5 ms·

Doge Is Putting Major Government Efficiency Projects at Risk

110 points by doener 2y ago

hayst4ck 2y ago
The conservative thesis is that DOGE is going through and eliminating wasteful spending, which is simple and, if you trust them, a good goal. The liberal thesis is that DOGE is like an army going through government institutions, replacing the old guard with new loyalists, and then removing safety nets, which results in people having to sell their assets (like housing, farms, or small businesses) when disaster (not being able to pay for fertilizer, not being able to pay for healthcare, suppliers costs going up 25%, etc.) hits them. It certainly feels like GOP policy is to cause disaster, and that makes sense if you understand that it costs money to deal with a disaster, people sell assets to pay for disaster response, and then rich people are able to buy those assets. Those assets are then rented back to the sellers, creating a persistent system of wealth transfer from the poor to the rich, which is very consistent with tax cuts for the rich.
- blitzar 2y ago
  The liberal thesis is that DOGE defines anything they don't like as waste / fraud / abuse. Claiming something is "fraud" removes opposition to cancelling it. This isn't 5d chess, it is 1d chess.
  - MarcelOlsz 2y ago
    It's not even 1d chess. It's like playing War with a deck of cards.
  - xnx 2y ago
    Fraud is also a crime that can be prosecuted. The lack of prosecution exposes they have not found any fraud, and probably aren't even looking.
    - localghost3000 2y ago
      The president was convicted of fraud and that doesn’t seem to matter. Let’s maybe stop acting like the rule of law is getting applied evenly in these times.
    - ineedaj0b 2y ago
      the 'fraud' will come out around midterms when it's politically advantageous to have publicity.
    - monkmartinez 2y ago
      IANAL. I would think fraud needs investigation much deeper than; "This $200 million is being spent on <insert program> that we don't need at the moment." First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off. If there is potential for fraud, you mark the case for further evaluation and investigation. The most important first step is always to stop the bleeding and in this case, bleeding money. You can come back to investigate at a later time. Prosecuting fraud before the bleeding has stopped is a waste of time imo.
      - alabastervlog 2y ago
        > First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off. If you're attempting to illegally seize control of the government's spending from Congress, sure, you do that.
      - hypeatei 2y ago
        > First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off The executive doesn't appropriate funds, Congress does. So that's completely wrong. > think fraud needs investigation much deeper than... Exactly but DOGE isn't doing that.
      - xnx 2y ago
        > "This $200 million is being spent on <insert program> that we don't need at the moment." That's "waste" (in their opinion), but they keep saying "waste, fraud, and abuse".
  - kernal 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - tombert 2y ago
      I think part of the issue is how impossible it is to know which parts of the cuts that DOGE has are honest. The easy example is when they said we're spending millions of dollars for "condoms for Gaza", only for it to be the wrong Gaza, and the Gaza that that spending was referring to was one of the largest HIV hotspots in the world, and it wasn't millions of dollars. It's tough to know how much of that is idiocy vs outright dishonesty.
    - kemayo 2y ago
      The feed lacks enough context for me to tell what I think about basically everything on it. If I uncritically accept that things on it are exactly what they're presenting them as being, sure, there's stuff that looks sketchy. But Musk is also the guy who has been telling me that Teslas will have "full self driving" within a year or two for the last decade, so... Plus, should you trust that raw feed? There's already news stories about them going through and removing stuff from their big list of cuts that they messed up: https://archive.is/fCO84 https://archive.is/fCO84
    - jcranmer 2y ago
      I haven't bothered to read the feed, but I'm going to go with "all of them", because what I personally object to is the process, so even trying to frame it in the veins of "do you support spending on X" is the wrong question to ask in the first place. There's already a lot of evidence for these cuts happening in large part by someone doing the equivalent on Ctrl-F on a database for terms and zeroing them out, which is not an effective process if you're trying to reduce "waste," no matter what your definition of "waste" is.
      - kernal 2y ago
        [flagged]
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    The right's take on this also seems premised on the idea that the bureaucracy has just grown and grown (it's been fairly steady over time, and leans small when compared to our international peers, so...) and that nobody's worked on efficiency or tracking work that whole time, when in fact there's been a shitload of that and, while you can find waste or even, rarely, fraud, it is not rampant, unless you define waste or fraud as "doing things I don't want them to, even though it's in the budget". In fact, on the fraud front, a lot of government inefficiency has been deliberately introduced—to fight fraud or corruption. So even if you find something inefficient, you better be careful or you'll be undoing an anti-fraud or anti-corruption measure. You see stuff like Elon asking for those dumb-ass "five things" emails when a large proportion of government workers already have their productivity tracked multiple ways, many of them quite objective and hard to fake, because people who are not complete morons have already worked on these problems. This is government based on dumb right-wing misconceptions about how government works. Or, if the people doing it aren't true believers, at least playing to those incorrect notions among voters.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      DOGE on government: tech-style "This would be easy to fix if you just..."
