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I also suspect that there really isn't nearly as much "waste" here as Musk is alleging, so we are going to be forced to re-hire people, while still paying a ton

I also suspect that there really isn't nearly as much "waste" here as Musk is alleging, so we are going to be forced to re-hire people, while still paying a ton of workers for 8 months of no work. This doesn't seem "efficient" to me, but "efficient" is a word that doesn't actually mean anything without context, which they don't provide.

varsketiz 2y ago
Well, it depends on what goals Trump and Musk consider worthwhile. Just hypothetically, if they dont consider healthcare for all a worthwhile goal - possibly every dollar spent on Obamacare is waste from their perspective. I think they will find a lot of waste - question is if people in the USA will agree.
- tombert 2y ago
  Well that's what I mean, "efficiency" is a term that doesn't mean anything in isolation, and because of that they can define it to mean whatever they want it to mean and declare victory as a result. I also think there might be some shady math going on; they're counting every canceled thing as "savings", but I don't think they're going to count the cost of rehiring the lost workers and redoing these contracts.
  - Majromax 2y ago
    > Well that's what I mean, "efficiency" is a term that doesn't mean anything in isolation, and because of that they can define it to mean whatever they want it to mean and declare victory as a result. Efficiency does have a sensible definition in isolation: an efficient system is one in which there are no more Pareto improvements. From the government perspective, you could consider this in terms of the cost/service frontier, and actions which move the government towards that frontier improve efficiency. However, I do agree with your practical concern that 'efficiency' is being used without regard at all for the services being delivered. This seems particularly likely since the government is attempting to eliminate whole departments or agencies by executive order, implying it gives no value to said services.
    - tombert 2y ago
      > Efficiency does have a sensible definition in isolation: an efficient system is one in which there are no more Pareto improvements. From the government perspective, you could consider this in terms of the cost/service frontier, and actions which move the government towards that frontier improve efficiency. I had to look up Pareto improvement, and I don't think that many systems exist where improvements are better in "every way" like the definition suggests. For example, most big tech companies will use something like Kubernetes (or an equivalent) to deploy multiple instances of a service and then load balance between them, even when none of them have reached full capacity. In one sense, this is "inefficient", in that we have computers sitting idle that could be doing work, but it's also efficient in another sense, which is to minimize downtime; if one of the computers or service crash, you won't experience much (or any) downtime because one of the replicas will handle requests. Someone could get rid of all the replicas and then claim victory in that they made things "more efficient" by reducing the cost, but that will come at the expense of possible downtime. Every system is different, and figuring out where on the spectrum you draw that line is rarely clear-cut, and there is almost always tradeoffs no matter what decision you make. Sometimes you can live with more downtime and it's better to cut the costs of the extra computers, sometimes downtime is not an option and you need a ton of redundancy. Humans are not computers, so it's not the best analogy in the world, but I think it still mostly holds; it looks like in a hand-wavey way they're just defining efficiency as "spending less money", but that really doesn't make any sense unless you can show that you're getting comparable results while spending less cash. I'm not saying that the government is perfect with spending money, obviously, and it's entirely possible that DOGE will find something that really should be eliminated. I'm just saying that it's rarely cut and dry, and it's very rare that cutting something is just a universal net improvement.
