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Remember: if anyone supported DOGE or still supports DOGE, they (both DOGE and their supporters) were not ever serious about the debt or government efficiency.
by miltonlost 1y ago
Remember: if anyone supported DOGE or still supports DOGE, they (both DOGE and their supporters) were not ever serious about the debt or government efficiency.
- tester5555 1y ago[flagged]
- miltonlost 1y agoI highly highly highly highly highly doubt that website and their data. It also doesn't mention how much was lost in those contracts because they were actually valuable science, health, diplomatic, or medicinal. For instance, $3 billion saved from cancelling "Increasing Community Access to Testing, Treatment and Response (ICATT). The ICATT program provides access to no-cost COVID-19 testing in U.S. communities to people that are uninsured and no-cost COVID-19 vaccines to people that are underinsured and uninsured." That is shortsighted, evil, inefficient (better to keep pandemics from not happening), and idiotic to cancel. Again, anyone supporting DOGE is not a serious thinker or actually cares about what is "waste"
- tester5555 1y ago[flagged]
- miltonlost 1y agoDo you think we should have cut funding for giving out COVID vaccines for free to the uninsured? Do you think that is actually helpful? See I can ask questions too. And the number I propose is 0%
- shadowgovt 1y agoDOGE is, I think, a response to a real issue Americans have with their government: its process of evaluating cost and benefit is glacial in a world that is moving ever faster. Unfortunately, it's glacial for a reason; there's 380 million people in the country and 8 billion in the world. That's a lot of effect to weigh when making changes to the status quo. There's a three-panel comic about a person deciding they need change in their life and getting it by taking a chainsaw to their room. Panel three is them looking around and going "oh no." That is, unfortunately, sort of how I conceptualize DOGE.
- dylan604 1y agoI'm guessing that if you made a Venn diagram of people in favor of DOGE and people that believe COVID was fake and the vaccine is a sham the result would be a circle
- selectodude 1y agothe USAID budget was about $20bn. Half a million extra dead so far from those cuts. So we can start there?
- ThrowMeAway1618 1y ago>the USAID budget was about $20bn. Half a million extra dead so far from those cuts. So we can start there? Saving $40k/person[0] is wonderful savings! Let's save even more! Boo yah! USA! USA! USA! [0] I mean it's not like they're Americans. And they're most likely not white either. In which case, unless they're mowing my lawn or picking my cotton, they're worth essentially zero.
- dddgghhbbfblk 1y agoI know that civility is a core value of this community but it is very hard to respond to your comments here while maintaining that. What number would I propose? Probably a negative one. I don't think "we can say that at least 50-75% is actually helping". On what basis? Helping with what?
- twisteriffic 1y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning They aren't engaging in good faith. You're better off not responding.
- shadowgovt 1y agoThese are exactly the kind of questions an administration could have, hypothetically, asked before forming a department dedicated to acting like it already had the answers. Did they ask them? I haven't seen evidence they did (if anything, the releases from the White House suggest DOGE became the tail that wags the dog, with OMB being asked to justify cuts to projects DOGE had already become convinced were waste, if they were consulted at all).
- apical_dendrite 1y agoYou're joking right? You realize that website has become a national laughing stock because they keep making multibillion dollar errors? [edit] to explain further - there were lots of different errors, but a big one is that many contracts have high max values because they can't always predict how much they'll need to spend over ten years but they want a contract in place in case they need to spend money quickly (say for spare parts). So in many cases the number DOGE says they cut was just a placeholder, not an actual reflection of money that was ever going to be spent. So if you have a contract for spare parts for MRI machines for VA hospitals with a max value of, say, $1B over ten years, but you actually spend $100M over ten years, then DOGE will say they saved $1B, when actually they will have only saved $100M. That does not include the downstream effects of not having a contract for spare parts for MRI machines. If the MRI machines have more downtime, then the VA has to spend more money sending patients elsewhere, but DOGE has no way to account for that in their wall of receipts.
- tester5555 1y agoLet's assume it is correct, are the savings a bad thing?
- miltonlost 1y agoHow about you give a position instead of asinine "just asking" questions? Because you give strong troll vibes otherwise
- recursive 1y agoThe savings are good, assuming they're correct. The correctness part seems to be in question. Also, I don't know whether the hypothetical benefit is more or less than the things that were being paid for.
