For those curious about a more thoughtful model of government reform--which is still sorely needed--the original US Digital Service team just published a bunch of interviews:
https://usdigitalserviceorigins.org/interviews/
I was working for a federal contractor when we had a release go out that had a problem. Some digital service folks got sent in, arriving about the same day we figured out the environmental problem planted by the previous contractor for the program. The digital services folks were extremely useful in getting us in contact with other gov folks to speed up releasing the fix, but otherwise they didn't do anything. They took all the credit afterward though.
I'm a federal employee, working as a software engineer for the Department of Defense on embedded systems which are used on aircraft.
The first few months of DOGE were complete chaos. The senior executive service received conflicting information from one week to the next. Our operations were severely impacted without any benefit. We couldn't even go to test ranges for field testing.In addition to that, the five bullet points were a major security issue due to classification by aggregation.
Although DOGE is gone, we're still experiencing the fallout. There's more red tape than ever before. Everything requires multiple levels of approval - even ordering a replacement capacitor has to go up three levels of management. We're forced to bring defense contractors to our field tests because it's a fight to bring more than one federal employee, almost doubling the cost of any trip. It took half a year for us to even be allowed to mail equipment to various depots. Now, we're effectively forced to pay contractors for tasks we could do organically.
More privatization will drive up cost in the defense industry up significantly. I.E, an unnamed military contractor wants more than 5 million dollars for a line item breakdown for a quote they gave us.
It's not the DoD, but this is happening out in the open at DHS where the secretary is requiring her personal sign-off on any purchase over $100k[0] when the previous limit was $25M.
Deployments of critical resources, such as tactical and specialized search and rescue teams, were delayed as a result of a budget restriction requiring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem to approve every purchase, contract and grant over $100,000[1]
> It's not the DoD, but this is happening out in the open at DHS where the secretary is requiring her personal sign-off on any purchase over $100k[0] when the previous limit was $25M.
This is EXACTLY what the PE firm did to my company after acquisition to "cut costs" and make numbers go up. I used to be able to sign off on my own purchase reqs up to $2000. That allowed me to easily acquire just about anything I needed and get my work done. Now I have to have EVERYTHING signed off on by upper management. As If I was an irresponsible spendthrift throwing money away on spare parts we actually needed. It's useless performative micromanagement by incompetent people. It's honestly insulting.
Government doesn't turn a profit, so the only way to get more money and prestige in the government is to have a higher headcount under you and more power. A good way to get more power is to add a bunch of red tape and also to slow down all the processes so you need more people and thus require a higher headcount which makes your management more prestigious.
All the incentives line up that this will only get worse.
"Unnamed military contractors" should be forced into competitive bids. Ditch the favoritism and let any US corporation bid on it and including bidding on the jobs where you need 3 layers of management to buy a capacitor when done by government employees. You can go out and buy a $500 Ar-15 on the private market that's about as good as an M4/M16 the military is paying thousands for -- that's the result of an actually free market for M-16/Ar-15 and the same thing can be brought to the rest of defense contracting.
Not defending DOGE, but it should be noted that much of what DoD pays for when it buys weapons is not the weapons, but reliable weapons and the logistics of supporting them under combat conditions. The apparently inflated unit costs often are given without looking at what's actually included contractually in those costs. Sure, any citizen can buy an AR-15 for $500, but that citizen isn't paying for a support structure that has to be able to deliver ammo or spare parts or spare units in a combat zone in time of war. Nor is that citizen paying for the guarantee that the contractor will be able to continue to produce all those things in the necessary quantities in time of war. Nor is the citizen paying for reliability guarantees about the weapon working under adverse conditions.
It's unfortunate that the reporting around such things doesn't actually dig into all this, but just gives quick sound bites without any real analysis.
I should have been more specific. I understand the sustainment cost of weapon systems and the like - which, while still too costly, is partially justified.
I was referring to the inflated cost the DoD pays for everyday items. I.E, having to pay double or triple the market rate for things like office chairs, computer headsets, and WIFI dongles. There's no sustainment cost. Just an inflated price.
I apologize in advance for not giving exact numbers - I'd rather not tie my posts to specific programs in the unlikely case that someone I work with reads my posts.
We received a quote containing two lines:
"Hardware Cost - xx million"
"Software Cost - xx million"
There was no further information. No detail on how those numbers were derived, nor what we were paying for other than the "hardware and software needed for organic sustainment of the system in question. The defense contractor wanted over 5 million for any additional detail. We wouldn't know whether we receive documentation, schematics, etc without paying additional money. I don't mean that they wanted us to pay more for things like documentation or schematics. We wouldn't know what we are receiving until we pay.
We were providing engineering support for a DoD Program Office which normally deals in multi-billion dollar acquisitions. They treated ~5 million as pocket change. Over multiple system acquisitions, that adds up fast.
One thing that really disgusted me about DOGE is that we did have a very successful reduction in the scope of the federal bureaucracy 30+ years ago, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Rei... . But we didn't want a thoughtful, respectful plan for reducing the scope of government, we wanted a WWE bomb thrower.
Side note, I think Al Gore was one of the most effective politicians of the last 50 years who wasn't president and he got tons of shit for it: 1. He never said he "invented the Internet", but he did give critical federal support to the Internet in its early days when he was a Senator, and technologists who actually know what they are talking about credit him with this, 2. He implemented the most successful reduction in the federal bureaucracy since WWII, 3. He conceded the 2000 election for the good of the country - he did not foment an uprising to try to fulfill his narcissistic supply, 4. He made many people aware of the dangers of climate change (though this may have admittedly backfired as some people interpret anything that comes from a Democratic voice as a "liberal hoax").
He said "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet, I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country", which is very very close to being indistinguishable from "inventing the internet"
> Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
> Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
> No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to
our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
> very very close to being indistinguishable from "inventing the internet"
For a native English speaker, no it isn't.
Also fwiw, if you weren't working in the field at that time, experiencing the process of connecting to the then Internet, I don't think you can comment on this authoritatively.
Your own quote you posted didn't say "I created the Internet". It said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet", which when coming from a politician is most reasonably interpreted as creating the conditions and policies (e.g. funding and regulatory framework) to make the Internet possible, which, according to the inventors of TCP/IP, he did.
I create a Local Area Network by connecting and configuring devices to a local router, as opposed to inventing Local Area Networking hardware equipment and respective protocols.
I still feel like people are missing the deeper problem with DOGE. Yes, they’re dismantling the government, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s stupid, reckless and cruel. But most Americans want the government reduced, and so we end up arguing over “effectiveness”. Notice how half the comments here follow that track.
The deeper problem is that the richest man in the world bought his own department of the federal government of The United States and was allowed unchecked power within it. Nothing like this has ever occurred before in American history. The only thing that got him out was that Washington isn’t big enough for two egos as big as Musk and Trump, and one had to go. And since Musk’s people are still embedded in there, I would bet that he still has plenty of influence.
For those in the red tribe that support this, would you support George Soros or Bill Gates buying their own department and using it to rearrange the government to fit their will? Well, shit like that is now on the table. Good job.
You can look to the writing of major political actors on the right and see that they just want to hurt people. People wrote that they want federal workers to be traumatized. They want to make life so unappealing for people working for institutions they hate (the bureaucracy and universities being the big two) that people simply leave and the institutions wither and die.
I have friends who work hard for the federal government to do things that people love. That curator who works at the museum of natural history to bring joy to a child who gets to learn something amazing about our world? That curator broke down sobbing at work multiple times this year. That's what they want.
Your comment made me really, really sad. Please tell your friend that there is someone out there, someone random, someone who will never meet them, who appreciates them and the work they've done over their career.
If you are on social media, maybe reach out? Like museum pages. Comment. Did you go to DC on a school trip? Maybe post it's impacts, or what you enjoyed/remember? Or just 'imagine a job where you get to positively impact so many peoples' lives! You all are doing good things!"
We need to tell each other we are seen. We aren't alone. To keep our heads up. We will get through this together if we keep our heads up. Only when they can force us to cry alone do they win. They are weak and want unnatural things, which is why they are flooding the zone trying to break us all down separately and make us feel isolated/powerless. Every football team defense 'floods the zone' every field goal/extra point kick. It doesn't work. Don't let it work here.
We aren't brave and will just complain from the sidelines, but we can at least cheer on those not on the sidelines. It's never been easier to express support. Hit up peoples/institutions socials and tell them they are seen, tell them keep their heads up because we do support them.
Saying "red tribe" is a pretty dead giveaway of, say, a certain way of thinking.
George Soros or Bill Gates will never be able to buy their own department for reasons that the people with the tribalist lens can't seem to grasp: the democratic coalition is FAR more principled and fractured / diverse than the republican coalition. I can already hear people howl for evidence; for evidence, look no farther than the party platforms for the last few electoral cycles.
A lot of things that seemed impossible a few years ago are now old hat. The Democrats wouldn’t be so hamfisted, but never say never.
And my point wasn’t that the Democrats would. It’s that the Democrats could and may even be forced to, in order to win an election. If JD Vance is selling a department for $500M, from a game theoretical perspective, the Democrats may have no choice.
The whole problem is that all the norms that allowed the republic to function are being stripped away, and this is one of the biggest violations of our norms to date, yet no one has even mentioned this aspect.
> the democratic coalition is FAR more principled and fractured / diverse than the republican coalition.
_Currently_. On the other hand, realistically, it's impossible to imagine this happening under, say, Bush (either version of Bush), and yet now here we are. Things change.
This makes a fair bit more sense when you realize that hierarchy and the resulting feudalist structures are basically the core tenets of right-wing ideology. On paper, the right should have a harder time working together: The fascists, theocrats, and kleptocrats have wildly divergent worldviews. However, more fundamental than any of their specific views, they all believe in rigid power hierarchies. Which means to bring one branch of the right into the fold of whichever group currently holds the most power, all they really have to do is win over the upper echelons of the weaker faction, and then secure them a place (not necessarily even that highly ranked of a place) within their power structure.
Meanwhile, across the isle, a vague alignment in short term goals is basically all that keeps the left and the liberals together as a coalition. Whereas the right can say and do just about anything as long as it doesn't jeopardize their direct underlings' position in the overarching power structure, even small, strategic concessions can obliterate what little trust leaders have built up over the years.
This petty score keeping is an intentional dodge of the real problems: This administration is doing ham-fisted execution of their strategy and trying to go around the law wherever they can get away with it.
Any country that enforces immigration laws (almost all of them) will be constantly deporting people. Saying a lot of people were deported under Obama is an intentional dodge around the glaring fact that we have masked ICE agents doing ham-fisted raids and doing extraordinarily dumb things like detaining factory workers at an important battery plant just because.
Obama didn’t bring in an external, unvetted team of 20 year olds to run amok and abjectly humiliate the Federal workforce. He also kept services running. And he did it within the law.
Get all of that? That’s what he didn’t do that DOGE did do.
I don't think you realize how good your first link makes Obama look and how badly it supports your claims, did you even read it?
Half that article is about cutting healthcare costs for the American people, which is a good thing that Republicans haven't had any results on since Nixon.
The other half demonstrates very plainly that Obama worked with Congress to pass laws to streamline spending and cut out middlemen, and that's notable because DOGE completely circumvented congress who is supposed to be the sole possessor of the power of the purse.
That part of the article pointed out that Obama cut the deficit by trillions, which of course Republicans have refused to do in the last few decades (with the Big Beautiful Bill and Tax Cut and Jobs Act both ballooning the deficit).
>and that's notable because DOGE completely circumvented congress who is supposed to be the sole possessor of the power of the purse.
Congress has the constitutional power of the purse but that refers specifically to raising and appropriating money[].
The executive has the power to actually go out and spend the appropriated money. Congress tried to usurp that power around the time of Nixon by stopping executive impoundment. But it's not clear if that's constitutional; it might be now under current SCOTUS interpretations but I wouldn't be surprised if SCOTUS reviews it and find that to be incorrect.
Personally I think congress usurping power of impoundment is a bright and clear violation of checks and balances built into the constitution that requires two branches to approve of spending before it can actually get spent. DOGE was a valiant attempt to bring us back into constitutional compliance.
"Congress—and in particular, the House of Representatives—is invested with the “power of the purse,” the ability to tax and spend public money for the national government."
But you said
"The executive has the power to actually go out and spend the appropriated money."
Most of congresses appropriations can't be faithfully executed because they largely violate the tenth amendment, appropriating functions of the federal government outside the scope authorized by the constitution and reserved to the people and states. This is exactly what DOGE was helping to keep in check.
At the times when the federal government was mostly within the constraints of the 10th amendment, federal spending was under 5% of GDP in non war-time.
The courts don't decide what the constitution is, the people that wrote and amended it did. The courts can only interpret it, often wrongly, as evidenced by the fact they routinely contradict themselves. The president has a duty to ignore any unconstitutional court ruling, as his oath requires.
No, but it says it’s his job to execute the law, not to use his discretion to pick and choose which laws to execute. The entire purpose of the constitution is to balance powers, not to ensure it’s never at any time violated. Any violation of the constitution is supposed to be corrected by the balancing force of other branches.
You might think giving one branch all the power to make sure the constitution is not violated might lead to a situation where it’s never violated, but what actually happens is the powers become unbalanced and the executive is free to violate the constitution at will.
Each branch can consider if law is unconstitutional. It takes all three in agreement to execute it.
The legislature is bound not to create unconstitutional laws. If the law does pass, the executive is bound not to execute it. If the law is executed, the court is bound to strike it (you can argue the court is also bound to strike it even if it's not executed, but Knife Rights v Garland for example found there is at least in that case no standing to challenge a non-executed law).
It's not that one branch has all the power so much as each branch has veto power to stop the unconstitutional law from actually coming into effect. The power to actually do something takes all 3 branches but the power to stop something only takes one. Even the founders understood this -- Jefferson helped block the Sedition Act and actively encouraged states to nullify and avert its enforcement. Obama and later presidents stopped the enforcement of many prohibitions on recreational intrastate commerce of marijuana, a blatantly unconstitutional federal law, which nonetheless still stands (enforcement of medical marijuana is defunded but not recreational). These increased our compliance with the constitution, without creating dictators.
The constitution states the bounds of the government, then gives the president no authority to outstep them. The 10th amendment is what you seek, it stops POTUS from executing extra-constitutional law as it would outstep the powers outlined for the federal government in the constitution.
