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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_... Not every fence still has a u

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_... Not every fence still has a use, but I hope they have a good think about what they're doing.

justinator 2y ago
They didn't.
SamBam 2y ago
I think that they are having a good think about what they are doing, but I believe that, in cutting key agencies that protect consumers from corporations, their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country.
- jrussino 2y ago
  > their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country. When people express worry over superhuman-AI alignment on forums like this, I find myself wishing they'd shift focus to the fact that we actually already have a problem with the mis-alignment of super-human entities in the form of large corporations and the billionaires who control them. (And yes, governments too; the whole point of our democratic form of government is that it's supposed to keep that behemoth better aligned with the values and will of "the people".) To me it seems obvious that keeping a misaligned super-AGI from destroying humanity and keeping billionares and large multinational corporations from destroying humanity with climate change in the long-term or just degrading our quality of life (via pollution, wealth inequality, etc.) in the short term are really just differences of degree and not of kind. But we actually have the latter problem right now, and, as a bonus, if we can figure out better ways of aligning our carbon-based and economic-legal system "overlords" in the present maybe it helps point us toward a better way of aligning our potential silicon-based "overlords" in the future.
  - idle_zealot 2y ago
    Congratulations, you've discovered class analysis. Unfortunately, that mode of thinking was successfully stigmatized during the Cold War's red scare, so good luck getting any group with power to take it seriously.
- Kapura 2y ago
  well good thing we have inspectors general to make sure that people in the government are acting correctly! oh wait https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
- killerteddybear 2y ago
  Good example is the CFPB. If they destroy it return all the money to taxpayers as Elon is saying he is doing, it's about 2 dollars to each of us. In return, we have a largely unregulated banking system that can do things like charge structuring for credit cards and checking account to maximize fees or overdrafts in a frankly fraudulent manner. It will cost us billions of dollars as a society to not have those protections anymore. Not to mention things like forced subscriptions that are impossible to cancel that the CFPB has been working against. I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
    >I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences. Those 'costs' to society are 'profits' to the banks. You don't get to have a choice about it. Elon is in charge and he's going with the banks.
  - slowmovintarget 2y ago
    Most banking regulations today do not come from the CFPB.
    - lordnacho 2y ago
      That's beside the point. Chances are you are saved more than the cost.
      - slowmovintarget 2y ago
        It directly addresses the notion posed by the commenter I was replying to with regard to the origin of banking regulations. We have, in no particular order: - The FDIC - The SEC - The Federal Reserve Board - The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency Those agencies regulate banking. Then we can go further and we have: - The National Credit Union Organization - The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) - The Financial Insurance Office (part of Treasury) - The Office of Foreign Assets Control - The Securities Investor Protection Corp. - The Commodity Futures Trading Commission - EBISA, ERISA, PBGC for retirement plans... And we need an additional agency because...? We don't need the CFPB.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- SmirkingRevenge 2y ago
  It's like hiring Cookie Monster to make the cookie factory more efficient. He's just going to plant himself at the end of the conveyor belt of fresh cookies with his mouth open, and get rid of everything else. Musk is going to try and entrench himself so much, that he'll never be able to countenance his opposition winning and removing him. Unless Trump dislodges him first, he's going to be a permanent problem.
dfltr 2y ago
The thing that frightens me is that the objective here is the explicit inverse of Chesterton's Fence: In dismantling these agencies, the DOGE team's intent is to cause the exact cascade of dysfunction that Chesterton warned about. Elon Musk (and the billionaire class he represents) doesn't want a functioning CFPB because it doesn't serve him (or them). It will take a little while for them to fully sabotage the IRS and DOE as well, but they're working their way up to it.
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  > fully sabotage the IRS Oh, I'm sure the parts that make sure I pay my taxes will function. But yeah, the parts that make sure Elon and Trump pay their taxes? If they aren't broken today, they will definitely be broken tomorrow.
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    This is already functionaly broken for them, but they can make it even better/worser
  - kemayo 2y ago
    "It's very inefficient to devote all those resources to auditing billionaires, so we've decided to refocus those people on clawing back $15 from people earning under $20k who made minor mistakes on their taxes."
- ecocentrik 2y ago
  They aren't going to dismantle the IRS, not when he and his friends are in a position to benefit from it.
drc37 2y ago
Elon's philosophy is the exact opposite. Remove 90% and see what really needs to be added back.
- cguess 2y ago
  The problem here is people die when those things are removed even for a few weeks or months. You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments. He's not doing this in good faith, he's convinced he's the smartest man in the world and should literally be a dictator.
  - drc37 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
      That's not an edge case. Cutting services that people depend on to live will kill them. That's a guarantee.
    - p_j_w 2y ago
      >I believe he is acting in good faith and the result will be a much more efficient government. If he's acting in good faith then where is the transparency he's promised? Taking Elon at his word is, at this point, naive at best.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 2y ago
    It's fine, it won't hurt Musk himself. All these wild experiments are perfectly okay from his perspective because, to him, there's basically zero risk.
  - laverya 2y ago
    > You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments. "Good" news then, this is already the case! Or should very much be assumed to be the case, following the various GSA hacks.
coolKid721 2y ago
Here's another chestertonism: There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again. Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths. Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.
- hiddencost 2y ago
  People are already dying, and quite a few more will. You can't turn the clock back on that.
- kemayo 2y ago
