are missing the deeper problem with DOGE. Yes, they’re dismantling the government, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s stupid, reckless and cruel. But most Americans want the government reduced, and so we end up arguing over “effectiveness”. Notice how half the comments here follow that track.
The deeper problem is that the richest man in the world bought his own department of the federal government of The United States and was allowed unchecked power within it. Nothing like this has ever occurred before in American history. The only thing that got him out was that Washington isn’t big enough for two egos as big as Musk and Trump, and one had to go. And since Musk’s people are still embedded in there, I would bet that he still has plenty of influence.
For those in the red tribe that support this, would you support George Soros or Bill Gates buying their own department and using it to rearrange the government to fit their will? Well, shit like that is now on the table. Good job.
I also want to lose weight but I still want to eat lots of burgers with fries.
People want all sorts of things but they don't really want all the nasty details needed to make them happen and they definitely do not want the negative consequences of their hasty decisions.
Most people love generic platitudes with no details though.
So when you say they "want smaller government" it's that they are literally agreeing with that statement verbatim rather then any plausible version of what that could be (and that's giving them credit: more cynically it's just "take away services from people who aren't me").
See Brexit for another national scale example of this: had anyone been forced to vote for a specific policy, it wouldn't have happened.
Exactly. I'm not concerned with the size of government. However, I would like to see better ROI - that is, a government that is more effective at delivery services. The "burn it all down" mentality never takes into account the vast amount of services provided by the government, and simply reducing the size of government won't help that.
>The "burn it all down" mentality never takes into account the vast amount of services provided by the government, and simply reducing the size of government won't help that.
People with that mentality tend to believe most services provided by the government are waste by definition (especially any "social" services) and should be privatized. At the extreme end, they believe the only legitimate role of government is violence - war, policing and enforcing contract law. But somehow not taxes.
>She was literally wailing, inconsolable, because she could not get into a childcare facility she could afford on such short notice. She literally had to choose between her little child and working.
People need to understand that the world doesn't revolve around themselves. Your employer doesn't have to bend to your every will and need. She also had the opportunity to get 8 months of severance if she was that short on money.
This is the quote that bugged me the most too, as it's an obvious attempt at pure emotional manipulation. Working from home as a federal employee was always a limited time privilege, not some sort of fundamental right.
And it sounds like she actually did find a place to drop off her child: "Her explaining to her manager the way her child cried and begged Mommy to stay home broke me." Yeah, most employed adults have to leave their children somewhere when they go to work.
These are sad stories but you have to wonder how many such stories you might collect from any mostly-functional organization. Certainly there were people who had unjust firings, toxic interactions before Trump and Musk. People who work at big tech companies also have experiences like this (layoffs while on maternity leave, while getting treated for terminal illnesses etc.). This isn't a sign of any grave malice and is inevitable in a large org. What I do wonder is whether DOGE achieved any significant savings, and that is not addressed in the article.
Indeed the article is less an article and more a random collection of gripes and quotes. The third paragraph betrays that they're not really doing any analysis...
> The government would likely end 2025 with about 300,000 fewer employees... The total figure amounted to one in eight workers... In recent weeks, hundreds of the employees DOGE pushed out have reportedly been offered reinstatement.
"Hundreds" coming back is portrayed as if it offsets the 300,000 gone. They continue:
> The true scope of DOGE’s attack on the federal government remains unknown. While there is no reason to think it achieved meaningful cost savings or operational efficiencies...
and then go on to complain about an immigrant database, which has nothing to do with the reduction in the federal workforce. Simple quick math would suggest $60 billion or so a year in savings from the workforce reduction. Of course the larger savings is in the whole programs that were eliminated, not just the salaries and benefits savings.
DOGE saving $2 trillion / year is indeed impossible. That kind of savings would require a national conversation about what federal roles we no longer need. But DOGE likely achieved hundreds of billions a year in savings. USAID alone had a $50 billion budget that was mostly eliminated, though a few billion just moved over to State.
The whole point of Doge was to fire the agencies that were investigating all of Musk's companies that were breaking laws. That and getting rid of competent people who might stand up to the orangefuhrer.
I think the self-dealing and getting rid of oversight was a very welcome bonus, but I think they genuinely thought they were the good guys coming to clean up government. Their methods were tragically ineffective as every serious person predicted.
We have fiscal issues, clearly, and they thought they were doing good work, but it was an absolute failure and many of the issues still remain, and were exacerbated by what DOGE did.
Well, the guys on the ground might be useful idiots [1]. But at the top there's no way they thought they were doing anything but dumping stuff into the trash.
Which when the EPA / etc are the only organizations large enough to stand up to you is uh very good for you.
I suspect Musk didn't know what his own goals were. The whole thing seemed more about emotion than logic.
I believe you're correct that he viewed the bureaucracy as a sort of foe, but that idea is somewhat paradoxical. You need employees to do anything. Fire everyone and Trump ends up nearly powerless.
It's impossible to prove intent. With the exception of the NHTSA, the following agencies were gutted, each whose jurisdiction covered his business interests. In the case of the NHTSA, about half of the team that oversees autonomous vehicle safely was let go [1].
Generously, two of those I would classify as "investigating" with only one actually using that word but the investigation started in 2023 and I've heard nothing of it.
He and his businesses have had several interactions with the federal government of varying antagonism but this is nothing like Trump firing Comey.
I think that it's pretty apparent that the pdf you linked is a pretty partisan document that makes a lot of tenuous links between Musk recommending firing the low level employees and his interactions with the heads of those agencies.
It is upsetting to me that people have so much trouble sifting fact from opinion or narrative.
The fact is that DOGE made cuts to NHTSA. It is also a fact that DOGE made cuts to a bunch of agencies, not just ones related to something Elon was doing.
There isn’t even any evidence that DOGE was more aggressive about cutting things related to Elon vs other government waste.
Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government. The opinion is that the reason is to cut people specifically going after Elon.
And to be clear I gave no opinion on what Elon did or didn’t do. My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious.
What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
> What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
How doge isn't a plain dictionary definition of corruption? A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
It used to be that in such cases that private citizen then must give up their rights to their businesses (or some other way of avoiding conflict of interest).
The one they did the most damage to was probably USAID. They didnt have anything to do with Elons businesses. Meanwhile the FAA was still blocking starship flights.
