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Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really

Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

hnuser123456 3mo ago
The 28th amendment was affirmed by Biden near the end of his term, which states that the "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." DEI programs that offer benefits only to women are unconstitutional.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- daheza 3mo ago
  They cut much more than DEI programs. They aggressively and ignorantly cut jobs and grants which could have benefited the planet and saved lives. https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj6Q=allRecords https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...
  - yandie 3mo ago
    This government thinks bike lanes are DEI: https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportation-secretary-bike-lanes-dei https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportat... They just slap DEI on any policy they disagree with.
  - 0xy 3mo ago
    NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan via grants issued to EcoHealth Alliance. Which, even if you do not think lab leak theory is likely, is extremely reckless and incompetent. So, at best, they're funding illegal research. At worst, their research inadvertently led to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage. Exactly how many grants are necessary to make up for that, and why would you trust the agency issuing grants for illegal research to manage such a program?
    - thunderfork 3mo ago
      >NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan Even this assertion is heavily, heavily disputed: https://web.archive.org/web/20210706065130/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/18/fact-checking-senator-paul-dr-fauci-flap-over-wuhan-lab-funding/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210706065130/https://www.washi...
      - 0xy 3mo ago
        Disputed by the person who approved the funding and has a major conflict of interest? The research clearly qualifies as gain-of-function, as natural viruses' functions were modified. >Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and a critic of gain-of-function research, told the Washington Post that the EcoHealth/Wuhan lab research “was — unequivocally — gain-of-function research.” He said it “met the definition for gain-of-function research of concern under the 2014 Pause.”.
        thunderfork 3mo ago
        From the article text of its conclusion: "the EcoHealth funding was not related to the experiments, but the collection of samples." Pretty cut and dry?
dfee 3mo ago
this is non sequitor. why isn't there really much waste in federal spending? because when you cut, nobody likes it. well, no. there is pork. a better example might be: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half" - John Wanamaker
- jchw 3mo ago
  Excellent quote. It's easy to draw conclusions one way or another, but the real challenge to fixing the budget is easily just as much trying to understand what the hell is going on with it. I imagine it like if you were trying to clear hard disk space but QDirStat only gave obscure indications of what the files were and you had to go through a complex legal process to delete anything.
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  - phil21 3mo ago
    Yeah. Anyone who has worked with government agencies (federal or state, doesn't matter) knows how much waste and grift there is. Not All Agencies(tm) of course, but many. The issue is figuring out how to actually fix that. It's Chesteron's Fences all the way down. Someone smarter than I would need to figure out how to even start on the problem. The big issue though is that everyday people get exposed to the obvious inefficiencies in their day to day interactions, and don't see much if any of the big picture. So in pop-culture the meme builds up that all government spending is inefficient wastefulness. No one really talks or thinks about the stuff that just works. The same sort of problems are endemic in private industry too. As I came from a working class background and worked my way up I like to say "America is fraud from the bottom up" - since I was exposed to the lower rungs of it first. It was definitely a shock coming into the working world as a naive teenager. It would take an entire cultural shift to get much traction, imo.
  - fluoridation 3mo ago
    I think your analogy is good, but misses the mark by millimeters. Optimizing is easy when you have a giant directory in the root of the drive named "delete this later". It's difficult when you have hundreds of thousands of directories, each with 100 files, of which you actually only need 75-85. You can't just delete any whole directory, because then things break; you have to go through each one and evaluate the purpose of each file, which is an expense in itself.
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izend 3mo ago
Why did Bill Clinton execute the largest Federal cuts in the 90s and everyone said they were needed?
- yoyohello13 3mo ago
  His cuts were actually considered and targeted. He didn’t just hire a billionaire to take a chainsaw to ‘woke’ gov programs.
  - gruez 3mo ago
    But the original claim was >There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con. It sounds like you're arguing for the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job, which implies that there actually is waste is government spending.
    - yoyohello13 3mo ago
      Yeah, I don't agree with OP really. Cuts can be warranted, necessary and popular. It takes actual work to determine the best places to make cuts though. The DOGE cuts were completely vibes based and did basically nothing, especially since the big beautiful bill increased spending right after. Frankly, the main reason I hate the Trump admin is because they make policy 100% based on vibes, always choosing the most intellectually lazy way possible to implement their goals to 'fix' whatever problems they 'think' exist.
    - bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
      >But the original claim was >>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. And your response to the claim "there isn't really much waste in federal spending" is to say "what about 30 years ago, someone you probably liked got rid of a lot of things they said were wasteful"? in short, if 30 years ago someone got rid of a lot of waste in federal spending it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste in federal spending.
Jtsummers 3mo ago
