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The idea behind DOGE made a mountain of sense, even if the execution was all over the place. Americans get sympathetic when they hear about the Air Force $1280

The idea behind DOGE made a mountain of sense, even if the execution was all over the place. Americans get sympathetic when they hear about the Air Force $1280 coffee mug. They don't forget that, even half a decade later, when they hear the word "waste." Apple's monitor stand has better build quality than what it's known for. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23/air-force-puts-the-kibosh-on-the-1300-coffee-cup/ https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23...

Jtsummers 1y ago
That's not even the real waste in DOD. The real waste is mostly in failed projects. Projects that either never deliver, or deliver years late and millions or billions over budget, typically with reduced features. They'd have to buy a million of those hot cups to come close to the waste that occurs due to these failed projects. DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  I'm not disputing it; but the downvoters missed my point. My point is that voters know that if a mere coffee mug costs that much, who knows what else stupid is going on. It's a smoke signal saying there's waste of unprecedented amounts everywhere.
  - bdamm 1y ago
    It is even deeper than that. The problem is that voters do not have faith in the organizations created to oversee and regulate government waste. Perhaps there isn't enough visibility. Or maybe the typical shenanigans that commenters love to harp on hides the actual good work that public servants sometimes do in managing the public purse. So as with most political challenges, it all comes down to trust, and a failure to garner it. The lack of trust then creates the vaccuum into which silly notions of thinking a coffee cup is worth a grand, or an ashtray is tens of thousands of dollars, or the magic hammer that is the same as a normal hammer but costs 100x, or whatever.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      Of they just don't fundamentally trust the institutions. I bet there isn't a single person in this country that can't pick a subject they care a lot about on which the government actively gaslit them in the last ~5yr. That kind of tarnishes what the .gov has to say on every other subject.
      - bdamm 1y ago
        I'm not saying people should implicitly trust the government. I'm saying that lack of trust, and lack of the ability of people and government to meet in a way that develops trust, is the issue that underlies people holding up a "$1280 coffee mug" as an example of government waste. The ideal is that representatives you do trust would be evaluating the government for you, and so you would be building trust by experiencing trust with one or more of your representatives. But the scale of the federal government has resulted in few people actually trusting their representatives, and the experience of having a trust test with a representative doesn't scale. This is the fundamental issue. To be totally clear, I am implying that a change to the system needs to proceed towards improvements in accountability and visibility, so that people can experience more legitimate trust in their government.
        potato3732842 1y ago
        People shouldn't need to trust. If you architect the system around it then it will attract people who want to abuse that trust. The system needs to be designed so that no trust is needed, the "correct" thing to do for any given cog in it is also the "correct" thing overall.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem. They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there.
  - btreecat 1y ago
    > >DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem. > > They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there. What "good slashing" did they actually do anywhere to assume they would have done good there?
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      All I said was they probably could've done some good slashing around in the DOD. Nothing more, nothing lesee. Take your strawman and get lost.
      - scott_w 1y ago
        There’s no straw man in the question. You’re being asked to substantiate your belief by showing where the people who would be responsible for “good slashing” demonstrated their ability to do some “good slashing” elsewhere.
  - snowwrestler 1y ago
    The general sense in DC was that DOGE was never going to make it to DoD because a) many of the individual people leading DOGE benefit personally from DoD spending (which is not true of IRS, HHS, USAID, etc), and b) most civilian policy leaders in this administration have built their political brand around boosting the military, and dramatic cuts don’t align with that.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  If you don't have failed projects, are you really trying hard enough?
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    If you change requirements all the time and never deliver, then no, you're not trying hard enough. Plan, Build, Evaluate, Learn.
jiggawatts 1y ago
I've been the one selling the "$1,280 mug", not in America, and not to the military, but to state and federal governments all over the place. It's always the same problem: They write "requirements" that end up being total nonsense, they have an unlimited budget, and they're terrified that they'll get "in trouble" for some slight oversight. This is a recipe for overspending, and is the bane of all such organisations everywhere. The reason that DOGE had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing government overspend is that this can't possibly be achieved by merely cancelling a few hundred contracts out of millions! The dynamic has to change, by realigning incentives and changing the rules, but DOGE did not have that power. Not to mention that nobody knows how to do this at the scale of the US government! Nobody. I don't have the answers, Elon doesn't, neither does anyone else like Peter Thiel. They keep talking about how the government is bad, but they don't have an alternative that wouldn't be subject to the exact same forces and produce an equally bad (or even identical) outcome.
- Jtsummers 1y ago