    - ModernMech 2y ago
      It tracks with their opinion of elections. They're sure there's fraud everywhere, but they can't point anything substantial whatsoever. Nevertheless, we have to spend a ton of money to combat it, and wouldn't you know, all the things the propose are designed to do nothing more can fix "problems" that don't exist.
- xnx 2y ago
  Might be less complicated than that. DOGE are vandals destroying the government because they hate the government.
  - Applejinx 2y ago
    Or indeed, they are soldiers and they're destroying the government because they're working for/with people who'd be unable to destroy it with direct military action. In that light, the absence of the 'profit' stage is sort of the point. It's mysterious if you have to come up with a narrative where somebody benefits from the destruction. If it's just sabotage, it serves as its own purpose and nobody around here needs to benefit or indeed survive it.
    - kweingar 2y ago
      For some of the cuts there could be a profit angle. You can fire government employees and replace their functions with favored contractors.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Russell Vought, who was installed as head of OMB, should face treason charges after this is all over. And I'm not one who says such things lightly. Imho, a willful, intentional impairment of US government functioning as a result of documented philosophical beliefs and statements of intent should be prosecutable. It's apparent by this point that OMB and DOGE have no intention of making government better and are instead simply shrinking it by any means necessary. ... which is why true believers (in anything) should never be allowed to hold the reigns of power.
      - xnx 2y ago
        Doubt might be the foundation of morals. A zealot can convince themselves anything is acceptable in reference to their goal.
- moshun 2y ago
  I’m not sure if what you’re proposing as a libel thesis actually is. Keep in mind the Heritage Foundation wrote the literal playbook (Project 2025) that the Trump admin is clearly following. In P2025 they clearly call out the intent to dismantle the U.S. government, remove safeguards and checks against presidential power and replace career public servants with Trump loyalists by the 10s of thousands. That’s not some liberal talking point. That’s straight from conservatives. Feel free to see how far along they are in implementing P2025 here: https://www.project2025.observer/ https://www.project2025.observer/
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - hayst4ck 2y ago
    Project 2025 architect and current head of the office of management and budget said, on video: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
    - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
      Even Vought & 2025 didn't expect such a blunt chainsaw approach, just firing any and everyone who technically could be fired without cause. But man they are still seemingly getting so much of the teardown of this nation that they wanted. There's still a huge amount of America alseep or worshipping those bringing the end of America, but my hope is still that eventually the endless lies and obfuscation wear thing. That we can conclusively see who the villains are. That was a huge part of Project 2025, and I think it was always a fantasy, that America abandoned our allies and starting trade wars and joining with the Russians isn't going to make us think the past was the villains here (you awful monsters). > Russ Vought Got His Trauma — But Not the Villains He Imagined https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/02/28/russ-vought-got-his-trauma-but-not-the-villains-he-imagined/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/02/28/russ-vought-got-his-tr...
- ineedaj0b 2y ago
  all those perspectives have truth to them but you're missing a third: they are preparing for automation. you can drastically reduce workforce sizes at all companies. AI hasn't done this yet because there's no hole to fill; people fill the hole happily. but.. it's coming and we all know how behind gov (and many businesses) navigate compared to our best tech companies. this reduction in gov size will happen first, then maybe 2026 or whenever you'll hear stories of legislation to increase pay for gov workers and congress to attract better talent.
  - rscho 2y ago
    Wouldn't automation and layoffs be synchronized, in such a plan ? Also, how do we plan automating park rangers ?
    - ineedaj0b 2y ago
      pragmatically, costs. to do it right you need to promise the data isn't leaving, so you'd need to deploy your own stack (costly but not too much). you're explicitly replacing 'people' which left or right probably don't have much support for and people already are incensed when they hear about Musk/Trump, now bring in Machines taking Jobs. it could happen in the next 4 years, i wouldn't write it off. but all cabinet members need to bring themselves up to speed. trump appears to be moving quickly but it's because he spent 2+ years thinking up everything he's doing. i doubt cabinet picks spent similar time - they probably weren't even sure he'd pick them.
  - nyrikki 2y ago