- altruios 1y agoCutting costs are not inherently good. Junk food can be cheaper than healthy food, it's not good to save on money now at the cost of spending thousands on medical care and insulin in the future. Or to paraphrase Terry Pratchett: "boots at $10 dollars that last a month are more expensive than $50 dollar boots that last a year" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory It's the difference between being cheap and being frugal... There's also the allegation that Elon's Doge cuts were to prevent various agencies from pursuing legal action against him.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoAlice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' 'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'
- shadowgovt 1y agoWithout knowing the details of the thirteen thousand contracts cancelled, we don't know. As a thought experiment ad absurdum, we can save 100% of the cost of government by shutting down the entire government. ... but then what happens next? This trivial exercise demonstrates how on-the-surface positive metrics can hide costs that either aren't being tracked at all or aren't tracked here. On this topic: some fascinating research recently out of Yale https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-reveals-stark-differences-in-life-expectancy-across-us-states-over-the-past-century/ https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-reveals-stark-diffe... investigated the known discrepancy in life expectancy in the American South vs. other states. Their conclusion is that likeliest cause is weather. The reason it didn't show up is that metrics weren't tracking the secondary effects of a region being smashed by one or two hurricanes a year; immediate death tolls are in the low dozens and wouldn't move the needle, but the shared cost of infrastructure rebuilding puts local and state governments perpetually in a reactionary mode, which means they set up welfare programs that they can never fund. It's those on-paper-existing but perpetually-emergency-drained programs that are likely accounting for the difference in life expectancy; it's not about dying in a hurricane, it's about a mother three years down the line losing her newborn to preventable illness that wasn't caught in time because she can't afford pediatric care and her county doesn't have enough money to subsidize it, they're too busy rebuilding all the bridges that got torn in half by floodwaters before that newborn was even conceived.
- anonymars 1y ago> Their conclusion is that likeliest cause is weather. This is an interesting thought, but where is that concluded? Is that the right link?
- shadowgovt 1y agoGood catch; wrong link. That link is to the research showing the mortality gap in the first place. Research on cause of gap: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07945-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07945-5
- throwaway0123_5 1y agoIf the program being cut is valuable, I would say absolutely. Ignoring that this website is obviously going to have massive bias, a huge amount of the savings listed are for programs I would generally support: Health services, health research, USAID (we saved a billion dollars on "polio immunization," yay), environmental research, education, etc. Maybe the specific contracts cut were wasteful, but they certainly don't provide enough information to determine that and I'm not going to assume the cuts were good because "money saved." Also, the savings are pretty minor overall. If we trust the website, we get $1.3k saved per taxpayer. The vast majority of the programs cut would have to be completely useless for me to think it is worth it to save $1.3k.
- ascagnel_ 1y agoAlso, "waste" doesn't have a singular definition: a contract with Honeywell (just picking a big government contractor at random) with the DOD/DOW to develop a new weapon could easily be seen as wasteful by one taxpayer, while another could see a different contract with Honeywell with the DOE or EPA to develop green energy tech as equally valid waste. The solution to this isn't to have one person run roughshod over already-signed contracts and commitments; the fix is for Congress either to not enter into them in the first place, or to use the CRA to override an agency's decision.
- nxobject 1y agoYes – we're still going to end up with deficits due to tax cuts. We may as well actually get things done while doing so, and be honest to ourselves about it.
- throw0101d 1y ago> What about the savings https://doge.gov/savings https://doge.gov/savings? Are they a bad thing? Cost versus value. E.g, what kind of soft power did the US lose when they shredded USAID? What kinds of medical research will not be done because of cuts to NIH: * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-layoffs-budget-cuts-medical-research-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-layoffs-budget-cuts-medical... What kind of tax revenue will be lost because the IRS is even more short-staffed and cannot investigate fraud: * https://apnews.com/article/irs-doge-layoffs-tax-season-0659e4b439400bf66023273f6a532fa0 https://apnews.com/article/irs-doge-layoffs-tax-season-0659e... For a comparison of DOGE's falsifiable/verifiable claims and reality see: * https://www.slowboring.com/p/yes-doge-failed-and-it-matters https://www.slowboring.com/p/yes-doge-failed-and-it-matters
- sejje 1y agoThat's a good argument to have about whether we should go after the savings or not. But it sounds like you agree they're savings.