> A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
Except he had no power to do this? In the end the executive branch had to authorize anything coming out of DOGE. Like it or not, elected officials (Trump) rubber stamped the cuts.
What would a platform that incentivizes rational analysis look like? Social media as a whole definitely does not. Social media incentivizes immediacy, hot takes, and strong opinions. The nature of the medium produces that sort of content and getting deeper, more thoughtful content requires a different medium. I wonder what that might look like.
I hit my senator very hard with information when this happened. It was clear to anyone with a brain and understanding of physics that they had no plans of doing anything other than installing crawlers and access control permissions.
Remember: if anyone supported DOGE or still supports DOGE, they (both DOGE and their supporters) were not ever serious about the debt or government efficiency.
Elon was serious about the debt. Thats why he and Trump don't get along any more. After the initial DOGE efforts, Trump raised the debt ceiling a few trillion dollars and got a new spending bill passed that increase spending like another trillion dollars - obviously not concerned about the debt.
What's certainly not going away is that Government waste and bloat is a home-run bipartisan issue where the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine.
Everyone left and right instinctively knows this is, that it's a problem that they're both taxed directly for and (I hope) many people know they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime.
I don't know if this was in your lifetime, but Bill Clinton reduced government spending through the National Performance Review. Not only did he do it, but he did it in a planned and strategic way, that included an initial phase of research, followed by education and recommendations, which were send to congress for approval.
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
The Republican party is literally in control of Congress and the presidency. Copying Clinton is something they could do. The fact that they don't appear to have made a serious effort to increase revenues and reduce spending in a sane and organized way raises questions.
The Senate still requires 60 votes to close debate and pass legislation, with rare weird exceptions like reconciliation. The 1990s had more bipartisanship, so Clinton skillfully got enough Republicans to support some of his moves.
Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
The Republicans have this idea that cutting taxes and increasing spending will reduce the ratio of debt/gdp by increasing the denominator. It does increase GDP but I think it increases the debt faster, so it can't work. Happy to be proven wrong.
They do not actually believe that. What they believe is that cutting taxes will give them the short-term means to acquire assets that will become much more valuable after the nation has been destroyed, to which the escalating debt contributes. The crisis is a feature for them.
It doesn't "raises questions" it "answers questions". Anybody who believes the republicans in America are "the party of fiscal responsibility" is a joke.
> the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine
The US government at the start of this administration was roughly the same as it was in 1970[1]. This, despite the addition of new departments (1970 is pre-EPA, for example), many new responsibilities, etc. And obviously the government has to perform all these services for 140 million more people than in 1970, a 70% increase.
Doing more with the same resources is a textbook definition of increasing efficiency.
> Everyone left and right instinctively knows this
That’s the first sign that a large group of people are going to something thoughtless and destructive.
Looking around at actual data from both gov and think tank sources, this quote from Pew is a good summary: “While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years.”
But that’s not the whole story. The postal service is shrinking, the vast majority of those federal employees work for the VA, the amount of funding being directed by the federal employees has grown (because of budget growth), federal regulations touch more private sector activity than in the past, and state and local governments employ significantly more people than they used to.
DOGE’s focus on headcount was wrongheaded because the number of federal employees is not the problem. The problem is Congress (budgets and laws) and states.
Conventional wisdom is that federal payroll growth is massive, and that is just wrong.
> DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime
On what timeline? The week of the first round of RIFs? The first month?
I assure you, as someone who works with in the space where DOGE has played, it will NOT be a reduction in costs in the long run. In fact, costs will go up because of the indiscriminate nature of "cost reduction". When the only people with knowledge of a system are removed, the remaining people cannot run it - no matter what AI they are given. At that point, you have to either hire back the people you fired, with a serious delay of important work, or you stumble for years until it can be figured out at the cost of delays, protests, lawsuits, whatever.
Considering firing everyone a reduction in costs is a shallow, short-term view.
What metric are you looking at when you say "the size of government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector" - AFAICT, excluding 2020 and 2021 (which I think is reasonable), the federal budget has been between 17% and 25% of GDP for the past 50 years (where the fluctuations are more a function of variable GDP).
The number of federal government employees has also remained mostly flat for the past 50 years (and IIRC most growth in overall public sector employment comes from schools).
> they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
Don't worry – unless we stop giving out tax cuts as well, we'll still be running deficits until Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. For the average taxpayer, it's about fiscal sustainability - "smaller government" may as well be a feel-good abstraction compared to that.
It was the only thing to be optimistic about in this administration, but it sure didn't last long. We should all know that this was the last attempt that had a chance of addressing the national debt -- the only other way out is extreme inflation.
Musk was absolutely the wrong guy for the job. He doesn't have the patience to spend 4 years carefully poring over government expenses, nor the security clearance (AFAIK) to address pentagon spending. Plus, I don't think he's humble enough to bring in people who actually know what to look for.
I do not instinctively know this, no. I encourage you to take an evidence-based approach. The deficit has largely grown over the past 25 years because of foreign wars, tax cuts, and pandemic response.
And how much of the work that they did will be out-sourced to private contractors at 5x and cost+ rates, lining the pockets of right-wing donor's corporate coffers?
People are having a tough period where they think their government doesn't care about them, to see so much wastage ignites the hard feelings that the "elite" has prioritised others than their own people.
I believe that is the reason why DOGE was supported by Trump, but I do think something like DOGE is needed but perhaps for better and less egotistical reasons.
The most incredible piece of logical gymnastics I remember from civics/history class in high school was that during economic downturns, we need government to spend more to help people, and during economic growth we of course also need more government to manage all the new growth. At no point do we cut the spending we've added, because it would always hurt those who have jobs.
People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
That's not a fair---or accurate---summary of Keynes.
The claim is that the government should act as a stabilizer: spending to drive aggregate demand during downswings (especially ones caused by external shocks) and regulating during up-swings.
In other words, "more" refers to different things and in different proportions in different phases of the business cycle; it's emphatically not a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" sort of thing.
> The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
In many cases, because they're slashing things that we are realizing that we do need, and we're going to pay even more to reconstruct the things they've destroyed.
The only way to effectively reducing spending and waste is by doing things slowly and carefully, evaluating the impact of the changes you are going to make carefully. This happened successfully in the 90s, but DOGE is not doing things that way.