    - miltonlost 2y ago
      Pareto Efficiency should not be the be-all-end-all (and only one subset of "efficiency", so your definition is only useful in isolation to Pareto Efficient). It only guarantees nothing is worse off, but that's only a relative comparison. A result of 99% of the wealth goes to 1 individual and 1% of the wealth is with everyone else is Pareto Efficient but not a good world! Efficiency can also be used amorally, e.g., Death Camps are an efficient way to kill undesirables!
  - ahi 2y ago
    A lot of federal workers spend their time overseeing projects run by the private sector. Whether or not those projects are worth doing, funds have been appropriated and the private sector will get their day in court and get their funding. Now with no oversight from some useless bureaucrat (our project manager defending our interests).
- pixl97 2y ago
  Well you can be sure the billionaire aligned media will only tell the part of the story in their best interest, so who knows how much of the actual story will be told to any portion of the population.
gramie 2y ago
Or even better, they can be brought back as contractors with vital skills and knowledge, at much higher cost!
scarface_74 2y ago
Re-hire people for what? They don’t want a functioning government
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  OK. What do they want? Seriously, what do you claim they want? A fascist dictatorship? You still need a functioning government for that. (It doesn't function for the people, but it still requires a large number of competent employees.) Anarchy? Mad Max? Everybody dies, so no government employees are needed? Takeover by Canada, Mexico, China, or Russia, so it becomes their problem? Or do you just claim that they're so stupid that they haven't thought past "Hur, let's, like, destroy the government, man"? Seriously, what do you actually claim that they actually want?
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    You act as if any of these people are logical. My best guess is that they want all of the power in the states and to privatize whatever is necessary for their cronies to profit from much like Putin did in Russia. Some of the Republicans just want to maintain power after Trump is gone. Trump is stupid and easily led and operates out of grift and animus. Musk is definitely going to get something out of this. Most likely federal contracts. Also a lot of Trump voters see him as their best defense to maintain their “way of life” and see the trends where the US is becoming a majority/minority, secular country. It was bad enough that this country let an “uppity Black” run the country for 8 years.
  - verall 2y ago
    > A fascist dictatorship? You still need a functioning government for that. Not really, just a functioning police force.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      That functioning police force needs a functioning tax collection system to fund it, and a functioning civil society to pay for it. So you need enforcement of contracts, and a functioning financial system, and working roads, and all kinds of stuff. You can't just sit there and say "we've got the police, so none of the civilians can touch us" - not for long, anyway.
rtkwe 2y ago
A large part of the GOP playbook around their goal of smaller government is to make the government work worse then use that to argue government can't do the job and it shouldn't do it or it needs to be privatized. "We can't give immigrants their due process before deporting them that takes forever! (We also refuse to expand the number of judges serving those cases)" "Public schools are horrible and don't work! (We've been choking their budget for decades)" etc etc.