- gurleen_s 1y agoObviously they’re savings, but in the same way that cutting your arm off will make you weigh less. That’s not a useful topic to discuss.
- kube-system 1y agoIf you defer costs or trade monetary costs for non-monetary costs, you aren't "saving", you're just moving them around. You can stop changing the oil on your car and show a couple hundred dollars of savings on paper over the next year or two ... but you will incur tens of thousands of costs consequentially.
- throw0101d 1y ago> But it sounds like you agree they're savings. I have no idea if what is posted on the site is actually valid. But even if it was, you can "save" money by not doing oil changes for your car, but what do you think will happen to your engine? How much will that cost you eventually? So whether the (alleged) savings will actually end up costing less (over the long term) is something that will have to be determined over time: * https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/penny_wise_and_pound_foolish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/penny_wise_and_pound_foolish
- margalabargala 1y agoConsidering that every independent estimate puts the money saved at slower to $90M than $200B, yes, running around thinking you have 5 orders of magnitude more effect than you do is a bad thing. Add to that that most of the things cut, for example weather forecasting, has returns to the economy of several times what is spent on it, and the damage to the economy is much larger than any savings.
- slightwinder 1y agoSaving a dime today, to waste a dollar tomorrow, is not good. DOGE has prominently trading long-term-benefits for short-term-gains. Some are already showing today, but many will show their harm in years and decades, too late to fix it, and when it will cost significant more to handle them.
- trymas 1y agoI am not going to look for the information again, but this list was debunked many times in my news feed. i.e. doge says they saved some insane amount of money for some program, but most importantly, for many cases: - most of the money have been paid already, so almost nothing is saved (imagine 5 year program for 10B, but 4 years have passed, 8B has been paid and now it will not be finished); - program brings more business than it costs; - or both; It grinds my gears when musk, trump and the like bring their “run government as a business” attitude. Government is a “meta-business”. It takes care of things that businesses won’t. Roads, trains, growing and educating new generation of workers and businessmen, army, etc. thiel’s technofascist libertarian dystopian city states will crumble from lack of infrastructure or if not - more powerful states (China?) will eat them up one by one.
- actionfromafar 1y agoThe Hubris is so thick with this one. They can’t bullshit China away.
- mempko 1y agoI can look at my budget and say, "Wow I spend a lot on coffee, better stop". Are these savings a good or bad thing? You have to remember every transaction has two parties. If I stop buying coffee, maybe it's better for me, but it's not better for the coffee shops, and the coffee producers. Every transaction has two parties. So who are the parties on the receiving end of government spending? Well, it's the private sector. It's you and me. To decide if it's a good thing you need to see if stopping the spending benefits BOTH parties.
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoYou're just proving his point. How are you unaware of the multiple controversies about the basic factual nature of the claimed numbers. Never mind the lack of any viable strategy.
- codexb 1y agoThey were, but the actual cuts needed (to entitlements) are politically impossible to make.
- phkahler 1y agoElon was serious about the debt. Thats why he and Trump don't get along any more. After the initial DOGE efforts, Trump raised the debt ceiling a few trillion dollars and got a new spending bill passed that increase spending like another trillion dollars - obviously not concerned about the debt.
- miltonlost 1y ago[flagged]
- phkahler 1y agoWhy do you think otherwise? He was very clear about it long before DOGE. He viewed the debt as an existential threat to the country and believed Trump was the only candidate that might actually fix it. Looks like the joke was on Elon.
- Imnimo 1y agoWe can look at what he did when he had the opportunity to help reduce it, for one.
- phatskat 1y agoI just don’t believe Musk has any ability to reason about things from a rational perspective. Some of the best work done to address the US debt has occurred under democratic leadership, while time and again we’ve seen republicans balloon the debt.
- 20after4 1y agoWhy would you believe his clear statements to be honest?
- nerevarthelame 1y agoTrump and Musk get along fine. They sat next to each other and chatted at Charlie Kirk's funeral: https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/tech/donald-trump-elon-musk-charlie-kirk https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/tech/donald-trump-elon-musk-c...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]