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending. There's actually a lot of waste. DOGE just didn't go after it. Check out DOD and all the 9- and 10-figure programs that get canceled without delivering anything, and whose work is often useless for follow-on work. OCX is a recent example, costing around $6 billion and took so long that the program it was supposed to replace ended up just doing the work instead. Essentially nothing of OCX will be retained. This isn't really unusual in the DOD.
- TitaRusell 3mo ago
  None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway. Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.
  - jimt1234 3mo ago
    I agree with the sentiment here, however, back in the 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a reduction in military spending. Military bases were closing; many of my friends/peers were discharged from service, and so on. And then 9/11 happened and military spending has skyrocketed ever since. Coincidence? Hmmm?
    - TitaRusell 3mo ago
      Trump was famously elected as the big isolationist candidate and we know how that went...
      - watwut 3mo ago
        He was pro-Russian, thus against help to Ukraine. That is literally the extend of his isolationism. The claim he is pro peace was always transparent lie and people literally recognized it at the time.
tancop 3mo ago
there are two big exceptions to this, the military and healthcare. playing world police is incredibly wasteful and so is funding a system based on submitting to the demands of big pharma and for-profit hospitals. the problem is 50 years worth of propaganda convincing americans that all this is good and necessary and if you disagree that makes you a communist/welfare queen/terrorist supporter/woke activist. at least now with gen z even the far right agrees that foreign wars are a bad idea.
- gruez 3mo ago
  >and for-profit hospitals. but only 36% are for-profit? https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership
  - gowld 3mo ago
    Medical services are for-profit, not the hospitals. The hospitals funnel money to for-profit vendors.
- johnrgrace 3mo ago
  The US has made an active policy decision for decades to be the world police, flowing from that policy spending on world policing isn't automatically waste unless it's highly inefficient.
  - kridsdale1 3mo ago
    It’s money well spent if you view the cost of not doing it as another war that leaves half the world’s industrial capacity in literal ruins as happened several times before. I’m not saying this is true, but it’s the motivation.
    - rileymat2 3mo ago
      A war that was very good for what the US economic juggernaut has become. We may be significantly better off maintaining great relationships with our Western Hemisphere countries and let the oceans protect us.
nananana9 3mo ago
There's plenty of waste. It doesn't matter how much you pour at the top of a leaky pipeline, very little of it will make its way down to the desired recipients. You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare for what can at best be described as mediocre outcomes. The Netherlands spends $6000 and is near the tops of the charts when it comes to quality. What's the ratio of effectiveness per dollar we're looking at here? 5 to 1? It doesn't matter whether or not people like it when you cut, you have to if your want your country to exist in 50 years. But just as importantly you have to get rid of the leeches in the middle of the pipe and make sure the money that's left is actually doing work for you.
- ivraatiems 3mo ago
  The spend is on private health insurance going to for-profit middlemen. It's not mostly on the government. People love to crow about Medicare and Medicaid (safety net government-run insurance) waste but the vast majority of "waste" is the record profits put up by private companies.
  - kansface 3mo ago
    Insurance companies don't make much money, actually. Hospitals, physicians, and pharma are at the top of the list (60% or so of total spending). Total insurance overhead is perhaps between 10 and 20%.
    - retornam 3mo ago
      please cite your sources, we can't take your comment at face value without citations.
      - kansface 3mo ago
        I asked ChatGPT of course, and the response roughly corresponded to my expectations so I went no further. Doctors make way more here than elsewhere (British doctors aren’t making 500-750k a year), pharma makes most of its money here, and hospitals charge an arm and a leg - it all checks out, no? Alternatively, if insurance were straight up responsible for doubling health care costs in any easily attributable way, we could easily get rid of it and would have done so by now. The only reason it can continue to exist is that it occupies a no-man’s land of utility.
tyjen 3mo ago
"There isn't really much waste in federal spending." That's debatable, because of all the pork programs that are snuck into large, omnibus spending bills. However, even that could be sold as, "one man's trash is another man's treasure" type of scenario; ergo, no waste! I challenge anyone to read through the budget proposals and see what was authorized, it's interesting to say the least.
lenerdenator 3mo ago
At this point, spending isn't the only problem, either. We need to increase revenues. It's thought that the IRS foregoes collecting hundreds of billions of dollars each year[0]. That's a significant chunk of the Federal government's discretionary spending each budget cycle. People who say they want to run the government like a business seem to ignore the fact that no business has ever remained financially sound without steady revenues. It simply cannot be done. [0]https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-each-year-due-to-unpaid-taxes/ https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...
mothballed 3mo ago
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- rlt 3mo ago
  You wouldn’t even take social security benefits despite (I assume) having been forced to pay social security taxes? Even Ayn Rand took social security benefits. Some people point to that as hypocrisy, but I feel if the government forced you to pay into a program it is moral to take back from it (though not more than you contributed), even if you morally object to the program overall.
- wat10000 3mo ago
  I can understand preferring to handle your own affairs rather than pay into SS. But why would you be so opposed to it that you'd rather die than receive SS payments?
  - mothballed 3mo ago
    The level of unprovoked violence used to enforce social security I find unjustifiable just to satisfy my material requirements.
    - wat10000 3mo ago
      Do you take that attitude towards all other government services?
      - mothballed 3mo ago
        Yes, I went out of my way to live in a place with no public roads, no public utilites, no fire, and no police and in a house built with no government inspections. Whenever there is a way to avoid interacting with public services I do everything I can to avoid them.
