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DOGE found basically nothing, and they worked with an axe trying to cut anything that come close to waste. So I am not sure where you see all this "waste and co

DOGE found basically nothing, and they worked with an axe trying to cut anything that come close to waste. So I am not sure where you see all this "waste and corruption".

FirmwareBurner 1y ago
Bad faith argument. Why are you moving the discussion to DOGE when that's not what I was talking about? You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV. And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS. Look at your nation's government contracts that funnel taxpayer money to private pockets, then look at the output. Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was definitely wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both. This is so prevalent and is has become the norm everywhere for so long, that people are not even giving it a second thought anymore when it comes to government corruption, but somehow people want to be spoon-fed sources as if it's an unbelievable conspiracy theory.
- nkrisc 1y ago
  Step up, throw down some numbers and sources.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    Let's do a thought exercise on your loaded question, considering government waste and corruption has been thoroughly covered by journalists since the invention of the free press and are a Google search away for you. If I don't post sources, then you just accept government corruption doesn't exist, simply because nobody Googled for you? If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist? Where, in good faith, were you hoping this conversation leads to when you were asking that?
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      >If I do post sources, then what? Do you take your words back and admit that stuff documented by the press it is real? If you post sources he will nitpick them to all hell. It's a classic bad faith argument move since it moves the discussion from one of the subject to one of source validity. You usually see HN's resident handful of chronically linkposting jerks do it in the other direction (i.e. they make some insane statement and shit out cherry picked sources to back it up and it's up to everyone else to disprove them) but I suppose it could be used in this way too.
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        It's not bad faith when it's a legitimate request, which depends on the assertion. If I say the sky is blue because of plane chemtrails, and you ask me for a source, that seems valid. As with any large procurement system, there is moderate government waste in proportional terms, but one of the primary drivers of that waste is... anti-corruption systems operating as intended. If you require 4 more forms than private sector, in order to be more sure there isn't corruption, then you've just imposed a cost that creates no value.
        FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        >It's not bad faith when it's a legitimate request, which depends on the assertion. No offence, but comparing asking for proof of corruption with proof of sky being blue of petrochemicals is a biased bad faith argument. Asking for sources on corruption is more like asking for proof that the earth is round, which is definitely not a legitimate request, but more trolling masquerading like an innocent request and dodge scrutiny ("It's just a question bro, why r u mad lol"). Nothing wrong with asking such a question per-se, but that's something you can also google yourself due to countless occurrences from legitimate sources, hence why it's in bad faith to ask such a thing from others, and should be more strictly moderated as many here abuse this "sauce or gtfo" attitude in bad faith to discredit a pov without providing any arguments.
        1y ago
  - thayne 1y ago
    Here is one example of waste: FedRAMP certified software often costs 2-10x equivalent non-certified software. That means the government is paying a lot more than anyone else for the same thing. Why? Well part of it is because getting and keeping that certification is itself expensive. There are expensive audits, that take up a lot of time, and generally require paying specialized consultants to get through. All of your cryptography needs to be done using expensive FIPS certified "modules". There are requirements about the hardware you run on. All of your vendors also need to be FedRAMP approved. The requirements often add a lot of friction to normal operations and slow things down. In many cases it is easier, and cheaper to run/build an entirely separate product for FedRAMP possibly in a separate data center, which adds a lot of cost. And to be honest, a lot of the requirements are mostly security theater. But another reason is just that the government is willing to pay that high premium for a stamp of approval. To be fair, it is warranted for the government to have some assurance of the security and quality of software they use, especially if the software is used for more sensitive purposes. But the certification process is overkill for many places software is used, and I think that if some effort was put onto steamlining the process, the cost could be brought down.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
  > Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both. I'm going to unpack this a little. The second sentence does not actually follow from the question asked by the first sentence. "Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. I may consider an outcome to be of high value where you see the outcome as low value, and vice versa. "Reasonable market rates" is a peculiar term to use when speaking about things government does. There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example. Your answer to your question contains a logic error due to the language choices of the question. You disagree with the value versus the cost spent. That does not mean there was corruption. It just means you disagree. Other people can hold the opinion that the value was worth the cost. I am not claiming that there is 0 corruption or waste ever in government. I am saying that there has been an effort to create a perception that there is far more corruption and waste than actually exists. That in turn is being used as justification for taking a wide variety of actions that would be hard to sell otherwise.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. No it isn't. Most value CAN be objectively measured. I'll give you examples. US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy. That's what waste and corruption does. Germany beats France at military spending and yet it's military is significantly less capable than France's. Waste and corruption. I could go on. If someone tells you the value of their work can't be objectively measured, it's because they're dodging accountability and they have their hand in your pocket and wish to keep it that way. >There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example. Fine, let's go with roads. If the "market price" price for road construction is 6 million/KM, but your government signed a deal with a contractor for a basic road at 20+ million per KM without any objective justification of why the price hike, then the taxpayers are being taken for a ride, called waste and corruption. And I'm not even saying anything out of the ordinary. Such grifts are the norm in plenty of countries.
- DannyBee 1y ago