    They fired the people helping with automation, and the people with domain knowledge to enable automation. We know the hack and slash method leads to more corruption and doesn't produce savings. The resources like 18f would have been critical for what you are describing above. 'Agentic AI' is still a pipe dream, context is still required for application of what we know it can do anyway. Nothing shows any inkling that DOGE has the appropriate SME's in place. If they do they better start communicating intent and proving themselves. Right now it seems that they are rank amateurs who are nothing more than an impediment to efficient, effective government.
- duke_sam 2y ago
  And will anyone talented enough to put all the pieces back together want to work for the federal government after all this? Feels like a good way of ensuring the only path forward is to pay large sums to private enterprise to fill the gaps.
  - jfim 2y ago
    That's assuming that the expectation is that the government keeps the same services afterwards. It seems the strategy is closer to making services dysfunctional to the point where they're unsalvageable, then cut funding for them because they don't work.
- qwertox 2y ago
  Very telling what he said on The Joe Rogan Experience, that he has found things that are so jaw dropping that he can't point them out because it would get him killed. But then he has some young nerds with no history dealing with that "sensitive" information putting them in a place where they can then extort those people, or sell that information to others. That it would then go against the cause, because it would stop his important work, he said. So I wonder how he's treating Republicans with dirt on their hands, if the then gives them a pass, "for the cause". Because the real thing he should be doing would then to anonymously blow the whistle on them in such a way that it can't be traced back to him. I'm not sure if he'd do that, even if it's what "the people" he's working for, that is, the American taxpayers, deserve. And he says he's doing it all for them.
- xracy 2y ago
  OR, it's really easy to prove the government doesn't do anything valuable when you run the government. My concern is that they don't believe this across all pieces of the government, and they do believe it in ways that only impact everyone else negatively.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
- kernal 2y ago
  [flagged]
egypturnash 2y ago
Department of Graft for Elon working exactly as designed.
qwertox 2y ago
I wonder if some of these humanitarian projects are "wasting the money" on helping three letter agencies manage and finance foreign activities. Then there comes some tech billionaire with a chainsaw and thinks it's funny how he stopped the funding and was cheering about it without noticing what he just did.
- Fomite 2y ago
  To paraphrase someone else, one of the purposes of those projects was to put the "Necessary" in "The United States is a necessary evil."
- xnx 2y ago
  I believe it was a vaccination drive and DNA sequencing that located Bin Laden in abbottabad.
skellington 2y ago
[flagged]
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  I offer up that we collect unpaid taxes ($250B). Then we increase the highest tax bracket to 90%. Then we get a progressive capital gains tax. That should pay out trillions.
  - Applejinx 2y ago
    You wouldn't need to go nearly that hard. 50%, or 25%, would still be a giant budget-balancer.
    - skellington 2y ago
      It always amazes me that we are on this super hardcore capitalist site 'hacker news' and yet so few people here know how income works at the highest levels. Super high earners don't earn W2 income. It's mostly long term cap gains or gains in tax advantaged accounts. A 90% tax would just encourage them to never sell their stock and to borrow against it instead.
      - sunshowers 2y ago
        I agree, ultra-rich capital gains taxation should shift towards being mark-to-market. The step-up basis for irrevocable trusts, and all the other games that make sense for $100MM+ net worth people, need to be eliminated.
        skellington 2y ago
        This is incredibly dumb. What happens when the stock market is up one year and down the next? What happens when you force them all to sell and there is not enough liquidity to support current prices so the act of selling hammers the value? You are just saying "let's slowing take equity away from founders" so we can throw it away into wasteful gov. spending.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
doener 2y ago
This will be flagged any minute.
kweingar 2y ago
It is frustrating that the conversation around DOGE becomes "well we can all at least agree that efficiency is needed, right?" The government is openly lying about nearly every aspect of its efficiency efforts, and this is not debatable. The only debate is whether they are lying to the courts or to the American public. They tell the public that Elon Musk, the leader of DOGE, is conducting mass firings, canceling contracts and programs, canceling building leases, etc. Then they go to court and say that Elon Musk is not in charge of DOGE (and not even a part of DOGE at all), that DOGE and OPM do not make any directives about firings in other agencies, that federal agencies are independently determining which contracts to cancel, etc. Republican Senators have been talking about needing better communication with Musk as he cuts programs, but the government tells federal judges that it's outrageous to suggest that Musk is cutting programs. Anyone is free to believe that this is good or acceptable, but then they should say that. Say that reducing the deficit is a valid rationale for lying to the courts, lying to the public, obscuring the chain of command, violating duly enacted laws, and violating lawful court orders. It's dishonest to look at criticism and say "what, do people have a problem with efficiency?"