The OMB has been trying to slowly and thoughtfully cut spending since the 70's, and they've struggled to see success. I think in terms of cutting spending, the slower it happens the less likely anything productive will come from it. It's why companies tend to cut whole departments at once, and the government desperately needs a way to cut funding from things that aren't working to reallocate it where the money is needed.
From what I've seen the DOGE cuts have been incredibly efficient in isolating poorly spent (or corrupt) money. Lots of corrupt foreign programs or government donations into partisan political groups. Most of the time when someone says they shouldn't have cut money, they're talking about an NGO or some research that benefits their particular partisanship at the cost of fairness or scientific rigor; which is exactly what we shouldn't be funding.
The Clinton admin was successful in the 90s. They cut costs enough to pull the US entirely out of the deficit. They did things slowly and methodically over 5 years, making sure the things they cut were unnecessary before cutting them. They also followed the law, avoiding the legal issues and consequential costs that DOGE is incurring.
Federal spending is up during this administration, the deficit is at modern-day averages, and the bills recently passed by this administration are going to increase it even further. The slash-and-burn style of cuts that DOGE is sloppy and ineffective. They are Chesterton's fencing themselves -- cutting things that they later find to be important. And on the other hand, not spending the time to actually seek out waste that is hard to find. A tech company works very differently than the government does, and they are slowly starting to discover that the hard way.
Another incredible thing you maybe didn't study in civics class is that the US had an "exorbitant privilege" it's now pissing away. The ability to borrow at extremely low rates from the rest of the world, because the US was so productive. We will miss it when it's gone.
Still looking for the people on hn who eight months ago said that this would be a good thing to come out and admit not only that they were wrong, but the model of the world and their way of absorbing info that led them to such a conclusion is also wrong. Looking at you, geohot.
a16z and certain Sequoia partners specifically supported this during the 2024 election.
If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
Or raise the money and spend it frivolously.
so like the average silicon valley startup right now?
"right now"?
> If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
And maybe (just maybe) raise your voice in _actionable_ support for dismantling the complexes these money ghouls use to wage war against you and regular society.
Peaceful protests, calling your reps, voting, and donating to organizations that have lawyers in the courts and lobbyists on Washington repping your interests are all super helpful relatively low effort steps that have impact when done en masse.
People keep saying this. But the fact is it doesn’t matter.
Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district. Most people aren’t.
And then we have the Supreme Court giving the President unlimited power.
and yet the center of political power oscillates – with real consequences – every two and four years... coincidentally around the time we have elections!
Respectfully, I've not seen any of these actions make a measurable difference in the last 10 years.
You don't think any election in the last 10 years has made a measurable difference? Elections are the result of voting en masse.
In the gerrymandered district in which I live, no.
I have seen not making these actions not make a measurable difference.
> I've not seen any of these actions make a measurable difference in the last 10 years
I've literally gotten language I drafted written into state and, twice now, federal law.
If you pick a hot-button issue, no, you probably won't move your elected. But on issues they didn't even consider to be on their plate? You can get attention. (Better yet if you can convince them you have other motivated voters beside you.)
Also helps when you’re a private equity investor and can bribe I mean contribute to politicians so they listen to you
That is an issue, but it's important to signal to those paying attention that the resistance is there and to not give up.
We've entered Civil War II and I fear it will have to get much worse before there's any chance of turning things around. Regardless we can never give up.
What signals make you so certain that we are in another civil war? Just curious.
The invasion of the Capitol, to overturn an election that they claim was fraudulent, followed by the pardoning of the invaders, is kind of a doozy. It suggests that one side or the other (or possibly both) is rejecting democracy and willing to use violence when they don't get the result they want. Not just the individuals involved, but the tens of millions who supported pardoning them.
Or alternatively, they were in fact correct, and tens of millions on the other side subverted democracy, at least temporarily (and would surely do so again if not prevented).
Either way, it sounds like you've millions of people each convinced that millions of others are about to start a civil war. Which sounds like it makes that war practically unavoidable.
The national guard rolling into multiple major US cities is serious warning sign.
The army and national guard had started preparing during the Obama years.
[1]:https://youtu.be/JEjU-X57Wrc?t=5815
It seems sometimes that they have mapped out how things are going to play out years in advance and are ready. After all what is the American government but just a group of fellow countrymen with all the data and resources?
It's practice. Our next October surprise very well may be a false flag attack that will be the pretext for martial law.
10 years ago that would sound crazy but today it's very real. I wish very much to be wrong in my prediction.
The military preemptively deployed to multiple US cities isn't a great sign.
Generally speaking, we don't deploy our military in peacetime. So unless there's a natural disaster in Chicago or D.C. right now, there aren't but so many conclusions to draw...
> a16z and certain Sequoia partners specifically supported this during the 2024 election.
Support for DOGE before it was implemented is not a bad thing. Ro Khanna (Democrat from Silicon Valley) supported it too. https://khanna.house.gov/media/in-the-news/opinion-democrats...
It is the act of supporting DOGE after the dumb implementation (e.g. 1/28/2025 Fork in the Road letter) that would concern me (which I think a16z has continued to do).
In my opinion, Elon Musk approached DOGE all wrong because he is used to running companies where payroll is the #1 expense, and cutting workers is how he has always cut costs at his previous companies when they were strapped for cash (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla). He did’t realize that the US Government is mostly an insurance company, so cutting office staff is a drop in the bucket. A tragedy of his own juvenile ignorance.
> Support for DOGE before it was implemented is not a bad thing.
Of course it is. It shows terrible judgment this was easily foreseeable.
Should be obvious. If you want a smaller government, you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide. Venture capital / private equity / etc. owned companies will stand in line to get those contracts.
And with deregulations, "move fast and break things" startups can move even faster.
What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd. They enjoy social freedoms which the current gov. would rather see go away...so, talk about selling their soul to the devil.
It often comes down to freedom for me, not freedom for everyone.
also known as power.
> What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd.
SV workers, sure. But "socially liberal" is absolutely not my impression of SV venture capitalists.
There are quite a few socially liberal VCs, perhaps even most. But there are also more libertarians, which is quite common among those who make fortunes managing money rather than building things.
> What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd
Silicon Valley has had a monarchist element for at least a decade now. I've been commenting on it for a while. It masked itself in the language of libertarianism. (Note: not all libertarians are monarchists.) But 2024 outed them (Andreessen, Musk, the All In crowd, et cetera) for the bastards that they are.