  I lived in DC for years, so i've had this discussion probably 8000 times already. Time for 8001 i guess. Let's separate waste and corruption - they are fairly different things. Let's then split waste into: 1. Programs <someone> (don't care who) thinks are not worth doing or shouldn't be done by government, or whatever - IE the overhead is not what people are arguing about, and even if the program had zero overhead, and government was being as efficient as possible, <someone> still thinks it shouldn't exist. 2. Programs with high overhead or otherwise seem inefficient. There are other things you can consider waste, but this feels like the majority of what people argue about. #1 is often subject to widely varied views on what government should be doing or you name it. For this discussion, you can be <someone> and decide which fall into #1 and which fall into #2 :) We'll just assume literally everything in #1 is waste and should be killed. If you kill everything that people initially think falls into #1, the US would probably spend no money. The majority of the budget is covered by things people think they disagree about, and want gone or not gone or whatever. However, for most people , if you remove the ignorance of what things are and what they are doing, and then you killed everything that actually falls into #1, it would not make a huge dent in the US budget. This is because the majority of people tend to support, at least in the sense of saying it doesn't being in #1, the things that are actually the majority of the US budget. and then we'll ignore #1, because reducing the overhead wouldn't matter, and if you take the same view as most people, it will not be a big pile when you get down to brass tacks. Let's talk about #2. #2 is often subject to arguments about the overhead. This is much easier to discuss. Most arguments about the overhead are about how high it is. This is, IMHO, not a useful measure at all. Asking whether something has high overhead doesn't tell you what to do if the answer is "yes". Better questions to ask (IMHO) are "Do i want the outcome this program achieves" (if not, it falls into #1), and then "Can i get the outcome on the same timeframe, with less overhead, and enough less overhead that it's worth it". The answer to the latter is often no. Sometimes it's yes in a theoretical sense (should it be possible to achieve the outcome for less money), but still no in a practical sense (can you actually pay someone to achieve the outcome for less money), even if you removed bureaucratic constraints (IE just stuck with the real requirements to achieve the outcome). Often times it's no practically because of scale- i can have 4 hard drives delivered by amazon tomorrow at 8am. I can't get them to deliver 4 million by tomorrow. On top of that, even if they could, while the odds are they are not the only people who could deliver 4, they may be the only people who can deliver 4 million. In that case, they have no reason to not charge me a near infinite amount of money since nobody else can do what i want. So it is very high overhead, but you can't actually reduce the overhead without changing the requirements. So if you want the outcome, as is, you have to accept the overhead. Plenty of times it's no in both the theoretical sense, and the practical sense, because notions of overhead amounts are wrong, and things are not as high overhead as people seem to believe. As an example, people continue to think USAID has high overhead, but it actually does not by any objective measure. In USAID's case, it just has funny accounting called NICRA. Anyone who digs enough to actually calculate the real overhead, consistently discover (and agree) it's competitive with private organizations that do the same. See, e.g., https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-wrong-about https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-w... for a reasonably new example of someone discovering this. Of course, there is certainly plenty of waste in government, but it's a lot less than people think.
zimpenfish 1y ago
> "waste and corruption" Well, "waste" is often defined by conservatives as "anything spent on the poors and/or not given to the rich" - by that standard, yeah, there's a lot of "waste" in the US government.
- transcriptase 1y ago
  What do you call it when the government pays for tens of thousands of annual licenses for software and only a few hundred are ever activated?
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    Oh oh I know this one! A rounding error!
    - transcriptase 1y ago
      Close! A drop in the bucket! Which is why it’s important the bucket is always getting larger, that way everything is a drop and no single thing is worth making more efficient!
      - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
        There are lots of single things worth making more efficient. This isn't one of them. This isn't even remotely close to the top decile of the list. This is probably in the last 5% of things you'd want to fix. It's not principled to solve problems in stupid ways, it's actually just stupid. Here's where someone who has thought about the problem for more than 5 seconds would likely start: gigantic healthcare organizations defrauding Medicare, in particular vertically integrated pay-viders. Literally tens of billions of dollars per year in known, easily detectable fraud.
        transcriptase 1y ago
        Sort your list by dollars saved divided by human-hours required to achieve, and add a column with likelihood of success after 2 years.
_lvbh 1y ago
The goal of DOGE wasn't really to cut waste and corruption, just stuff they didn't like. I'd argue that most of the military is waste and that America has no need to involve itself in wars. Something like Japan's SDF is sufficient and the extras could help with domestic infrastructure and public transport.
the_sleaze_ 1y ago
Your argument is that the government doesn't waste money? Are you sure that's a defensible position? Nearby a vacation spot there is a sand dune next to the road, and a carpenter spent an afternoon building a ramp over it so that his son could drive his mobility scooter onto the beach. The city tore it down, then took over 2 years to build it back, worse quality, at a final cost of over $40,000. What do you make of this story, and how did DOGE even attempt a fix?
jagermo 1y ago
I am convinced that you can find waste (probably not as much corruption) in every modern government. However, you need people to really dive into the processes, ask what and why those have been set up in the past (every rule has an origin story) and if they can be bundled or streamlined. Same with expenses, you need things like forensic accountants and time to understand things. Doge wanted to take shortcuts and destroyed everything without having alternatives in place. They had hoped for short-term wins, and neither the workers there nor their boss has the attention span or the experience necessary to really understand and optimize processes, thus reducing waste.
- overfeed 1y ago
  > neither the workers there nor their boss has the attention span or the experience necessary to really understand and optimize processes, thus reducing waste. The Government Accountability Office is a congressional body that's been doing exactly what you describe for years. It's old - so it goes against the narrative that government waste is unmonitored, it's also unglamorous, boring, and not meme-able, and most importantly non-partisan, so it won't reliably dominate the news cycle with outrageous partisan talking points.