That is, the constitution limits POTUS powers to ones explicitly given. If the law exceeds it, he cannot implement it, regardless of the opinion of the judiciary or congress. This is bound on all 3 branches, and due to the design of the constitution it only takes one branch blocking a law to stop it.
Now, you state we need to challenge laws before the president can stop enforce them. Riddle me this, why is it the federal courts won't even let you challenge the federal Switchblade Act, because they state no standing as it hasn't been enforced (by their definition) in over 10 years (Knife Rights v Garland) []. How could what you say possibly be true if the law isn't even allowed to be challenged? If what you said was true, and POTUS had to enforce the law, then there would always be standing by the people jeopardized by it to challenge it. The courts wont even let you do what you've asked.
> Each branch can consider if law is unconstitutional. It takes all three in agreement to execute it. The legislature is bound not to create unconstitutional laws. If the law does pass, the executive is bound not to execute it.
I agree the legislature is bound to not create unconstitutional laws, but the sole power the executive has under the Constitution as to the constitutionality of laws is his veto power, which was intentionally limited by the Framers:
“But it is to be remembered that this qualified negative is in no respect a violation of the rule which declares that the legislative power shall be vested in the Congress. It is not a transfer of the power of legislation to the Executive, because it does not enable him to do any thing more than to suspend the passage of a law, and is a mere check upon the legislative body, by subjecting their resolutions to revision and consideration. The power of preventing bad laws includes that of preventing good ones; and this alone would furnish a complete answer to the objection, if any could be supposed to exist. But the principal answer is, that the veto is not absolute, and that it may be overcome by two-thirds of both Houses.” - Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 73
You're saying that the President actually has an absolute veto; if he vetoes a bill, and Congress overrides the veto, you're saying the President gets the ultimate veto in that he can just claim the law is unconstitutional and refuse to implement it. So now you have to answer why the Framers would have limited the veto power if they had intended POTUS to have an ultimate veto through selective execution of laws.
> Even the founders understood this -- Jefferson helped block the Sedition Act and actively encouraged states to nullify and avert its enforcement.
The Sedition Act expired as soon as he entered office, so I'm not sure how you figure he "blocked" it in any sense. Whatever Jefferson had to say about the sedition act was his right, but he didn't use any unconstitutional powers to work against it.
> Obama and later presidents stopped the enforcement of many prohibitions on recreational intrastate commerce of marijuana, a blatantly unconstitutional federal law, which nonetheless still stands (enforcement of medical marijuana is defunded but not recreational).
The scope of POTUS' power over the DOJ is circumscribed by Congress; Article II gives the President general executive power, but the specific scope of prosecutorial discretion is grounded in statutory law -- whatever discretion he has over prosecutions is granted by Congress. You concede that POTUS have not stopped enforcement of the law entirely, which would be unconstitutional; but they have used persecutorial discretion to focus resources, which is constitutional.
>You're saying that the President actually has an absolute veto; if he vetoes a bill, and Congress overrides the veto, you're saying the President gets the ultimate veto in that he can just claim the law is unconstitutional and refuse to implement it. So now you have to answer why the Framers would have limited the veto power if they had intended POTUS to have an ultimate veto through selective execution of laws.
Veto prevents the law from going on the books.
Unconstitutional 'veto' doesn't stop future administrations, it's much softer and merely reflects the president following his oath, but allows people to elect another executive who could then enforce the law. That is, veto power is for stopping constitutional or constitutional laws from going on the books. Refusing to execute doesn't strike from the books but allows execution of oath to follow the constitution.
Of course, I'm not sure your point about president not acting on good faith and thus refusing to execute constitutional laws -- in that case he could be impeached but if not it's a sign the whole system has broken down as at that point at least 2 of the 3 branches of government no longer respect the constitution.
>The Sedition Act expired as soon as he entered office, so I'm not sure how you figure he "blocked" it in any sense. Whatever Jefferson had to say about the sedition act was his right, but he didn't use any unconstitutional powers to work against it.
You're right that his time in office didn't actually block it, although Jefferson made clear that he believed the executive had the power to stop enforcing it, and had encouraged states to nullify it before he even took office and before it expired. I'll concede here the argument he personally was the one that blocked it was weak, although it clearly shows a founders take that the constitution permits the executive to follow the constitution instead of an unconstitutional legislation.
>You concede that POTUS have not stopped enforcement of the law entirely, which would be unconstitutional; but they have used persecutorial discretion to focus resources, which is constitutional.
If you prefer, you can switch to the Switchblade Act , which the federal courts have absolutely and unequivocally ruled has had the enforcement of the law "stopped entirely" (albeit in very twisted logic, they didn't count seizures that were then returned) for 10 years (Knife Rights v Garland). In fact the courts in that case basically found you couldn't even challenge a law that had been unenforced by the executive in 10 years, as they basically considered it as no one having standing as it basically doesn't exist as something jeopardizing anyone. Of course the main reason to challenge it is because it's unconstitutional (violates 2nd amendment) in the first place (thankfully executive took care of this before it went to courts, though would be nice if they'd double tap on it)!
I would think if the courts agreed with you, and the executive did have to enforce the laws, they couldn't have argued there is no standing to challenge the Switchblade Act, since the executive was bound to enforce it. The fact you can't challenge a law the executive has chosen not to enforce would seem to presume the courts have decided that the lack of standing stands on a legitimate machination of government, else it would be an absolutely preposterous premise that you won't be in jeopardy.
POTUS has no power to defy the constitution if the opinions requires unconstitutional activity. I.e. if congress passes a laws that says "no guns" and SCOTUS says "yes that's what the 2A says" the president has to ignore it because the 10th amendment blocks him from having the power to enforce it.
Nowhere in the constitution would it give him the ability to ignore the constitution if the other 2 branches violate it. You are inventing new dictatorial rights for POTUS.
>.e. if congress passes a laws that says "no guns" and SCOTUS says "yes that's what the 2A says" the president has to ignore it because the 10th amendment blocks him from having the power to enforce it.
No. Because the law would be constitutional since the Supreme Court said it is
You keep trying to argue that the president determines what is constitutional but the courts do. It doesn't matter what the president thinks is constitutional
Federal courts have argued they there isn't even standing to consider the constitutionality of an unenforced law (Knife Rights v Garland).
If the president was bound to enforce the law, how could the court possibly argue the constitutionality can't be considered because no one is in jeopardy?
The court basically decided you can't even challenge the Switchblade Act on 2A constitutional grounds because it's already been nullified by the executive as it's not been enforced in 10 years[].
Nullification of execution/enforcement was something even the founders (Thomas Jefferson) considers legitimate application of the constitution in regards to the unconstitutional Sedition Act.
I said what laws are constitutional not "what is the constitution".
I was very specific and my argument was not long so can you explain what I said, by quoting me, that implied the courts decide the contents of the Constitution?
>The president has a duty to ignore any unconstitutional court ruling, as his oath requires.
The Constitution states “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties…”
The president's oath is to uphold the Constitution. Therefore by ignoring court rulings he's not upholding the constitution
Ignoring constitutional court rulings violates the constitution.
Ignoring court rulings requiring him to violate the constitution, is something he's required to do, under his oath which constrains his authority to a narrowly defined scope.
> Most of congresses appropriations can't be faithfully executed because they largely violate the tenth amendment
This is plainly untrue, as the constitutionality of these appropriations can only be established by a court. Bills signed into law are presumed constitutional and valid until an Article III officer decides otherwise. The system is: Congress writes the law, funds the law. President signs the law, executes the law. Court interprets the law, invalidates the law. You can't have the POTUS sign, execute, interpret, and invalidate laws.
Separation of powers is what made the government work. Right now the Article II branch is the one who usurped power, the Congress and SCOTUS abdicated power, and it's causing the government to fail at all levels. If you give the executive the power you want it to have, the entire thesis of the Constitution crumbles (as we are witnessing), so quoting it at this point is futile and meaningless until balance of power is restored.
Right now, what would happen if what you said is true, is every time a new executive comes in, he can invalidate not just the executive orders but all laws passed by the previous administration, on a whim; without review, evidence, or argument he can shut down agencies and choose not to enforce any laws that are politically expedient. That's not how to run a constitutional republic. It's certainly descriptive of another form of government, but here you were quoting the Constitution.
> At the times when the federal government was mostly within the constraints of the 10th amendment, federal spending was under 5% of GDP in non war-time.
You'd have to go back to 1929 to see that kind of spending level. Since then, we went through a great depression and got a New Deal for America, which means the Federal Government has a larger role. We can surely revisit that role, and that's kind of what's happening right now. But it's wrong to say that the spending levels circa 1930s are somehow ideal of more constitutional without presenting more evidence.
>Court interprets the law, invalidates the law. You can't have the POTUS sign, execute, interpret, and invalidate laws.
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388993 as to why it takes all three branches agreeing on the constitutionality of a law for it actually to be put in effect and why that doesn't create the kind of dictatorship you're envisioning.
>is every time a new executive comes in, he can invalidate not just the executive orders but all laws passed by the previous administration, on a whim; without review, evidence, or argument he can shut down agencies and choose not to enforce any laws that are politically expedient.
POTUS is bound by constitution, even if SCOTUS thinks following the constitution is unconstitutional. This doesn't create an unchecked executive -- the legislature can also check the executive by impeaching him if he violates the constitution.
>You'd have to go back to 1929 to see that kind of spending level. Since then, we went through a great depression and got a New Deal for America, which means the Federal Government has a larger role. We can surely revisit that role, and that's kind of what's happening right now. But it's wrong to say that the spending levels circa 1930s are somehow ideal of more constitutional without presenting more evidence.
Yes exactly, it was circa the 30s when the apparatus of the state really cranked up to exceed the constitutional constraints of the federal government. The courts would create a more lasting correction to the problem, but that doesn't mean POTUS isn't also bound to stop executing all the unconstitutional laws. A lot of this stems from fraudulent portrayal of intrastate commerce as interstate commerce, which means a great deal of the actions of DEA, ATF, FDA, EPA, etc cannot legally be funded nor most of the wildly unconstitutional provisions of the cherished tyrannical civil rights act.
> This doesn't create an unchecked executive -- the legislature can also check the executive by impeaching him if he violates the constitution.
The impeachment clause is for high crimes and misdemeanors and is supposed to be an extraordinary procedure that takes an immense amount of time. It's not realistic to rely on it to prevent a President from selectively enforcing or ignoring laws on a day-to-day basis, especially considering it has never been successfully used to remove any president from office even in the case where Trump used his office to extort a bribe.
Anyway here's what James Madison had to say about your proposal in Federalst 47:
"No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self–appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, which the argument supposes, it would be the very worst of all possible governments."
> the state really cranked up to exceed the constitutional constraints of the federal government... this stems from fraudulent portrayal of intrastate commerce... a great deal of the actions of DEA, ATF, FDA, EPA, etc cannot legally be funded
See, this is the problem with giving a single person the power to decide which laws to implement. You've made sweeping statements about "fraudulent" portrayals and the government exceeding constitutional authority, but these are just your own conclusory assertions. It's not clear that any constitutional constraints were actually violated, that portrayals of intrastate commerce were fraudulent, or that agencies like the DEA, FDA, etc. cannot legally be funded. These claims are unsupported, in fact they are anti-supported by decades of judicial review. Given your position, the President could just decide to shut down those agencies just on the flimsy basis you have provided. That's not how the system works.
I and others have realized that, despite your frequent appeals to the Constitution and the Framers, you do not appear to genuinely support the idea of a constitutional republic. Instead, you seem comfortable with a king-like authority, a single individual wielding absolute control over the government. That's a legitimate position, but you should be upfront about it rather than twisting the Constitution to fit your ideology. You're never going to squeeze a dictator-shaped peg into a constitution-sized hole -- doing so destroys the constitutional order.
It seems Congress took action on presidents withholding funds with Title X of the "Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974"
If a president wants to permanently withhold funds then they must ask Congress for a "rescission"(request to cancel the funds) within 45 days~~\
This was created because Nixon withheld funds from programs he didn't support.[1]
This law was challenged in a 1975 court case, Train v NYC, which the Supreme Court upheld the law and stated the full amount appropriated must be spent
>The executive has the power to actually go out and spend the appropriated money. Congress tried to usurp that power around the time of Nixon by stopping executive impoundment. But it's not clear if that's constitutional; it might be now under current SCOTUS interpretations but I wouldn't be surprised if SCOTUS reviews it and find that to be incorrect.
>Personally I think congress usurping power of impoundment is a bright and clear violation of checks and balances built into the constitution that requires two branches to approve of spending before it can actually get spent. DOGE was a valiant attempt to bring us back into constitutional compliance.
It's constitutional because the Supreme Court ruled it was in the case Train v NYC. They are the ones who determine what laws are constitutional or not. You can disagree but their opinion is what is acted upon.
>the constitution that requires two branches to approve of spending
The president must sign spending bills and while he may be overridden with a veto that's the check and balance.
>It's constitutional because the Supreme Court ruled it was in the case Train v NYC. They are the ones who determine what laws are constitutional or not. You can disagree but their opinion is what is acted upon.
We're going in circles, I already addressed this.
>The president must sign spending bills and while he may be overridden with a veto that's the check and balance.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people
POTUS has no power to execute an unconstitutional law
> DOGE was a valiant attempt to bring us back into constitutional compliance.
What garbage. I can guarantee the concept or discussion of "constitutional compliance" came up exactly zero times in Trump and Elon's discussion of deploying DOGE. Because if that was their true concern, there are other ways of figuring that out. Valiant? Our heroes...
People call Elon a Nazi because of the salute he did, stuff he has said about Jewish people, pro-white nationalist dog whistles, etc.
I feel like you also overlooked the context of Obama's severe cuts and reorg... it was coming out of the Great Financial Recession which was the worst economy the US had seen in ~100 years...
> Obama did far more severe cuts and re-orgs in his second term.
You fail to mention that Obama did this through legislation and actual proposals rather than giving random tech bros and billionaires access to government systems to stop payments on a whim. Did you even read your own links?
> Nobody cared because we weren't in the sensationalist era where one becomes a "nazi" for wanting a smaller government.
