6 ms·
DoGE "cut muscle, not fat"; 26K experts rehired after brutal cuts
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- LunicLynx 11mo agoIsn’t this part of Elons „process“: Delete until you deleted too much, then restore enough to make it work again, hopefully in a leaner state
- decremental 11mo ago[dead]
- Jtsummers 11mo agoThat's what the supporters said. The problem was, and is, a complete lack of deliberation, which his process doesn't provide room for. As mentioned in one of the linked discussions by ChrisArchitect, they didn't go out and actually talk to the groups they were cutting (or not cutting). The people in the field know where a lot of waste is, and having an organization, theoretically, at the level of DOGE take interest in it would have gotten things moving that just don't happen when you're 10-20 levels from those with actual authority to change policy.
- ikrenji 11mo agono one gives a shit if a tweet fails to post. can't bring the same energy into running a country, can you
- benzible 11mo agoUnfortunately, 600K people and counting are no longer in a condition to be restored... > As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/the-shutdown-of-usaid-has-already-killed-hundreds-of-thousands https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary...
- golemiprague 11mo ago[dead]
- mullingitover 11mo agoThe fallacy here is assuming Musk actually knows what he's doing (or even where he is) most of the time. He is objectively, measurably spending the majority of his waking hours tweeting, not learning or performing work of any value. There was a whole project to install a bigass gaming rig in his government office dormitory[1], because the remaining time when he wasn't tweeting he needed to play video games. [1] https://www.polygon.com/opinion/532455/elon-musk-gaming-pc-doge-office/ https://www.polygon.com/opinion/532455/elon-musk-gaming-pc-d...
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 11mo ago[dupe] 'Suddenly exposed' DOGE employees fear prosecution after Musk abandoned them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024983 Doge 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028721
- KaiserPro 11mo agoIts one of those things that's a hard lesson to learn; ideology isn't greater than experience. One of the biggest lessons I learnt when I was a younger dev is a living allegory that my manager told me: "one day the new boss came in to a budget meeting. The boss was out to make a good impression, and come out winning. The boss looked for any 'useless spend'. Looking at the budget, the Boss saw how much was being spent on cleaner. Looking around, the Boss boomed 'The place is spotless, why the fuck am I paying for cleaners. There's nothing to clean' The underlings laughed and clapped. Oh how clever the Boss was, saving such a big amount at the first budget. Needless to say the Boss was most put out when the invoice for pest removal, food standard violation and toilet cleaning landed in the next budget. " There's a reason why things are done that way. It might not be a good reason, but its still a reason. You need to find and evaluate the reason for something existing, before you fuck it up. Yes, before you ask, I did fuck up, more than once.
- yoyohello13 11mo agoI have a big legacy code base as part of my responsibility and Chesterton's Fence comes up at least once a month.
- johnnyanmac 11mo agoI'm sure every Cybersecurity firm has a story like this. It's so weird because advertising has the opposite mentality. "Well we keep getting money so it has to be working right?" So no one ever considers testing a time where they do less ads and don't pay out billions to appear on billboards.
- alistairSH 11mo agoWho’s going to prosecute them? It won’t be the Trump DOJ. They’re safe, sadly.
- bgirard 11mo agoThis is one of many frequent reminders: In some environments, how you brand and market your work (Mush with a chainsaw cutting spending comes to mind) is often more important than the work you do. Most wont bother to look at the actual results of your work.
- restes 11mo agoI don’t understand. Are you claiming the actual results of Musk’s work here were good?
- floren 11mo agoI think rather he's saying that Musk loudly declared he was slashing government waste and firing do-nothing bureaucrats, and the people who supported him never really bothered to see if that was the case or not.
- Zigurd 11mo agoI guess I'm what they derisively call a normie. Both the sink and the chainsaw seemed like red flags.
- ben_w 11mo agoI'm a massive weirdo, what I like and dislike is almost anti-correlated with public success, or at least success in American markets. You should therefore be unsurprised to learn that I laughed about the sink and had a completely neutral reaction to the chainsaw (other than who it was in support of). I should have noticed in advance that my reactions were warning signs. Unfortunately, I can also add the visual design of Cybertruck to that list — not that I'd want it on the road, obvious safety hazard from the shape, but I liked the look of it.
- johnnyanmac 11mo agobranding works as long as you let the actual people behind the curtain do the work (even if results are nowhere near the hype). DOGE actively kicked out those people (the USDS) and started pushing buttons everywhere. Your brand fails if it ends up doing the exact opposite of what you say to the point where people feel it in their day-to-day. Anyone who has even more delays when working with government stuff has DOGE in part to thank. Be it healthcare, social security, taxes, etc. We will all feel this for years to come.
- encomiast 11mo agoThis is coming out the same day two DOJ cases led by a US attorney with no previous prosecutorial experience were unceremoniously tossed out. DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology while cutting entire groups of experienced technologists like 18F. To say nothing of the CDC, whose communications are starting to look like a bad, late-night infomercials. I understand having a problem with a authority that manifests as a distrust of experts, but the combination of ignorance and arrogance is breathtaking. Hopefully 2026 can be a year of restoring some adults to positions of responsibility.
