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We have to remember with the flood of all the news around DOGE - the point of all this is NOT to have an effective, efficient way to manage the federal workforc

We have to remember with the flood of all the news around DOGE - the point of all this is NOT to have an effective, efficient way to manage the federal workforce or even to have good government. The point is RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. Curtis Yarvin and his ilk are the inspiration for this, basically the point is to replace the government as it is now with a technocratic monarchy led by the whims of a single person who can lead like a CEO.

howmayiannoyyou 2y ago
About 3 million USGOV employees, 1.9% of the US workforce, but somehow you've concluded the entirety of that workforce is essential. No redundancies, no waste, no fraud, no obsolescence - just "mean businessmen" reducing "poor workers". Go spend some time working in Government, or reviewing GAO or CBO investigations and get a real education on the status quo.
- baggachipz 2y ago
  It'd be nice if this were a solution to the problem. Instead, they're randomly ruining the lives of tons of families, killing american businesses, and completely kneecapping the ones who are "lucky" enough to remain. "This restaurant has mediocre food and service, burn it to the ground with everybody locked inside!"
- aimazon 2y ago
  obviously some government employees are not providing value for money to the people because that’s just what happens in big organizations (public or private). The point being made by critics of DOGE is not “there’s no waste in the government” it’s that the DOGE goal is to gut government services, whether they’re wasteful or not is immaterial.
- genericresponse 2y ago
  I'm sorry, but that's not what OP said. OP didn't say anything about the essential-ness of the entire workforce. They solely spoke to the larger, well documented and endorsed by major SV players, plan to transform our government structure.
- MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
  There are all of those things. DOGE is not finding them. They aren't even trying to find them. There's a real problem (which is extremely minor, proportionally) that this regime is taking advantage of to take absolute control of the country.
  - dworkr 2y ago
    The debt is not a minor problem, which is why conservatives should be unhappy. The cuts so far are at best rounding error. We're cutting the cheap useful programs (USaid, Ed) and leaving the big issues with entitlements for future bipartisan efforts which everyone knows will never come. The opposite of the 80/20 rule seems to be guiding the process. And a lot of people on the right are free market liberals, including many key never trumpers, so the Milton Friedman fan club and CATO types are not going to point out the obvious math.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      > The cuts so far are at best rounding error The budget is going to be messy. You're going to get a Liz Truss budget, which is definitely going to make a lot of the public unhappy. > future bipartisan efforts I think one effect of all this is creating a group of angry Democrats who, in a mirror of the Tea Party, will start primarying any Democrat who uses the word "bipartisan" as anything but a swearword.
      - smegger001 2y ago
        yeah I predict that we are headed in four years for a hell of a pendulum swing and the republicans need to remember that any norm they violate, any law they break, all of the insane legal theories of a unbound executive they get passed by their pet supreme court justices will be used as precedent by their opposite to the fullest when that pendulum swing back to the left.
        dworkr 2y ago
        The only way to avoid that requires a lot of very angry people realizing that it's in their own interest to embrace their enemy. That literally never happens. So RIP to the way we were. If only more people valued institutions and heritage, rather than seeing America's value in dynamism singularly. Identity requires long term memory.
- gosub100 2y ago
  I think in addition to what they are doing, they should show a concrete example of say, a post office in some east cost bureaucratic wasteland. And go through everything from the paper cups in the coffee room to the logistics routes to the hiring practices and show how the waste creeps into every single nook and cranny. Then do a "rehab" and show the nominal and percentage increases while still moving the same number of parcels and junk mail.
  - fredophile 2y ago
    That doesn't sound terrible but honestly I don't think DOGE has the right staffing to do this. All the DOGE employees I've heard about are very young and come from programming backgrounds. Do they have any accountants? Anyone with experience in auditing or logistics? At best, any attempt to do what you suggested would end up like a bad reality show and I wouldn't expect long term improvement.
    - gosub100 2y ago
      It doesn't need to be DOGE staff. With presidential intervention they could cut through the red tape and completely expose them. Showing the waste on paper is one thing, but going through an entire PO will help relate the concept to more people. An exemplar of waste and how it can be fixed.
  - acdha 2y ago