DOGE found basically nothing, and they worked with an axe trying to cut anything that come close to waste. So I am not sure where you see all this "waste and corruption".

FirmwareBurner 1y ago

Bad faith argument. Why are you moving the discussion to DOGE when that's not what I was talking about? You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV. And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS. Look at your nation's government contracts that funnel taxpayer money to private pockets, then look at the output. Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was definitely wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both. This is so prevalent and is has become the norm everywhere for so long, that people are not even giving it a second thought anymore when it comes to government corruption, but somehow people want to be spoon-fed sources as if it's an unbelievable conspiracy theory.

nkrisc 1y ago
Step up, throw down some numbers and sources.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  Let's do a thought exercise on your loaded question, considering government waste and corruption has been thoroughly covered by journalists since the invention of the free press and are a Google search away for you. If I don't post sources, then you just accept government corruption doesn't exist, simply because nobody Googled for you? If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist? Where, in good faith, were you hoping this conversation leads to when you were asking that?
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >If I do post sources, then what? Do you take your words back and admit that stuff documented by the press it is real? If you post sources he will nitpick them to all hell. It's a classic bad faith argument move since it moves the discussion from one of the subject to one of source validity. You usually see HN's resident handful of chronically linkposting jerks do it in the other direction (i.e. they make some insane statement and shit out cherry picked sources to back it up and it's up to everyone else to disprove them) but I suppose it could be used in this way too.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      It's not bad faith when it's a legitimate request, which depends on the assertion. If I say the sky is blue because of plane chemtrails, and you ask me for a source, that seems valid. As with any large procurement system, there is moderate government waste in proportional terms, but one of the primary drivers of that waste is... anti-corruption systems operating as intended. If you require 4 more forms than private sector, in order to be more sure there isn't corruption, then you've just imposed a cost that creates no value.
      - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
        >It's not bad faith when it's a legitimate request, which depends on the assertion. No offence, but comparing asking for proof of corruption with proof of sky being blue of petrochemicals is a biased bad faith argument. Asking for sources on corruption is more like asking for proof that the earth is round, which is definitely not a legitimate request, but more trolling masquerading like an innocent request and dodge scrutiny ("It's just a question bro, why r u mad lol"). Nothing wrong with asking such a question per-se, but that's something you can also google yourself due to countless occurrences from legitimate sources, hence why it's in bad faith to ask such a thing from others, and should be more strictly moderated as many here abuse this "sauce or gtfo" attitude in bad faith to discredit a pov without providing any arguments.
        1y ago
- thayne 1y ago
  Here is one example of waste: FedRAMP certified software often costs 2-10x equivalent non-certified software. That means the government is paying a lot more than anyone else for the same thing. Why? Well part of it is because getting and keeping that certification is itself expensive. There are expensive audits, that take up a lot of time, and generally require paying specialized consultants to get through. All of your cryptography needs to be done using expensive FIPS certified "modules". There are requirements about the hardware you run on. All of your vendors also need to be FedRAMP approved. The requirements often add a lot of friction to normal operations and slow things down. In many cases it is easier, and cheaper to run/build an entirely separate product for FedRAMP possibly in a separate data center, which adds a lot of cost. And to be honest, a lot of the requirements are mostly security theater. But another reason is just that the government is willing to pay that high premium for a stamp of approval. To be fair, it is warranted for the government to have some assurance of the security and quality of software they use, especially if the software is used for more sensitive purposes. But the certification process is overkill for many places software is used, and I think that if some effort was put onto steamlining the process, the cost could be brought down.
sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
> Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both. I'm going to unpack this a little. The second sentence does not actually follow from the question asked by the first sentence. "Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. I may consider an outcome to be of high value where you see the outcome as low value, and vice versa. "Reasonable market rates" is a peculiar term to use when speaking about things government does. There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example. Your answer to your question contains a logic error due to the language choices of the question. You disagree with the value versus the cost spent. That does not mean there was corruption. It just means you disagree. Other people can hold the opinion that the value was worth the cost. I am not claiming that there is 0 corruption or waste ever in government. I am saying that there has been an effort to create a perception that there is far more corruption and waste than actually exists. That in turn is being used as justification for taking a wide variety of actions that would be hard to sell otherwise.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. No it isn't. Most value CAN be objectively measured. I'll give you examples. US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy. That's what waste and corruption does. Germany beats France at military spending and yet it's military is significantly less capable than France's. Waste and corruption. I could go on. If someone tells you the value of their work can't be objectively measured, it's because they're dodging accountability and they have their hand in your pocket and wish to keep it that way. >There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example. Fine, let's go with roads. If the "market price" price for road construction is 6 million/KM, but your government signed a deal with a contractor for a basic road at 20+ million per KM without any objective justification of why the price hike, then the taxpayers are being taken for a ride, called waste and corruption. And I'm not even saying anything out of the ordinary. Such grifts are the norm in plenty of countries.
DannyBee 1y ago
I lived in DC for years, so i've had this discussion probably 8000 times already. Time for 8001 i guess. Let's separate waste and corruption - they are fairly different things. Let's then split waste into: 1. Programs <someone> (don't care who) thinks are not worth doing or shouldn't be done by government, or whatever - IE the overhead is not what people are arguing about, and even if the program had zero overhead, and government was being as efficient as possible, <someone> still thinks it shouldn't exist. 2. Programs with high overhead or otherwise seem inefficient. There are other things you can consider waste, but this feels like the majority of what people argue about. #1 is often subject to widely varied views on what government should be doing or you name it. For this discussion, you can be <someone> and decide which fall into #1 and which fall into #2 :) We'll just assume literally everything in #1 is waste and should be killed. If you kill everything that people initially think falls into #1, the US would probably spend no money. The majority of the budget is covered by things people think they disagree about, and want gone or not gone or whatever. However, for most people , if you remove the ignorance of what things are and what they are doing, and then you killed everything that actually falls into #1, it would not make a huge dent in the US budget. This is because the majority of people tend to support, at least in the sense of saying it doesn't being in #1, the things that are actually the majority of the US budget. and then we'll ignore #1, because reducing the overhead wouldn't matter, and if you take the same view as most people, it will not be a big pile when you get down to brass tacks. Let's talk about #2. #2 is often subject to arguments about the overhead. This is much easier to discuss. Most arguments about the overhead are about how high it is. This is, IMHO, not a useful measure at all. Asking whether something has high overhead doesn't tell you what to do if the answer is "yes". Better questions to ask (IMHO) are "Do i want the outcome this program achieves" (if not, it falls into #1), and then "Can i get the outcome on the same timeframe, with less overhead, and enough less overhead that it's worth it". The answer to the latter is often no. Sometimes it's yes in a theoretical sense (should it be possible to achieve the outcome for less money), but still no in a practical sense (can you actually pay someone to achieve the outcome for less money), even if you removed bureaucratic constraints (IE just stuck with the real requirements to achieve the outcome). Often times it's no practically because of scale- i can have 4 hard drives delivered by amazon tomorrow at 8am. I can't get them to deliver 4 million by tomorrow. On top of that, even if they could, while the odds are they are not the only people who could deliver 4, they may be the only people who can deliver 4 million. In that case, they have no reason to not charge me a near infinite amount of money since nobody else can do what i want. So it is very high overhead, but you can't actually reduce the overhead without changing the requirements. So if you want the outcome, as is, you have to accept the overhead. Plenty of times it's no in both the theoretical sense, and the practical sense, because notions of overhead amounts are wrong, and things are not as high overhead as people seem to believe. As an example, people continue to think USAID has high overhead, but it actually does not by any objective measure. In USAID's case, it just has funny accounting called NICRA. Anyone who digs enough to actually calculate the real overhead, consistently discover (and agree) it's competitive with private organizations that do the same. See, e.g., https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-wrong-about https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-w... for a reasonably new example of someone discovering this. Of course, there is certainly plenty of waste in government, but it's a lot less than people think.