This is a strawman. No one is claiming that wanting government efficiency is the equivalent of being a Nazi. Although, there are plenty of other actions from Trump and his ilk that warrant that view.
> Did you know that Obama deported more people than Trump as well? Was he somehow a fascist for respecting the border?
I'm not sure what this has to do with DOGE but I'll bite: Did Obama send people to a foreign labor camp in El Salvador? Did Obama deport international students for the their protest against Israel? Did Obama create a detention facility called Alligator Alcatraz?
I also want to lose weight but I still want to eat lots of burgers with fries.
People want all sorts of things but they don't really want all the nasty details needed to make them happen and they definitely do not want the negative consequences of their hasty decisions.
Most people love generic platitudes with no details though.
So when you say they "want smaller government" it's that they are literally agreeing with that statement verbatim rather then any plausible version of what that could be (and that's giving them credit: more cynically it's just "take away services from people who aren't me").
See Brexit for another national scale example of this: had anyone been forced to vote for a specific policy, it wouldn't have happened.
Though this is the exact opposite of the strategy of the Prime Minister at the time - he specifically did not want to make plans for Brexit so that very uncertainty could be used to scare people away from it.
He and the rest of the pro EU side feared that any concrete plans would make it look more like a reasonable option.
Incompetent is the wrong word. They showed excellent strategy and cunningness when derailing Bernie Sanders's campaigns. They have repeatedly shown excellence in strategy when outsiders threatened them. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes to Mamdani's campaign. What trick will the Democrats pull out of their bag to derail him?
It’s a bizarre tactic. The DNC plays very dirty with their own members. On the outward public stage they “take the high road” and seem to constantly neuter themselves to prove how much they care.
Democrat voters didn’t turn out this past election cycle. Even in the face of Trump. They’ve truly made their base apathetic. “Hold your nose” is a tough strategy to sell long term.
I will never forget what they did to Sanders. Maybe he would’ve lost anyways. It’s likely. But that whole take the high road thing is only messaging. Internally they function nothing like a democracy.
It’s pretty clear that’s the end goal — that there is never a Democratic president ever again and we have a Putin-style authoritarian system. They may get there.
> But most Americans want the government reduced...
Citation needed. Do elderly Americans selling their every worldly possession to pay for home healthcare after a medical crisis want reduced or increased government? Do single mothers unable to afford childcare want reduced or increased government? Do the people in Granbury, Texas suffering health effects from the noise of a Bitcoin mine want reduced or increased government? Do the Trump voters who want to round up and deport every last undocumented immigrant want reduced or increased government? Do the families stuck sending their chilren to failing urban schools want reduced or increased government? Do veterans struggling to access healthcare want reduced or increased government? Do consumers paying inflated prices to a proliferation of monopolies and private equity roll-ups want reduced or increased government?
People want everyone else's government programs reduced. The programs that benefit them are of course absolutely crucial to the lifeblood of the nation.
Having more federal government employees doesn't mean better access to affordable healthcare for the elderly. Those things are almost totally disconnected. As for veterans, the VA has been improving access to healthcare by making it easier for them to obtain services from private provider organizations.
Likewise, primary school funding and standards are largely state and local government issues. Cuts to federal staffing don't really impact that, either.
I'm not supportive of DOGE activities but if we're going to criticize then let's at least accurately connect cause and effect.
OP didn't specify decreasing government employees. They said decreasing government. And DOGE was promised to cut federal spending. In any case, I wasn't addressing DOGE, but the specific assertion that most people want less government.
The US has been heading towards this for a long time though. It's almost inevitable as a result of unrestrained capitalism, so the fact it was the wealthiest person in the world that got first crack at it make sense.
Everything is for sale, including government, if unregulated capitalism is the followed ideology.
Pretty clear a large portion of Americans want smaller government. But they also want the benefits (sometimes only for themselves) that comes with a larger government (and spending).
It's all about how you ask the question; there would be a lot of people who want a thing _called_ small government, because they have been told that that is a good thing, but the _benefits_ of big government (ideally without the _costs_ of big government, but realistically most people in the US do not care about the deficit; if they did Trump would already have been deposed).
A large portion of the electorate do not have an accurate sense of how big the government is or what it spends money on. DOGE is a living example. They believed (and musk boasted) they'd find trillions in wasted money. I think a lot of people just believe this must be true because they've heard stories in the past. In fact, DOGE found zero waste. Programs they cut were programs they just didn't like. And they fell short of their goals by multiple orders of magnitude. And are now rolling back some of those cuts because they were either illegal or hastily done. The bulk of federal spending goes straight back to constituents in the form of entitlements or to the military or to debt service. Discretionary spending is a fraction of total spending and covers hundreds of vital services. IGs already look for fraud which is pretty rare.
Exactly. I'm not concerned with the size of government. However, I would like to see better ROI - that is, a government that is more effective at delivery services. The "burn it all down" mentality never takes into account the vast amount of services provided by the government, and simply reducing the size of government won't help that.
>The "burn it all down" mentality never takes into account the vast amount of services provided by the government, and simply reducing the size of government won't help that.
People with that mentality tend to believe most services provided by the government are waste by definition (especially any "social" services) and should be privatized. At the extreme end, they believe the only legitimate role of government is violence - war, policing and enforcing contract law. But somehow not taxes.
Uh no ... the perspective of corporate businessman does not trivially or with difficulty translate to goverment statesman more so in the legislative branch.
I reject the implied inevitability of your statement.
A nice read of your claim is you dont trust regular state employees at all - I could see that. But don't way overshoot by going 100 light-years beyond that.
I'll leave to others to argue say if musk is running tesla or X well.
>> The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it.
And now people are pushing for AI coding where no one is going to write a code but only read it (with auto accept changes).
I often find myself guilty of not reading the article but only the comments here myself, so in case this is you: Go take the time and read it, even if it's painful.
I read a lot of heavy stuff, but this collection of quotes makes me sick to my stomach.
And even more so: how this inhumane, perverted treatment of fellow human beings, regardless of whether you fantasize/reason that DOGE does net good for the planet, finds no mention yet in the comments here, at all. To add to that, these are people who have spent much of their life in public service, for the benefit of society.
To be honest, I don't even know what is worse; the quotes, or that.
Even if you don’t give a f*ck about decency, it is simply irrational to do it like that if it were about cost cutting. The only goal of this can be to create trauma and more violence, like one person in the article rightfully quotes. This is to provoke people into violence, plain and simple.
“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
These people do not believe in America as it exists or the promise of what it could be. They hate us and they want to destroy what we have to create something fundamentally different.
> “The vibe they gave was ‘So, what is it that you do here?’ and ‘Why can’t AI do that?’” —TTS worker
From what I've read, this particular group of children naively thinks "AI" can and should do everything. As in, they think it's literally magic and have no clue how it or computing works. I remember reading about how one was asking on twitter how to use AI to convert word processor documents between formats, when that's a simple classic computing task. I'm afraid the next generation is going to think the only tool they need is a sledgehammer.
> I often find myself guilty of not reading the article but only the comments here myself, so in case this is you: Go take the time and read it, even if it's painful.
The problem isn't that we need another document showing how terrible these people are.
The problem is that we don't have people proposing effective, concrete steps to stop them.
Judging from many of the comments here and in other threads, it seems like no document is actually making people see how terrible these people are. Not even here of all places, where one could assume a decent capacity for rational thought. They either don't want to see the violence, or cannot see it, or condone or even support it. Which doesn't make rational sense, since it only leads to more violence, which I doubt can seriously be the end goal, to escalate us into extinction.
You don't even need to bring morals into it or care about anyone else than your own peers. It just doesn't make any sense other than self-harm and a comprehensible yet pointless expression of own pain.
Vote in enough Democrats in the midterms to take control of Congress. Most of what the president has been doing is only possible because Congress hasn't stepped up.
> The problem is that we don't have people proposing effective, concrete steps to stop them.
Here's an effective, concrete step.
NATIONAL BOYCOTT OF ALL NON-ESSENTIALS.
It's far easier and less painful for the participants than a general strike (cause, you know, you won't get fired from your job for not spending money), but will bring MAGA's handlers to the bargaining table in a week. The only thing those ghouls love is money, and they only thing that scares the shit out of them is not making any.
It's also never going to happen (because there's no fucking way the dems want the hoi polloi to have that kind of power - and thus, they won't lift a finger to organize or assist it.)
By being uninspiring and boring and losing because of it.
Republicans promised a bulldozer the size of a small city and they're delivering. Sometimes people prefer winning even if it means they lose.
They went big and the Democrats went home, offering "sensible policy" and "reasonable governance" and programs for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities.
None of that is bad on its face but it doesn't win elections. Especially when Elon is promising a Sandals resort on Mars.
Even if you disagreed with Bernie, the guy was willing to go big and bold and cared about what he was promising. It doesn't have to be universal healthcare. It can be UBI or building a solarpunk future or colonizing the bottom of the ocean. The Space Race. The Great Society. Morning in America. The New Deal. Something big and exciting and someone we believe really, really wants it.
The Republicans are promising front row seats to the end of the world and the Democrats are promising to check everyone's tire pressure. Understanding why the former can appeal more than the latter is the key to winning future elections.
I personally feel like I have done net good for society through my work and and how I’ve treated people and it felt like a slap in the face when Joe Biden personally said that I would be getting fired from my job at a federal contractor because I disagreed with him. I won’t ever forget what he did to me and I feel like people should be talking about this just as much as they talk about DOGE. I won’t speak too much about DOGE but I feel that it’s important to say my truth about the matter and that I feel a form of catharsis and justice in the dismantling of bureaucracy that infringed on my rights as a human being. I welcome anyone who would like to discuss this with me because I have much more to say on the topic.
What's certainly not going away is that Government waste and bloat is a home-run bipartisan issue where the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine.
Everyone left and right instinctively knows this is, that it's a problem that they're both taxed directly for and (I hope) many people know they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime.
I don't know if this was in your lifetime, but Bill Clinton reduced government spending through the National Performance Review. Not only did he do it, but he did it in a planned and strategic way, that included an initial phase of research, followed by education and recommendations, which were send to congress for approval.
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
The Republican party is literally in control of Congress and the presidency. Copying Clinton is something they could do. The fact that they don't appear to have made a serious effort to increase revenues and reduce spending in a sane and organized way raises questions.
The Republicans have this idea that cutting taxes and increasing spending will reduce the ratio of debt/gdp by increasing the denominator. It does increase GDP but I think it increases the debt faster, so it can't work. Happy to be proven wrong.
They do not actually believe that. What they believe is that cutting taxes will give them the short-term means to acquire assets that will become much more valuable after the nation has been destroyed, to which the escalating debt contributes. The crisis is a feature for them.
It doesn't "raises questions" it "answers questions". Anybody who believes the republicans in America are "the party of fiscal responsibility" is a joke.
The Senate still requires 60 votes to close debate and pass legislation, with rare weird exceptions like reconciliation. The 1990s had more bipartisanship, so Clinton skillfully got enough Republicans to support some of his moves.
Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
> Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
Biden passed the bipartisan infrastructure act as well as USICA subsidies. The first step act was bipartisan. The deficit reduction in Obama's time was bipartisan. The american rescue plan wasn't bipartisan, but republicans claim credit for its effects. You don't really have much evidence here.
> Everyone left and right instinctively knows this
That’s the first sign that a large group of people are going to something thoughtless and destructive.
Looking around at actual data from both gov and think tank sources, this quote from Pew is a good summary: “While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years.”
But that’s not the whole story. The postal service is shrinking, the vast majority of those federal employees work for the VA, the amount of funding being directed by the federal employees has grown (because of budget growth), federal regulations touch more private sector activity than in the past, and state and local governments employ significantly more people than they used to.
DOGE’s focus on headcount was wrongheaded because the number of federal employees is not the problem. The problem is Congress (budgets and laws) and states.
Conventional wisdom is that federal payroll growth is massive, and that is just wrong.
> DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime
On what timeline? The week of the first round of RIFs? The first month?
I assure you, as someone who works with in the space where DOGE has played, it will NOT be a reduction in costs in the long run. In fact, costs will go up because of the indiscriminate nature of "cost reduction". When the only people with knowledge of a system are removed, the remaining people cannot run it - no matter what AI they are given. At that point, you have to either hire back the people you fired, with a serious delay of important work, or you stumble for years until it can be figured out at the cost of delays, protests, lawsuits, whatever.
Considering firing everyone a reduction in costs is a shallow, short-term view.
> the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine
The US government at the start of this administration was roughly the same as it was in 1970[1]. This, despite the addition of new departments (1970 is pre-EPA, for example), many new responsibilities, etc. And obviously the government has to perform all these services for 140 million more people than in 1970, a 70% increase.
Doing more with the same resources is a textbook definition of increasing efficiency.
What metric are you looking at when you say "the size of government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector" - AFAICT, excluding 2020 and 2021 (which I think is reasonable), the federal budget has been between 17% and 25% of GDP for the past 50 years (where the fluctuations are more a function of variable GDP).
The number of federal government employees has also remained mostly flat for the past 50 years (and IIRC most growth in overall public sector employment comes from schools).
No, it does make sense. Most of the purported growth in government spending is just using raw figures, and not correcting for either inflation or monetary expansion. It is a convenient mistake.
> they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
Don't worry – unless we stop giving out tax cuts as well, we'll still be running deficits until Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. For the average taxpayer, it's about fiscal sustainability - "smaller government" may as well be a feel-good abstraction compared to that.
I do not instinctively know this, no. I encourage you to take an evidence-based approach. The deficit has largely grown over the past 25 years because of foreign wars, tax cuts, and pandemic response.
And how much of the work that they did will be out-sourced to private contractors at 5x and cost+ rates, lining the pockets of right-wing donor's corporate coffers?
People are having a tough period where they think their government doesn't care about them, to see so much wastage ignites the hard feelings that the "elite" has prioritised others than their own people.
I believe that is the reason why DOGE was supported by Trump, but I do think something like DOGE is needed but perhaps for better and less egotistical reasons.
> People are having a tough period where they think their government doesn't care about them, to see so much wastage ignites the hard feelings that the "elite" has prioritised others than their own people.
Have you considered that maybe a segment of the population feels that way because of decades of propaganda targeted at dismantling the government?