varsketiz 2y ago

Well, it depends on what goals Trump and Musk consider worthwhile. Just hypothetically, if they dont consider healthcare for all a worthwhile goal - possibly every dollar spent on Obamacare is waste from their perspective. I think they will find a lot of waste - question is if people in the USA will agree.

tombert 2y ago
Well that's what I mean, "efficiency" is a term that doesn't mean anything in isolation, and because of that they can define it to mean whatever they want it to mean and declare victory as a result. I also think there might be some shady math going on; they're counting every canceled thing as "savings", but I don't think they're going to count the cost of rehiring the lost workers and redoing these contracts.
- Majromax 2y ago
  > Well that's what I mean, "efficiency" is a term that doesn't mean anything in isolation, and because of that they can define it to mean whatever they want it to mean and declare victory as a result. Efficiency does have a sensible definition in isolation: an efficient system is one in which there are no more Pareto improvements. From the government perspective, you could consider this in terms of the cost/service frontier, and actions which move the government towards that frontier improve efficiency. However, I do agree with your practical concern that 'efficiency' is being used without regard at all for the services being delivered. This seems particularly likely since the government is attempting to eliminate whole departments or agencies by executive order, implying it gives no value to said services.
  - tombert 2y ago
    > Efficiency does have a sensible definition in isolation: an efficient system is one in which there are no more Pareto improvements. From the government perspective, you could consider this in terms of the cost/service frontier, and actions which move the government towards that frontier improve efficiency. I had to look up Pareto improvement, and I don't think that many systems exist where improvements are better in "every way" like the definition suggests. For example, most big tech companies will use something like Kubernetes (or an equivalent) to deploy multiple instances of a service and then load balance between them, even when none of them have reached full capacity. In one sense, this is "inefficient", in that we have computers sitting idle that could be doing work, but it's also efficient in another sense, which is to minimize downtime; if one of the computers or service crash, you won't experience much (or any) downtime because one of the replicas will handle requests. Someone could get rid of all the replicas and then claim victory in that they made things "more efficient" by reducing the cost, but that will come at the expense of possible downtime. Every system is different, and figuring out where on the spectrum you draw that line is rarely clear-cut, and there is almost always tradeoffs no matter what decision you make. Sometimes you can live with more downtime and it's better to cut the costs of the extra computers, sometimes downtime is not an option and you need a ton of redundancy. Humans are not computers, so it's not the best analogy in the world, but I think it still mostly holds; it looks like in a hand-wavey way they're just defining efficiency as "spending less money", but that really doesn't make any sense unless you can show that you're getting comparable results while spending less cash. I'm not saying that the government is perfect with spending money, obviously, and it's entirely possible that DOGE will find something that really should be eliminated. I'm just saying that it's rarely cut and dry, and it's very rare that cutting something is just a universal net improvement.
  - miltonlost 2y ago
    Pareto Efficiency should not be the be-all-end-all (and only one subset of "efficiency", so your definition is only useful in isolation to Pareto Efficient). It only guarantees nothing is worse off, but that's only a relative comparison. A result of 99% of the wealth goes to 1 individual and 1% of the wealth is with everyone else is Pareto Efficient but not a good world! Efficiency can also be used amorally, e.g., Death Camps are an efficient way to kill undesirables!
- ahi 2y ago
  A lot of federal workers spend their time overseeing projects run by the private sector. Whether or not those projects are worth doing, funds have been appropriated and the private sector will get their day in court and get their funding. Now with no oversight from some useless bureaucrat (our project manager defending our interests).
pixl97 2y ago
Well you can be sure the billionaire aligned media will only tell the part of the story in their best interest, so who knows how much of the actual story will be told to any portion of the population.

gramie 2y ago

Or even better, they can be brought back as contractors with vital skills and knowledge, at much higher cost!

scarface_74 2y ago

Re-hire people for what? They don’t want a functioning government

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
OK. What do they want? Seriously, what do you claim they want? A fascist dictatorship? You still need a functioning government for that. (It doesn't function for the people, but it still requires a large number of competent employees.) Anarchy? Mad Max? Everybody dies, so no government employees are needed? Takeover by Canada, Mexico, China, or Russia, so it becomes their problem? Or do you just claim that they're so stupid that they haven't thought past "Hur, let's, like, destroy the government, man"? Seriously, what do you actually claim that they actually want?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  You act as if any of these people are logical. My best guess is that they want all of the power in the states and to privatize whatever is necessary for their cronies to profit from much like Putin did in Russia. Some of the Republicans just want to maintain power after Trump is gone. Trump is stupid and easily led and operates out of grift and animus. Musk is definitely going to get something out of this. Most likely federal contracts. Also a lot of Trump voters see him as their best defense to maintain their “way of life” and see the trends where the US is becoming a majority/minority, secular country. It was bad enough that this country let an “uppity Black” run the country for 8 years.
- verall 2y ago
  > A fascist dictatorship? You still need a functioning government for that. Not really, just a functioning police force.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    That functioning police force needs a functioning tax collection system to fund it, and a functioning civil society to pay for it. So you need enforcement of contracts, and a functioning financial system, and working roads, and all kinds of stuff. You can't just sit there and say "we've got the police, so none of the civilians can touch us" - not for long, anyway.

rtkwe 2y ago

A large part of the GOP playbook around their goal of smaller government is to make the government work worse then use that to argue government can't do the job and it shouldn't do it or it needs to be privatized. "We can't give immigrants their due process before deporting them that takes forever! (We also refuse to expand the number of judges serving those cases)" "Public schools are horrible and don't work! (We've been choking their budget for decades)" etc etc.