110 points by doener 2y ago

The conservative thesis is that DOGE is going through and eliminating wasteful spending, which is simple and, if you trust them, a good goal. The liberal thesis is that DOGE is like an army going through government institutions, replacing the old guard with new loyalists, and then removing safety nets, which results in people having to sell their assets (like housing, farms, or small businesses) when disaster (not being able to pay for fertilizer, not being able to pay for healthcare, suppliers costs going up 25%, etc.) hits them. It certainly feels like GOP policy is to cause disaster, and that makes sense if you understand that it costs money to deal with a disaster, people sell assets to pay for disaster response, and then rich people are able to buy those assets. Those assets are then rented back to the sellers, creating a persistent system of wealth transfer from the poor to the rich, which is very consistent with tax cuts for the rich.

blitzar 2y ago
The liberal thesis is that DOGE defines anything they don't like as waste / fraud / abuse. Claiming something is "fraud" removes opposition to cancelling it. This isn't 5d chess, it is 1d chess.
- MarcelOlsz 2y ago
  It's not even 1d chess. It's like playing War with a deck of cards.
- xnx 2y ago
  Fraud is also a crime that can be prosecuted. The lack of prosecution exposes they have not found any fraud, and probably aren't even looking.
  - localghost3000 2y ago
    The president was convicted of fraud and that doesn’t seem to matter. Let’s maybe stop acting like the rule of law is getting applied evenly in these times.
  - ineedaj0b 2y ago
    the 'fraud' will come out around midterms when it's politically advantageous to have publicity.
  - monkmartinez 2y ago
    IANAL. I would think fraud needs investigation much deeper than; "This $200 million is being spent on <insert program> that we don't need at the moment." First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off. If there is potential for fraud, you mark the case for further evaluation and investigation. The most important first step is always to stop the bleeding and in this case, bleeding money. You can come back to investigate at a later time. Prosecuting fraud before the bleeding has stopped is a waste of time imo.
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      > First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off. If you're attempting to illegally seize control of the government's spending from Congress, sure, you do that.
    - hypeatei 2y ago
      > First you find where the money is being spent and if it doesn't match the goals of the administration, you turn it off The executive doesn't appropriate funds, Congress does. So that's completely wrong. > think fraud needs investigation much deeper than... Exactly but DOGE isn't doing that.
    - xnx 2y ago
      > "This $200 million is being spent on <insert program> that we don't need at the moment." That's "waste" (in their opinion), but they keep saying "waste, fraud, and abuse".
- kernal 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - tombert 2y ago
    I think part of the issue is how impossible it is to know which parts of the cuts that DOGE has are honest. The easy example is when they said we're spending millions of dollars for "condoms for Gaza", only for it to be the wrong Gaza, and the Gaza that that spending was referring to was one of the largest HIV hotspots in the world, and it wasn't millions of dollars. It's tough to know how much of that is idiocy vs outright dishonesty.
  - kemayo 2y ago
    The feed lacks enough context for me to tell what I think about basically everything on it. If I uncritically accept that things on it are exactly what they're presenting them as being, sure, there's stuff that looks sketchy. But Musk is also the guy who has been telling me that Teslas will have "full self driving" within a year or two for the last decade, so... Plus, should you trust that raw feed? There's already news stories about them going through and removing stuff from their big list of cuts that they messed up: https://archive.is/fCO84 https://archive.is/fCO84
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    I haven't bothered to read the feed, but I'm going to go with "all of them", because what I personally object to is the process, so even trying to frame it in the veins of "do you support spending on X" is the wrong question to ask in the first place. There's already a lot of evidence for these cuts happening in large part by someone doing the equivalent on Ctrl-F on a database for terms and zeroing them out, which is not an effective process if you're trying to reduce "waste," no matter what your definition of "waste" is.