At least in the UK we had a decade of austerity done under the guise it was needed to "improve economic growth" or "balance the books" and that we were living beyond our means.
It was the only thing to be optimistic about in this administration, but it sure didn't last long. We should all know that this was the last attempt that had a chance of addressing the national debt -- the only other way out is extreme inflation.
Musk was absolutely the wrong guy for the job. He doesn't have the patience to spend 4 years carefully poring over government expenses, nor the security clearance (AFAIK) to address pentagon spending. Plus, I don't think he's humble enough to bring in people who actually know what to look for.
The most incredible piece of logical gymnastics I remember from civics/history class in high school was that during economic downturns, we need government to spend more to help people, and during economic growth we of course also need more government to manage all the new growth. At no point do we cut the spending we've added, because it would always hurt those who have jobs.
People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
That's not a fair---or accurate---summary of Keynes.
The claim is that the government should act as a stabilizer: spending to drive aggregate demand during downswings (especially ones caused by external shocks) and regulating during up-swings.
In other words, "more" refers to different things and in different proportions in different phases of the business cycle; it's emphatically not a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" sort of thing.
> The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
In many cases, because they're slashing things that we are realizing that we do need, and we're going to pay even more to reconstruct the things they've destroyed.
The only way to effectively reducing spending and waste is by doing things slowly and carefully, evaluating the impact of the changes you are going to make carefully. This happened successfully in the 90s, but DOGE is not doing things that way.
The OMB has been trying to slowly and thoughtfully cut spending since the 70's, and they've struggled to see success. I think in terms of cutting spending, the slower it happens the less likely anything productive will come from it. It's why companies tend to cut whole departments at once, and the government desperately needs a way to cut funding from things that aren't working to reallocate it where the money is needed.
From what I've seen the DOGE cuts have been incredibly efficient in isolating poorly spent (or corrupt) money. Lots of corrupt foreign programs or government donations into partisan political groups. Most of the time when someone says they shouldn't have cut money, they're talking about an NGO or some research that benefits their particular partisanship at the cost of fairness or scientific rigor; which is exactly what we shouldn't be funding.
The Clinton admin was successful in the 90s. They cut costs enough to pull the US entirely out of the deficit. They did things slowly and methodically over 5 years, making sure the things they cut were unnecessary before cutting them. They also followed the law, avoiding the legal issues and consequential costs that DOGE is incurring.
Federal spending is up during this administration, the deficit is at modern-day averages, and the bills recently passed by this administration are going to increase it even further. The slash-and-burn style of cuts that DOGE is sloppy and ineffective. They are Chesterton's fencing themselves -- cutting things that they later find to be important. And on the other hand, not spending the time to actually seek out waste that is hard to find. A tech company works very differently than the government does, and they are slowly starting to discover that the hard way.
Another incredible thing you maybe didn't study in civics class is that the US had an "exorbitant privilege" it's now pissing away. The ability to borrow at extremely low rates from the rest of the world, because the US was so productive. We will miss it when it's gone.
>People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
Right. And those hundreds of millions went to tax cuts/benefits for the wealthiest (top 10%) among us, and less benefit to the bottom 10%, as well as trillions (3.8, in fact[0]) more in debt to actually pay for those cuts.
Did anyone figure out about the social security fraud claim? I figure the 135 year old people were a dumb mistake, but surely they must have found a bunch of people who were cheating? We didn't hear anything so maybe not, but would be good to know.
Yes, that was covered a while back by Planet Money I think when interviewing one former DOGE worker. It turns out there are different lists of people, in different formats, maintained by different departments, for different purposes. What happens is, one group comes up with a list of people who are supposedly ripping the govt off. They send that list to another department, who comes back and says, no, some of those people are supposed to get benefits, some of these forms were just filed incorrectly, some records are out of date, some ancient database has a short integer that rolls over, etc.
Like any complex bureaucratic process, there will be errors, and they know that, so there are checks to correct those errors. And you need a lot of people (with a lot of tribal, historic, or contextual knowledge) to deal with that complexity. But you don't hear that full story. You hear a sound bite of a partial truth selectively repeated by people who want to pass off a specific narrative.
Another way to think about it: think of the oldest legacy computer system at a company you're aware of. Now realize the US government has computers going back to 1965, and paper records from way, way before then.
Lyn Alden had a good, terse analysis of why DOGE was unlikely to be effective in this newsletter[0]. The math was simple, the folks behind DOGE must have themselves known that their stated mission was impossible.
It starts with these paragraphs, if you want to seek to it:
"This is the goal of the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. This is an advisory commission rather than an official government department. Musk has famously vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending—roughly 30% of last year’s federal budget.
Although this sounds good on paper, achieving such a target will be quite challenging, given the composition of government spending. Last year, the government spent $6.75 trillion, with $4.1 trillion (61%) classified as mandatory spending."
Classifying some spending as "mandatory" is a ruse to make people ignore the potential for any savings there.
The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything? Paying for things that are ineffective or unnecessary? Would it be better to means test certain benefits so that the government isn't making big social assistance payouts to recipients with a net worth over a million dollars? Is there any Medicare fraud?
The next largest and almost as big is social security, so what happens if we means test that program, or even just get rid of the reverse means testing in the existing program which makes larger payouts to people who made more money?
These things would all reduce "mandatory" spending, potentially by a significant amount, and there is nothing preventing that from happening except for the false insistence that it can't be done.
The problem with means-testing benefits is that it often will cost more to means-test than to just accept nonzero fraud rates past a very minimal point, and there is a significant amount of friction introduced when you add more friction to people who do not have time or energy to spare.
e.g. if I ask you to submit receipts for literally everything that you bought in the last week, in order to give you a $20 stipend weekly, you will probably not bother, even if you could use the $20, and it will probably cost more than $20 to pay me for the time processing that.
I'm not saying there's no waste, but I am saying that the optimal amount of waste to reward is nonzero.
Half the country is willing to get punched in the face as long as they know their opponents are getting kicked in the nuts. It’s all about hurting the other team more.
Right, which is why broadly-available old-age insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security work. Everyone pays in their own money, to which they are entitled. So there’s not really any reason to spend that extra $10.
It’s also why “Medicare For All” runs into opposition. It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health care before paying a dime into the system.
So then lets say a healthy 22-year-old graduates from college at the top of their class. Life's looking up for them. They've already got a job lined up that starts in two weeks and they're excited and energetic about entering the workforce and living on their own as adult.
Then suddenly, some random guy in a mustang doing 150 in a 30 jumps the curb and runs over our optimistic 22-year-old, and continues speeding into the distance. A random onlooker witnesses the event and calls an ambulance, who rushes them to the hospital. Thanks to the hard work ICU doctors and surgeons spanning days, our 22-year-old miraculously lives, but is in bad shape. They're never gonna walk again, and they're gonna need weeks of physical therapy just to retrain the fine motor skills required to write and type.
All of this, for a variety of factors is gonna cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. On top of the massive hospital bill they're about to be saddled with.
I take it that our now not-so-healthy 22-year-old should just go fuck themselves then? They've never paid a dime into the system so why should they be entitled to health care?
>I take it that our now not-so-healthy 22-year-old should just go fuck themselves then? They've never paid a dime into the system so why should they be entitled to health care?
No, no one is entitled to the labor of others, not in this scenario where they are 3rd party to the damages. That doesn't even remotely make sense no matter how bad of a sob story you attach to it.
This isn't actually a sob story, and I'm not saying he's entitled to labor of others. What I am asking is how your proposed system handles a case such as this.
And while it may be an edge case, these are large, broad systems that directly impact the lives of millions of living, breathing people. Such systems must be robust and well-examined.
And I'd also like to ask what a society would look like, that invests so heavily in the education of it's young generation, and relies on them to bring innovations and new ideas to the table, only to cut them down the moment they need any sort of assistance. It certainly seems to me like a huge waste of resources.
What if healthcare was just an investment in our society? Our young 22-year-old gets healthcare covered not because he's entitled to it but because society is invested in his well-being in order to continue existing and improve itself. Because the ROI of the young being kept healthy and able to work and pay into the system is greater than the cost of the ICU doctors and surgeons and wheelchairs and physical therapy.
The voluntary way of capturing future ROI with present investment is loans (or if you don't care about ROI, donation). Now I'm not saying that is necessarily the only option but it's the one you're gunning for based upon your economic argument.
Based on your criteria it's the most textbook case for an individual loan imaginable, your argument is the 22 y/o needs a loan for some healthcare, that he can more than pay it back, and that both parties will benefit. In the absence of charity, some kind of trade, family or friend assistance, then in any rational market (US market is regulated to hell so no guarantee it works there unless you free that market) it's a no brainer and as sure as an apple will fall from a tree, someone would be happy to make that trade although the kinetics and packaging might be up for debate.
I don't see how you can possibly presuppose a requirement for public assistance, in that scenario, in order for the health care to happen. Public assistance is only economically necessary to complete the health care if there is negative ROI and all donation or voluntary options are exhausted.
>No, no one is entitled to the labor of others, not in this scenario where they are 3rd party to the damages. That doesn't even remotely make sense no matter how bad of a sob story you attach to it.
Absolutely! We should just Brian Kilmeade[0] those folks too, since they're just a burden on society, right?
It's interesting to me you jumped right past charity, loans, work-trade, or any other variety of options and instead went straight to your preferred method of doing things -- either violence (tax man with guns) and if not that you question if they should be executed.
I'm just advocating putting the violent methods aside.
Of course not. At scale you basically need to remove the government from the situation, they're the one regulating health care into a gigantic blimp. Once health care is completely deregulated and the costs drop you won't need to spending anything close to "all [future] money."
Now if you offered me a deal, I could substitute all my taxes, or even everyone's taxes, for charity, yes I would take that in a heartbeat. In all likelihood I think I would probably donate about 10% of my income to charity if there were no taxes, but the government is so terribly ineffectual it might actually beat the 20-30% I pay now.
Look like the effective tax rate has went up rather than down since I started working in 2010, most of which I was closer to the top 1% than the middle 20%. []
There is no savings I can identify there, nor in my tax records, which have only increased in % as I've made more money. And all well above the 10% of the income I would pledge to donate to charity if taxes are eliminated. But yes I have donated to charity on occasion (sometimes formally, sometimes directly in cash to people that needed it), despite the fact I keep getting taxed harder every year and despite the fact the government robs me of ~20-30% of my income under its own bloated forcible charity scheme.
If no one is entitled to the labor of others, why would we engage in charity?
Work-trade when it's someone's health is slavery, so we're going to go ahead and pull that off the table.
Loans are, more or less, how we've gotten into the awful state we are currently in in the US with unpayable medical debt.
I propose an alternate approach: medical care is a civil service that you can voluntarily provide, like fire prevention or undrafted military service. If you do, you are paid the rate the society agrees to for the work. We all pay for it with taxes. If we want more of it, we raise taxes and incentives. This removes several perverse market effects and sets up a minimum standard of care divorced from individual circumstance to level out the effect of bad luck a bit.
This is, more or less, a model that many countries are currently enjoying.
>If no one is entitled to the labor of others, why would we engage in charity?
Because some people want to help others beyond what they're forced to do. There is a long history of charitable health services in the US and worldwide, you might rightly ascertain they can't possibly provide all of medical care, nonetheless it's non-zero enough to dispel the notion it can't be provided in the absence of an entitlement.
> medical care is a civil service that you can voluntarily provide,
Civil services are funded by people working to pay their taxes. Work-trade when it's someone health is slavery, so work-trade when it's to not have to go in a tiny cage dragged away by an IRS agent has to be slavery too, especially when you consider the health implications of that.
Therefore the public / civil service options are tossed out by your own criteria.
Loans, again, if those aren't allowed you can toss out any government option because that's a huge part of how the government is funding itself.
Using your own criteria only charity or cash payments would be allowed. Not sure I agree with that one, but that's what you're leaving us with.
I think if you're arguing "taxes are slavery" you are coming from a vantage point that is far too libertarian to have a constructive conversation. We can probably just short-circuit that by saying "The only way people in the US get jailed for taxes is by committing fraud; we correctly left debtor's prison in the past" and be done with that, yes?
Taxes aren't slavery; they're how we operate modern, functional, post-feudal societies (and whether they are actually "paying for" services or are "redistributing supply and demand more equitably by curtailing the spending power of the ones who have too much so that the ones who have too little can have access to resources at all" is an implementation detail for macroeconomists and operators of fiat currencies).
You do raise the interesting question of funding it by buying bonds though. I don't see an issue with that; the argument against loans is a practical one, not a theoretical one ("the private debt incurred upon patients is, in essence, an involuntary one-sided loan granted to them, and we've seen that lead to massively unfair outcomes"). Voluntarily loaning the government money seems to work great and is miles distant from involuntarily-accrued (or accrued under duress; "sure, that procedure is optional because you always have the option to die") medical debt.
>"The only way people in the US get jailed for taxes is by committing fraud; we correctly left debtor's prison in the past" and be done with that, yes?
False. You can be jailed for "tax evasion" which could be as simple as simply saying "yes I owe taxes, no I won't bother calculating and I have put all my money in bitcoins and I'll never give them to you." That needn't be fraud -- everything about that could be 100% accurate and true with no intend to defraud yet still criminal. (btw we still have debtor's prison -- you can be jailed for not paying child support debts and the absurd argument often used you're jailed for violating the court order to pay the debt rather than owing the debt is little more than a legal parlor trick).
>Taxes aren't slavery
They are by your definition, where I need to trade work to pay for them to improve my health (get thrown into a prison, a den of disease and mental health problems). Of course, we could get into a semantic debate about slavery, but it's clear you've already defined slavery not to be literal chattel slavery, i.e. as black people in chains working the cotton fields, rather you appear to be referring to being forced to work under threat of violence which in this case you take the violence to be a threat to your health.
>You do raise the interesting question of funding it by buying bonds though. I don't see an issue with that; the argument against loans is a practical one, not a theoretical one ("the private debt incurred upon patients is, in essence, an involuntary one-sided loan granted to them, and we've seen that lead to massively unfair outcomes"). Voluntarily loaning the government money seems to work great and is miles distant from involuntarily-accrued (or accrued under duress; "sure, that procedure is optional because you always have the option to die") medical debt.