        hnfong 3mo ago
        Well, computing and AI technology is going to be nationalized and state owned in a couple years. Good luck.
rlt 3mo ago
“Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons“ It’s essentially self-evident that someone receiving money or benefits paid for by others considers those benefits to be “important.”
Executor 3mo ago
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TheAceOfHearts 3mo ago
It all started off as obvious bullshit: in 2024 Elon Musk was claiming that he could cut $2 trillion in waste, fraud, and abuse. He then walked that back to $1 trillion in cuts, but he didn't even get close.
WalterBright 3mo ago
The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all.
- jayGlow 3mo ago
  test scores have actually gone down in a number of states I don't think whatever the department of education is doing is actually working.
  - retornam 3mo ago
    State governments administer education separately, the Department of Education's job is to make sure they are following federal law. The Department mainly administers federal programs that dish out funding to states. Y'all really don't understand how education works in America and your comments make it clear for all to see.
    - breakwaterlabs 3mo ago
      By what yardstick should we then measure the DoEd's performance-per-dollar, or determine whether it represents "waste"? Because it seems to me that a chief indicator that waste likely exists is an inability to show ROI.
      - WalterBright 3mo ago
        Waste exists when there is no incentive to eliminate it.
- great_tankard 3mo ago
  Are you saying that the priorities of the Department of Education have been misplaced, or that it was a mistake to have a Department of Education at all? "Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.
throwawaypath 3mo ago
>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. "[Pushing MAGA initiatives] is important to somebody for good reasons." Yes, zealots love pushing their ideology. In about 15 seconds I found the following: Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching These are pure waste pushed by religious zealots. https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Awards.csv https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...
WalterBright 3mo ago
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending. When there is no profit motive, there is no motive to be efficient.
- Jtsummers 3mo ago
  And when there is a profit motive, and no meaningful competition, there is also no motive to be efficient or effective. This is what you'll find in many of the large DOD contracts. So it's a compounding effect. It's down to whether the overseers of the contracts care enough to rein in the contractors, or to do just enough to stay on this side of legal. And the contractors certainly aren't doing charity work, so they'll balloon the costs up to the point of significant pushback and then tighten it down a bit.
  - WalterBright 3mo ago
    And when you get cost plus contracts, the incentive is to maximize costs. With government agencies, the incentive is to spend 100% of the budget, otherwise their budget will get cut the next year. Some years back, "Frontline" did an episode on dentist businesses. The government had a new program where they paid dentists who did dental surgery on poor people. There was a sudden drastic rise on dental surgeries on poor people, and little of it was medically justifiable. "Frontline" was shocked, shocked to see this happen. But of course, it was the obvious and inevitable result of how the government issued the payments.
baby 3mo ago
You’re wrong. The execution failed because it was backed by (white supremacist) ideology. COGE is a new attempt at the idea taking place in New York, and much better orchestrated.
lacy_tinpot 3mo ago
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending What makes the federal any different than any other organization?
dennis_jeeves2 3mo ago
>When you actually cut, nobody likes it. Yep, the section of people that lose out will make a noise. >There isn't really much waste in federal spending. With *cumulative taxation (state+ fed) being in the region of 60% or about 2/3 of one's income where do I even start to untangle the huge mess of govt spending - waste or otherwise? Cumulative= income tax Fed + State, inflation, payroll tax, Regulatory burden, Capital gains tax, tarrifs, sales tax, property tax, city tax, school tax etc.
esalman 3mo ago
I think flying apache helicopters to salute a musician at his home or beachgoers on 4th of July counts as waste, and are not really important to anybody. So are the remodeling of reflecting pool and ballroom construction.
IshKebab 3mo ago
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending. I don't know much about US spending but if it's anything like the UK I doubt that. There's plenty of waste. People only end up thinking there isn't, because it's extremely difficult to cut just the waste, so cuts are usually equally to waste and useful functions. But that doesn't mean there's no waste! The problem is to cut the waste you pretty much have to spend a ton of money hiring highly skilled and motivated employees, and then fight decades of accumulation of cultural acceptance of the waste. Basically impossible.
breakwaterlabs 3mo ago
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending I do not believe anyone who has consulted in federal IT or worked on contracts is capable of making such a statement. All of the motivations for all parties are heavily bent towards waste, and in fact any attempt to make things more efficient (reduce headcount, for instance) would be recieved poorly by department heads and contractors. As one example, a department head who reduces staff by 20% has just reduced their own next year's budget AND kneecapped their resume.
Rapzid 3mo ago
The entire administration is. It's the most overtly wasteful and fraudulent admin of my lifetime anyway(so going back to Reagan). They disgraced the People's House. Gilded it so the POTUS could feel like a king/emperor/tzar. Destroyed the East Wing to build a ball room. Initially said it would be privately funded (which is itself a hugely corrupt act having individuals and corporations directly fund hundreds of millions to a vanity project for the POTUS). But then tried to raid the public coffers for it to the tune of over a billion dollars. Accepted a plane from Qatar and spent millions rebuilding it. Now saying they are going to donate it to the Trump library(aka steal from the public). All the contracts going to family and friends? The overt pay-to-play politics? Yeah, of course DOGE was BS.