I mean it was barely masked. They dropped mentions of the dark enlightenment like name dropping Curtis yarvin/mencius moldbug pretty frequently if you listened to their talks.
Sam Harris is the only intellectual in that space that I know of who was repulsed by their actual views and pulled back but maybe there are others.
The libertarian party itself got taken over by a less sophisticated group of these guys in a Mises Caucus mask from a coup orchestrated by the overstock.com ceo in 2022
Privatization of those functions results in the government paying consultants more than they would pay staff, with less institutional knowledge, and far less efficiency than if the functions were directly in the government.
Generally, the government doesn't do things that private industry could do on their own. There are specific times where this isn't true. For example, there were small commuter buses in San Francisco for a while that the existing MUNI service could not accomplish. But these are quite rare!
For example, private industry is never going to fund basic research that is the foundation of the US's wealth and strength, except through taxation. The idea is ludicrous.
We could have private highways, private roads, perhaps, but we would be handing off public decisions to a private company that is almost certainly a monopoly. There are only rare cases where roads and highways are not inherently monopolistic.
SV venture capital is not one type of person, there are both liberal and libertarians among them. The libertarian variety got suckered in by the Dark Enlightenment propaganda and thought they could be the puppetmasters controlling the world with propaganda. They should have looked to what happens to their ilk in places like Russia before backing someone who wants to turn the US into an autocracy like Russia:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/business/russian-oligarchs-de...
They cosplay as socially liberal but they want to be free from the responsibilities of belonging to a decent society.
>you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide
Most of what DOGE cut was stuff no one wanted or needed in the first place. Just scroll their twitter feed, cutting this stuff shouldn't be termed as "smaller government".
If you take their claims at face value then you might believe that, however, if you look into it even just a little you find that they drastically misrepresented what was cut.
For those curious about a more thoughtful model of government reform--which is still sorely needed--the original US Digital Service team just published a bunch of interviews: https://usdigitalserviceorigins.org/interviews/
The US Digital Service has done a ton of great work in a thoughtful manner. Thanks Obama!
I hope a similar oral history will be done for 18F – it ran very, very lean.
Lyn Alden had a good, terse analysis of why DOGE was unlikely to be effective in this newsletter[0]. The math was simple, the folks behind DOGE must have themselves known that their stated mission was impossible.
It starts with these paragraphs, if you want to seek to it:
"This is the goal of the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. This is an advisory commission rather than an official government department. Musk has famously vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending—roughly 30% of last year’s federal budget.
Although this sounds good on paper, achieving such a target will be quite challenging, given the composition of government spending. Last year, the government spent $6.75 trillion, with $4.1 trillion (61%) classified as mandatory spending."
[0] https://www.lynalden.com/full-steam-ahead-all-aboard-fiscal-...
Classifying some spending as "mandatory" is a ruse to make people ignore the potential for any savings there.
The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything? Paying for things that are ineffective or unnecessary? Would it be better to means test certain benefits so that the government isn't making big social assistance payouts to recipients with a net worth over a million dollars? Is there any Medicare fraud?
The next largest and almost as big is social security, so what happens if we means test that program, or even just get rid of the reverse means testing in the existing program which makes larger payouts to people who made more money?
These things would all reduce "mandatory" spending, potentially by a significant amount, and there is nothing preventing that from happening except for the false insistence that it can't be done.
The problem with means-testing benefits is that it often will cost more to means-test than to just accept nonzero fraud rates past a very minimal point, and there is a significant amount of friction introduced when you add more friction to people who do not have time or energy to spare.
e.g. if I ask you to submit receipts for literally everything that you bought in the last week, in order to give you a $20 stipend weekly, you will probably not bother, even if you could use the $20, and it will probably cost more than $20 to pay me for the time processing that.
I'm not saying there's no waste, but I am saying that the optimal amount of waste to reward is nonzero.
They do say that the US is a country where people will happily spend $10 to ensure no one gets $1 they weren't entitled to..
Right, which is why broadly-available old-age insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security work. Everyone pays in their own money, to which they are entitled. So there’s not really any reason to spend that extra $10.
It’s also why “Medicare For All” runs into opposition. It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health care before paying a dime into the system.
That's just status quo bias. Countries with fully socialized healthcare systems make the same "everyone pays taxes and then everyone gets it" argument for including the healthy 22-year-olds and you can make the same "this person doesn't deserve public money" argument for not providing government benefits to people who have their own wealth.
Moreover, it doesn't have anything to do with whether you could modify those programs to cost less money if your primary goal was to lower spending.
It's very easy to make that case: healthcare should be a human right, and our society should provide it to every person to the extent that it can.
We can just decide to make things public services. No one ever says "wait a minute, kids shouldn't be get to use roads for free before paying a dime into the system." It sounds ridiculous! But for some reason, people buy that logic when it comes to healthcare and college.
> It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health
The economic future potential of a healthy 22-year-old is way higher than an aged 68-year-old. I don't think it's very hard at all to make the case we should be spending money on keeping the 22-year-old healthy, in fact I think it's very easy to tilt so far into claiming it's so that you'd be justifiably accused of cruelty ("what if everyone over 70 were tossed into the Soylent Green vats," etc.)
It's quite true that means testing has an efficiency cost. One of the best ways to improve the efficiency of social security would be to convert it into a UBI.
But that's a very different question than whether it would lower the budget, and we're talking about programs that are paying out a lot more than $20. If doing means testing means you can stop paying $1000+/month to someone who is already a millionaire, that's still a savings even if it adds $20 in overhead. Meanwhile we're already paying the cost of doing the means testing, because we do it in reverse, and removing that would increase efficiency and lower spending.
Moreover, other taxes require keeping track of that stuff regardless. You already have to track the value of your assets for the purposes of capital gains tax and property tax. Doing that calculation to begin with isn't free, but the incremental cost of copying that line from the other tax forms onto the Medicare form would cost far less than it does to pay benefits to people who don't need the money. And it also has an efficiency benefit whenever it isn't a cash payment, since insurance is a moral hazard -- if the government is paying for something then you take it even if you value it at a third of what it costs, whereas if you're paying your own money you don't buy things that cost more than they're worth, so having less insurance coverage for people who could afford to pay out of pocket increases efficiency.
> means you can stop paying $1000+/month to someone who is already a millionaire, that's still a savings even if it adds $20 in overhead.