I also find this to be one of the most interesting solutions. Hypothetically if a 22 year old were to have some illness, it's totally conceivable that a bunch of lenders could bid for a race to the bottom so the 22 year old could get a loan low enough that it would easily be both a net positive for him and for the people who helped loan the money that saves him. Of course, if charity or some other option is available instead, all the better.
In any case, the biggest enemy for both of us is overregulation of the health system. Once medical licensing is eliminating and medical regulations eliminated, fights over how to pay become much lower stakes.
Not even remotely related. Yes, if you fail to bother to calculate your taxes you can be liable. If you do calculate them and you can't pay them, the government works out a payment plan. These trains of thought more or less died with Thoreau arguing why he shouldn't pay taxes (while living on borrowed property owned by his rich neighbor).
> Once medical licensing is eliminating and medical regulations eliminated
Independent issue to paying for medicine. If I understand correctly, your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could. Those regulations are paid for in blood (or in this case, snake-oil); agree to disagree that lowering the constraints wouldn't just return us to the bad practices that required the constraints in the first place.
> If I understand correctly, your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could. Those regulations are paid for in blood (or in this case, snake-oil); agree to disagree that lowering the constraints wouldn't just return us to the bad practices that required the constraints in the first place.
The "agree to disagree" isn't necessary because it isn't relevant.
People can argue that quacks used to show up to rip people off and then skip town before people caught on that snake oil is snake oil, but they couldn't really do that anymore because now we have the internet which allows your past victims to notify your future victims even if they live in a different city.
But that argument is boring. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, because the laws that really make medicine expensive aren't the ones that require you to register as a doctor so they can more easily investigate quacks. They're the ones that e.g. the AMA has lobbied for to limit the supply of doctors. And we could get rid of those regardless of whether we also get rid of the other ones.
The train of thought didn't die with Thoreau. It lived on in the minds of those such as Murray Rothbard, and to the extent as it applies to universal healthcare, also known fringe character (and nobel economist) Milton Friedman. Of course Locke himself (a major inspiration for the US constitution, which very narrowly constrains what the federal government can spend money on), I suppose too old as he's the oldest of all of them, only justified taxes so far as they allowed the government to enforce negative rights, that is rights for one person not to molest another rather than positive rights like an entitlement to get something from another such as care.
>your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could
Really all the above. Probably even more so due to stuff like the intertwining of the insurance and pharmaceutical and medical industries with regulatory apparatus creating all the worst regulatory capture incentives to rent-seek patients with the free market destroyed.
Or are you just spouting ridiculous tropes? Charity? Work-Trade? Loans? Paid by whom in that scenario?
I'd expect you're more in line with Kilmeade than McCain. Why don't you just admit it? It's all out in the open now, no need to hide any more. You'll be broadly lauded for your economic smarts!
Your thesis is that people so broadly support additional tax money going to fix the 22 year old that it could be legitimate law, but somehow so few support it that charity or other alternatives (if the very people that support it weren't forced by law) would be a ridiculous trope?
No. My thesis is that we can reduce total healthcare spending by having a single-payer system that covers everyone.
It's not additional tax money, it's money that doesn't need to go to corporate jets and huge pay packages for the C-Suite and large dividends for the shareholders of insurance companies, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers.
And the tens to hundreds of billions we save on that can pay for that 22 year old.
But we can't have that, now can we? Better to Brian Kilmeade 'em, eh?
But you just said it's a ridiculous trope that people would want to charitably donate to the healthcare of others. How would you get the majority to support a single payer system when electing to help others is such a ridiculous trope that you flippantly dismiss it?
> But you just said it's a ridiculous trope that people would want to charitably donate to the healthcare of others. How would you get the majority to support a single payer system when electing to help others is such a ridiculous trope that you flippantly dismiss it?
A lot of people have a broken sense of fairness where they're only willing to help someone else if everyone else is required to do it too. It's one of the things causing the world to burn.
Some of this is even learned behavior. A lot of the dumbest econ 101 classes teach people that giving to charity is irrational. (It's not irrational. It's something you do because you want to do it, like eating cake or buying a fast car. Once your basic needs are met, the purpose of having money is to use it for the things you want to use it for. It's not irrational to want to do something good instead of something insalubrious.)
>But you just said it's a ridiculous trope that people would want to charitably donate to the healthcare of others. How would you get the majority to support a single payer system when electing to help others is such a ridiculous trope that you flippantly dismiss it?
Are you really that ignorant of the issue, or are you just being deliberately obtuse?
We as a society already pay way more than we would with a rational single-payer system. That's not hyperbole either.
What's more, not having employers and employees pay insurance premiums would more than offset any additional taxes.
But you knew that already, because we've known this to be the case for most, if not all, of your life.
I'm done explaining the facts of life to you. Perhaps you should ask your dad.
> corporate jets and huge pay packages for the C-Suite and large dividends for the shareholders of insurance companies
And armies and armies of middle-folk who are adjudicating from afar whether a given medical procedure is justified or not.
The way the US practices paying for medicine is, counter-intuitively, very expensive because we pay a lot of people to find reasons to justify not paying for it. If we took their salaries and put them into actual service provision, and cut down the vast web of categories and sub-categories to salami-slice the nickels and dimes, we'd spend far less on employment of arbiters and on paperwork and we'd have more money to pay for more services (and no a priori reason to believe the system would oversaturate).
That's just status quo bias. Countries with fully socialized healthcare systems make the same "everyone pays taxes and then everyone gets it" argument for including the healthy 22-year-olds and you can make the same "this person doesn't deserve public money" argument for not providing government benefits to people who have their own wealth.
Moreover, it doesn't have anything to do with whether you could modify those programs to cost less money if your primary goal was to lower spending.
It's very easy to make that case: healthcare should be a human right, and our society should provide it to every person to the extent that it can.
We can just decide to make things public services. No one ever says "wait a minute, kids shouldn't be get to use roads for free before paying a dime into the system." It sounds ridiculous! But for some reason, people buy that logic when it comes to healthcare and college.
We are not by ourselves though. Sure compared to 1000AD we might be being a little... precious. But hopefully we can enjoy the fact we invented all this technology to make our lives better and dream for bigger rights than is possible in a dog eat dog barbaric world.
No right to be free from what? If you are by yourself, who is there to enslave you? It doesn't matter how how rights are endowed; the entire concept is meaningless except with regard to other humans.
Both of those rights govern exactly what I said: your interactions with other people. But anyway, no one is proposing anyone be forced to do someone's bidding.
I think you've identified the symptom but misidentified the cause.
The majority in the US (as of 2022, according to Gallup) believe healthcare should be universally provided.
The majority also believe it should not be a government responsibility.
Broadly speaking, the US position is "Our current system sucks and we should be providing people healthcare detached from presence or absence of individual insurance... But also the government cannot be trusted to successfully execute on complex national projects."
> It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health
The economic future potential of a healthy 22-year-old is way higher than an aged 68-year-old. I don't think it's very hard at all to make the case we should be spending money on keeping the 22-year-old healthy, in fact I think it's very easy to tilt so far into claiming it's so that you'd be justifiably accused of cruelty ("what if everyone over 70 were tossed into the Soylent Green vats," etc.)
It's quite true that means testing has an efficiency cost. One of the best ways to improve the efficiency of social security would be to convert it into a UBI.
But that's a very different question than whether it would lower the budget, and we're talking about programs that are paying out a lot more than $20. If doing means testing means you can stop paying $1000+/month to someone who is already a millionaire, that's still a savings even if it adds $20 in overhead. Meanwhile we're already paying the cost of doing the means testing, because we do it in reverse, and removing that would increase efficiency and lower spending.
Moreover, other taxes require keeping track of that stuff regardless. You already have to track the value of your assets for the purposes of capital gains tax and property tax. Doing that calculation to begin with isn't free, but the incremental cost of copying that line from the other tax forms onto the Medicare form would cost far less than it does to pay benefits to people who don't need the money. And it also has an efficiency benefit whenever it isn't a cash payment, since insurance is a moral hazard -- if the government is paying for something then you take it even if you value it at a third of what it costs, whereas if you're paying your own money you don't buy things that cost more than they're worth, so having less insurance coverage for people who could afford to pay out of pocket increases efficiency.
> means you can stop paying $1000+/month to someone who is already a millionaire, that's still a savings even if it adds $20 in overhead.
Only if these hypothetical millionaires you are stopping make up more than 1/50 of the people you are means-testing. You are not only paying for those who fail the means-test, but for all those who are passing it.
> Only if these hypothetical millionaires you are stopping make up more than 1/50 of the people you are means-testing.
Then why don't we use the non-hypothetical numbers? More than 10% of retirees are millionaires and the $1000+ in payments is actually $2000+ on average and even more for the people who made enough money to be millionaires.
One reason those programs are not means tested is because it means that everyone can depend on them. Once they are means-tested to only apply to poor/middle class people, they will begin to be aggressively cut like the other means-tested programs.
Also worth noting net worth "over a million dollars" is not extravagant for a Medicare-age person who did not have a pension, for example. This is basically a median home and $600k in savings. Not poor, but also not likely to be able to pay anything close to rack rate for health insurance for an older person.
I’d also add that there’s a powerful benefit to having something like Medicare as a right of citizenship: it builds social cohesion and avoids the stigma which is often attached to social programs. Some landlords go to great lengths to avoid section 8 tenants, for example, and that has a substantial negative cost to society.
> I’d also add that there’s a powerful benefit to having something like Medicare as a right of citizenship
While not attached to citizenship, there already is something built in. New immigrants to the US often have to have a financial sponsor (I did, on my K-1 fiance visa). That sponsor has to agree (and demonstrate ability) that in the event that the new immigrant claims public benefits in the first ten years of their residence in the US (Medicare, Social Security, etc.) that the government is entitled to recoup those benefit costs from the sponsor.
The Medicare budget is approximately $1400/month for each person over 65. A completely plausible means testing approach isn't "if you have a million dollars you have to go pay a billion dollars for healthcare" but rather that if you have that much money you have to pay the $1400 to get Medicare. Someone with $600,000 and earning 5% APY would be getting more than that in interest, not including appreciation or imputed rent on the $400,000 house, and would stop having to pay the full rate if their net worth fell below the threshold anyway.
This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits. (Although it would help offset costs to have a lower-risk pool of insureds come into the program, in addition to the other societal benefits.)
> earning 5% APY would be getting more than that in interest
Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
> imputed rent on the $400,000 house
They live in the house, which lowers their monthly expenses to a level where they can pay them using Social Security and the interest from their savings.
Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years. And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
> This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits.
Whether something would have a particular policy outcome and whether you have the votes to pass it are two different things. Moreover, you could obviously require wealthy retirees to pay for Medicare without allowing younger people to do it. Stranger things have happened.
> Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
They do have another way to pay living expenses. They have $600,000+ plus a house, and as soon a they only had $599,999 plus a house they would no longer have to pay the full rate for Medicare.
> Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years.
You can just as easily make the contrary argument. These programs were never funded -- social security started out making payments to people who never paid in and there isn't anywhere near enough in the "trust fund" to make existing payouts. The people paying the taxes to make up the shortfall were too young to be eligible to vote or not even born when those promises were made, so by what right does an older generation have to bind them to a promise it made to itself and then never actually funded?
> And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
How about we do this and trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military so that we can lower the taxes on the secretary to the same rates paid by Warren Buffet?
> and there isn't anywhere near enough in the "trust fund" to make existing payouts
They were funded. But administration after administration constantly "borrows" from it, and then (in one party's case) points to the shortfall as proof of a "failure".
No, they weren't. There was never a point in the history of social security where you could continue making the payments to existing retirees on the basis of the saved up money they paid in themselves so that a future generation could decide that they would prefer to both not pay into and not receive social security.
There have been years when working people paid more into the program than retirees withdrew, i.e. when less than all of the money paid by the current generation went immediately to the previous generation, but that money was never even close to enough to fund the promised future payouts.
Moreover, Congress "borrows" the money in the sense that the Social Security Administration holds it as government bonds rather than cash, but then the Social Security Administration gets the interest on the bonds.
The problem is, that was never even close to enough money either way, because the program was configured from the outset to transfer most of the money from current working people to current retirees instead of investing it at interest in order to make the future payments to the people paying into it. This could have been slightly better if the "trust fund" was invested in stocks rather than government bonds because they pay more interest, but it still wouldn't have been near enough. And if even that was the case then the government in those past years couldn't have spent as much money because it would have lost that huge sink for government debt, in which case all the people currently collecting social security would have had to have paid higher taxes for the level of government services they received.
Meanwhile using the money from existing workers for existing retirees not only doesn't actually fund the program, it only even fails to implode as long as you a) never intend to wind the program down and b) the ratio of working people to retirees never decreases. But the ratio of working people to retirees did decrease, because people started having fewer kids and living longer, so now the unfunded "trust fund" isn't just insufficient to make the payments to the people who are currently paying in, it's soon not even going to be able to make the payments to the people who are currently retired, because it's now shrinking rather than growing as a result of more people collecting for each one paying in.
>And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
Yes, there are issues with Social Security and Medicare. Not least of which is that, at least for the next thirty years or so (at least until the baby boomers are mostly all dead -- not because I wish them ill, but because later generations are smaller, constraining the pool of contributors to SS/Medicare).
A simple fix (that would give us ~50 years to figure out how to do this better) would be to remove the income cap on SS/Medicare contributions. Currently, that's $176,100[0]. Doing so would keep SS/Medicare solvent long enough to figure out how to structure the safety net appropriately, without jeopardizing the health/well being of those who paid in expecting it to work for them too.
That is not actually a simple fix. You're proposing a 15.3% tax increase -- on top of all existing taxes -- on everyone who makes more than that amount of money. They're obviously going to lobby against that or otherwise take measures to thwart it using tax avoidance strategies etc., making it both less effective than anticipated and no easier to pass than actually reforming the programs.
On top of that, tax incidence is more complicated than "well the people paying it have higher incomes". Federal revenue has been a stable percentage of GDP since WWII, whereas that's an enormous increase in government collections exceeding all historical precedent, and the money had previously been going somewhere else, and the somewhere else (investment markets) would notice it going away. In other words, a tax hike that big would crash the stock market and the housing market etc.