hnuser123456 3mo ago

The 28th amendment was affirmed by Biden near the end of his term, which states that the "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." DEI programs that offer benefits only to women are unconstitutional.

deleted 3mo ago
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daheza 3mo ago
They cut much more than DEI programs. They aggressively and ignorantly cut jobs and grants which could have benefited the planet and saved lives. https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj6Q=allRecords https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...
- yandie 3mo ago
  This government thinks bike lanes are DEI: https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportation-secretary-bike-lanes-dei https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportat... They just slap DEI on any policy they disagree with.
- 0xy 3mo ago
  NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan via grants issued to EcoHealth Alliance. Which, even if you do not think lab leak theory is likely, is extremely reckless and incompetent. So, at best, they're funding illegal research. At worst, their research inadvertently led to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage. Exactly how many grants are necessary to make up for that, and why would you trust the agency issuing grants for illegal research to manage such a program?
  - thunderfork 3mo ago
    >NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan Even this assertion is heavily, heavily disputed: https://web.archive.org/web/20210706065130/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/18/fact-checking-senator-paul-dr-fauci-flap-over-wuhan-lab-funding/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210706065130/https://www.washi...
    - 0xy 3mo ago
      Disputed by the person who approved the funding and has a major conflict of interest? The research clearly qualifies as gain-of-function, as natural viruses' functions were modified. >Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and a critic of gain-of-function research, told the Washington Post that the EcoHealth/Wuhan lab research “was — unequivocally — gain-of-function research.” He said it “met the definition for gain-of-function research of concern under the 2014 Pause.”.
      - thunderfork 3mo ago
        From the article text of its conclusion: "the EcoHealth funding was not related to the experiments, but the collection of samples." Pretty cut and dry?