    - kernal 2y ago
      [flagged]
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  The right's take on this also seems premised on the idea that the bureaucracy has just grown and grown (it's been fairly steady over time, and leans small when compared to our international peers, so...) and that nobody's worked on efficiency or tracking work that whole time, when in fact there's been a shitload of that and, while you can find waste or even, rarely, fraud, it is not rampant, unless you define waste or fraud as "doing things I don't want them to, even though it's in the budget". In fact, on the fraud front, a lot of government inefficiency has been deliberately introduced—to fight fraud or corruption. So even if you find something inefficient, you better be careful or you'll be undoing an anti-fraud or anti-corruption measure. You see stuff like Elon asking for those dumb-ass "five things" emails when a large proportion of government workers already have their productivity tracked multiple ways, many of them quite objective and hard to fake, because people who are not complete morons have already worked on these problems. This is government based on dumb right-wing misconceptions about how government works. Or, if the people doing it aren't true believers, at least playing to those incorrect notions among voters.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    DOGE on government: tech-style "This would be easy to fix if you just..."
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    It tracks with their opinion of elections. They're sure there's fraud everywhere, but they can't point anything substantial whatsoever. Nevertheless, we have to spend a ton of money to combat it, and wouldn't you know, all the things the propose are designed to do nothing more can fix "problems" that don't exist.
xnx 2y ago
Might be less complicated than that. DOGE are vandals destroying the government because they hate the government.
- Applejinx 2y ago
  Or indeed, they are soldiers and they're destroying the government because they're working for/with people who'd be unable to destroy it with direct military action. In that light, the absence of the 'profit' stage is sort of the point. It's mysterious if you have to come up with a narrative where somebody benefits from the destruction. If it's just sabotage, it serves as its own purpose and nobody around here needs to benefit or indeed survive it.
  - kweingar 2y ago
    For some of the cuts there could be a profit angle. You can fire government employees and replace their functions with favored contractors.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Russell Vought, who was installed as head of OMB, should face treason charges after this is all over. And I'm not one who says such things lightly. Imho, a willful, intentional impairment of US government functioning as a result of documented philosophical beliefs and statements of intent should be prosecutable. It's apparent by this point that OMB and DOGE have no intention of making government better and are instead simply shrinking it by any means necessary. ... which is why true believers (in anything) should never be allowed to hold the reigns of power.
    - xnx 2y ago
      Doubt might be the foundation of morals. A zealot can convince themselves anything is acceptable in reference to their goal.
moshun 2y ago
I’m not sure if what you’re proposing as a libel thesis actually is. Keep in mind the Heritage Foundation wrote the literal playbook (Project 2025) that the Trump admin is clearly following. In P2025 they clearly call out the intent to dismantle the U.S. government, remove safeguards and checks against presidential power and replace career public servants with Trump loyalists by the 10s of thousands. That’s not some liberal talking point. That’s straight from conservatives. Feel free to see how far along they are in implementing P2025 here: https://www.project2025.observer/ https://www.project2025.observer/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hayst4ck 2y ago