  One thing that would help, but only help, not solve, is to train the people writing requirements. I've seen so much overfitting. "We developed on a Dell 1234ABC, so that's what we need 200 of when we deliver this to the field." That's not how computers work, but that's how they end up writing requirements. That can even make it into the TO for systems so now they have a drawing of the back of a Dell 1234ABC and the front, showing how it's installed at a desk and cabled up. Once that happens, if the system lasts more than a year, they have to start sourcing Dell 1234ABCs with the same specs. However, that's an item that's no longer sold. So then they switch to maintaining the ones they have, which means a support contractor is hired to staff locations to handle these repairs (because the local IT staff is already responsible for a lot of things, and maintaining obsolete hardware is not their priority). When what's needed is any computer with X GB of RAM, X GB (or TB these days) of storage, and so on. Set the minimum specs, go acquire it from whatever vendor, and move on. It'd cost a fraction of the amount of that multi-million support contract whose entire job is to maintain obsolete computers.
  - zbentley 1y ago
    That would help a tiny amount. The bigger problem, which GP alluded to and which is very, very frustrating to entangle, is the incentives around accountability. Pahlka’s writing puts it better than I could: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/the-water-is-a-mirror https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/the-water-is-a-mirror https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/
rat87 1y ago
The idea behind DOGE was to 1. fire people who don't automatically support Trump regardless of the law/constitution/good of the nation 2. Fire people who Trump or maga dislike for some reason (LGBTQ, minorities, people who have ever criticized Trump) 3. Destroy government in general (from people on the ideological right who are willing to set aside any principles to work for Trump) Reducing waste or making government efficient was never one of the goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have gotten rid of people doing actual oversight work for the government. They also wouldn't have fired so many people on whims (that they had to take back in many cases)
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  It was also to justify increased government spending, namely the extension of the tax cuts
  - MisterMower 1y ago
    What are you talking about? Reducing government revenue does not increase government spending.
    - ants_everywhere 1y ago
      That's really a matter of accounting. Under some accounting systems if you have a financial obligation and that obligation is forgiven, then it's an expense (e.g. bad debt expense) for the forgiving party and income for the party that is forgiven. A big tax cut like this is forgiving the dues everyone owes for living in a society. It's only really a pure loss of revenue if you believe that taxes aren't an inherent part of the social contract. At least empirically I agree with Hobbes that life in the state of nature is nasty brutish and short and that there are no, for example, big tech companies in anarchies. So in both theory and practice taxes are conceptually subscription fees that arise with the social contract in exchange for protection, public services, and the protection of rights. In this sense they are debt and cancelling the debt is an expense. Of course I recognize that in practice the government does not treat future tax revenue as receivables in terms of accounting. But there are sufficiently many games and white lies in the bill to make it appear budget neutral that I don't think anybody really believes the actual budget accounting is what's driving the bill. It's a political bill and politically I think it's reasonable to consider it an expense.
dangus 1y ago
The idea never made sense, the government isn't particularly wasteful, and the entire premise is based on bad math that misunderstands how much money the federal government actually spends on things, especially salaries. On top of that, the premise was based on defying congressional appropriations. Congress decides how money is spent. When the Clinton administration undertook this, they went through Congress to enact legitimate and lasting reform. [1] The federal government has a much lower employee to citizen ratio than it used to have, it's quite efficient. [1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-government-size-rego https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-...
- parineum 1y ago
  The issue now is that, at the time, the Clinton admin was looking at a political reality of cuts happening in a Republican congress and chose to work with them to make those cuts align more with his party's agenda than it would have before. That reality isn't something either party seems to be willing to deal with today. The only time changes happen in the federal government are when one party controls the whole thing. Which is why there's such a fight for these mid-terms. If Republicans lose either house of congress, the last 2 years of the Trump admin will be stalemate.
  - dangus 1y ago
    I don’t think it’s party willingness to deal with government efficiency, I think it is more accurate to say that neither party thinks that government efficiency is a significant problem. In other words, it’s just something Trump wanted to do. The GOP is very firmly under his control. The other policy that’s like that is tariffs. Nobody in the GOP wants tariffs except for Trump. You could see the lack of cheers at the SOTU. The other truth of the matter is that the Republican Party has become addicted to cutting taxes without replacing revenue. It seems to me that there’s a desire to create a debt crisis to justify cuts to social programs. In reality, social programs would be highly sustainable if taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals weren’t continually being reduced.
    - 1y ago
stirfish 1y ago
Thanks for this link. I always assumed that things like $1280 coffee cups were like dad's "business trips", where we all know that's not really what's going on but we're all politely not talking about it. Like a coffee cup might've been in the shipping manifest, but that wasn't all of it and we still needed to pay to ship it to [redacted]