dfee 3mo ago

this is non sequitor. why isn't there really much waste in federal spending? because when you cut, nobody likes it. well, no. there is pork. a better example might be: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half" - John Wanamaker

jchw 3mo ago
Excellent quote. It's easy to draw conclusions one way or another, but the real challenge to fixing the budget is easily just as much trying to understand what the hell is going on with it. I imagine it like if you were trying to clear hard disk space but QDirStat only gave obscure indications of what the files were and you had to go through a complex legal process to delete anything.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- phil21 3mo ago
  Yeah. Anyone who has worked with government agencies (federal or state, doesn't matter) knows how much waste and grift there is. Not All Agencies(tm) of course, but many. The issue is figuring out how to actually fix that. It's Chesteron's Fences all the way down. Someone smarter than I would need to figure out how to even start on the problem. The big issue though is that everyday people get exposed to the obvious inefficiencies in their day to day interactions, and don't see much if any of the big picture. So in pop-culture the meme builds up that all government spending is inefficient wastefulness. No one really talks or thinks about the stuff that just works. The same sort of problems are endemic in private industry too. As I came from a working class background and worked my way up I like to say "America is fraud from the bottom up" - since I was exposed to the lower rungs of it first. It was definitely a shock coming into the working world as a naive teenager. It would take an entire cultural shift to get much traction, imo.
- fluoridation 3mo ago
  I think your analogy is good, but misses the mark by millimeters. Optimizing is easy when you have a giant directory in the root of the drive named "delete this later". It's difficult when you have hundreds of thousands of directories, each with 100 files, of which you actually only need 75-85. You can't just delete any whole directory, because then things break; you have to go through each one and evaluate the purpose of each file, which is an expense in itself.

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izend 3mo ago

Why did Bill Clinton execute the largest Federal cuts in the 90s and everyone said they were needed?

yoyohello13 3mo ago
His cuts were actually considered and targeted. He didn’t just hire a billionaire to take a chainsaw to ‘woke’ gov programs.
- gruez 3mo ago
  But the original claim was >There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con. It sounds like you're arguing for the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job, which implies that there actually is waste is government spending.
  - yoyohello13 3mo ago
    Yeah, I don't agree with OP really. Cuts can be warranted, necessary and popular. It takes actual work to determine the best places to make cuts though. The DOGE cuts were completely vibes based and did basically nothing, especially since the big beautiful bill increased spending right after. Frankly, the main reason I hate the Trump admin is because they make policy 100% based on vibes, always choosing the most intellectually lazy way possible to implement their goals to 'fix' whatever problems they 'think' exist.
  - bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
    >But the original claim was >>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. And your response to the claim "there isn't really much waste in federal spending" is to say "what about 30 years ago, someone you probably liked got rid of a lot of things they said were wasteful"? in short, if 30 years ago someone got rid of a lot of waste in federal spending it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste in federal spending.

Jtsummers 3mo ago

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending. There's actually a lot of waste. DOGE just didn't go after it. Check out DOD and all the 9- and 10-figure programs that get canceled without delivering anything, and whose work is often useless for follow-on work. OCX is a recent example, costing around $6 billion and took so long that the program it was supposed to replace ended up just doing the work instead. Essentially nothing of OCX will be retained. This isn't really unusual in the DOD.

TitaRusell 3mo ago
None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway. Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.
- jimt1234 3mo ago
  I agree with the sentiment here, however, back in the 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a reduction in military spending. Military bases were closing; many of my friends/peers were discharged from service, and so on. And then 9/11 happened and military spending has skyrocketed ever since. Coincidence? Hmmm?
  - TitaRusell 3mo ago
    Trump was famously elected as the big isolationist candidate and we know how that went...
    - watwut 3mo ago
      He was pro-Russian, thus against help to Ukraine. That is literally the extend of his isolationism. The claim he is pro peace was always transparent lie and people literally recognized it at the time.

tancop 3mo ago

there are two big exceptions to this, the military and healthcare. playing world police is incredibly wasteful and so is funding a system based on submitting to the demands of big pharma and for-profit hospitals. the problem is 50 years worth of propaganda convincing americans that all this is good and necessary and if you disagree that makes you a communist/welfare queen/terrorist supporter/woke activist. at least now with gen z even the far right agrees that foreign wars are a bad idea.

gruez 3mo ago
>and for-profit hospitals. but only 36% are for-profit? https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership
- gowld 3mo ago
  Medical services are for-profit, not the hospitals. The hospitals funnel money to for-profit vendors.
johnrgrace 3mo ago
The US has made an active policy decision for decades to be the world police, flowing from that policy spending on world policing isn't automatically waste unless it's highly inefficient.
- kridsdale1 3mo ago
  It’s money well spent if you view the cost of not doing it as another war that leaves half the world’s industrial capacity in literal ruins as happened several times before. I’m not saying this is true, but it’s the motivation.
  - rileymat2 3mo ago
    A war that was very good for what the US economic juggernaut has become. We may be significantly better off maintaining great relationships with our Western Hemisphere countries and let the oceans protect us.