  Project 2025 architect and current head of the office of management and budget said, on video: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    Even Vought & 2025 didn't expect such a blunt chainsaw approach, just firing any and everyone who technically could be fired without cause. But man they are still seemingly getting so much of the teardown of this nation that they wanted. There's still a huge amount of America alseep or worshipping those bringing the end of America, but my hope is still that eventually the endless lies and obfuscation wear thing. That we can conclusively see who the villains are. That was a huge part of Project 2025, and I think it was always a fantasy, that America abandoned our allies and starting trade wars and joining with the Russians isn't going to make us think the past was the villains here (you awful monsters). > Russ Vought Got His Trauma — But Not the Villains He Imagined https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/02/28/russ-vought-got-his-trauma-but-not-the-villains-he-imagined/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/02/28/russ-vought-got-his-tr...
ineedaj0b 2y ago
all those perspectives have truth to them but you're missing a third: they are preparing for automation. you can drastically reduce workforce sizes at all companies. AI hasn't done this yet because there's no hole to fill; people fill the hole happily. but.. it's coming and we all know how behind gov (and many businesses) navigate compared to our best tech companies. this reduction in gov size will happen first, then maybe 2026 or whenever you'll hear stories of legislation to increase pay for gov workers and congress to attract better talent.
- rscho 2y ago
  Wouldn't automation and layoffs be synchronized, in such a plan ? Also, how do we plan automating park rangers ?
  - ineedaj0b 2y ago
    pragmatically, costs. to do it right you need to promise the data isn't leaving, so you'd need to deploy your own stack (costly but not too much). you're explicitly replacing 'people' which left or right probably don't have much support for and people already are incensed when they hear about Musk/Trump, now bring in Machines taking Jobs. it could happen in the next 4 years, i wouldn't write it off. but all cabinet members need to bring themselves up to speed. trump appears to be moving quickly but it's because he spent 2+ years thinking up everything he's doing. i doubt cabinet picks spent similar time - they probably weren't even sure he'd pick them.
- nyrikki 2y ago
  They fired the people helping with automation, and the people with domain knowledge to enable automation. We know the hack and slash method leads to more corruption and doesn't produce savings. The resources like 18f would have been critical for what you are describing above. 'Agentic AI' is still a pipe dream, context is still required for application of what we know it can do anyway. Nothing shows any inkling that DOGE has the appropriate SME's in place. If they do they better start communicating intent and proving themselves. Right now it seems that they are rank amateurs who are nothing more than an impediment to efficient, effective government.
duke_sam 2y ago
And will anyone talented enough to put all the pieces back together want to work for the federal government after all this? Feels like a good way of ensuring the only path forward is to pay large sums to private enterprise to fill the gaps.
- jfim 2y ago
  That's assuming that the expectation is that the government keeps the same services afterwards. It seems the strategy is closer to making services dysfunctional to the point where they're unsalvageable, then cut funding for them because they don't work.
qwertox 2y ago
Very telling what he said on The Joe Rogan Experience, that he has found things that are so jaw dropping that he can't point them out because it would get him killed. But then he has some young nerds with no history dealing with that "sensitive" information putting them in a place where they can then extort those people, or sell that information to others. That it would then go against the cause, because it would stop his important work, he said. So I wonder how he's treating Republicans with dirt on their hands, if the then gives them a pass, "for the cause". Because the real thing he should be doing would then to anonymously blow the whistle on them in such a way that it can't be traced back to him. I'm not sure if he'd do that, even if it's what "the people" he's working for, that is, the American taxpayers, deserve. And he says he's doing it all for them.
xracy 2y ago
OR, it's really easy to prove the government doesn't do anything valuable when you run the government. My concern is that they don't believe this across all pieces of the government, and they do believe it in ways that only impact everyone else negatively.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kernal 2y ago
[flagged]