Jtsummers 1y ago

That's not even the real waste in DOD. The real waste is mostly in failed projects. Projects that either never deliver, or deliver years late and millions or billions over budget, typically with reduced features. They'd have to buy a million of those hot cups to come close to the waste that occurs due to these failed projects. DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.

gjsman-1000 1y ago
I'm not disputing it; but the downvoters missed my point. My point is that voters know that if a mere coffee mug costs that much, who knows what else stupid is going on. It's a smoke signal saying there's waste of unprecedented amounts everywhere.
- bdamm 1y ago
  It is even deeper than that. The problem is that voters do not have faith in the organizations created to oversee and regulate government waste. Perhaps there isn't enough visibility. Or maybe the typical shenanigans that commenters love to harp on hides the actual good work that public servants sometimes do in managing the public purse. So as with most political challenges, it all comes down to trust, and a failure to garner it. The lack of trust then creates the vaccuum into which silly notions of thinking a coffee cup is worth a grand, or an ashtray is tens of thousands of dollars, or the magic hammer that is the same as a normal hammer but costs 100x, or whatever.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    Of they just don't fundamentally trust the institutions. I bet there isn't a single person in this country that can't pick a subject they care a lot about on which the government actively gaslit them in the last ~5yr. That kind of tarnishes what the .gov has to say on every other subject.
    - bdamm 1y ago
      I'm not saying people should implicitly trust the government. I'm saying that lack of trust, and lack of the ability of people and government to meet in a way that develops trust, is the issue that underlies people holding up a "$1280 coffee mug" as an example of government waste. The ideal is that representatives you do trust would be evaluating the government for you, and so you would be building trust by experiencing trust with one or more of your representatives. But the scale of the federal government has resulted in few people actually trusting their representatives, and the experience of having a trust test with a representative doesn't scale. This is the fundamental issue. To be totally clear, I am implying that a change to the system needs to proceed towards improvements in accountability and visibility, so that people can experience more legitimate trust in their government.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        People shouldn't need to trust. If you architect the system around it then it will attract people who want to abuse that trust. The system needs to be designed so that no trust is needed, the "correct" thing to do for any given cog in it is also the "correct" thing overall.
potato3732842 1y ago
>DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem. They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there.
- btreecat 1y ago
  > >DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem. > > They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there. What "good slashing" did they actually do anywhere to assume they would have done good there?
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    All I said was they probably could've done some good slashing around in the DOD. Nothing more, nothing lesee. Take your strawman and get lost.
    - scott_w 1y ago
      There’s no straw man in the question. You’re being asked to substantiate your belief by showing where the people who would be responsible for “good slashing” demonstrated their ability to do some “good slashing” elsewhere.
- snowwrestler 1y ago
  The general sense in DC was that DOGE was never going to make it to DoD because a) many of the individual people leading DOGE benefit personally from DoD spending (which is not true of IRS, HHS, USAID, etc), and b) most civilian policy leaders in this administration have built their political brand around boosting the military, and dramatic cuts don’t align with that.
ACCount37 1y ago
If you don't have failed projects, are you really trying hard enough?
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  If you change requirements all the time and never deliver, then no, you're not trying hard enough. Plan, Build, Evaluate, Learn.

jiggawatts 1y ago

I've been the one selling the "$1,280 mug", not in America, and not to the military, but to state and federal governments all over the place. It's always the same problem: They write "requirements" that end up being total nonsense, they have an unlimited budget, and they're terrified that they'll get "in trouble" for some slight oversight. This is a recipe for overspending, and is the bane of all such organisations everywhere. The reason that DOGE had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing government overspend is that this can't possibly be achieved by merely cancelling a few hundred contracts out of millions! The dynamic has to change, by realigning incentives and changing the rules, but DOGE did not have that power. Not to mention that nobody knows how to do this at the scale of the US government! Nobody. I don't have the answers, Elon doesn't, neither does anyone else like Peter Thiel. They keep talking about how the government is bad, but they don't have an alternative that wouldn't be subject to the exact same forces and produce an equally bad (or even identical) outcome.