nananana9 3mo ago

There's plenty of waste. It doesn't matter how much you pour at the top of a leaky pipeline, very little of it will make its way down to the desired recipients. You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare for what can at best be described as mediocre outcomes. The Netherlands spends $6000 and is near the tops of the charts when it comes to quality. What's the ratio of effectiveness per dollar we're looking at here? 5 to 1? It doesn't matter whether or not people like it when you cut, you have to if your want your country to exist in 50 years. But just as importantly you have to get rid of the leeches in the middle of the pipe and make sure the money that's left is actually doing work for you.

ivraatiems 3mo ago
The spend is on private health insurance going to for-profit middlemen. It's not mostly on the government. People love to crow about Medicare and Medicaid (safety net government-run insurance) waste but the vast majority of "waste" is the record profits put up by private companies.
- kansface 3mo ago
  Insurance companies don't make much money, actually. Hospitals, physicians, and pharma are at the top of the list (60% or so of total spending). Total insurance overhead is perhaps between 10 and 20%.
  - retornam 3mo ago
    please cite your sources, we can't take your comment at face value without citations.
    - kansface 3mo ago
      I asked ChatGPT of course, and the response roughly corresponded to my expectations so I went no further. Doctors make way more here than elsewhere (British doctors aren’t making 500-750k a year), pharma makes most of its money here, and hospitals charge an arm and a leg - it all checks out, no? Alternatively, if insurance were straight up responsible for doubling health care costs in any easily attributable way, we could easily get rid of it and would have done so by now. The only reason it can continue to exist is that it occupies a no-man’s land of utility.

tyjen 3mo ago

"There isn't really much waste in federal spending." That's debatable, because of all the pork programs that are snuck into large, omnibus spending bills. However, even that could be sold as, "one man's trash is another man's treasure" type of scenario; ergo, no waste! I challenge anyone to read through the budget proposals and see what was authorized, it's interesting to say the least.

lenerdenator 3mo ago

At this point, spending isn't the only problem, either. We need to increase revenues. It's thought that the IRS foregoes collecting hundreds of billions of dollars each year[0]. That's a significant chunk of the Federal government's discretionary spending each budget cycle. People who say they want to run the government like a business seem to ignore the fact that no business has ever remained financially sound without steady revenues. It simply cannot be done. [0]https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-each-year-due-to-unpaid-taxes/ https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...

mothballed 3mo ago

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rlt 3mo ago
You wouldn’t even take social security benefits despite (I assume) having been forced to pay social security taxes? Even Ayn Rand took social security benefits. Some people point to that as hypocrisy, but I feel if the government forced you to pay into a program it is moral to take back from it (though not more than you contributed), even if you morally object to the program overall.
wat10000 3mo ago
I can understand preferring to handle your own affairs rather than pay into SS. But why would you be so opposed to it that you'd rather die than receive SS payments?
- mothballed 3mo ago
  The level of unprovoked violence used to enforce social security I find unjustifiable just to satisfy my material requirements.
  - wat10000 3mo ago
    Do you take that attitude towards all other government services?
    - mothballed 3mo ago
      Yes, I went out of my way to live in a place with no public roads, no public utilites, no fire, and no police and in a house built with no government inspections. Whenever there is a way to avoid interacting with public services I do everything I can to avoid them.
      - hnfong 3mo ago
        Well, computing and AI technology is going to be nationalized and state owned in a couple years. Good luck.

rlt 3mo ago

“Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons“ It’s essentially self-evident that someone receiving money or benefits paid for by others considers those benefits to be “important.”

Executor 3mo ago

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TheAceOfHearts 3mo ago

It all started off as obvious bullshit: in 2024 Elon Musk was claiming that he could cut $2 trillion in waste, fraud, and abuse. He then walked that back to $1 trillion in cuts, but he didn't even get close.