  ..."can't put the clock back" doesn't literally mean that you can't change the time on a clock. It's referring to not being able to go back and change things that already happened. This is true. There are things that, once done, cannot be undone. You can try to fix their consequences. You can change what you do going forward, so that the thing would not be done that way again. But you can't, say, un-kill an executed innocent.
  - coolKid721 2y ago
    reread the quote
    - kemayo 2y ago
      Your argument about what Chesterton means remains built on deliberately misunderstanding what other sayings mean, so I'm skeptical.
kemayo 2y ago
The most charitable interpretation is that Musk's doing what he did at Twitter -- wildly cutting back, and then backing off and repairing when he finds that something he threw away was actually necessary. I'm not convinced that this is a good strategy when dealing with something with higher stakes than "posting dank memes", though. "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security. That is, as you said, sometimes the fence-that-is-inefficient-processes exists for a reason. EDIT TO BE LESS SUBTLE BASED ON REPLIES: I think this is bad. Even in the most-charitable interpretation, it is bad. Particularly for the government, but even at Twitter it succeeded at making it smaller but approximately-nobody thinks Twitter is better now.
- ravetcofx 2y ago
  except when things break, actual people in the country get harmed, and "Repairing" in this case will be privatization
  - kemayo 2y ago
    Yes, I wasn't trying to imply that it was a good approach to apply to the US government. ;_;
  - cma 2y ago
    And the federal workforce outside of the military is only like 4.5% of the federal budget
- meowkit 2y ago
  Its not really an interpretation- he has literally talked about this as his playbook dozens of times. One step in the playbook is reduce - “if you dont break things 10% of the time then you are not reducing enough” is almost verbatim what he has said, and done, for all of his companies. I strongly disagree with my fellow Americans that government systems should be immune to this process or that people will be harmed. This sensitivity to perceived harm is a problem in and of itself.
  - 2y ago
ljm 2y ago
It's usually said in business that you should spend your first 100 days getting the lay of the land before you start making big decisions. It might even be more ideal to give it 12 months before you tear up the playbook and bring your own. Obviously, for a government staffed with experienced people, you'll be working with people who know how things work, and an incoming administration will have spent plenty of time outlining a plan of action well in advance of coming into office. Does that apply to a notorious shitposting edgelord like Musk who is storming around like a bull in a china shop and sees the US as his new plaything? I doubt it - I certainly doubt any level of thinking is involved.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  This administration (at least) thinks they spent an entire term learning, and now ith a 4-year gap are "hitting the ground running". The people were promised "we will quicky change and fix everything"; this is "we will quickly change everything", declare mission accomplished and hope they get lucky or maybe the dropped words won't be noticed.
caminante 2y ago
Without more color, aren't you guilty of "tearing down their fence?" Seems like a forced meta critique.
fny 2y ago
And yesterday I learned they’re shielded from FOIA despite whatever transparency was promised.
crote 2y ago
> I hope they have a good think about what they're doing. They probably did, if you look at it from a perspective of deliberately ruining the government. It looks like they are trying to reduce the government to nothing more than the IRS. Everything else will either get permanently trashed (any kind of consumer protection), sold off for parts, or contracted out to a private company started by one of their buddies. Yeah, it might result in a very chaotic transition period, but these people don't care. They are rich enough that it's not going to personally affect them, and in the end they'll end up even richer. The entire goal right now is to do so much damage that it is going to take decades to restore - if it's even possible at all.
- eszed 2y ago
  They especially want to gut the IRS. Look at how understaffed their enforcement division has been, for years.
rsynnott 2y ago
I mean, it's not really a valid case of Chesterton's Fence if you're doing it _maliciously_. I don't _really_ buy the "they are merely terribly incompetent and demolishing a lot of Chesterton's fences", at this point.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
It's a variation on "never change a winning team". Which is valid. As long as the team is winning. Doing more of the same is not going to fix things if it stops winning. It's a problem with bureaucracies. They bloat. They grow. They never shrink. Byzantine bureaucracies refer to the notion that this got out of hand shortly before the collapse of what remained of the Roman empire at that point. Bureaucracies are also sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque to indicate how nonsensical, illogical, and absurdist bureaucracies can become. Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people. It's complicated, vast, and very change resistant. The task of doing something about that is so intimidating that no recent previous government has had the nerve to do anything significant about that. They all chickened out and instead just added their own layers of more bureaucracy to the mix. It's easier to add stuff to the pile than to take stuff away from it. So, after a few centuries of that, there's probably a lot of stuff there that barely makes sense to anyone. The department highlighted in the article strikes me like a good example of a product of such a bureaucracy. The article barely explains why this apparently very large, expensive, and richly staffed department exist, what it does, and why that is so important. It also fails to outline what kind of budget it has and what the intended purpose of that budget is. I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing. That chat bot that they highlight doesn't strike me as "key technology". Quite the opposite actually. The article raises more questions than it answers here. What was that thing supposed to do? Who was it for? Who backed/approved this? Why? How much did that cost? What else do people in that department do? All reasonable questions to ask.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  > Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people At < 3 million people this is substantially under its peak and at about its level in the 1960's, and a smaller fraction of the workforce than pretty much everywhere. Wages are 0.9 per cent of the federal budget.
- ModernMech 2y ago
  > I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing. Right, exactly. And neither can Musk, really. So at this point, the answer isn't to just go ahead and take a sledge hammer to it. The correct course would be to actually go through the Congress and ask those very reasonable questions you pose. But Musk doesn't even want to work with with the Congressional DOGE Committee he set up. That's highly concerning.
tmaly 2y ago
I wish there was a good solution to Chesterton's fence.