Only if these hypothetical millionaires you are stopping make up more than 1/50 of the people you are means-testing. You are not only paying for those who fail the means-test, but for all those who are passing it.
> Only if these hypothetical millionaires you are stopping make up more than 1/50 of the people you are means-testing.
Then why don't we use the non-hypothetical numbers? More than 10% of retirees are millionaires and the $1000+ in payments is actually $2000+ on average and even more for the people who made enough money to be millionaires.
One reason those programs are not means tested is because it means that everyone can depend on them. Once they are means-tested to only apply to poor/middle class people, they will begin to be aggressively cut like the other means-tested programs.
Also worth noting net worth "over a million dollars" is not extravagant for a Medicare-age person who did not have a pension, for example. This is basically a median home and $600k in savings. Not poor, but also not likely to be able to pay anything close to rack rate for health insurance for an older person.
The Medicare budget is approximately $1400/month for each person over 65. A completely plausible means testing approach isn't "if you have a million dollars you have to go pay a billion dollars for healthcare" but rather that if you have that much money you have to pay the $1400 to get Medicare. Someone with $600,000 and earning 5% APY would be getting more than that in interest, not including appreciation or imputed rent on the $400,000 house, and would stop having to pay the full rate if their net worth fell below the threshold anyway.
> you have to pay the $1400 to get Medicare
This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits. (Although it would help offset costs to have a lower-risk pool of insureds come into the program, in addition to the other societal benefits.)
> earning 5% APY would be getting more than that in interest
Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
> imputed rent on the $400,000 house
They live in the house, which lowers their monthly expenses to a level where they can pay them using Social Security and the interest from their savings.
Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years. And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
> This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits.
Whether something would have a particular policy outcome and whether you have the votes to pass it are two different things. Moreover, you could obviously require wealthy retirees to pay for Medicare without allowing younger people to do it. Stranger things have happened.
> Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
They do have another way to pay living expenses. They have $600,000+ plus a house, and as soon a they only had $599,999 plus a house they would no longer have to pay the full rate for Medicare.
> Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years.
You can just as easily make the contrary argument. These programs were never funded -- social security started out making payments to people who never paid in and there isn't anywhere near enough in the "trust fund" to make existing payouts. The people paying the taxes to make up the shortfall were too young to be eligible to vote or not even born when those promises were made, so by what right does an older generation have to bind them to a promise it made to itself and then never actually funded?
> And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
How about we do this and trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military so that we can lower the taxes on the secretary to the same rates paid by Warren Buffet?
I’d also add that there’s a powerful benefit to having something like Medicare as a right of citizenship: it builds social cohesion and avoids the stigma which is often attached to social programs. Some landlords go to great lengths to avoid section 8 tenants, for example, and that has a substantial negative cost to society.
How much will the optimization and means testing cost? Will it end up starting an entire division of workers to review and verify? There is no free lunch. This is like optimizing by shaving single digit milliseconds in uploading artifacts for your build time, but 10 minutes is spent somewhere else.
Right, but DOGE was told by the current government that they weren't allowed to touch Medicare. This is covered in the article I linked.
This is quite the comment.
1) You start off saying the mandatory spending is a ruse.
2) You provide no evidence for it.
3) You ask some pretty basic (still good) questions that each department already undergoes.
4) You conclude the spending must not be mandatory after all, just by the mere existence of your questions. Almost assuming the worst case answer to each question you raised.
Do you understand this is Seagull budget planning? I am no government defender, but I am consistently flabbergasted by people who think government fraud detection started and ended with DOGE. Do you guys seriously write "Are we paying for unnecessary things" as though it's an insightful question nobody in government has looked into before? Even after we have confirmed DOGE did fuck all and likely made this whole process even worse?
> The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything?
Yeah, it's over paying for private equity vultures who overcharge to extra maximum profit from healthcare. But that's reform that sorely needs to happen by the government reigning in those private companies not to the government. By trying to "drown [the government] in the bathtub" like Norquist advocated, project 2025 asshats are damaging our country.
Some things are mandatory only if you love your neighbor.
> But that's reform that sorely needs to happen by the government reigning in those private companies not to the government.
So the government passes regulations that cause private equity asshats to jack up prices, e.g. by making it infeasible to start new companies to compete with them, and then the government overpays to buy things from them, but this is somehow not the government's doing?
Bad regulations passed at the behest of private asshats are still bad regulations and the solution is still to repeal them.
> Some things are mandatory only if you love your neighbor.
And some things aren't mandatory at all, like having the government overpay for stuff which is nevertheless classified as "mandatory" spending.
> the folks behind DOGE must have themselves known that their stated mission was impossible.
this assumes these people aren't actual complete dumbasses in this domain
(they are)
Striving for efficiency is laudable, but that wasn't the goal. It was to dismantle institutions that the Oligarchs and their minions wanted to destroy.
I often find myself guilty of not reading the article but only the comments here myself, so in case this is you: Go take the time and read it, even if it's painful.
I read a lot of heavy stuff, but this collection of quotes makes me sick to my stomach.
And even more so: how this inhumane, perverted treatment of fellow human beings, regardless of whether you fantasize/reason that DOGE does net good for the planet, finds no mention yet in the comments here, at all. To add to that, these are people who have spent much of their life in public service, for the benefit of society.
To be honest, I don't even know what is worse; the quotes, or that.
Even if you don’t give a f*ck about decency, it is simply irrational to do it like that if it were about cost cutting. The only goal of this can be to create trauma and more violence, like one person in the article rightfully quotes. This is to provoke people into violence, plain and simple.
The cruelty is the point.
That was the explicitly stated goal of the creators of Project 2025. “We want to put them in trauma.”
Yes. They've said it even more blatantly.
“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
These people do not believe in America as it exists or the promise of what it could be. They hate us and they want to destroy what we have to create something fundamentally different.
I don't know who this person is, but I looked up the quote. The quote you've cherry-picked is complaining that the left has been especially violent this political season. He says the right is winning and will continue to win bloodlessly if the left cuts out the political violence. Here's where I found it: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kevin_Roberts_(political_strat...
Political violence against disagreeable people is disturbing and I wish you would condemn it.
> Political violence against disagreeable people is disturbing and I wish you would condemn it.
If the end game of those disagreeable people is to literally ruin one's life, violence as an answer is understandable.
Name any act of violence that has been committed by a "left" person this "political season," whatever time frame that encompasses.