egypturnash 2y ago

Department of Graft for Elon working exactly as designed.

qwertox 2y ago

I wonder if some of these humanitarian projects are "wasting the money" on helping three letter agencies manage and finance foreign activities. Then there comes some tech billionaire with a chainsaw and thinks it's funny how he stopped the funding and was cheering about it without noticing what he just did.

Fomite 2y ago
To paraphrase someone else, one of the purposes of those projects was to put the "Necessary" in "The United States is a necessary evil."
xnx 2y ago
I believe it was a vaccination drive and DNA sequencing that located Bin Laden in abbottabad.

skellington 2y ago

[flagged]

teaearlgraycold 2y ago
I offer up that we collect unpaid taxes ($250B). Then we increase the highest tax bracket to 90%. Then we get a progressive capital gains tax. That should pay out trillions.
- Applejinx 2y ago
  You wouldn't need to go nearly that hard. 50%, or 25%, would still be a giant budget-balancer.
  - skellington 2y ago
    It always amazes me that we are on this super hardcore capitalist site 'hacker news' and yet so few people here know how income works at the highest levels. Super high earners don't earn W2 income. It's mostly long term cap gains or gains in tax advantaged accounts. A 90% tax would just encourage them to never sell their stock and to borrow against it instead.
    - sunshowers 2y ago
      I agree, ultra-rich capital gains taxation should shift towards being mark-to-market. The step-up basis for irrevocable trusts, and all the other games that make sense for $100MM+ net worth people, need to be eliminated.
      - skellington 2y ago
        This is incredibly dumb. What happens when the stock market is up one year and down the next? What happens when you force them all to sell and there is not enough liquidity to support current prices so the act of selling hammers the value? You are just saying "let's slowing take equity away from founders" so we can throw it away into wasteful gov. spending.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

doener 2y ago

This will be flagged any minute.

kweingar 2y ago

It is frustrating that the conversation around DOGE becomes "well we can all at least agree that efficiency is needed, right?" The government is openly lying about nearly every aspect of its efficiency efforts, and this is not debatable. The only debate is whether they are lying to the courts or to the American public. They tell the public that Elon Musk, the leader of DOGE, is conducting mass firings, canceling contracts and programs, canceling building leases, etc. Then they go to court and say that Elon Musk is not in charge of DOGE (and not even a part of DOGE at all), that DOGE and OPM do not make any directives about firings in other agencies, that federal agencies are independently determining which contracts to cancel, etc. Republican Senators have been talking about needing better communication with Musk as he cuts programs, but the government tells federal judges that it's outrageous to suggest that Musk is cutting programs. Anyone is free to believe that this is good or acceptable, but then they should say that. Say that reducing the deficit is a valid rationale for lying to the courts, lying to the public, obscuring the chain of command, violating duly enacted laws, and violating lawful court orders. It's dishonest to look at criticism and say "what, do people have a problem with efficiency?"