justinator 2y ago

They didn't.

SamBam 2y ago

I think that they are having a good think about what they are doing, but I believe that, in cutting key agencies that protect consumers from corporations, their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country.

jrussino 2y ago
> their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country. When people express worry over superhuman-AI alignment on forums like this, I find myself wishing they'd shift focus to the fact that we actually already have a problem with the mis-alignment of super-human entities in the form of large corporations and the billionaires who control them. (And yes, governments too; the whole point of our democratic form of government is that it's supposed to keep that behemoth better aligned with the values and will of "the people".) To me it seems obvious that keeping a misaligned super-AGI from destroying humanity and keeping billionares and large multinational corporations from destroying humanity with climate change in the long-term or just degrading our quality of life (via pollution, wealth inequality, etc.) in the short term are really just differences of degree and not of kind. But we actually have the latter problem right now, and, as a bonus, if we can figure out better ways of aligning our carbon-based and economic-legal system "overlords" in the present maybe it helps point us toward a better way of aligning our potential silicon-based "overlords" in the future.
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  Congratulations, you've discovered class analysis. Unfortunately, that mode of thinking was successfully stigmatized during the Cold War's red scare, so good luck getting any group with power to take it seriously.
Kapura 2y ago
well good thing we have inspectors general to make sure that people in the government are acting correctly! oh wait https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...
killerteddybear 2y ago
Good example is the CFPB. If they destroy it return all the money to taxpayers as Elon is saying he is doing, it's about 2 dollars to each of us. In return, we have a largely unregulated banking system that can do things like charge structuring for credit cards and checking account to maximize fees or overdrafts in a frankly fraudulent manner. It will cost us billions of dollars as a society to not have those protections anymore. Not to mention things like forced subscriptions that are impossible to cancel that the CFPB has been working against. I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  >I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences. Those 'costs' to society are 'profits' to the banks. You don't get to have a choice about it. Elon is in charge and he's going with the banks.
- slowmovintarget 2y ago
  Most banking regulations today do not come from the CFPB.
  - lordnacho 2y ago
    That's beside the point. Chances are you are saved more than the cost.
    - slowmovintarget 2y ago
      It directly addresses the notion posed by the commenter I was replying to with regard to the origin of banking regulations. We have, in no particular order: - The FDIC - The SEC - The Federal Reserve Board - The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency Those agencies regulate banking. Then we can go further and we have: - The National Credit Union Organization - The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) - The Financial Insurance Office (part of Treasury) - The Office of Foreign Assets Control - The Securities Investor Protection Corp. - The Commodity Futures Trading Commission - EBISA, ERISA, PBGC for retirement plans... And we need an additional agency because...? We don't need the CFPB.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
SmirkingRevenge 2y ago
It's like hiring Cookie Monster to make the cookie factory more efficient. He's just going to plant himself at the end of the conveyor belt of fresh cookies with his mouth open, and get rid of everything else. Musk is going to try and entrench himself so much, that he'll never be able to countenance his opposition winning and removing him. Unless Trump dislodges him first, he's going to be a permanent problem.