There is no simple fix for this. People voted for a government willing to write them a check it couldn't cash and your only real choices are "don't give that much to wealthy retirees" or "take it from the economy at the expense of the kids".
>That is not actually a simple fix. You're proposing a 15.3% tax increase -- on top of all existing taxes -- on everyone who makes more than that amount of money
No. Not even close. It's not increasing anyone's taxes. It's just making them fairer. Most folks have to pay those taxes on all their income. Why should it be any different for the folks with the highest incomes?
What's more, I can say from experience that not paying SS/Medicare taxes over the arbitrary limit makes exactly zero material difference in my quality of life.
Whereas keeping SS/Medicare solvent while we figure out a better way will have a significant positive impact on my life and the lives of millions of others.
Don't be disingenuous. If there isn't anyone paying more than they are now then there isn't any additional government revenue.
> Most folks have to pay those taxes on all their income. Why should it be any different for the folks with the highest incomes?
The way social security works is that you pay in proportion to your income and then you receive social security payments in proportion to what you paid. There is a cap on both of these. You're proposing to only remove the cap on one of them. That's the same "fairness" argument for not solving the problem by making social security payments according to need or in fixed amounts, so if you're not concerned about that fairness equation then you already have a way of solving the problem without raising taxes.
> What's more, I can say from experience that not paying SS/Medicare taxes over the arbitrary limit makes exactly zero material difference in my quality of life.
This is what I mean by tax incidence. It's not your life which is affected. You're just putting the extra money in your IRA or whatever. But at scale that has consequences for other people. What do you expect happens if you take literally trillions of dollars out of capital markets?
How much will the optimization and means testing cost? Will it end up starting an entire division of workers to review and verify? There is no free lunch. This is like optimizing by shaving single digit milliseconds in uploading artifacts for your build time, but 10 minutes is spent somewhere else.
1) You start off saying the mandatory spending is a ruse.
2) You provide no evidence for it.
3) You ask some pretty basic (still good) questions that each department already undergoes.
4) You conclude the spending must not be mandatory after all, just by the mere existence of your questions. Almost assuming the worst case answer to each question you raised.
Do you understand this is Seagull budget planning? I am no government defender, but I am consistently flabbergasted by people who think government fraud detection started and ended with DOGE. Do you guys seriously write "Are we paying for unnecessary things" as though it's an insightful question nobody in government has looked into before? Even after we have confirmed DOGE did fuck all and likely made this whole process even worse?
> Do you guys seriously write "Are we paying for unnecessary things" as though it's an insightful question nobody in government has looked into before?
It isn't a novel question, which is how we know so conclusively that the answer is "yes, the government is paying for many unnecessary things". The people receiving the money keep lobbying to prevent it from being eliminated, so the primary thing preventing it from being eliminated is government authority to actually change things. Whether or not that's what DOGE did, it's the thing a government efficiency operation could and ought to do.
> The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything?
Yeah, it's over paying for private equity vultures who overcharge to extra maximum profit from healthcare. But that's reform that sorely needs to happen by the government reigning in those private companies not to the government. By trying to "drown [the government] in the bathtub" like Norquist advocated, project 2025 asshats are damaging our country.
Some things are mandatory only if you love your neighbor.
> But that's reform that sorely needs to happen by the government reigning in those private companies not to the government.
So the government passes regulations that cause private equity asshats to jack up prices, e.g. by making it infeasible to start new companies to compete with them, and then the government overpays to buy things from them, but this is somehow not the government's doing?
Bad regulations passed at the behest of private asshats are still bad regulations and the solution is still to repeal them.
> Some things are mandatory only if you love your neighbor.
And some things aren't mandatory at all, like having the government overpay for stuff which is nevertheless classified as "mandatory" spending.
How are you supposed to get an accountable government agency? Is the VA or the DMV or the DEA actually accountable right now, and if so then why are they so bad?
Accountability comes from the ability to reject something objectionable, i.e. it comes from having other alternatives that subject the provider to competitive pressure. That's not what you get from a government agency, nor is it what you get from a consolidated market where the incumbents have captured the government. It is what you get from a competitive market, which is the thing we currently lack.
I'm adding the rest of the context from the post I linked since it's clear almost no one is reading it:
"Mandatory spending includes entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which are legally required to provide benefits to eligible recipients. Even if DOGE wanted to, this spending can’t be cut. To change these programs’ funding, eligibility, or benefits, Congress must vote to amend the laws, a daunting task in the current polarized political climate.
Compounding the issue, President-Elect Trump recently stated his unwillingness to touch Social Security or Medicare. In addition, the Republican Party included protecting these programs as one of twenty promises in its 2024 GOP Platform.
If the incoming administration follows along party lines, that leaves discretionary spending (26%) as the only realistic target to trim spending."
Striving for efficiency is laudable, but that wasn't the goal. It was to dismantle institutions that the Oligarchs and their minions wanted to destroy.
The honest real question is what to do? We are at a turning point in history. Right now you are either polarized or asleep. The question is not only what can you do but what will you do. Now, not tomorrow. I personally am starting to get active locally in my city government. Commenting on the downfall isn't enough. Do something.
Still looking for the people on hn who eight months ago said that this would be a good thing to come out and admit not only that they were wrong, but the model of the world and their way of absorbing info that led them to such a conclusion is also wrong. Looking at you, geohot.
There are multiple generations of folks who've been trained to believe that Ronald Reagan was delivering divine wisdom when he said "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem" / "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."
I know many folks that don't have any animus to individual people. They just have been brainwashed since early childhood...
Yes. I'm not for calling out individual people, those who probably had hope and some may be young and didn't have the warning flags going off. I can only imagine they're disappointed and had no malice.
But people who have some level of fame who put their name behind it, and who had some influence in inspiring others down this wrong path most definitely need to address it. If you truly believe the intelligence of tech people over others in every field which led you down this path, follow the proper postmortem process.
It's a point of pride to fight tooth and nail arguing a wrong point. I worked with a guy who out right admitted that he will argue with you even if he knows he is wrong. It's not a discussion, its a fight they must win. They will die on their hill of macho pride. THEY MUST DEFEAT YOU.
Smart people admit they are wrong and learn, then move on for the better. The stagnant macho person will never learn anything and just wants status quo in perpetuity, so long as it benefits them.
They might act like it's a macho thing to argue against you, but let's be real, it can be painfully embarrassing to admit you're wrong, especially if you were really dug in already. Since it's about avoiding pain, it's the weak route to take to continue to defend a position you know is wrong.
What pain? If you feel pain from being wrong or having someone point it out you have thin skin. It's akin to being called stupid which is such a weak insult.
That's... exactly my point? They put up the defense because they are "thin skinned". It only looks all strong and macho on the surface when they continue to argue back.
Conversations around this administration and the people related or in support of them always bring me back to the Alt-Right Playbook.[1]
Usually I have a specific video in mind that is relevant, but this feels like a good time to link the whole series. It’s a good, informative, and (depressingly) humorous look at the alt-right - and while it doesn’t offer much in solid solutions, I think being able to understand how they operate and where they’re coming from allows us all to have a better chance in mitigating them and stopping the tide of fascism.
It was a reward for the biggest campaign donation in US political history. Musk didn't rig the election, he's not that competent or powerful. Occam's Razor tells us what happened was the Democrats went with a strategy that has never worked before (changing candidate mid-race), and they ended up predictably losing. That's it.
geohot has/had a weird obsession with Elon for a few years now. He copied what Elon did a lot and is sort of like an Elon Stan. Which led to him agreeing and competing with Elon a lot. However, after geohot interned at Twitter/X I think he moved on from Elon and liking his views etc.
But I suspect for most them their real desire was simply long lasting harm to the federal government and pain and suffering inflicted on those who work for the government.
I'm not sure why you think any of them would believe they were wrong. I don't think any of them were hoping for some kind of transformation other than destruction.
Why do you suspect this? Is it your view that right wingers are inherently evil as opposed to, say, having different opinions about how things should be done? I urge you to find some empathy.
I have friends who are gay, trans, non-Christian, or brown. Not all right-wingers say that they aren’t fully people but many do, and the more libertarian ones aren’t exactly rushing to shut that down. It is very hard to trust a group of people unwilling to recognize my neighbors as fully human.
In the federal space, we’ve seen purges of women and minorities, shutdowns of groups which work on things like civil rights or pollution in poor communities, widespread refusal to pay money as promised, and attempts to punish organizations for 1st amendment activities. There is zero expectation of good-faith from anyone who supports that.
Conversely I distrust people with a view of educating kids on an array of issues in gender and sexuality.
Unfortunately your/US views have become simplistic (yes simplistic) along two hyper extremes. Both sides are wrong at this stage. Just wrong in different ways.
Are you saying that respecting other people and letting them live their own lives without affecting you is worthy of distrust? Because I have directly seen what’s taught in schools here and it’s basically the golden rule without the quiet exceptions.
The golden rule is to treat people how I would like to be treated, and I welcome opinions from my friends and family on my life choices. I might not agree, and if I disagree strongly enough I might resolve to find a community where people are more aligned with me - but I'd expect that community to also have opinions on what's a good or a bad way to live your life.
You say that not all right wingers are bigoted, and then go on to proclaim the entire group doesn't recognize minorities as being human. Have you spoken honestly and in good faith with right wingers?
Let me clarify my point: I’m not saying every Republican is the same on every one of those issues, I’m saying that the people who disagree are not standing up to the people rejecting the idea that certain groups deserve full rights.
I have a number of family and a few remaining right-wing acquaintances (all of the libertarians I knew are voting straight-ticket for Democrats against MAGA) – not “kinda liked Reagan” but people who’ve had worked published in national media or been invited to dinner at Rupert Murdoch’s estate. Privately, people express concern or distaste for anti-liberty actions - but not in public, never to the point of standing up for a group being targeted. Like the Mexican woman who cleans their house, she’s great even if her husband was originally undocumented, so of course ICE shouldn’t go after them – but they won’t speak up on behalf of anyone they don’t know personally, even just to call for due process.
I left the Republican sphere during the Bush years when it became obvious that for all of the talk about ethics and the rule of law during the Clinton administration, there wasn’t a desire to hold their fellows to that same standard. Sadly, it’s only gotten worse since then – as we can see from the blatant lawlessness this year where even people who might share goals like reducing government spending or reconsidering industrial policy should feel safe saying there’s a better, legal way to do it.
I have had many such conversations (Texas is a fun state) and while many don't consider themselves bigoted, their policy preferences amount to, essentially, "but I'd rather we not treat people equally."
They don't "hate gay people". (They have gay friends!) But they don't think gay people should be able to marry or adopt children. Sometimes Leviticus comes up.
They don't "hate Black people" (They have black co-workers!). They just think the disparities in the justice, education and financial systems are all Black people's own fault.
They don't "hate immigrants" (They love Mexico!), they just think they're not assimilating, taking American jobs and draining tax payer resources.
Trans people seem to be the only group they'll outright admit to hating.
This is an odd comment, do you not know any right wing people? Especially in the non-coastal parts of the country?
This opinion comes from having many conversations with (real, not online) people who literally state that they consider that the government is inherently evil and it's sole function is to rob people of their liberty and hard earned money. I've spent a considerable amount of time doing business travel and working in parts of the country where I've heard people, in an public office conversation, voice that support for public radio is literally fascism to nodding agreement among their peers. I once mentioned an experience I had in the beginning of the pandemic and the response was "oh yea, that's when people still thought it was serious right?"
I don't think these people are inherently evil, they believe the government is evil and that those who work for it are working to undermine everyday Americans. If you actually had a conversation with anyone deep in the MAGA community you would know that harming the federal government, for them, is seen as a victory and virtuous.
It's baffling to me that anyone can still not understand the foundation of the MAGA community and growing extreme right. For years they have increasingly felt that their way of life has been robbed from them (and to be fair, it has been, rural communities in the US are in trouble), and they sincerely believe that this is caused by sinister forces working in the federal government, immigrants, the global elite, and "radical" woke leftists that want to harm their children.
To be fair, many are evil and hold evil opinions about their fellow humans. How do I find empathy with someone who doesn’t subscribe to the same reality and does not value lives of even their own neighbors?
I think if you actually spoke with them, many would make the same claims about the left. Many right wingers see the left as being equally evil, that doesn't mean it's true.
Empathy is always good, but in this case, within your "right winger" party you've got powerful factions with active and explicitly stated intentions to dismantle the federal government.
I said it would be a good thing and still do. Dismantling USAID alone was worth it. It's easy to spend taxpayer money, it's harder to make cuts, no matter how you do it you'll be the bad guy. But government needs to live within its means.
Dismantling USAID has condemned hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to literal death through a loss of famine relief and life saving medications for diseases like HIV and tuberculosis. It has diminished the soft power of the United States, destroyed the credibility of the country for a generation or more, and didn't even save that much money. It has profited the average American not at all and likely made everyone less safe.
I have no idea what kind of person thinks that was a good idea.
Borrowing billions of dollars when you are $37 trillion in debt and giving that borrowed money to people who hate you is insane. And most of that money goes to warlords and dictators. USAID needed a complete overhaul. And do you accuse the countries who don't give aid of causing famine and death? Why just America? You are welcome to give out of your own pocket if it assuages your guilt.
The venn diagram of that group and the group that immediately, with zero evidence, following the Charlie Kirk incident, declared war on “the left” is a circle.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. At the time of the original post, where people were condemning “leftists” and saying “this means war against the left,” there was zero evidence. No one had been caught (I guess they may have piled drived a poor janitor or something at this point), no idea who it could even be. This was days before it was revealed to be some MAGA splinter group.
One of the strange joys of this site is reading the insane takes of otherwise intelligent right-wingers as they try to bend reality to fit with their beliefs.
At the very best you'll get "the left forced them to do it" but blank denial of reality and invention of entirely fake parallel worlds is much more likely.
They've been doing that for climate, renewables, COVID, Trump etc. far longer than for DOGE with no sign of giving up.
I thought it was a good idea in spirit although I wasn't sure how effectively it would be done. To be honest I'm still not sure how effective it was. Almost all criticism I've seen of DOGE has been from those biased against it already. Obviously federal employees will be negative about a program designed around reducing their scope and funding...
All you have to do is look at the non-serious initial claim of $2T savings. That is wildly high, and told you that the people running it had no interest in success. It’s like if we have a startup founder here saying they’re going to have AGI by Christmas and be the first $10T company.