    That’s definitely be much better than what they’re doing but it’s too low-level to make big savings. The things which cost large sums usually go back to high-level policies. In the case of the post office, that’s the congressional mandate to pre-fund employee pensions - they have to pay in your full estimated decades of pensions costs before you retire, whereas normal pension plans assume the company won’t disappear the day you retire – and the expectation that they provide service in rural locations. That’s a public benefit, vital for many people, but the post office can’t book that public benefit on their financial ledger. A more widespread one is also more familiar to most HN readers: governments need a ton of IT, like everyone else, but are prohibited from offering competitive salaries or hiring staff instead of engaging a few large contracting companies. That has the direct impact of doubling costs and increasing turnover, but even worse is the higher likelihood of failure caused by not having institutional knowledge and expertise: contracting only works when you can provide clear instructions and hold the vendor accountable, but that requires you to have staff capable of doing so. Some agencies have been able to recruit skilled people based on their mission, but those are many of the teams being gutted now and it’ll take many years of better governance to convince people to come back after seeing how their public-spirited predecessors were treated.
- fredophile 2y ago
  They didn't say the entire workforce is essential and there are no redundancies. They said the way DOGE is approaching this isn't designed to effectively identify and deal with actual waste. There are already multiple instances of DOGE having to backtrack because they fired or tried to fire employees who are essential.
  - throw_pm23 2y ago
    So why isn't the charitable interpretation that the system works well, there is even correction built into it, since they backtrack when necessary?
    - fredophile 2y ago
      Do you think there are no costs to getting these things wrong? If your boss fired you today and then called you up next week saying they'd made a mistake and offering you your old job back how charitable would you feel? When funding for cancer research gets cut, do you think the studies that lost their funding can all suddenly pick up where they left off if funding comes back at some point in the future? When jobs ensuring safety are cut, even if they're brought back, are you ok with the additional risk during the time period they're off the job?
AlgorithmicTime 2y ago
[dead]
ujkhsjkdhf234 2y ago
This is important. This is all distraction and flooding the zone. Keep focused on what is important. If you voted for Trump, did you vote for this? Are you seeing the results you wanted? Are prices down and wages up? Are you ok with Trump wanting to increase debt by several trillion? Isn't that the opposite of what they are saying they are doing?
- ryandrake 2y ago
  MAGA voters so far seem to be pretty satisfied with the administration's actions. They voted the way they did, knowing "griefing government employees" was on the agenda, and Musk is definitely delivering on that promise. MAGA voters don't care about the government making their own lives better. It's about making their opponents' lives worse.
  - MisterTea 2y ago
    > MAGA voters don't care about the government making their own lives better. It's about making their opponents' lives worse. I know a lot of people who flipped this election and voted for Trump NOT for his politics, but to stick it to the Dems. A scant few are regretful and the rest appear indifferent.
    - ujkhsjkdhf234 2y ago
      I think they are uninformed. Media is not reporting this correctly and won't call the coup a coup.
  - crimsoneer 2y ago
    Hard agree. "Owning the libs" is pretty much the only actual item on the MAGA manifesto.
  - QuantumGood 2y ago
    Anything that either "the libs" bring up, or is attributed to them, becomes fodder for polarization propaganda. So there is no stable statement of MAGA being "satisfied" with something since the goalposts are always moved by propaganda. For example, "Defeat Project 2025" projects were derided as libs acting dumb, e.g. (1) Trump had attempted to sidestep association with it, (2) libs were demonstrating more of their "Trump Derangement Syndrome", (3) some parts of p2025 had been highlighted and praised in MAGA media. So a positive association with p2025 by MAGA was not due to thoughtful committment to some principle or desire. They're flooded with misinformation, and don't believe they should be concerned about being misinformed, partly because anything negative about MAGA is projected as "the bad thing the libs do", e.g. be misinformed is the other guy's problem, not mine.
yubblegum 2y ago
> Curtis Yarvin and his ilk are the inspiration for this No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Year_Plan#Role_of_G%C3%B6ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Year_Plan#Role_of_G%C3%B6... quote: Hitler extended to Göring the power to make law simply by publishing decrees, which enabled him to create other plenipotentiaries in overall charge of various industries. Göring constantly expanded the scope of the plan until he became the de facto master of the German economy, and the Office of the Four Year Plan became, along with his control of the Luftwaffe as an independent armed service, the power base that he had lacked since the weakening of the other government positions that he held. Göring held no significant position in the Nazi Party, and his influence before he took on the Four Year Plan had been based primarily on his public popularity as a war hero and his easy access to Hitler. The Reichswerke, an industrial conglomerate aimed at hastening growth in ore mining and steel output of Nazi Germany, a major piece of the Four Year Plan, was established and controlled by Göring. Although the appointment of Göring as head of the plan had short-term benefits to Hitler, in the long term it was a disaster, as Göring knew next to nothing about economics, a factor that Hitler cited as one of the reasons for the choice.[12] p.s. r/publishing decrees/tweeting ..
- yubblegum 2y ago
  I must be an oracle or something : https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5163375-musk-trump-cabinet-meeting/ https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5163375-musk-tru... Minister without portfolio. (He already has his luftwaffe)
  - drawkward 2y ago
    Hopefully, Musk being a disaster for Trump is similarly oracular.
    - yubblegum 2y ago
      Certainly hope not. The "disaster" in that story didn't end well for the nation involved and I am an American and I care for the wellbeing of my nation.

