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Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand government reform

• rmason 2y ago
  I am cautiously optimistic about what Elon Musk is attempting with DOGE. But half my friends are convinced he will fail and that his legacy won't be Tesla or sending rockets to Mars but failing to reform the government. The other half think two trillion is too small a target. I think two trillion is way too high a target but I am pretty certain they will achieve meaningful cuts that will make our government more nimble and faster. I just wished that Trump had not promised they wouldn't be allowed to touch social security or Medicare and Medicaid. I think there are hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicare and Medicaid fraud that could be rooted out in two and a half years. But I do plead guilty to being an optimist.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • Flozzin 2y ago
    I want to say it was the NYTimes, "the daily" podcast that did a pretty good job of being even handed when talking about this. If anyone is interested, it should be the Dec 4th one. They brought up the fact that we've tried to do things like this in the past, and that they have all mostly failed, for political reasons. Cutting government spending is very hard to do. Everyone has special interests they look to protect, and no congress person wants to be the one that stopped funding for their district/state. I too am hopeful, but I have my doubts.
  • wat10000 2y ago
    It’s funny to see people talking about DOGE as if it was actually a thing. Right now it’s just a collective term for Vivek and Elon saying stuff. It’s not actually a department and there’s no indication that will ever change. These two guys are going to say a bunch of stuff, they’ll be totally ignored by the politicians and bureaucrats alike, and that’s all that’s going to happen with DOGE.
  • ActorNightly 2y ago
    If you paid attention to anything that Musk have said, it should be pretty clear that he is an idiot. Everything "engineering" Tesla or SpaceX related that came out of his mouth was communicated to him buy actual engineers. Once he went on his own to do Twitter without any advisers, the amount of cognitive dissonanse that he dispayed and still does to this day is astounding. There is no chance that someone like that can make any correct cuts. Even if you dont believe any of that, the fact that he championed Trump should be a huge red flag on his mental state.
  • ActorNightly 2y ago
    If you think Republicans can do anything effective, you clearly havent been paying attention in the last 8 years.
  • CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
    You have no one in your circle thinking he will succeed at making himself richer by crippling regulators?
  • blitzar 2y ago
    Spending will by increase by > 2 trillion
• dang 2y ago
  I noticed that Stewart Brand recommended this piece (https://x.com/stewartbrand/status/1868407292418498605 https://x.com/stewartbrand/status/1868407292418498605), so I've replaced the baity title with the neutral subtitle and re-upped it. If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're posting thoughtfully, i.e. reflectively* and not reacting reflexively to one of the obvious triggers here. That's how the article is written (not counting the title), so please respond in kind and sail around the obvious icebergs. * https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
  • jjtheblunt 2y ago
    Re-upped means what?
    • josters 2y ago
      I understood it as being posted to the Second-Chance Pool [1]. [1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=readme-ov-file#second-chance-pool https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...
      • dang 2y ago
        Correct, except instead of adding it to the pool and waiting for the software to randomly place it, I did it manually.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• AvAn12 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • Kinrany 2y ago
    I wonder if there's a better way to phrase this. Keeping politics out is neither possible nor desirable, but we all know that there's something that's related to politics that should be avoided to keep conversations high quality.
    • idle_zealot 2y ago
      It's partisanship that ought be avoided. Team sports. Outside of that politics are a game of ideology, ideas, policy, and power dynamics, all of which are worth discussing.
      • wrs 2y ago
        Exactly — reasoned debate about political issues (remember that?) is a positive good; reflexive name-calling and jingoism is not.
        • AvAn12 2y ago
          Historically, HN has not been a forum for reasoned debate about political issues. Can we please keep it that way?
  • criddell 2y ago
    Nope. Technology itself is political, especially software.
  • dang 2y ago
    This is a perennial question (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 for how far back it goes). I suppose we should add it to the FAQ. The answer, which has been stable for many years, is that some stories with political overlap are inevitable and ok, as long as they aren't garden-variety politics and there is something of intellectual interest to be discussed. The current post falls in that category (as long as one skips the title and starts at the subtitle). A thwack of past explanations about this is accessible via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) familiarize yourelf with some of those, and then still have a question, I'd be happy to take a crack at answering it.
• PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  Meanwhile the DOD will continue vaccuuming up taxpayer money and doing god knows what with it for god knows what reasons
  • Analemma_ 2y ago
    Yeah, any talk about “reigning in government spending/waste” that doesn’t start and end with the military is totally unserious. The DOD wastes more money every day than all the usual suspects in this kind of talk do in a year.