That's a non-sequitur. Plenty of serious AI companies have made predictions about AGI or replacing programmers which have not come to fruition. That doesn't mean they don't have interest in success.
I said serious in the sense of something they seriously believe they can deliver. Those wild predictions on unrealistic timeframes are for the stock market.
For an example: Sergei Brin, Sebastian Thrun, and Elon Musk were all interested in self-driving cars. Musk has been making materially misleading statements promising to deliver L5 in the next year or so many times since 2013, and still doesn’t have more than L2. Waymo did not promise things they couldn’t deliver, treated safety as a top priority, and is expanding L4 taxi services around the country. They’re all interested, Waymo is serious, but Musk’s strategy has made him enormously rich and I think that’s always been his top priority.
The spirit of the "program" leaned in the right direction, but Elon was absolutely the wrong guy to put in charge of it. Misplaced incentives, lack of interpersonal skills, lack of respect and empathy, lack of organizational skills when he does not have strong, professional lieutenants that will implement changes.
Edit: and who TF would have thought putting "big balls doge kid" in a position of power would be a good thing? That kid, along with whomever hired him, would be tossed out of any professional corp env swiftly.
> The spirit of the "program" leaned in the right direction ...
Congressional oversight in combination with incorporating CBO[0] work products to perform the oversight obviates the purported need for DOGE.
> ... Elon was absolutely the wrong guy to put in charge of it. Misplaced incentives, lack of interpersonal skills, lack of respect and empathy, lack of organizational skills ...
A more succinct way to describe this is; corruption.
It was an effort in spirit only. It was aimed almost entirely at damaging those agencies that Trump hated and that Musk wanted to muck up so he could gain advantages from less government oversight and regulations. In the end it had almost no effect on overall government spending, but it certainly helped Trumps aims to damage the government departments he didn't like, undo what Biden had done, and gain some advantages for Elon's companies.
It’s still completely insane that people still think it was anything other than this. I can understand if you’re a musk fan you could have thought he was being serious on the bullshit (otherwise how could you be a musk fan?) but think today there was any plan or “spirit” behind it is pure delusion.
The spirit of the program did not lean in the right direction at all.
It started and ended with malicious intent and demonstration of power. Classic Trump.
The correct spirit is how it was done under Clinton / Gore. Slowly, thoughtfully, carefully, properly planned and delicately executed.
(and this says nothing of party politics or the quality of president that Clinton was, this is only commentary of that particular action as comparison)
The program started from ignorance of the functions of the federal government and the people who work in it. People who don’t know anything drank and believed the koolaid. Their actions might make sense if the propaganda was true. But it isn’t.
The whole thing seemed to me to be a quid pro quo for Elon to get Trump elected via Twitter. I'm fairly sure everyone but DOGE knew it would not accomplish anything.
He also lacked the authority to realize the full vision, being only a guest of Trump. Hence the inevitable conflict when it came to the big beautiful bill.
This happens more often than not anyway. Overpriced office space, expensive furniture, extra layers of management because we're "structuring to scale the organization", fancy and expensive titles for people who barely do anything. I worked at one place that raised 70 million, then spent 10 renovating a rented space, only to close up barely 1 year later. I had left by that point.
Yes, except this was real, not fiction. I witnessed it more than once. During the dotcom days, a company I worked for raised 8 mil... then blew 25% on renovations. I still remember getting a tour of the "space", where the new logo (which probably cost 6 figures to design) was unveiled.
If they were burning $5M a month, not renovating an office for $10M would’ve bought two additional months of salary and operational costs. I assume the bulk of the other $60M went to salaries?
My company just spent $10M renovating an office but we’ve been in business for several decades and have been profitable every year for the past decade, I’m not sure about prior to that. It’s not always a bad idea to spend money on office space.
Tenant improvements (office remodels) are $75-$150/square foot these days depending on the level of finishes and FFE (furniture, fixtures, and equipment), and can go higher if you’re building out dozens of offices instead of open office space with perimeter private offices or want high end architectural lighting, aesthetic flourishes, etc. I know you can wire up a basic office with lights and receptacles for about $15/sqft if you use union labor and basic 2x4s/recessed cans for lighting.
My state allows 1 occupant per 150 gross sq ft of floor space (interior partitions, columns, and other items that occupy floor space are counted in gross square footage), so an office tower with a 22,500 sq ft floor plate allows for 150 occupants. At $100/sqft, you’re looking at $2.25M to build out a single floor of an office tower.
Depending on the market, the landlord might offer an allowance for tenant improvements or ‘pay’ for the improvements and they get paid back later over time through rent payments.
Yes, that sounds right. There were roughly 400 to 500 people near the end, if I remember, so $5M monthly burn is in the right ball park. This was over 15 years ago when salaries were much less. Usually waste in one area, like office space, means waste in other areas. So, yeah, the office space alone wouldn't buy much time. You'd need a whole change in attitude.
Oh this was 15 years ago? $10M is pretty extravagant for ~500 people, considering construction labor was nearly half the price it is now back in 2010, probably 60-65% of today’s wages.
How does one find these jobs where the founders are planning on lighting a pile of money on fire and not working ever again? Would love to burn some money myself.
> If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
And maybe (just maybe) raise your voice in _actionable_ support for dismantling the complexes these money ghouls use to wage war against you and regular society.
Peaceful protests, calling your reps, voting, and donating to organizations that have lawyers in the courts and lobbyists on Washington repping your interests are all super helpful relatively low effort steps that have impact when done en masse.
> I've not seen any of these actions make a measurable difference in the last 10 years
I've literally gotten language I drafted written into state and, twice now, federal law.
If you pick a hot-button issue, no, you probably won't move your elected. But on issues they didn't even consider to be on their plate? You can get attention. (Better yet if you can convince them you have other motivated voters beside you.)
Unfortunately, my (Republican) senator doesn't seem to agree with me (a Democrat) on even the smaller issues. Yet he theoretically represents every resident of this state in the Senate, including the ones that didn't vote for him.
It does. But every single case where I got to draft legislation occurred before I made money and before I’d given anyone any money. (I never gave either of the federal electeds I worked with money.)
I called about a bill that wasn’t getting attention. The elected thought it was interesting, but their staff were overworked. (They’re always overworked.) I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work. In a minority of cases, they introduced those into the working copy of the bill, and in a minority of those cases the bill actually passed.
Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
> I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work... Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
I'd argue that time to do free work, and especially the ability to do is legal drafting, is something that the upper classes have a lot more access to than others.
Some school district and property tax measures. That’s why I vote (and just for the general principle of it). Even my state and local reps are gerrymandered into lifelong stability.
They win with 80+% margins. They don’t even bother campaigning themselves and delegate it to their staff. The party wants it this way and is actively hostile to any primary challenges.
I have better things to do with my time than charge at windmills.
Civic engagement when the deck is stacked that bad against you is just pissing your time away. We only have so much time in this earth to accomplish things.
That is an issue, but it's important to signal to those paying attention that the resistance is there and to not give up.
We've entered Civil War II and I fear it will have to get much worse before there's any chance of turning things around. Regardless we can never give up.
The invasion of the Capitol, to overturn an election that they claim was fraudulent, followed by the pardoning of the invaders, is kind of a doozy. It suggests that one side or the other (or possibly both) is rejecting democracy and willing to use violence when they don't get the result they want. Not just the individuals involved, but the tens of millions who supported pardoning them.
Or alternatively, they were in fact correct, and tens of millions on the other side subverted democracy, at least temporarily (and would surely do so again if not prevented).
Either way, it sounds like you've millions of people each convinced that millions of others are about to start a civil war. Which sounds like it makes that war practically unavoidable.
It seems sometimes that they have mapped out how things are going to play out years in advance and are ready. After all what is the American government but just a group of fellow countrymen with all the data and resources?
1. Trump declared a Venezuelan gang as a terrorist organization.
2. Since then, Trump has ordered the military to conduct extrajudicial killings of people suspected of being in that gang who were on boats. He is implicitly asserting that military action is allowed without Congressional approval if the target is a terrorist organization (it probably isn't legal, and he's put out no justification for it).
3. He just declared Antifa a terrorist organization. He has a history of blaming things on Antifa and has mused about declaring other leftist organizations as terrorists.
The military preemptively deployed to multiple US cities isn't a great sign.
Generally speaking, we don't deploy our military in peacetime. So unless there's a natural disaster in Chicago or D.C. right now, there aren't but so many conclusions to draw...
Well, the President of the Heritage Foundation (the ones behind Project 2025, which is the playbook they're following) has said: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
People keep saying this. But the fact is it doesn’t matter.
Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district. Most people aren’t.
And then we have the Supreme Court giving the President unlimited power.
> Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district
I’ve knocked on doors for judicial elections in Manhattan where a single tenants’ association’s turnout out swung every election on the ballot. (In another case, the judge who went to Koreatown with us after a meet and greet swung our eight top to turn out, which was more than the margin for an off-cycle mid-week judicial primary.)
There are always elections on the ballot that matter. And civic engagement isn’t limited to voting.
Local politics and civic engagement might help getting a speed bump installed in front of the town grocery store, but it doesn’t stop unaccountable, non-identifying masked ICE thugs from swooping into your neighborhood and black-bagging your friends and neighbors. National politics overrides state and local.
Or women bleeding to death because doctors are afraid to perform life saving abortion because they might get arrested.
The (Republican) governor of GA has been spending years and millions of dollars to get the Hyundai plant in GA that would bring 8500 direct jobs and no telling how many indirect jobs to GA. That was delayed an almost ruined by ICE.
It was such a bad fuckup that Trump tried to beg the Koreans to stay after being arrested by ICE. They refused.
The GA voters overwhelmingly voted for Kemp over a MAGA endorsed candidate during the primaries and even a Republican governor can’t block the federal government’s jack booted thugs
and yet the center of political power oscillates – with real consequences – every two and four years... coincidentally around the time we have elections!
And those same purple states have decided where it oscillates - like I said.
Whether you are a Republican or Democrat in California it doesn’t matter who you as individual votes for for President. If you are in Los Angeles county, it also doesn’t matter who you vote for in the general election as your representative.
The primaries matter though. California sends the same number of Senators to DC as West Virginia and half as many as North and South Dakota combined even though they don’t have nearly the population.
How long and what strike of luck will it be based on timing that you think this country will see a liberal Supreme Court? Especially since justices nominated by Democrats refuse to leave when a Democratic President is in office? But then again, we are in this mess we are in today because the Democrats were too cowardly to pressure Biden not to run sooner.
If it didn't matter they wouldn't get so upset about you doing it.
Never listen to anyone telling you that your voice doesn't matter.
Like... here's a story about me getting a kind of boring corporate law (related to limited liability companies) changed in Italy. Tons of people rolled their eyes at me and said it'd never happen, but I kept poking away at it, and it did happen:
If anything, I get upset at how naive the left is, how they think that “this isn’t who we are”, and how out of touch they are. They try to play fair - the right plays to win.
Right now, the governor of California is trying to meet Texas gerrymandering with its own. But liberals are clutching their pearls with “two wrongs don’t make a right” and arguing about things like this in their committees
The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.
It is the act of supporting DOGE after the dumb implementation (e.g. 1/28/2025 Fork in the Road letter) that would concern me (which I think a16z has continued to do).
In my opinion, Elon Musk approached DOGE all wrong because he is used to running companies where payroll is the #1 expense, and cutting workers is how he has always cut costs at his previous companies when they were strapped for cash (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla). He did’t realize that the US Government is mostly an insurance company, so cutting office staff is a drop in the bucket. A tragedy of his own juvenile ignorance.
What was the pitch for DOGE? I get that govt agencies are insanely bloated. I don't get how DOGE intended to fix that even at the start, and the scammy charts they kept publishing weren't giving confidence. Was looking at it optimistically too, cause Musk did debloat Twitter.
> Support for DOGE before it was implemented is not a bad thing
A reminder that before it was implemented, it was called DOGE. It was never a serious thing, and supporting it may not have been bad, but it was hopelessly naive.
Should be obvious. If you want a smaller government, you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide. Venture capital / private equity / etc. owned companies will stand in line to get those contracts.
And with deregulations, "move fast and break things" startups can move even faster.
What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd. They enjoy social freedoms which the current gov. would rather see go away...so, talk about selling their soul to the devil.
There are quite a few socially liberal VCs, perhaps even most. But there are also more libertarians, which is quite common among those who make fortunes managing money rather than building things.
Privatization of those functions results in the government paying consultants more than they would pay staff, with less institutional knowledge, and far less efficiency than if the functions were directly in the government.
Generally, the government doesn't do things that private industry could do on their own. There are specific times where this isn't true. For example, there were small commuter buses in San Francisco for a while that the existing MUNI service could not accomplish. But these are quite rare!
For example, private industry is never going to fund basic research that is the foundation of the US's wealth and strength, except through taxation. The idea is ludicrous.
We could have private highways, private roads, perhaps, but we would be handing off public decisions to a private company that is almost certainly a monopoly. There are only rare cases where roads and highways are not inherently monopolistic.
SV venture capital is not one type of person, there are both liberal and libertarians among them. The libertarian variety got suckered in by the Dark Enlightenment propaganda and thought they could be the puppetmasters controlling the world with propaganda. They should have looked to what happens to their ilk in places like Russia before backing someone who wants to turn the US into an autocracy like Russia:
> What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd
Silicon Valley has had a monarchist element for at least a decade now. I've been commenting on it for a while. It masked itself in the language of libertarianism. (Note: not all libertarians are monarchists.) But 2024 outed them (Andreessen, Musk, the All In crowd, et cetera) for the bastards that they are.
I mean it was barely masked. They dropped mentions of the dark enlightenment like name dropping Curtis yarvin/mencius moldbug pretty frequently if you listened to their talks.
Sam Harris is the only intellectual in that space that I know of who was repulsed by their actual views and pulled back but maybe there are others.
The libertarian party itself got taken over by a less sophisticated group of these guys in a Mises Caucus mask from a coup orchestrated by the overstock.com ceo in 2022
The monarchists bent wasn't masked, but the racism was. I still remember the controversy around Yarvin being removed as a speaker at Strange Loop. A lot of people could not understand why what he said was racist.