zimpenfish 1y ago

> "waste and corruption" Well, "waste" is often defined by conservatives as "anything spent on the poors and/or not given to the rich" - by that standard, yeah, there's a lot of "waste" in the US government.

transcriptase 1y ago
What do you call it when the government pays for tens of thousands of annual licenses for software and only a few hundred are ever activated?
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  Oh oh I know this one! A rounding error!
  - transcriptase 1y ago
    Close! A drop in the bucket! Which is why it’s important the bucket is always getting larger, that way everything is a drop and no single thing is worth making more efficient!
    - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
      There are lots of single things worth making more efficient. This isn't one of them. This isn't even remotely close to the top decile of the list. This is probably in the last 5% of things you'd want to fix. It's not principled to solve problems in stupid ways, it's actually just stupid. Here's where someone who has thought about the problem for more than 5 seconds would likely start: gigantic healthcare organizations defrauding Medicare, in particular vertically integrated pay-viders. Literally tens of billions of dollars per year in known, easily detectable fraud.
      - transcriptase 1y ago
        Sort your list by dollars saved divided by human-hours required to achieve, and add a column with likelihood of success after 2 years.

_lvbh 1y ago

The goal of DOGE wasn't really to cut waste and corruption, just stuff they didn't like. I'd argue that most of the military is waste and that America has no need to involve itself in wars. Something like Japan's SDF is sufficient and the extras could help with domestic infrastructure and public transport.

the_sleaze_ 1y ago

Your argument is that the government doesn't waste money? Are you sure that's a defensible position? Nearby a vacation spot there is a sand dune next to the road, and a carpenter spent an afternoon building a ramp over it so that his son could drive his mobility scooter onto the beach. The city tore it down, then took over 2 years to build it back, worse quality, at a final cost of over $40,000. What do you make of this story, and how did DOGE even attempt a fix?

jagermo 1y ago

I am convinced that you can find waste (probably not as much corruption) in every modern government. However, you need people to really dive into the processes, ask what and why those have been set up in the past (every rule has an origin story) and if they can be bundled or streamlined. Same with expenses, you need things like forensic accountants and time to understand things. Doge wanted to take shortcuts and destroyed everything without having alternatives in place. They had hoped for short-term wins, and neither the workers there nor their boss has the attention span or the experience necessary to really understand and optimize processes, thus reducing waste.

overfeed 1y ago
> neither the workers there nor their boss has the attention span or the experience necessary to really understand and optimize processes, thus reducing waste. The Government Accountability Office is a congressional body that's been doing exactly what you describe for years. It's old - so it goes against the narrative that government waste is unmonitored, it's also unglamorous, boring, and not meme-able, and most importantly non-partisan, so it won't reliably dominate the news cycle with outrageous partisan talking points.