    • wat10000 2y ago
      The major suspects this time around are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those agencies are very efficient by normal measures. But Elon/Vivek are coming at it from a perspective that considers their entire mission to be 100% waste. From that perspective, they waste many times more than the DoD spends. I don’t think they’ll get anywhere with it, but they’re very serious.
      • PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        > From perspective, they waste many times more than the DoD spends. I don’t think they’ll get anywhere with it, but they’re very serious. It's extremely difficult to take anyone who suggests introducing a profit margin to reduce waste as acting serious. (I realize you were probably indicating they weren't bluffing; just saying.) Plus, they can account for their spending and the DOD cannot.
        • wat10000 2y ago
          The main point seems to be to cut spending on these programs. If one sees them as nothing but waste then that’s automatically a reduction. It’s a pretty extreme view, but I think it’s serious. Destroying these programs has long been a dream of the more libertarian extremes of the Republican Party. Fortunately for the people who depend on these programs, “DOGE” isn’t real and has no power to do anything.
• nobodywillobsrv 2y ago
  I would recomment Americans watch a bit of David Starkey who largely comments on the British horror show as it sort of gets in to some of what is wrong with the US (largely the move to put power in the hands of unelected bodies).
• BurningFrog 2y ago
  Very interesting and non partisan description of the near hopelessness of trying to make government more effective!
  • roenxi 2y ago
    Usually I am against one-liners like yours, but in this case I really think this is the only response. DOGE is a lobby group with no plan and therefore no prospects of success. There isn't much to talk about. The Republicans have been disingenuous about any efficiency or economic reform for my entire lifetime and even assuming Trump & Co are serious I doubt they have the numbers to get Congressional support for big reform, so there will be at most small incremental changes that will probably be rolled back in a few years. I'd like to be wrong, but if there is anything here I don't see it. It is going to take a lot more than buzz and conversation to handle the unmanageable pork-barrelling beast that is the US bureaucracy.
    • wslh 2y ago
      Adopting a skeptical approach is indeed wise in politics. However, there's a significant opportunity to align bureaucracies with modern technologies. Politics, as a field, seems unusually resistant to technological advancements that could enhance democratic processes. This reminds me of the early days of IT, when it was merely a peripheral division in most organizations. Over time, IT evolved into a core strategic function, transforming how businesses operate. Could a similar shift happen in politics?
    • kiba 2y ago
      My perspective is that if done correctly, the federal budget should stay roughly the same. Although I am worried about the federal budget being more devoted to debt servicing overtime. Perhaps it would be possible to boost service level while reducing budgetary load. The reason is simple. Fast and efficient bureaucracy requires adequate and well trained manpower to operate. It's not just about eliminating busywork, but also having the manpower to manage the queue.
      • 2y ago
• Hilift 2y ago
  In 1947, the US congress attempted exactly the same thing with the National Security Act of 1947. There were inter-service rivalries during WW2 that needed to be addressed. The Air Force was separated from the Army, but the Army quickly re-established their own air operations with the helicopter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_1947 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_1947
  • jdougan 2y ago
    The Army got really screwed with this and the succeeding Key West Agreement. Doing everything with helicopters ("airplanes want to fly, helicopters want to crash") is ridiculous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West_Agreement
• jrexilius 2y ago
  Jennifer is a smart, dedicated gal who has been working on this problem since the Obama administration. I _very_ briefly worked with USDS on the DoD-VA hand-off of medical records (the very early stages of trying to fix that train wreck), which had very clear bipartisan support at the time. It was not for lack of political will, nor severity of problem, nor through incompetence that the effort struggled. Most people, from the whitehouse to the hill, very much wanted veterans to stop dying or killing themselves on the waitlist. And yet, there was no smooth path. I saw a very brief glimpse of the problem and understand that there is a whole iceberg under the water line. She has been dedicated to the problem for years. I would listen to her and give her a whole lot of benefit of the doubt about the politics of it all, regardless of your political tribal affiliation. Some times you have to set othodoxy aside.
  • xbar 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • julianeon 2y ago
    The disconnect here is that, if I hadn't read the article, I would assume Jennifer was saying "Elon Musk may be the hero we need, the outsider who can finally reform the bureacracy." But a careful reading shows she isn't really saying that. There is some polite language in her tone and an unwillingness to antagonize unnecessarily. If you put 2 and 2 together, then, she's saying that the most likely outcome is that Elon Musk won't be able to reform the government either (but good luck to him, hope something good comes out of it, etc).