WalterBright 3mo ago

The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all.

jayGlow 3mo ago
test scores have actually gone down in a number of states I don't think whatever the department of education is doing is actually working.
- retornam 3mo ago
  State governments administer education separately, the Department of Education's job is to make sure they are following federal law. The Department mainly administers federal programs that dish out funding to states. Y'all really don't understand how education works in America and your comments make it clear for all to see.
  - breakwaterlabs 3mo ago
    By what yardstick should we then measure the DoEd's performance-per-dollar, or determine whether it represents "waste"? Because it seems to me that a chief indicator that waste likely exists is an inability to show ROI.
    - WalterBright 3mo ago
      Waste exists when there is no incentive to eliminate it.
great_tankard 3mo ago
Are you saying that the priorities of the Department of Education have been misplaced, or that it was a mistake to have a Department of Education at all? "Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.

throwawaypath 3mo ago

>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. "[Pushing MAGA initiatives] is important to somebody for good reasons." Yes, zealots love pushing their ideology. In about 15 seconds I found the following: Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching These are pure waste pushed by religious zealots. https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Awards.csv https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...

WalterBright 3mo ago

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending. When there is no profit motive, there is no motive to be efficient.

Jtsummers 3mo ago
And when there is a profit motive, and no meaningful competition, there is also no motive to be efficient or effective. This is what you'll find in many of the large DOD contracts. So it's a compounding effect. It's down to whether the overseers of the contracts care enough to rein in the contractors, or to do just enough to stay on this side of legal. And the contractors certainly aren't doing charity work, so they'll balloon the costs up to the point of significant pushback and then tighten it down a bit.
- WalterBright 3mo ago
  And when you get cost plus contracts, the incentive is to maximize costs. With government agencies, the incentive is to spend 100% of the budget, otherwise their budget will get cut the next year. Some years back, "Frontline" did an episode on dentist businesses. The government had a new program where they paid dentists who did dental surgery on poor people. There was a sudden drastic rise on dental surgeries on poor people, and little of it was medically justifiable. "Frontline" was shocked, shocked to see this happen. But of course, it was the obvious and inevitable result of how the government issued the payments.

baby 3mo ago

You’re wrong. The execution failed because it was backed by (white supremacist) ideology. COGE is a new attempt at the idea taking place in New York, and much better orchestrated.

lacy_tinpot 3mo ago

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending What makes the federal any different than any other organization?

dennis_jeeves2 3mo ago

>When you actually cut, nobody likes it. Yep, the section of people that lose out will make a noise. >There isn't really much waste in federal spending. With *cumulative taxation (state+ fed) being in the region of 60% or about 2/3 of one's income where do I even start to untangle the huge mess of govt spending - waste or otherwise? Cumulative= income tax Fed + State, inflation, payroll tax, Regulatory burden, Capital gains tax, tarrifs, sales tax, property tax, city tax, school tax etc.

esalman 3mo ago

I think flying apache helicopters to salute a musician at his home or beachgoers on 4th of July counts as waste, and are not really important to anybody. So are the remodeling of reflecting pool and ballroom construction.

IshKebab 3mo ago

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending. I don't know much about US spending but if it's anything like the UK I doubt that. There's plenty of waste. People only end up thinking there isn't, because it's extremely difficult to cut just the waste, so cuts are usually equally to waste and useful functions. But that doesn't mean there's no waste! The problem is to cut the waste you pretty much have to spend a ton of money hiring highly skilled and motivated employees, and then fight decades of accumulation of cultural acceptance of the waste. Basically impossible.

breakwaterlabs 3mo ago

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending I do not believe anyone who has consulted in federal IT or worked on contracts is capable of making such a statement. All of the motivations for all parties are heavily bent towards waste, and in fact any attempt to make things more efficient (reduce headcount, for instance) would be recieved poorly by department heads and contractors. As one example, a department head who reduces staff by 20% has just reduced their own next year's budget AND kneecapped their resume.

Rapzid 3mo ago

The entire administration is. It's the most overtly wasteful and fraudulent admin of my lifetime anyway(so going back to Reagan). They disgraced the People's House. Gilded it so the POTUS could feel like a king/emperor/tzar. Destroyed the East Wing to build a ball room. Initially said it would be privately funded (which is itself a hugely corrupt act having individuals and corporations directly fund hundreds of millions to a vanity project for the POTUS). But then tried to raid the public coffers for it to the tune of over a billion dollars. Accepted a plane from Qatar and spent millions rebuilding it. Now saying they are going to donate it to the Trump library(aka steal from the public). All the contracts going to family and friends? The overt pay-to-play politics? Yeah, of course DOGE was BS.