Are you in the states? ICE protests that get violent. Burning Tesla dealerships. Assassinations. The list is long and growing.
Just write one down. Any particular place and date.
[flagged]
Please don't comment like this here. You can make your points with substantive arguments rather than trollish snark like this.
Huh?
I think it's hard to make a case that the left is meaningfully more violent, even weighing in stuff like riots/arson/looting (and it's not actually fair to pin all that on the left, when we know so much is opportunistic and only loosely ideology-driven).
But you can't name an act of violence committed by someone on the left recently? Not one?
I was just told that violence is understandable, tho. The rational mind is a scary thing.
Actually, I was wrong. The left has been cool cool since forever.
> “The vibe they gave was ‘So, what is it that you do here?’ and ‘Why can’t AI do that?’” —TTS worker
From what I've read, this particular group of children naively thinks "AI" can and should do everything. As in, they think it's literally magic and have no clue how it or computing works. I remember reading about how one was asking on twitter how to use AI to convert word processor documents between formats, when that's a simple classic computing task. I'm afraid the next generation is going to think the only tool they need is a sledgehammer.
> I often find myself guilty of not reading the article but only the comments here myself, so in case this is you: Go take the time and read it, even if it's painful.
The problem isn't that we need another document showing how terrible these people are.
The problem is that we don't have people proposing effective, concrete steps to stop them.
Judging from many of the comments here and in other threads, it seems like no document is actually making people see how terrible these people are. Not even here of all places, where one could assume a decent capacity to rational thought. They either don't want to see the violence, or cannot see it, or condone or even support it. Which doesn't make rational sense, since it only leads to more violence, which I doubt can seriously be the end goal, to escalate us into extinction. You don't even need to bring morals into it or care about anyone else than your own peers. It just doesn't make any sense other than self-harm.
I still feel like people are missing the deeper problem with DOGE. Yes, they’re dismantling the government, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s stupid, reckless and cruel. But most Americans want the government reduced, and so we end up arguing over “effectiveness”. Notice how half the comments here follow that track.
The deeper problem is that the richest man in the world bought his own department of the federal government of The United States and was allowed unchecked power within it. Nothing like this has ever occurred before in American history. The only thing that got him out was that Washington isn’t big enough for two egos as big as Musk and Trump, and one had to go. And since Musk’s people are still embedded in there, I would bet that he still has plenty of influence.
For those in the red tribe that support this, would you support George Soros or Bill Gates buying their own department and using it to rearrange the government to fit their will? Well, shit like that is now on the table. Good job.
> But most Americans want the government reduced.
I also want to lose weight but I still want to eat lots of burgers with fries.
People want all sorts of things but they don't really want all the nasty details needed to make them happen and they definitely do not want the negative consequences of their hasty decisions.
Yea man, I cannot fathom why they would carry out actions like this knowing that their opponents could do the same thing next time they are in charge.
It’s almost like they’re governing with the expectation of never losing an election
Or they expect the other side to fold like a wet towel since that is all that they have seen since forever?
Most people love generic platitudes with no details though.
So when you say they "want smaller government" it's that they are literally agreeing with that statement verbatim rather then any plausible version of what that could be (and that's giving them credit: more cynically it's just "take away services from people who aren't me").
See Brexit for another national scale example of this: had anyone been forced to vote for a specific policy, it wouldn't have happened.
> But most Americans want the government reduced,
facts not in evidence
tldr: no they do not
Exactly. I'm not concerned with the size of government. However, I would like to see better ROI - that is, a government that is more effective at delivery services. The "burn it all down" mentality never takes into account the vast amount of services provided by the government, and simply reducing the size of government won't help that.
>The "burn it all down" mentality never takes into account the vast amount of services provided by the government, and simply reducing the size of government won't help that.
People with that mentality tend to believe most services provided by the government are waste by definition (especially any "social" services) and should be privatized. At the extreme end, they believe the only legitimate role of government is violence - war, policing and enforcing contract law. But somehow not taxes.
https://archive.is/TiaSF
>She was literally wailing, inconsolable, because she could not get into a childcare facility she could afford on such short notice. She literally had to choose between her little child and working.
People need to understand that the world doesn't revolve around themselves. Your employer doesn't have to bend to your every will and need. She also had the opportunity to get 8 months of severance if she was that short on money.
This is the quote that bugged me the most too, as it's an obvious attempt at pure emotional manipulation. Working from home as a federal employee was always a limited time privilege, not some sort of fundamental right.
And it sounds like she actually did find a place to drop off her child: "Her explaining to her manager the way her child cried and begged Mommy to stay home broke me." Yeah, most employed adults have to leave their children somewhere when they go to work.
These are sad stories but you have to wonder how many such stories you might collect from any mostly-functional organization. Certainly there were people who had unjust firings, toxic interactions before Trump and Musk. People who work at big tech companies also have experiences like this (layoffs while on maternity leave, while getting treated for terminal illnesses etc.). This isn't a sign of any grave malice and is inevitable in a large org. What I do wonder is whether DOGE achieved any significant savings, and that is not addressed in the article.
Indeed the article is less an article and more a random collection of gripes and quotes. The third paragraph betrays that they're not really doing any analysis...
> The government would likely end 2025 with about 300,000 fewer employees... The total figure amounted to one in eight workers... In recent weeks, hundreds of the employees DOGE pushed out have reportedly been offered reinstatement.
"Hundreds" coming back is portrayed as if it offsets the 300,000 gone. They continue:
> The true scope of DOGE’s attack on the federal government remains unknown. While there is no reason to think it achieved meaningful cost savings or operational efficiencies...
and then go on to complain about an immigrant database, which has nothing to do with the reduction in the federal workforce. Simple quick math would suggest $60 billion or so a year in savings from the workforce reduction. Of course the larger savings is in the whole programs that were eliminated, not just the salaries and benefits savings.
DOGE saving $2 trillion / year is indeed impossible. That kind of savings would require a national conversation about what federal roles we no longer need. But DOGE likely achieved hundreds of billions a year in savings. USAID alone had a $50 billion budget that was mostly eliminated, though a few billion just moved over to State.
> What I do wonder is whether DOGE achieved any significant savings
The answer is no.
Apples and oranges.
The fallout of a few employees being screwed by Google or similar is a lot different than the fallout of everyone being screwed by government.