    • derbOac 2y ago
      I'm not sure if this is controversial but here's my take: if your thesis can be so completely misunderstood on a cursory reading of a topic like this, it's either poor writing, or you're not writing in good faith, and are engaging in a kind of plausible deniability with regard to an unpopular opinion. For me, the underlying problem with the piece (which I did read) is that it seems to accept and run with the basic idea that DOGE etc is about government reform rather than lack of accountability and self-serving grift. The tone in general is something like "well this is what you get for ignoring the need for government reform, a sort of monstrous crude reformer" rather than calling out the fundamental problems with conflict of interest and mismanagement afforded by further problems with lack of public accountability. It seems to me to have the same basic problems in ethical reasoning as blaming the victim arguments, although the contours are different. I'm generally someone who is for deregulation in a lot of government, but that's not what we're seeing with DOGE. The problems are not about the orderliness of the disruption, it's about the nature of it and the ultimate actual goals of those involved, which are not in the public interest. Government reform in this particular case, in my opinion is just a fraudulent cover story for blatant grift and self-serving financial and social aggrandizement. No con artist is open about what they're doing; there's always a cover story, which is the nature of the thing. This piece at least indirectly supports that fraud by accepting its motivations and methods — if not its tact and pleasantness — at face value. It's either poorly written to me, or disingenuous.
• anonymouskimmer 2y ago
  How is this thoughtful? (I can see how it's reflective.) The last time the Dems controlled the Presidency and both houses of congress was the first two years of Obama's first term (Jan 2009 - Jan 2011). And prior to that the first two years of Clinton's first term (Jan 1993 - Jan 1995; which had limited success, for the same reason this will have limited success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinventing_Government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv... ). The last time the Reps controlled both houses and the Presidency was the first two years of Trump's last term (Jan 2017 - Jan 2019). Prior to that the first 6 years under Bush II (Jan 2001 - Jan 2007). And the last time Dem appointees controlled the Supreme court was in 1969. So I really, really cannot trust the thoughtfulness of any opinions or marshallings of fact in the linked article. ...I've now read the entire article and stand by my more general point. This person is looking at government from one limited perspective, as someone who has worked with people who've tried to work in it and reform it in the past. The fundamental barrier to government reform is in Congress, nowhere else. There's nothing special about Musk's ability to convince Congress to do things it doesn't want to do. Even if he threatens to primary them. Most of these people are in relatively safe districts. They have the name recognition in their districts. They can point to the things they've done for their districts. Most of them are not in any danger from a Musk-funded primary opponent. The only thing that would truly reform government in more than bits and pieces would be enough Congress people, in both houses, who are not only of the same party, but are basically also of the same sub-caucus within that party. Fat chance getting that. Without that all you get is horse trading, which leads to the bits and pieces reformations.
  • burningChrome 2y ago
    >> The fundamental barrier to government reform is in Congress, nowhere else. The most salient point here. I had a huge conversation with a friend of mine last night at a Christmas party our mutual couple friends have every year. We both agreed on this and one thing we both understood was the fact that Republicans talk about smaller government, but at no time, either when they've had the presidency or been in control of congress have they ever reduced spending. If you want to really reign in government, you either have to raise taxes to account for all the social program spending, or you have to reduce spending. Both are political suicide and no candidate ever wants to be on record saying they'll do either. As an independent, I see both sides making the situation worse, but only one side saying they want smaller government, but then doing nothing to stand behind that principle.
• delusional 2y ago
  "Reform" is itself too ambiguous to be a target. I don't think anyone wants the government to more efficiently murder their own citizens, or oppress their minority population, yet if you simply settle for wanting "reform" that would have to count. What we want is not simply "reform" not simply "efficiency". What we want is more good things. And therein lies the problem for DOGE. We don't believe that they are going to make good things efficient. Beurocratic inefficiency is rooted in trust. The beurocratic network of controls and accountability departments are established when the existing system fail, and are slowly dismantled again (usually by the logic of "why are we doing this when we never catch anything") when it's no longer needed. The problem for the American beurocracy is that the American people neither trust each other, nor act in a way that would foster that trust. The very existance of billionaires is a glowing example of why American beurocracy exists. Something has to stop their otherwise uncompromised power.
• aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
• khana 2y ago
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• scythe 2y ago
  The first comment on the blog is also illuminating: > But I would urge you to take seriously the role of the courts in creating this mess. There are bad lawyers. But the good ones often are warning the agency about real hazards that can waste enormous amounts of agency effort. Go read a regulatory preamble from the 1970s. It’s a hoot. The agencies often took a few pages to say “here’s what we’re doing”, offered a minimal justification, and that was it. Now, a rulemaking is a multiyear saga, as the agencies jump through every hoop, and know the courts are at the end of the gauntlet. A lawyer who doesn’t warn the program staff what can happen if, say, you end up in front of a judge in ND Tex, is not doing their job. If you don’t document everything to the nth degree you are going to have to do it again. Period. An agency can spend hundreds of pages documenting its reasons, but if the court doesn’t like the way it handled a few comments? Do it over. It's one thing to reform regulatory agencies, but it's another to reform the courts. It seems like we now play racquetball with the courts, with each opposing administration appointing judges who are sympathetic to its viewpoints. This leaves the underlying system untouched and just points it back and forth, while the judges themselves are left with the same wicked problem of applying ambiguous laws to specific situations. But I don't know if DOGE is really about analyzing government operations and producing recommendations for reform. For one thing, we already have the Government Accountability Office, and also the Congressional Budget Office. For another, personnel is policy. Musk and Ramaswamy aren't accountants. They're pundits. I would expect the primary difference between DOGE and previous attempts at government reform will be its strategy in engaging with the public.
  • fastball 2y ago
    Musk is certainly not just a pundit. He is an operator.
    • blitzar 2y ago
      in the arena trying stuff
    • burkaman 2y ago
      A pundit is "a person who gives opinions in an authoritative manner usually through the mass media". He clearly fits this definition. He does plenty of other stuff too, but "pundit" is a completely valid label to use.
• rayiner 2y ago
  The American government can’t do anything because Congress has delegated all its power to the administrative state. But because you can’t really have unelected bureaucrats doing whatever they want, Congress subjected administrative actions to endless judicial review. To fix this, we need to end the filibuster so Congress can actually make laws. It’s much harder to legally challenge the real laws made by Congress than the fake laws made by administrative agencies. Then we need to repeal the Administrative Procedure Act, and rely on the Congressional Review Act to ferret out bad administrative rulemaking. The framers really did understand what they were doing. People like it when they can vote and immediately see results. If they don’t like the results, they can vote a different way next time. People don’t like it when voting doesn’t change anything, because all the actual work is being done by unelected people fighting with lawyers in courts.
  • analog31 2y ago
    We also need to end gerrymandering, otherwise Congress and the state legislatures will continue to be un-elected as well. This is the only way to bring back a government that's willing to govern in good faith.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      Gerrymandering is a red herring because it cancels out. For example, this year democrats won a larger share of house seats than their share of the popular vote. The alternatives are worse, having maps drawn by unelected and unaccountable redistricting commissions: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-failed-promise-of-independent-election-mapmaking https://www.propublica.org/article/the-failed-promise-of-ind...
      • analog31 2y ago
        That seems to me like a cherry picked metric, and in any event, canceling out isn't the point of democracy. And gerrymandering means that redistricting is also being done by an unelected and unaccountable body -- the legislature. I'm willing to accept the risk of fair elections. This is even with the understanding that it would probably change the behavior of the parties in unpredictable ways. Give me back my vote! But I don't doubt that there will continue to be relentless pressure on our elective system. Democracy is fragile, and can be overthrown without violence through gradual erosion of its institutions. This is not a fault of democracy per se, because any government can be overthrown.
• FpUser 2y ago
  >"What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built" In theory billionaires should be treated just as your average Joe. What worries me more is that they seem to be able to buy government they want. Not completely there yet but moving in the direction. And while I do not put much trust to government having people's interest at heart I think the government subjugated by billionaires will be a nightmare in the end.
  • marbro 2y ago
    Elon Musk moved from South Africa to New Jersey to California to Texas because he wasn't getting the government that he wants.
• analog31 2y ago
  I think that faith in "disruption" is one of those modern business myths, that's applied in hindsight to famous entrepreneurs. I don't think it's something you can plan, hire, or even hope for. There are two analogies that give me pause: 1. The "insurgency" problem: The people who can overthrow a government are never the same people as, or are even willing to cooperate with, the people who can govern. 2. The "second system effect" described by Fred Brooks. The workings of a bureaucracy seem analogous to a massive, complex software app that must be kept running while it's being completely re-written from scratch.
  • gsf_emergency 2y ago
    Please pardon my attempt to rephrase your questions in microecon terms 2. Tech debt is a community ("public") good in the short term and an externality (community antigood) at longer time scales 1. The devs who are responsible for fixing bugs are not always the guys who wrote the code
    • bilbo0s 2y ago
      I'm thinking 1 is more like: "The devs who can write a new system are not the same as the devs who can keep a system running." That's definitely true in my experience. The people you can hire to write a totally new system are out there in abundance. But finding a guy or gal good at maintenance is actually surprisingly difficult. Good maintenance devs are worth their weight in gold.