howmayiannoyyou 2y ago

About 3 million USGOV employees, 1.9% of the US workforce, but somehow you've concluded the entirety of that workforce is essential. No redundancies, no waste, no fraud, no obsolescence - just "mean businessmen" reducing "poor workers". Go spend some time working in Government, or reviewing GAO or CBO investigations and get a real education on the status quo.

baggachipz 2y ago
It'd be nice if this were a solution to the problem. Instead, they're randomly ruining the lives of tons of families, killing american businesses, and completely kneecapping the ones who are "lucky" enough to remain. "This restaurant has mediocre food and service, burn it to the ground with everybody locked inside!"
aimazon 2y ago
obviously some government employees are not providing value for money to the people because that’s just what happens in big organizations (public or private). The point being made by critics of DOGE is not “there’s no waste in the government” it’s that the DOGE goal is to gut government services, whether they’re wasteful or not is immaterial.
genericresponse 2y ago
I'm sorry, but that's not what OP said. OP didn't say anything about the essential-ness of the entire workforce. They solely spoke to the larger, well documented and endorsed by major SV players, plan to transform our government structure.
MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
There are all of those things. DOGE is not finding them. They aren't even trying to find them. There's a real problem (which is extremely minor, proportionally) that this regime is taking advantage of to take absolute control of the country.
- dworkr 2y ago
  The debt is not a minor problem, which is why conservatives should be unhappy. The cuts so far are at best rounding error. We're cutting the cheap useful programs (USaid, Ed) and leaving the big issues with entitlements for future bipartisan efforts which everyone knows will never come. The opposite of the 80/20 rule seems to be guiding the process. And a lot of people on the right are free market liberals, including many key never trumpers, so the Milton Friedman fan club and CATO types are not going to point out the obvious math.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > The cuts so far are at best rounding error The budget is going to be messy. You're going to get a Liz Truss budget, which is definitely going to make a lot of the public unhappy. > future bipartisan efforts I think one effect of all this is creating a group of angry Democrats who, in a mirror of the Tea Party, will start primarying any Democrat who uses the word "bipartisan" as anything but a swearword.
    - smegger001 2y ago
      yeah I predict that we are headed in four years for a hell of a pendulum swing and the republicans need to remember that any norm they violate, any law they break, all of the insane legal theories of a unbound executive they get passed by their pet supreme court justices will be used as precedent by their opposite to the fullest when that pendulum swing back to the left.
      - dworkr 2y ago
        The only way to avoid that requires a lot of very angry people realizing that it's in their own interest to embrace their enemy. That literally never happens. So RIP to the way we were. If only more people valued institutions and heritage, rather than seeing America's value in dynamism singularly. Identity requires long term memory.
gosub100 2y ago
I think in addition to what they are doing, they should show a concrete example of say, a post office in some east cost bureaucratic wasteland. And go through everything from the paper cups in the coffee room to the logistics routes to the hiring practices and show how the waste creeps into every single nook and cranny. Then do a "rehab" and show the nominal and percentage increases while still moving the same number of parcels and junk mail.
- fredophile 2y ago
  That doesn't sound terrible but honestly I don't think DOGE has the right staffing to do this. All the DOGE employees I've heard about are very young and come from programming backgrounds. Do they have any accountants? Anyone with experience in auditing or logistics? At best, any attempt to do what you suggested would end up like a bad reality show and I wouldn't expect long term improvement.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    It doesn't need to be DOGE staff. With presidential intervention they could cut through the red tape and completely expose them. Showing the waste on paper is one thing, but going through an entire PO will help relate the concept to more people. An exemplar of waste and how it can be fixed.
- acdha 2y ago
  That’s definitely be much better than what they’re doing but it’s too low-level to make big savings. The things which cost large sums usually go back to high-level policies. In the case of the post office, that’s the congressional mandate to pre-fund employee pensions - they have to pay in your full estimated decades of pensions costs before you retire, whereas normal pension plans assume the company won’t disappear the day you retire – and the expectation that they provide service in rural locations. That’s a public benefit, vital for many people, but the post office can’t book that public benefit on their financial ledger. A more widespread one is also more familiar to most HN readers: governments need a ton of IT, like everyone else, but are prohibited from offering competitive salaries or hiring staff instead of engaging a few large contracting companies. That has the direct impact of doubling costs and increasing turnover, but even worse is the higher likelihood of failure caused by not having institutional knowledge and expertise: contracting only works when you can provide clear instructions and hold the vendor accountable, but that requires you to have staff capable of doing so. Some agencies have been able to recruit skilled people based on their mission, but those are many of the teams being gutted now and it’ll take many years of better governance to convince people to come back after seeing how their public-spirited predecessors were treated.
fredophile 2y ago
They didn't say the entire workforce is essential and there are no redundancies. They said the way DOGE is approaching this isn't designed to effectively identify and deal with actual waste. There are already multiple instances of DOGE having to backtrack because they fired or tried to fire employees who are essential.
- throw_pm23 2y ago
  So why isn't the charitable interpretation that the system works well, there is even correction built into it, since they backtrack when necessary?
  - fredophile 2y ago
    Do you think there are no costs to getting these things wrong? If your boss fired you today and then called you up next week saying they'd made a mistake and offering you your old job back how charitable would you feel? When funding for cancer research gets cut, do you think the studies that lost their funding can all suddenly pick up where they left off if funding comes back at some point in the future? When jobs ensuring safety are cut, even if they're brought back, are you ok with the additional risk during the time period they're off the job?