Your concern for an illusory fiat ledger is noted.
Utter and complete disgrace, I hope people don't forget what was done here.
You can't forget what you never knew. Nobody's paying attention and nobody cares. If you disagree, then explain how we got here in the first place.
It’s easier to destroy than to build
I see hollowing out of institutions but no one is building anything
The whole point of Doge was to fire the agencies that were investigating all of Musk's companies that were breaking laws. That and getting rid of competent people who might stand up to the orangefuhrer.
I think the self-dealing and getting rid of oversight was a very welcome bonus, but I think they genuinely thought they were the good guys coming to clean up government. Their methods were tragically ineffective as every serious person predicted.
We have fiscal issues, clearly, and they thought they were doing good work, but it was an absolute failure and many of the issues still remain, and were exacerbated by what DOGE did.
That’s what C- brains bring to a project.
Well, the guys on the ground might be useful idiots [1]. But at the top there's no way they thought they were doing anything but dumping stuff into the trash.
Which when the EPA / etc are the only organizations large enough to stand up to you is uh very good for you.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
"You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!"
Kakistocracy edition
In other words, their heads were so far up their own asses they couldn't distinguish between self-dealing and public good.
I suspect Musk didn't know what his own goals were. The whole thing seemed more about emotion than logic.
I believe you're correct that he viewed the bureaucracy as a sort of foe, but that idea is somewhat paradoxical. You need employees to do anything. Fire everyone and Trump ends up nearly powerless.
He sort of figured out the basics of how the government worked as he went along, but a little late at that point: https://www.reddit.com/r/mmt_economics/comments/1jdkz81/elon...
Do you have an example of a cut to something that was investigating Musk? I'm not saying you're wrong - I have no clue and I'm truly curious.
It's impossible to prove intent. With the exception of the NHTSA, the following agencies were gutted, each whose jurisdiction covered his business interests. In the case of the NHTSA, about half of the team that oversees autonomous vehicle safely was let go [1].
NHTSA, CFPB, DoT (FAA), DoE
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/21/musk-doge...
Starship ban was immediately lifted once Musk got in power. Look the dates.
https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-spacex-doge-faa...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/28/faa-clears-spacex-for-starsh...
One internet search away: https://qz.com/elon-musk-doge-nhtsa-tesla-neuralink-spacex-f...
Which one was "investigating" musk?
https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2025.02....
Broken link.
Apologies, it seems to move every few months. https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/dem...
Generously, two of those I would classify as "investigating" with only one actually using that word but the investigation started in 2023 and I've heard nothing of it.
He and his businesses have had several interactions with the federal government of varying antagonism but this is nothing like Trump firing Comey.
I think that it's pretty apparent that the pdf you linked is a pretty partisan document that makes a lot of tenuous links between Musk recommending firing the low level employees and his interactions with the heads of those agencies.
It is upsetting to me that people have so much trouble sifting fact from opinion or narrative.
The fact is that DOGE made cuts to NHTSA. It is also a fact that DOGE made cuts to a bunch of agencies, not just ones related to something Elon was doing.
There isn’t even any evidence that DOGE was more aggressive about cutting things related to Elon vs other government waste.
Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government. The opinion is that the reason is to cut people specifically going after Elon.
And to be clear I gave no opinion on what Elon did or didn’t do. My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious.
What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
> What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
How doge isn't a plain dictionary definition of corruption? A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
It used to be that in such cases that private citizen then must give up their rights to their businesses (or some other way of avoiding conflict of interest).
The one they did the most damage to was probably USAID. They didnt have anything to do with Elons businesses. Meanwhile the FAA was still blocking starship flights.
> A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
Except he had no power to do this? In the end the executive branch had to authorize anything coming out of DOGE. Like it or not, elected officials (Trump) rubber stamped the cuts.
What would a platform that incentivizes rational analysis look like? Social media as a whole definitely does not. Social media incentivizes immediacy, hot takes, and strong opinions. The nature of the medium produces that sort of content and getting deeper, more thoughtful content requires a different medium. I wonder what that might look like.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
I hit my senator very hard with information when this happened. It was clear to anyone with a brain and understanding of physics that they had no plans of doing anything other than installing crawlers and access control permissions.
Our leadership is so inept it hurts.
Remember: if anyone supported DOGE or still supports DOGE, they (both DOGE and their supporters) were not ever serious about the debt or government efficiency.
Elon was serious about the debt. Thats why he and Trump don't get along any more. After the initial DOGE efforts, Trump raised the debt ceiling a few trillion dollars and got a new spending bill passed that increase spending like another trillion dollars - obviously not concerned about the debt.
Trump and Musk get along fine. They sat next to each other and chatted at Charlie Kirk's funeral: https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/tech/donald-trump-elon-musk-c...
They were, but the actual cuts needed (to entitlements) are politically impossible to make.
Which is why they went the non-democratic/illegal route by avoiding congress.
What's certainly not going away is that Government waste and bloat is a home-run bipartisan issue where the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine.
Everyone left and right instinctively knows this is, that it's a problem that they're both taxed directly for and (I hope) many people know they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime.
I don't know if this was in your lifetime, but Bill Clinton reduced government spending through the National Performance Review. Not only did he do it, but he did it in a planned and strategic way, that included an initial phase of research, followed by education and recommendations, which were send to congress for approval.
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
Reference: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...
That's true, although that also took an act of congress so it was very much a bi-partisan effort, something we're sorely lacking today.
The Republican party is literally in control of Congress and the presidency. Copying Clinton is something they could do. The fact that they don't appear to have made a serious effort to increase revenues and reduce spending in a sane and organized way raises questions.
The Senate still requires 60 votes to close debate and pass legislation, with rare weird exceptions like reconciliation. The 1990s had more bipartisanship, so Clinton skillfully got enough Republicans to support some of his moves.
Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
The Republicans have this idea that cutting taxes and increasing spending will reduce the ratio of debt/gdp by increasing the denominator. It does increase GDP but I think it increases the debt faster, so it can't work. Happy to be proven wrong.
They do not actually believe that. What they believe is that cutting taxes will give them the short-term means to acquire assets that will become much more valuable after the nation has been destroyed, to which the escalating debt contributes. The crisis is a feature for them.
> raises questions.
It doesn't "raises questions" it "answers questions". Anybody who believes the republicans in America are "the party of fiscal responsibility" is a joke.