      • gsf_emergency 2y ago
        Yes! Was trying to keep the 2 points tightly integrated but your thinking is definitely closer to analog31's interpretation of the political economics. There can be a cyclical aspect to the situation: the new hire gives up fixing legacy and rewrites the base out of anger. Probably many other archetypes that I missed, all of which resemble the basic setup. One might also generalize "coding culture" to "culture around legal codes". To pile on your point: meanwhile, the suboptimal job market conditions (shall we say) preps the engineering culture for vicious spirals
• davidw 2y ago
  This is a pretty good take on what is likely to be an effort that mostly is in the interests of the extremely wealthy people running it, and is a reply to the posted article: https://resnikoff.beehiiv.com/p/you-don-t-have-to-hand-it-to-doge https://resnikoff.beehiiv.com/p/you-don-t-have-to-hand-it-to... Also some useful history around "we're just going to eliminate all the waste! Easy peasy!" https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-fraudulence-of-waste-fraud-and https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-fraudulence-of-waste-...
  • mlinhares 2y ago
    If anyone thinks there's anything good coming out of this for those who aren't multi-millionaires and billionaires, I have some land on the Moon to sell you.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • fastball 2y ago
    That's not a good take at all. The author tries to make out as if Elon Musk is nothing more than a crony capitalist, pointing out that SpaceX has $15B in govt contracts. This conveniently ignores the reason SpaceX has those contracts in the first place, which is because they have consistently been the best available supplier to NASA/DoD/etc. You can contrast what SpaceX has been delivering with Falcon and Starship vs what Boeing has been delivering with Starliner to get a tiny glimpse into how silly a claim it is that Musk is doing this to gift himself government contracts. Or compare how little the other billionaire-funded space company (Blue Origin) has delivered, even though they were actually founded before SpaceX. Musk doesn't need to (somehow) give his company a leg up via DOGE, his company is already the best provider available by a huge margin. From there, the author says: > consider the track record of Musk’s Boring Company, which is responsible for several of the worst municipal infrastructure boondoggles of the past few years. In what sense is that true, even a tiny bit? TBC delivered the Las Vegas loop first phase for a cost of $31M per mile, which is significantly cheaper than what anyone else is digging tunnels for. A significant portion of that is station cost, which obviously becomes much less of the overall cost if you build longer tunnels. They completed this project in about 15 months. This was their first real project, before they had much opportunity to iterate on TBM designs (which if you look at the history of SpaceX, iteration speed is clearly a strong point in favor of Musk-led companies). You can compare that to Cali's high speed rail project, which has a Phase 1 projected cost of $106.2B for 494 miles of track, which works out to $215M per mile, and that's not even a tunnel. They began in 2015 (before TBC was even incorporated) and there is not yet a single mile in operation.
• rashidae 2y ago
  I’m just going to watch and hold on to my opinions, as time and time again, Musk has championed his will.
  • username135 2y ago
    Can you elaborate?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • llamaimperative 2y ago
      I think they’re saying they’re going to abdicate responsibility for thinking about what’s happening to their government because a strong man is in charge now. (strong man, not strongman, but you can decide what the difference is)
• ActorNightly 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • fastball 2y ago
    [flagged]
• heisenbit 2y ago
  The fundamental problem is that there is no „wall“ but a labyrinth with many walls. Some of real value, some outdated, misunderstood and some a real problem. We can all agree on that. Now how does Elon decide which ones to smash?
  • pnut 2y ago
    By overshooting, obviously. He's demonstrably comfortable with breaking good things in the service of eliminating bad ones.
  • throw16180339 2y ago
    There's no reason to take Trump or Musk at face value. DoGE is an excuse to weaken or abolish government departments that Republicans dislike.
• arghandugh 2y ago
  [flagged]
• athrowaway3z 2y ago
  > What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built? Had this read "What if successful businessmen leading a unified government can't disrupt the system?" I'd raise an eye brow and see what they had to say. Instead, without the flowery language of helping out, this argues directly that we ought to dismantle the distribution of power and give it to one man - ordained by wealth - in the name of efficiency. It looks like, swims like, and quacks like fascist ideology.
  • octopoc 2y ago
    What even is fascism anymore? Is populism fascist? The ancient Romans had a concept of temporary dictators for emergencies. Was that fascism? I recently read Starship Troopers, which many people say is a cautionary tale about fascism. It’s not cautionary, but it really leaves me wondering what the hell is the common theme amongst all these examples of fascism except maybe being a threat to the status quo. The book wasn’t even totalitarian, which is what most people mean when they say fascist.
    • athrowaway3z 2y ago
      Its the director of the movie that made it a cautionary tale about fascism. The commentary track is great as well. Verhoven calls out specifically that fascist tickle your senses by making it fucking sexy. Imagine our great future and all the good things we can make possible (if we don't have to listen and consider.)