AlgorithmicTime 2y ago

[dead]

ujkhsjkdhf234 2y ago

This is important. This is all distraction and flooding the zone. Keep focused on what is important. If you voted for Trump, did you vote for this? Are you seeing the results you wanted? Are prices down and wages up? Are you ok with Trump wanting to increase debt by several trillion? Isn't that the opposite of what they are saying they are doing?

ryandrake 2y ago
MAGA voters so far seem to be pretty satisfied with the administration's actions. They voted the way they did, knowing "griefing government employees" was on the agenda, and Musk is definitely delivering on that promise. MAGA voters don't care about the government making their own lives better. It's about making their opponents' lives worse.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > MAGA voters don't care about the government making their own lives better. It's about making their opponents' lives worse. I know a lot of people who flipped this election and voted for Trump NOT for his politics, but to stick it to the Dems. A scant few are regretful and the rest appear indifferent.
  - ujkhsjkdhf234 2y ago
    I think they are uninformed. Media is not reporting this correctly and won't call the coup a coup.
- crimsoneer 2y ago
  Hard agree. "Owning the libs" is pretty much the only actual item on the MAGA manifesto.
- QuantumGood 2y ago
  Anything that either "the libs" bring up, or is attributed to them, becomes fodder for polarization propaganda. So there is no stable statement of MAGA being "satisfied" with something since the goalposts are always moved by propaganda. For example, "Defeat Project 2025" projects were derided as libs acting dumb, e.g. (1) Trump had attempted to sidestep association with it, (2) libs were demonstrating more of their "Trump Derangement Syndrome", (3) some parts of p2025 had been highlighted and praised in MAGA media. So a positive association with p2025 by MAGA was not due to thoughtful committment to some principle or desire. They're flooded with misinformation, and don't believe they should be concerned about being misinformed, partly because anything negative about MAGA is projected as "the bad thing the libs do", e.g. be misinformed is the other guy's problem, not mine.

yubblegum 2y ago

> Curtis Yarvin and his ilk are the inspiration for this No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Year_Plan#Role_of_G%C3%B6ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Year_Plan#Role_of_G%C3%B6... quote: Hitler extended to Göring the power to make law simply by publishing decrees, which enabled him to create other plenipotentiaries in overall charge of various industries. Göring constantly expanded the scope of the plan until he became the de facto master of the German economy, and the Office of the Four Year Plan became, along with his control of the Luftwaffe as an independent armed service, the power base that he had lacked since the weakening of the other government positions that he held. Göring held no significant position in the Nazi Party, and his influence before he took on the Four Year Plan had been based primarily on his public popularity as a war hero and his easy access to Hitler. The Reichswerke, an industrial conglomerate aimed at hastening growth in ore mining and steel output of Nazi Germany, a major piece of the Four Year Plan, was established and controlled by Göring. Although the appointment of Göring as head of the plan had short-term benefits to Hitler, in the long term it was a disaster, as Göring knew next to nothing about economics, a factor that Hitler cited as one of the reasons for the choice.[12] p.s. r/publishing decrees/tweeting ..

yubblegum 2y ago
I must be an oracle or something : https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5163375-musk-trump-cabinet-meeting/ https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5163375-musk-tru... Minister without portfolio. (He already has his luftwaffe)
- drawkward 2y ago
  Hopefully, Musk being a disaster for Trump is similarly oracular.
  - yubblegum 2y ago
    Certainly hope not. The "disaster" in that story didn't end well for the nation involved and I am an American and I care for the wellbeing of my nation.