Jtsummers 1y ago
One thing that would help, but only help, not solve, is to train the people writing requirements. I've seen so much overfitting. "We developed on a Dell 1234ABC, so that's what we need 200 of when we deliver this to the field." That's not how computers work, but that's how they end up writing requirements. That can even make it into the TO for systems so now they have a drawing of the back of a Dell 1234ABC and the front, showing how it's installed at a desk and cabled up. Once that happens, if the system lasts more than a year, they have to start sourcing Dell 1234ABCs with the same specs. However, that's an item that's no longer sold. So then they switch to maintaining the ones they have, which means a support contractor is hired to staff locations to handle these repairs (because the local IT staff is already responsible for a lot of things, and maintaining obsolete hardware is not their priority). When what's needed is any computer with X GB of RAM, X GB (or TB these days) of storage, and so on. Set the minimum specs, go acquire it from whatever vendor, and move on. It'd cost a fraction of the amount of that multi-million support contract whose entire job is to maintain obsolete computers.
- zbentley 1y ago
  That would help a tiny amount. The bigger problem, which GP alluded to and which is very, very frustrating to entangle, is the incentives around accountability. Pahlka’s writing puts it better than I could: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/the-water-is-a-mirror https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/the-water-is-a-mirror https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/

rat87 1y ago

The idea behind DOGE was to 1. fire people who don't automatically support Trump regardless of the law/constitution/good of the nation 2. Fire people who Trump or maga dislike for some reason (LGBTQ, minorities, people who have ever criticized Trump) 3. Destroy government in general (from people on the ideological right who are willing to set aside any principles to work for Trump) Reducing waste or making government efficient was never one of the goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have gotten rid of people doing actual oversight work for the government. They also wouldn't have fired so many people on whims (that they had to take back in many cases)

ants_everywhere 1y ago
It was also to justify increased government spending, namely the extension of the tax cuts
- MisterMower 1y ago
  What are you talking about? Reducing government revenue does not increase government spending.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    That's really a matter of accounting. Under some accounting systems if you have a financial obligation and that obligation is forgiven, then it's an expense (e.g. bad debt expense) for the forgiving party and income for the party that is forgiven. A big tax cut like this is forgiving the dues everyone owes for living in a society. It's only really a pure loss of revenue if you believe that taxes aren't an inherent part of the social contract. At least empirically I agree with Hobbes that life in the state of nature is nasty brutish and short and that there are no, for example, big tech companies in anarchies. So in both theory and practice taxes are conceptually subscription fees that arise with the social contract in exchange for protection, public services, and the protection of rights. In this sense they are debt and cancelling the debt is an expense. Of course I recognize that in practice the government does not treat future tax revenue as receivables in terms of accounting. But there are sufficiently many games and white lies in the bill to make it appear budget neutral that I don't think anybody really believes the actual budget accounting is what's driving the bill. It's a political bill and politically I think it's reasonable to consider it an expense.

dangus 1y ago

The idea never made sense, the government isn't particularly wasteful, and the entire premise is based on bad math that misunderstands how much money the federal government actually spends on things, especially salaries. On top of that, the premise was based on defying congressional appropriations. Congress decides how money is spent. When the Clinton administration undertook this, they went through Congress to enact legitimate and lasting reform. [1] The federal government has a much lower employee to citizen ratio than it used to have, it's quite efficient. [1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-government-size-rego https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-...

parineum 1y ago
The issue now is that, at the time, the Clinton admin was looking at a political reality of cuts happening in a Republican congress and chose to work with them to make those cuts align more with his party's agenda than it would have before. That reality isn't something either party seems to be willing to deal with today. The only time changes happen in the federal government are when one party controls the whole thing. Which is why there's such a fight for these mid-terms. If Republicans lose either house of congress, the last 2 years of the Trump admin will be stalemate.
- dangus 1y ago
  I don’t think it’s party willingness to deal with government efficiency, I think it is more accurate to say that neither party thinks that government efficiency is a significant problem. In other words, it’s just something Trump wanted to do. The GOP is very firmly under his control. The other policy that’s like that is tariffs. Nobody in the GOP wants tariffs except for Trump. You could see the lack of cheers at the SOTU. The other truth of the matter is that the Republican Party has become addicted to cutting taxes without replacing revenue. It seems to me that there’s a desire to create a debt crisis to justify cuts to social programs. In reality, social programs would be highly sustainable if taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals weren’t continually being reduced.
  - 1y ago

stirfish 1y ago

Thanks for this link. I always assumed that things like $1280 coffee cups were like dad's "business trips", where we all know that's not really what's going on but we're all politely not talking about it. Like a coffee cup might've been in the shipping manifest, but that wasn't all of it and we still needed to pay to ship it to [redacted]