    • giraffe_lady 2y ago
      https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-definition-of-fascism/ https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-... It's a long article but includes a pretty good descriptive definition of fascist movements. (search "taxonomy" to skip to the definition) He spends some time on the specific issue that no single instance of fascism, even the original italian model, explicitly manifests every single point of the definition. And some of them show up prominently in systems that it doesn't really make sense to call fascist. So every government has some of these elements to different degrees, the point where they have "enough" of them "strongly enough" to be considered fascism is kind of a judgement call. But that doesn't mean the individual points aren't concrete or can't be evaluated straightforwardly into a working definition. Some of the things that differentiate contemporary fascism from "mere" dictatorship are: - attachment to an idealized syncretic national history - machismo and contempt for the weak - positioning in opposition to an "enemy" that is so powerful it justifies immediate pervasive violent action but is also somehow degenerate and weak
• mordae 2y ago
  I have yet to see a department of innovation to actually do anything. The only innovation I have seen in any organization has always been from the inside, never imposed. Not giving Musk e.g. Treasury to bully everyone with budgets clearly indicates this is only to flatter his ego, but effectively protect everyone else from him wielding actual power. I am happy US administration remains sane even in these trying times. > wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo I have yet to meet a veteran civil servant with whom I cannot establish rapport and prepare the groundwork for a project. The key is to actually increase their agency without needlessly exposing them to risks they cannot mitigate. Yeah, sometimes you run into egos and people who are used to huge bribes, but that just means marking them for dismissal when possible and adding their favorite sponsor to the delivery team temporarily. And if all fails, they refuse to budge and insist on protecting the old, unusable, siloed system to protect their bribes? That's where you report to their boss with final word said by the cabinet member. And find another project for 4 years until the situation resolves itself. These people usually don't last long. But when things go well, public servants can really rip through the red tape and make the project reality. It's just that they need to see the benefit.
• ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  Recent quote I saw based on the life of the investigator who set up the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1850: > If you tell a farmer you’re collecting signatures to cap the salaries of government employees, and you’re a smooth-talking confidence man, the farmer will sign almost anything, even the deed to his own land. This kind of swindle is called “the boodle game”. which feels closer to what DOGE is doing than any real reform.
  • robertlagrant 2y ago
    In what way?
    • whoitwas 2y ago
      They told them they'll cut spending. They intend to eliminate social security and medicare that most of those who voted for him depend on. Additionally, they want to remove regulation and regulatory bodies that protect consumers from corporations.
    • lazyeye 2y ago
      And with what evidence?
      • ZeroGravitas 2y ago
        Every public pronouncement they've made about it. The Krugman piece linked elsewhere in these comments examines a few in more detail if you don't find them instantly indicative of non-seriousness without further context (but you should).
        • lazyeye 2y ago
          Vague generalizations mean nothing. Also here's another prediction from the esteemable Krugman:- "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
• Animats 2y ago
  Well, first off, the number of Federal employees hasn't changed much since the 1960s. It's payments to contractors which are more of a problem. Second, only defense and entitlements really matter. Here's the top level breakdown of the Federal budget.[1] Entitlements, such as Social Security, Medicare, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, account for about 65% of the budget. Defense, 14%. Interest paid, 13%. Everything else, about 9%. Most of the noise about cuts focuses on that 9%, but that's not where the money goes. About half the federal budget goes to old people. [1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
  • alexey-salmin 2y ago
    This is a good take, but I wonder if there's a difference between "goes to old people" vs "is spent on things concerning old people" as in how much of that money actually reaches old people directly or indirectly. Given that "half a budget" is around 3 trillion and there are 60 million old people in the US this gives $100k for a household of 2 people which I doubt they receive. Quite possibly there's a big room for optimization too.
    • llamaimperative 2y ago
      Given healthcare costs that doesn’t seem wildly high after accounting for the administrative burden you’d expect for administering that amount of money.
    • matwood 2y ago
      End of life care is crazy expensive [1]. Things like assisted living, hospice, and medical care for end of life is where a vast majority of the costs end up. Could the actual care be made more efficient? Maybe. The irony is the GOP spread lies about death panels when the ACA was being debated, and we may end up with them here if we go down a path of deciding who gets what EoL care in the name of efficiency. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(22)00176-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...
• rbanffy 2y ago
  One thing I learned while working closely with the (Brazilian) government is that the government itself exists only because a law says so, and the most important difference between public service and private initiative is that the private sector has laws regulating what it can’t do while public sector can only do things (and offer services) that are stated in law. In short, outside the government you can do whatever you need as long as it’s not explicitly forbidden while public servants can only do what’s explicitly permitted. Governments are not designed (nor should they be) for efficiency. They are designed for safety, accountability, transparency, and universality. Finally, I must say that I started working with government agencies with the misconception they are lazy, underqualified, people, and nothing is further from what I encountered. The people I worked with were smart, well educated, intelligent, and had an unparalleled sense of public duty I’ve never seen elsewhere.
  • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    > while public servants can only do what’s explicitly permitted. I think that is determined by structure of legal system, many systems the public servants can do whatever they want in pursuit of policy goals that has not been expressly forbidden, but of course should be able to make the case that it was in support of those goals.
    • rbanffy 2y ago
      Indeed - they have some very limited freedom, but the policy goals increase in detail on every level from the top and, with that, the set of allowable actions is reduced. For instance, let's imagine you want to add a feedback form to a website - you need to track the data collected, make sure it's used only in the appropriate legal ways, that the infrastructure to host the data is procured within the budget already set up, and so on. They need to tread carefully not to step outside what government is authorized to do. This is why I got involved in government work in the first place - free and open-source at least eased the procurement step - we only needed to prove the software was adequate and would not do anything not permitted by the rules that governed the adopting org.
    • potato3732842 2y ago
• JP_Watts 2y ago
  I don't always subscribe to someone's Substack, but when I do, it's Jennifer Pahlka.
• hiddencost 2y ago
  "POSIWID". The purpose of the system is what it does.
• whoitwas 2y ago
  Change has directionality it isn't change || !change. In this case change would be weighted toward enabling corporations, and bolstering security required for that. I consider that negative change. I would like to see change to strengthen communities, improve education, and bolster human health. These will be all be further eroded and decrease through DOGE change.
• cess11 2y ago
  What a weird eulogy. Why does she want to hide her infatuation with the incoming administration rooted in the explicitly far-right faction of the US one-party state? Would it somehow hurt her economically or socially?
• jccalhoun 2y ago
  The problem is the only suggestions for reform that I have heard from Musk and others are firing people and eliminating programs. If there is a push for other kinds of reform that makes things clearer and simpler then I would support them. However, since SpaceX and Amazon have argued the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional, I have little hope that the reforms they propose will be the kind I would like to see. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/18/nx-s1-5192918/spacex-amazon-nlrb-labor-board-elon-musk https://www.npr.org/2024/11/18/nx-s1-5192918/spacex-amazon-n...
  • baranul 2y ago
    It looks like the kind of "reform" and deregulation that these Billionaires want, is whatever will put more money into their pocket, their businesses, and those of their rich friends. Unfortunately, lots of poor voters erroneously think they will get something out of it, but that's unlikely to be the intent or the result.
  • karmonhardan 2y ago
    It's certainly funny how popular "Defund the" is when it ends with, "[agency with a track record of actually providing service and value to both individual Americans and the country as a whole]" instead of "police". Turns out, conservatism is selective when it comes to preservation of institutions. One guess what the qualifier is.
    • gruez 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • dragontamer 2y ago
      They are apparently pro police but anti-FBI, which is basically the Federal Level police force in charge of finding corruption in politicians. The problem here is it feels like Police for thee but not for me.
      • adamrezich 2y ago
        > FBI, which is basically the Federal Level police force in charge of finding corruption in politicians. This is false.
• splitrocket 2y ago
  For every complex problem, there is a solution that is easy, simple, and wrong. And then there's the Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (not sure it's a law), which states, simplified, that a simpler system cannot control a more complicated system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)
  • svieira 2y ago
    And the corollary to that called the "Principle of Subsidiarity" which states (paraphrasing) that "Responsibilities must be minimally delegated upwards"
• matt_morgan 2y ago
  I'm reminded of [Things You Should Never Do Part 1](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...) , but substitute all those rulings and laws and interpretations for all the bug fixes, i.e. they support and provide service for edge cases, i.e. marginal people, organizations, and places. That's what the lawsuits are for; not to protect the ruling but to protect the people who weren't being served. Let's tear it all out just to build it again, adding all new bug fixes for all the same reasons.
• dralley 2y ago
  People like Peter Thiel are not so interested in government reform and efficiency so much as toppling "the ancien [sic] liberal order" and replacing it with techno-fuedalism.
  • marbro 2y ago
    Thiel isn't a techno-feudalist, he's a libertarian.
    • dralley 2y ago
      He explicitly opposes liberalism and pluralist democracy. He's not a libertarian.