dfltr 2y ago

The thing that frightens me is that the objective here is the explicit inverse of Chesterton's Fence: In dismantling these agencies, the DOGE team's intent is to cause the exact cascade of dysfunction that Chesterton warned about. Elon Musk (and the billionaire class he represents) doesn't want a functioning CFPB because it doesn't serve him (or them). It will take a little while for them to fully sabotage the IRS and DOE as well, but they're working their way up to it.

smallmancontrov 2y ago
> fully sabotage the IRS Oh, I'm sure the parts that make sure I pay my taxes will function. But yeah, the parts that make sure Elon and Trump pay their taxes? If they aren't broken today, they will definitely be broken tomorrow.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  This is already functionaly broken for them, but they can make it even better/worser
- kemayo 2y ago
  "It's very inefficient to devote all those resources to auditing billionaires, so we've decided to refocus those people on clawing back $15 from people earning under $20k who made minor mistakes on their taxes."
ecocentrik 2y ago
They aren't going to dismantle the IRS, not when he and his friends are in a position to benefit from it.

drc37 2y ago

Elon's philosophy is the exact opposite. Remove 90% and see what really needs to be added back.

cguess 2y ago
The problem here is people die when those things are removed even for a few weeks or months. You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments. He's not doing this in good faith, he's convinced he's the smartest man in the world and should literally be a dictator.
- drc37 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
    That's not an edge case. Cutting services that people depend on to live will kill them. That's a guarantee.
  - p_j_w 2y ago
    >I believe he is acting in good faith and the result will be a much more efficient government. If he's acting in good faith then where is the transparency he's promised? Taking Elon at his word is, at this point, naive at best.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 2y ago
  It's fine, it won't hurt Musk himself. All these wild experiments are perfectly okay from his perspective because, to him, there's basically zero risk.
- laverya 2y ago
  > You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments. "Good" news then, this is already the case! Or should very much be assumed to be the case, following the various GSA hacks.

coolKid721 2y ago

Here's another chestertonism: There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again. Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths. Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.

hiddencost 2y ago
People are already dying, and quite a few more will. You can't turn the clock back on that.
kemayo 2y ago
..."can't put the clock back" doesn't literally mean that you can't change the time on a clock. It's referring to not being able to go back and change things that already happened. This is true. There are things that, once done, cannot be undone. You can try to fix their consequences. You can change what you do going forward, so that the thing would not be done that way again. But you can't, say, un-kill an executed innocent.
- coolKid721 2y ago
  reread the quote
  - kemayo 2y ago
    Your argument about what Chesterton means remains built on deliberately misunderstanding what other sayings mean, so I'm skeptical.

kemayo 2y ago

The most charitable interpretation is that Musk's doing what he did at Twitter -- wildly cutting back, and then backing off and repairing when he finds that something he threw away was actually necessary. I'm not convinced that this is a good strategy when dealing with something with higher stakes than "posting dank memes", though. "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security. That is, as you said, sometimes the fence-that-is-inefficient-processes exists for a reason. EDIT TO BE LESS SUBTLE BASED ON REPLIES: I think this is bad. Even in the most-charitable interpretation, it is bad. Particularly for the government, but even at Twitter it succeeded at making it smaller but approximately-nobody thinks Twitter is better now.