> The Republican party is literally in control of Congress and the presidency
And SCOTUS. They have seized power of all three branches and "checks and balances" are but a memory.
And whose fault is that? Hint: one party has specifically focused on eliminating ANYTHING resembling bi-partisanship..
> the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine
The US government at the start of this administration was roughly the same as it was in 1970[1]. This, despite the addition of new departments (1970 is pre-EPA, for example), many new responsibilities, etc. And obviously the government has to perform all these services for 140 million more people than in 1970, a 70% increase.
Doing more with the same resources is a textbook definition of increasing efficiency.
1 - Seriously, you won't see the growth you describe in the data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
> Everyone left and right instinctively knows this
That’s the first sign that a large group of people are going to something thoughtless and destructive.
Looking around at actual data from both gov and think tank sources, this quote from Pew is a good summary: “While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years.”
But that’s not the whole story. The postal service is shrinking, the vast majority of those federal employees work for the VA, the amount of funding being directed by the federal employees has grown (because of budget growth), federal regulations touch more private sector activity than in the past, and state and local governments employ significantly more people than they used to.
DOGE’s focus on headcount was wrongheaded because the number of federal employees is not the problem. The problem is Congress (budgets and laws) and states.
Conventional wisdom is that federal payroll growth is massive, and that is just wrong.
> DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime
On what timeline? The week of the first round of RIFs? The first month?
I assure you, as someone who works with in the space where DOGE has played, it will NOT be a reduction in costs in the long run. In fact, costs will go up because of the indiscriminate nature of "cost reduction". When the only people with knowledge of a system are removed, the remaining people cannot run it - no matter what AI they are given. At that point, you have to either hire back the people you fired, with a serious delay of important work, or you stumble for years until it can be figured out at the cost of delays, protests, lawsuits, whatever.
Considering firing everyone a reduction in costs is a shallow, short-term view.
What metric are you looking at when you say "the size of government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector" - AFAICT, excluding 2020 and 2021 (which I think is reasonable), the federal budget has been between 17% and 25% of GDP for the past 50 years (where the fluctuations are more a function of variable GDP).
The number of federal government employees has also remained mostly flat for the past 50 years (and IIRC most growth in overall public sector employment comes from schools).
Comparing it to GDP doesn’t seem to make sense. Maybe to government revenue.
No, the claim was that it has outgrown the private sector. GDP is in fact a good proxy for that claim.
Outgrowing government revenue is a different claim.
> they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
Don't worry – unless we stop giving out tax cuts as well, we'll still be running deficits until Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. For the average taxpayer, it's about fiscal sustainability - "smaller government" may as well be a feel-good abstraction compared to that.
Wait, has there actually been a reduction in federal spending in total? Or just in specific agencies?
No, federal spending is up by $376 billion.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
It was the only thing to be optimistic about in this administration, but it sure didn't last long. We should all know that this was the last attempt that had a chance of addressing the national debt -- the only other way out is extreme inflation.
Musk was absolutely the wrong guy for the job. He doesn't have the patience to spend 4 years carefully poring over government expenses, nor the security clearance (AFAIK) to address pentagon spending. Plus, I don't think he's humble enough to bring in people who actually know what to look for.
I do not instinctively know this, no. I encourage you to take an evidence-based approach. The deficit has largely grown over the past 25 years because of foreign wars, tax cuts, and pandemic response.
And how much of the work that they did will be out-sourced to private contractors at 5x and cost+ rates, lining the pockets of right-wing donor's corporate coffers?
People are having a tough period where they think their government doesn't care about them, to see so much wastage ignites the hard feelings that the "elite" has prioritised others than their own people.
I believe that is the reason why DOGE was supported by Trump, but I do think something like DOGE is needed but perhaps for better and less egotistical reasons.
And there was.
The most incredible piece of logical gymnastics I remember from civics/history class in high school was that during economic downturns, we need government to spend more to help people, and during economic growth we of course also need more government to manage all the new growth. At no point do we cut the spending we've added, because it would always hurt those who have jobs.
People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
That's not a fair---or accurate---summary of Keynes.
The claim is that the government should act as a stabilizer: spending to drive aggregate demand during downswings (especially ones caused by external shocks) and regulating during up-swings.
In other words, "more" refers to different things and in different proportions in different phases of the business cycle; it's emphatically not a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" sort of thing.
> The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
In many cases, because they're slashing things that we are realizing that we do need, and we're going to pay even more to reconstruct the things they've destroyed.
The only way to effectively reducing spending and waste is by doing things slowly and carefully, evaluating the impact of the changes you are going to make carefully. This happened successfully in the 90s, but DOGE is not doing things that way.
The OMB has been trying to slowly and thoughtfully cut spending since the 70's, and they've struggled to see success. I think in terms of cutting spending, the slower it happens the less likely anything productive will come from it. It's why companies tend to cut whole departments at once, and the government desperately needs a way to cut funding from things that aren't working to reallocate it where the money is needed.
From what I've seen the DOGE cuts have been incredibly efficient in isolating poorly spent (or corrupt) money. Lots of corrupt foreign programs or government donations into partisan political groups. Most of the time when someone says they shouldn't have cut money, they're talking about an NGO or some research that benefits their particular partisanship at the cost of fairness or scientific rigor; which is exactly what we shouldn't be funding.
The Clinton admin was successful in the 90s. They cut costs enough to pull the US entirely out of the deficit. They did things slowly and methodically over 5 years, making sure the things they cut were unnecessary before cutting them. They also followed the law, avoiding the legal issues and consequential costs that DOGE is incurring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Clinton...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
Federal spending is up during this administration, the deficit is at modern-day averages, and the bills recently passed by this administration are going to increase it even further. The slash-and-burn style of cuts that DOGE is sloppy and ineffective. They are Chesterton's fencing themselves -- cutting things that they later find to be important. And on the other hand, not spending the time to actually seek out waste that is hard to find. A tech company works very differently than the government does, and they are slowly starting to discover that the hard way.
> They are Chesterton's fencing themselves
Which is incredibly ironic for people who claim to be "conservative."
Another incredible thing you maybe didn't study in civics class is that the US had an "exorbitant privilege" it's now pissing away. The ability to borrow at extremely low rates from the rest of the world, because the US was so productive. We will miss it when it's gone.
You didn't learn that in civics/history class; you made it up.