• lmeyerov 2y ago
  I would welcome DOGE focusing on how much velocity it will increase and how many lines of bad policy it will remove. Likewise, cutting inefficient people should instead be replacing them. It is so hard to make progress within gov, so focusing on firing and demoralizing makes the environment even more afraid to move, and inefficiency even more of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a counterpoint, I'm happy for the pro-AI discussions as these systems have been difficult to move forward. Many senior people are working to figure out how to legally do it, so dictates cutting red tape for them, not headcount, is welcome, and would let them focus on the project phases they actually want to do. We work with multiple groups at the federal level, and while some people our peers interact with I do wish were out of the way, those are a minority, and more of a symptom. The ultimate problem is the procedures being tasked, the underlying mandates & regulations driving them, and lack of ability to succeed despite these. Imagine if your IT department was largely run by lawyers who fear jail time for any sign of malpractice because that's what the law says and they've built up defensive practices over the years as different situations came up. Of course the default is 'no'! The solution is not to stop having an IT department, but to fix the policy problems and rotate leadership for the new culture.
  • brokenmachine 2y ago
    >I'm happy for the pro-AI discussions as these systems have been difficult to move forward. What needs does government have that you think would be better performed by AI?
    • lmeyerov 2y ago
      At the federal level, most things are big, underfunded, understaffed, underpaid, and over regulated, so programs are low quality, behind, and slow. I stay away from state level, and expect there is less data and $, and even more problems. Think fairly basic data extraction, data cleaning, workflow automation, moving to the cloud, getting basic modern security.
      • brokenmachine 2y ago
        I'm not trying to be troublesome, just really trying to understand the opportunities... Basic data extraction and data cleaning? You can't trust AI to do anything without hallucinating or ignoring possibly important data. Workflow automation, in what way? Once again, can't be trusted. Moving to the cloud? How does AI help with that? Getting basic modern security. Again, how does AI help with that?
• system7rocks 2y ago
  I loved the article. And as a non-profit leader, I recognize the challenge of coming into an existing system, learning it, identifying things that need to change, and trying (vainly mostly) to change it. My dream (but impossible) reforms for Congress would be: - You can only run for political office if you have (personally) written and passed legislation at a lower level (city, county, state). I understand we need staff to help us draft legislation, but you must be a legislator, not a figurehead, to serve. No idea how to enforce this on any practical level other than a draft tracking system. GitHub for politics? - If you do not pass one piece of legislation while in office each year, you cannot run for reelection. Your job is to work on legislation, negotiate, and pass laws. If you block a piece of legislation, it does not count. Once out, you must repeat the process - go back to 1. - Congress get compounded bonuses or raises for passing legislation in consecutive years and can also make a special Legislator All-Star team. Trading cards will be released in schools so young kids can grow up celebrating the amazing legislators in hot streaks. CSPAN will keep a statistical database of legislators accomplishments and reframe politics around class sports narratives, like comebacks and underdogs and unlikely team-ups.
  • shermantanktop 2y ago
    Seems like this incents net-new legislation, and should also reward either removing or updating legislation.
    • system7rocks 2y ago
      It would also require a constitutional amendment. Haha
      • system7rocks 2y ago
        You sound not well too,
  • marbro 2y ago
    I don't want legislators to write new legislation, I want them to repeal existing legislation. I want 535 guys like Thomas Massie and Ron Paul but they fail your criteria.
• olau 2y ago
  From the article: > It's really hard to have an accurate model for why change is so hard in large bureaucratic institutions, and specifically for public sector ones, where the differences in governance really do matter. From the discussion of organization types by Mintzberg, it seems a natural consequence. Bureaucracies are the efficient, right answer to stable circumstances - you make a stable organization, figure out the right answers and make everyone follow these answers. Non-compliance is a problem - the culture you aim for is "what's our accepted answer to this". When you think about it, what is change but non-compliance with the previously accepted rules? (Software development is in the opposite category. The bread and butter is change and chaos.)
• buryat 2y ago
  we need startup mentality and efficiency in the governmental structures that are built for redistributing valuable resources in a system that exists in opposition to the outside world. Competition still does exists and we have internal and external dangerous forces that might make human life on the planet uncomfortable. To prevent this sudden wake up call to the broader society we must engineer incentives that will make the society slightly feeling the urge to do something productive that brings value. This force will be embedded into the economic model and will keep propagating further. Bringing a more just efficient and lean government that is working purely for the society's greater good.
  • kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Most startups burn runway and fail. Not a model for longstanding governance. Likewise what are your incentives? I think we have enough incentives already for people to be productive its just they face blockers to productivity. Investment is limited. Knowledge is gated and not evenly distributed or made accessible as means of stratifying the populace by trade. We seem more content to have a society of a few highly paid engineers vs a society where everyone is an engineer making a median wage. And a lack of social safety net means development optimizes for quick profitability in order to at least pay the owners bills vs developing novel technology that isn’t dependent on profitability in todays economic context (which severely limits human technological potential).