ravetcofx 2y ago
except when things break, actual people in the country get harmed, and "Repairing" in this case will be privatization
- kemayo 2y ago
  Yes, I wasn't trying to imply that it was a good approach to apply to the US government. ;_;
- cma 2y ago
  And the federal workforce outside of the military is only like 4.5% of the federal budget
meowkit 2y ago
Its not really an interpretation- he has literally talked about this as his playbook dozens of times. One step in the playbook is reduce - “if you dont break things 10% of the time then you are not reducing enough” is almost verbatim what he has said, and done, for all of his companies. I strongly disagree with my fellow Americans that government systems should be immune to this process or that people will be harmed. This sensitivity to perceived harm is a problem in and of itself.
- 2y ago

ljm 2y ago

It's usually said in business that you should spend your first 100 days getting the lay of the land before you start making big decisions. It might even be more ideal to give it 12 months before you tear up the playbook and bring your own. Obviously, for a government staffed with experienced people, you'll be working with people who know how things work, and an incoming administration will have spent plenty of time outlining a plan of action well in advance of coming into office. Does that apply to a notorious shitposting edgelord like Musk who is storming around like a bull in a china shop and sees the US as his new plaything? I doubt it - I certainly doubt any level of thinking is involved.

skeeter2020 2y ago
This administration (at least) thinks they spent an entire term learning, and now ith a 4-year gap are "hitting the ground running". The people were promised "we will quicky change and fix everything"; this is "we will quickly change everything", declare mission accomplished and hope they get lucky or maybe the dropped words won't be noticed.

caminante 2y ago

Without more color, aren't you guilty of "tearing down their fence?" Seems like a forced meta critique.

fny 2y ago

And yesterday I learned they’re shielded from FOIA despite whatever transparency was promised.

crote 2y ago

> I hope they have a good think about what they're doing. They probably did, if you look at it from a perspective of deliberately ruining the government. It looks like they are trying to reduce the government to nothing more than the IRS. Everything else will either get permanently trashed (any kind of consumer protection), sold off for parts, or contracted out to a private company started by one of their buddies. Yeah, it might result in a very chaotic transition period, but these people don't care. They are rich enough that it's not going to personally affect them, and in the end they'll end up even richer. The entire goal right now is to do so much damage that it is going to take decades to restore - if it's even possible at all.

eszed 2y ago
They especially want to gut the IRS. Look at how understaffed their enforcement division has been, for years.

rsynnott 2y ago

I mean, it's not really a valid case of Chesterton's Fence if you're doing it _maliciously_. I don't _really_ buy the "they are merely terribly incompetent and demolishing a lot of Chesterton's fences", at this point.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

It's a variation on "never change a winning team". Which is valid. As long as the team is winning. Doing more of the same is not going to fix things if it stops winning. It's a problem with bureaucracies. They bloat. They grow. They never shrink. Byzantine bureaucracies refer to the notion that this got out of hand shortly before the collapse of what remained of the Roman empire at that point. Bureaucracies are also sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque to indicate how nonsensical, illogical, and absurdist bureaucracies can become. Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people. It's complicated, vast, and very change resistant. The task of doing something about that is so intimidating that no recent previous government has had the nerve to do anything significant about that. They all chickened out and instead just added their own layers of more bureaucracy to the mix. It's easier to add stuff to the pile than to take stuff away from it. So, after a few centuries of that, there's probably a lot of stuff there that barely makes sense to anyone. The department highlighted in the article strikes me like a good example of a product of such a bureaucracy. The article barely explains why this apparently very large, expensive, and richly staffed department exist, what it does, and why that is so important. It also fails to outline what kind of budget it has and what the intended purpose of that budget is. I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing. That chat bot that they highlight doesn't strike me as "key technology". Quite the opposite actually. The article raises more questions than it answers here. What was that thing supposed to do? Who was it for? Who backed/approved this? Why? How much did that cost? What else do people in that department do? All reasonable questions to ask.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
> Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people At < 3 million people this is substantially under its peak and at about its level in the 1960's, and a smaller fraction of the workforce than pretty much everywhere. Wages are 0.9 per cent of the federal budget.
ModernMech 2y ago
> I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing. Right, exactly. And neither can Musk, really. So at this point, the answer isn't to just go ahead and take a sledge hammer to it. The correct course would be to actually go through the Congress and ask those very reasonable questions you pose. But Musk doesn't even want to work with with the Congressional DOGE Committee he set up. That's highly concerning.

tmaly 2y ago

I wish there was a good solution to Chesterton's fence.