- spwa4 11mo ago> DOGE sent in a bunch of 20 somethings to "fix" the technology ... Elon Musk claims that the vast majority of decisions were made by AI modeling.
- water-data-dude 11mo agoThe transformer architecture was introduced in 2017, so they send in a bunch of 8 year olds to "fix" the technology ;)
- jorts 11mo agoIt was all incredibly reckless.
- CrossVR 11mo agoI'd trust the 20 somethings more than the AI model.
- spwa4 11mo agoI think we can all agree that the whole thing was an incredibly bad idea.
- Incipient 11mo agoLike a lot of things, the IDEA is good, the execution is trash. Absolutely everyone can get behind a more efficient government with less corruption (the idea of a business man cutting corruption is nuts). The execution however, as is often the case, was awful (leave it up to the individual to decide if that was deliberate or not).
- beanjuiceII 11mo ago[flagged]
- encomiast 11mo agoWhat I saw was that DOGE spent all their time chasing non-existent (or at most minor) problems imagined from the conspiracy theories they heard about in the media (e.g. woke contracts). They drank their own kool-aid and when they were actually given the keys they came up with nada. A total waste of everyone's time. I would be interested in knowing what specific 'major waste' DOGE found in your agency. I would also be curious, given how much latitude they were given, how your management made sure they could now go any further. What I saw was senior managers escorted from the building by security and put on administrative leave if they offered anything other than complete cooperation.
- qcnguy 11mo ago[flagged]
- fwip 11mo agoAt the risk of stretching the metaphor - fat is useful, too. In animals, a layer of fat will help you withstand 'lean times' of less nutrition or higher work. Run the body too hard without fat, and you burn muscle for short-term gain, or worse, die. Similarly, in organizations, 'fat' helps out when the workload increases or productivity decreases. Run an organization too lean, and when you need to respond to a new situation, you burn out your muscle (workers) and/or go broke. This is similar to the concept of "slack."
- Zigurd 11mo ago...said no junior associate at a private equity firm ever.
- red-iron-pine 11mo agoand, arguably, that is where this problem begins to take root
- jfengel 11mo agoThe metaphor extension is valid. If they had succeeded in just cutting fat, it might have been merely a mistake -- failing to understand how redundancy works in an organization. Instead, they cut without regard to fat content. Many of the organizations were already operating on a shoestring. We didn't have an abundance of park rangers. It wasn't "merely" a mistake. It was the application of ideology, without regard to either the principles of good governance or the law.
- vessenes 11mo ago[flagged]
- mullingitover 11mo ago> this stat in particular is not proof they were dumb or didn't implement their objectives. No argument on that point: their objectives were always graft, mixed with a sprinkling of revenge and self-promotion.
- calvinmorrison 11mo agoIts one of those things that's a hard lesson to learn; the bell is run, the canary in the coal mine is yowling yet people do not listen. Then a country, or large organization, or a business is at the end of its ropes and hard decisions have to be made. The bumbling idiots who lead us into the situation won't take the blame, the "mean guy" who makes the cuts to save the country does.
- ben_w 11mo agoWas the USA failing before Trump took power? Most would say no. World's largest economy, and while it did have problems the nation was still an aspiration for many outside it. Now it looks like the aspirations go elsewhere. And they do so because the cuts increased the problems, they did not save anything. Core point aside, a nit to pick: > the canary in the coal mine is yowling yet people do not listen If the canary is making a noise, the coal mine is safe. They get sick and die quickly in bad air.
- calvinmorrison 11mo agowell I learned two malapropisms today. One the Canary, the other blinkenlights. Regardless, governemnt spending and debt eventually gets hit with austerity if you can't grow your way out. Nobody wants to be greece.
- ndsipa_pomu 11mo ago> well I learned two malapropisms today. One the Canary, the other blinkenlights. Not malapropisms in my opinion - a malapropism is someone using the wrong word such as “She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.”
- johnnyanmac 11mo agoI'll repeat it here but: 60% of government spending is in 3 categories. Anyone who is touting a need to balance the budget and is not taking moves to hit on these 3 (Medicare, Social Security, National Defesnse) is not seriously interested in balancing the budget. DOGE did try to "fix" Social Security and caused chaos instead (and a severe example of Chesterson's Fence). They didn't touch healtchare, and Musk instead bolstered more contracts from the IMC point of view.
- CephalopodMD 11mo agoDoge cut muscle sure. They cut the bones too. They sold one of our kidneys on the black market. And then jabbed us in the eyes 3 Stooges style for good measure so we couldn't even see how bad it really was. We went in for liposuction and buccal fat removal surgery and came out the other side severely disfigured with Maralago face and a hunchback.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Herring 11mo ago> We went in for liposuction .. That's so generous it's past inaccurate. If they genuinely wanted a liposuction they wouldn't have hired their local pedophile rapist grifter to do it.
- djaouen 11mo ago[flagged]
- JohnTHaller 11mo agoAnd those $5,000 DoGE checks the Republicans promised will be coming out any day now. Along with the healthcare plan Trump promised within a couple weeks in the beginning of his first term.
- JohnTHaller 11mo agoLink in case the flaggers bring it down: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/doge-doesnt-exist-anymore-but-expert-says-its-still-not-dead/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/doge-doesnt-exis...