I do not think the racism was masked anymore than the monarchist bent. Monarchists are just more palatable than racists.
I have been railing against these people for over a decade.
My experience with every friend or acquaintance denying their racism pretty much came down to “no one is actually that bad, you’re being ridiculous”
Between that and the people telling me Project 2025 was a caricature of a cartoon villain and would never happen last year, I am losing my mind at all the people confiding in me hat in hand that maybe, these people might actually want to bad things
It was really obvious what these people wanted. They advertised it. They wrote entire books about their plan. But all they had to do is say “no, that’s not true” in a single interview and everyone bought it because the alternative was mentally painful
You can have members of this group straight up admit to lying[1] and yet I have people who I can show the video of them admitting to lying who then still try to claim the lie is truthful.
If you are reading this comment and had seen these actions and events and had waved them off previously, then my opinion is that you were actively ignorant to save yourself the mental anguish
I agree they were not masked for people who can see through the masks, but the abstractness of their argument style gave them a level of plausible deniability that you just don't see anymore. For example, whereas before they would express their racism by pointing to literature like "The Bell Curve", now they just say stuff like this: https://www.thenerdreich.com/curtis-yarvins-racist-slurs-hav...
>you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide
Most of what DOGE cut was stuff no one wanted or needed in the first place. Just scroll their twitter feed, cutting this stuff shouldn't be termed as "smaller government".
If you take their claims at face value then you might believe that, however, if you look into it even just a little you find that they drastically misrepresented what was cut.
Read some of the LeopardsAteMyFace stories on reddit, and there are tons of federal workers that voted for this, and still are on the Kool-Aid, even as they are financially struggling.
One federal worker that voted for Trump, had his wife die during the mess, crossed multiple layers of hell to be rejected aid, dropped into poverty levels ... he still thinks that it was not Trumps fault. Trump just need "guidance", "temperance"...
Side note: he is also heavily religious so the overlap was not hard to spot, between religion and zealot worshiping.
The whole point of Doge was to fire the agencies that were investigating all of Musk's companies that were breaking laws. That and getting rid of competent people who might stand up to the orangefuhrer.
I think the self-dealing and getting rid of oversight was a very welcome bonus, but I think they genuinely thought they were the good guys coming to clean up government. Their methods were tragically ineffective as every serious person predicted.
We have fiscal issues, clearly, and they thought they were doing good work, but it was an absolute failure and many of the issues still remain, and were exacerbated by what DOGE did.
Well, the guys on the ground might be useful idiots [1]. But at the top there's no way they thought they were doing anything but dumping stuff into the trash.
Which when the EPA / etc are the only organizations large enough to stand up to you is uh very good for you.
It's impossible to prove intent. With the exception of the NHTSA, the following agencies were gutted, each whose jurisdiction covered his business interests. In the case of the NHTSA, about half of the team that oversees autonomous vehicle safely was let go [1].
Generously, two of those I would classify as "investigating" with only one actually using that word but the investigation started in 2023 and I've heard nothing of it.
He and his businesses have had several interactions with the federal government of varying antagonism but this is nothing like Trump firing Comey.
I think that it's pretty apparent that the pdf you linked is a pretty partisan document that makes a lot of tenuous links between Musk recommending firing the low level employees and his interactions with the heads of those agencies.
It is not unreasonable to expect that someone given this level of trust over the government should not have even an appearance of a conflict of interest. The mere fact that he himself is someone who is the beneficiary of billions of dollars of spending is an actual conflict.
I don't disagree with that at all but the appearance of a potential conflict of interest is a far cry from the assertion that the op made which is an exaggeration of the document linked which is an exaggeration of the appearance of conflict of interest.
It is upsetting to me that people have so much trouble sifting fact from opinion or narrative.
The fact is that DOGE made cuts to NHTSA. It is also a fact that DOGE made cuts to a bunch of agencies, not just ones related to something Elon was doing.
There isn’t even any evidence that DOGE was more aggressive about cutting things related to Elon vs other government waste.
Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government. The opinion is that the reason is to cut people specifically going after Elon.
And to be clear I gave no opinion on what Elon did or didn’t do. My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious.
What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
> What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
How doge isn't a plain dictionary definition of corruption? A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
It used to be that in such cases that private citizen then must give up their rights to their businesses (or some other way of avoiding conflict of interest).
The one they did the most damage to was probably USAID. They didnt have anything to do with Elons businesses. Meanwhile the FAA was still blocking starship flights.
Damaging USAID irreparably damages the US soft power around the globe. As Elon’s businesses are not limited to US borders, I wonder if there is perhaps a bigger picture here.
> A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
Except he had no power to do this? In the end the executive branch had to authorize anything coming out of DOGE. Like it or not, elected officials (Trump) rubber stamped the cuts.
What would a platform that incentivizes rational analysis look like? Social media as a whole definitely does not. Social media incentivizes immediacy, hot takes, and strong opinions. The nature of the medium produces that sort of content and getting deeper, more thoughtful content requires a different medium. I wonder what that might look like.
What’s more concerning to me is that my very cold take got downvoted into oblivion and that aside from yours, all the responses are irrational.
And this is not Facebook. There is no algorithm driving views and hot takes. This is ordinary, everyday people choosing to be irrational because self-righteousness is its own dopamine hit incentive, even in the absence of external incentives.
HN _is_ social media. It is the medium, not the algorithm that encourages the behaviour.
Like how a garbage can close to the door is more likely to be used than one on the other side of the room. The people who change their behaviour in those situations aren’t making a thoughtful, rational choice not to use a garbage can on the other side of the room. It is subtle, quick, and mostly unconscious.
“The medium is the message.” This is what that old quote was getting at.
"Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government"
Then
"My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious"
It doesn't matter if the person is bias or not, what matters is it they backed their opinion up with facts
> There isn’t even any evidence that DOGE was more aggressive about cutting things related to Elon vs other government waste.
I mean, they were scraping the signage off USAID offices on day one of DOGE, while Musk walked away with $0 of his own grants cut. There was no process at all for determining whether any of his billions were waste fraud or abuse. Surely all the money he's getting from the government is well-deserved and prudent.
I suspect Musk didn't know what his own goals were. The whole thing seemed more about emotion than logic.
I believe you're correct that he viewed the bureaucracy as a sort of foe, but that idea is somewhat paradoxical. You need employees to do anything. Fire everyone and Trump ends up nearly powerless.
This is a nice story but just doesn't hold up to the evidence of what was "cut".
The reason people lie it as a story is because it makes everything have a logical sense to it. It brings reason to the disorder, and people hate chaos so cling to this Machivaleian mirage of a plan. An evil plan is better than chaos. Even if it is not true.
However there _is_ an underlying reason to _some_ of the DOGE vandalism, and that is that Elon Musk's personal social media feed is a brain destroying fire hose of far right racism and conspiracy theories. One of the big boogey men of the far right racist conspiracy theories was USAID. So that is why USAID was shut down with the consequent loss of thousands upon thousands of lives. Because Musk believes bullshit he reads on the internet.
Made me sick to read that. It really makes me despise Musk, and Trump, and Vought, for their psychological violence towards our federal employees, and causing so much destruction that will take a long time to rebuild and restore.
I hit my senator very hard with information when this happened. It was clear to anyone with a brain and understanding of physics that they had no plans of doing anything other than installing crawlers and access control permissions.
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.
Elon 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.
"serious" at a superficial level. He never understood what he was doing, and went around smashing things indiscriminately, often in a way that was more expensive (e.g., laying off federal workers who were paid for doing nothing for months, then rehired when someone realized that they were in fact doing something valuable).
These are sad stories but you have to wonder how many such stories you might collect from any mostly-functional organization. Certainly there were people who had unjust firings, toxic interactions before Trump and Musk. People who work at big tech companies also have experiences like this (layoffs while on maternity leave, while getting treated for terminal illnesses etc.). This isn't a sign of any grave malice and is inevitable in a large org. What I do wonder is whether DOGE achieved any significant savings, and that is not addressed in the article.
> What I do wonder is whether DOGE achieved any significant savings
I don't think you actually wonder this because this information is easily and widely available with essentially zero effort.
Not only were there no real cost savings, but it was painfully and mathematically obvious that it was impossible for this approach to produce that kind of outcome.
Indeed the article is less an article and more a random collection of gripes and quotes. The third paragraph betrays that they're not really doing any analysis...
> The government would likely end 2025 with about 300,000 fewer employees... The total figure amounted to one in eight workers... In recent weeks, hundreds of the employees DOGE pushed out have reportedly been offered reinstatement.
"Hundreds" coming back is portrayed as if it offsets the 300,000 gone. They continue:
> The true scope of DOGE’s attack on the federal government remains unknown. While there is no reason to think it achieved meaningful cost savings or operational efficiencies...
and then go on to complain about an immigrant database, which has nothing to do with the reduction in the federal workforce. Simple quick math would suggest $60 billion or so a year in savings from the workforce reduction. Of course the larger savings is in the whole programs that were eliminated, not just the salaries and benefits savings.
DOGE saving $2 trillion / year is indeed impossible. That kind of savings would require a national conversation about what federal roles we no longer need. But DOGE likely achieved hundreds of billions a year in savings. USAID alone had a $50 billion budget that was mostly eliminated, though a few billion just moved over to State.
> But DOGE likely achieved hundreds of billions a year in savings. USAID alone had a $50 billion budget that was mostly eliminated, though a few billion just moved over to State.
A lot to unpack here
----
If you're an institutionalist: Does the executive now hold power of the purse?
If you're a humanitarian: was $50B for millions of lives and god knows how many more of massive quality of life improvement worth it?
If you care about evidence: "Likely hundreds of billions a year in savings" is insufficiently rigorous to throw around such large numbers. I've heard its as low as $2B and likely lower.
USAID was also a key channel for gathering open source intelligence in developing countries, and provided cover identities for CIA agents. There was certainly some waste and corruption but eliminating it completely was a massive own goal from a soft power perspective.
>She was literally wailing, inconsolable, because she could not get into a childcare facility she could afford on such short notice. She literally had to choose between her little child and working.
People need to understand that the world doesn't revolve around themselves. Your employer doesn't have to bend to your every will and need. She also had the opportunity to get 8 months of severance if she was that short on money.
This is the quote that bugged me the most too, as it's an obvious attempt at pure emotional manipulation. Working from home as a federal employee was always a limited time privilege, not some sort of fundamental right.
And it sounds like she actually did find a place to drop off her child: "Her explaining to her manager the way her child cried and begged Mommy to stay home broke me." Yeah, most employed adults have to leave their children somewhere when they go to work.
The comments here are crazy. Excuse me if I don't find Wired and a bunch of disgruntled ex-fed employees to be a credible unbiased source. The US Govt is so clearly bloated and inefficient it had to be trimmed and optimized. At least some here recognize that cuts in the 90's also worked. And I'm old enough to remember people crying bloody murder then too. People hate to be pulled off government's gravy train.
I think the main point is the manner in which these cuts were conducted. These were chaotic, very quick, and reckless. Very little empathy was shown. They were conducted by 19-23 year olds with the world's richest man (who bought his position) in charge of them.
This is not true, as it's been done before by a previous government, the Clinton administration, which actually did post a budget surplus in the 90s. Their method was to go slowly and methodically, so you are not correct to say that it cannot be done unless it's done quickly.
However, you're also wrong about "what's been done" -- this year the government will not only post a deficit but the highest deficit in US history. So to the extent that you support this administrations effort to cut the deficit, they have abjectly failed to do so. So perhaps it's more true that you cannot cut costs if you try to do it quickly, because doing it quickly has not worked. My prediction is in the next 4 years, the deficit will increase every year.
Moreover, you stated in your earlier reply that it is "obvious" the government was "inefficient it had to be trimmed and optimized". This is not obvious.
For starters, you (and also DOGE) neglected to define "efficiency", so we are left wondering what is being optimized. Efficiency is a weasel word -- it doesn't mean anything on its own -- so using it without measuring anything is immediately suspicious. How can you say you've made it more efficient by cutting spending if you don't have a metric for efficiency?
I'll give you a metric: in 2024 there were as many government employees as there were in 1970, despite the population growing by 140 million people, a 70% increase. Population explodes, yet government does not... that's efficiency. So no, it's not "obvious" the government as it existed in 2024 is inefficient.
First chart shows where the extra work is being handled, it's at the local level. That's what should be happening, so nothing to correct there.
Second chart shows what is actually growing: government dependents. So when you say "Have some empathy for the middle class that has to carry this terrible tax burden." I direct you to the following collection of lamentations of middle class people, his supporters, pleading for the President to stop the economic damage he's doing to the middle class: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace
Actually what you're suggesting is that we have to save the middle class by cutting lower class social support systems. But Trumponomics (all tariffs all the time, crony capitalism, mob-like strongarming of private companies) is driving a reduction of the middle class to the point where they need more social services.
Even if you take Trump, Musk, etc at their words -- that the government is horribly bloated and that DOGE has saved $206B -- this still doesn't look in totality like a sound economic decision:
1. The deficit has increased with Trump in office.
2. The rate at which the deficit is getting worse has increased with Trump in office.
3. That's in large part due to an increase in government expenditures more than enough to offset the claimed savings.
4. Even if that entire $206B were actually being distributed to taxpayers somehow, it's on par with the increase in grocery prices just since Trump took office, resulting in a net loss for taxpayers (you pay for groceries with post-tax income).
5. The things being cut first are those which help anyone with a middle-class or lower income. E.g., the CFPB more than paid for itself for years from the perspective of anyone other than a malicious bank just from one policy change limiting abusive fees banks are able to charge.
6. Even if you believe that all such departments need to be neutered and downsized (a bit weird that we need to reduce their power, impact, and effectiveness just to make them more "efficient", but whatever), it's objectively costing more in lawsuits and hiring critical personnel back than it would have to think for a moment before firing literally everyone.
7. Even at $206B with sane economic decisions elsewhere in the government, it's still not enough to move the needle on anything, and it's a far cry from the $2T in advertised cuts that were used to trick the American people into allowing this chicanery into our government.
And so on. Nothing about the current administration would qualify as increasing government efficiency even squinting at it in a modern art museum.
And that's if you take them at their word. At a bare minimum, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, DOGE themselves have admitted to many of those advertised cuts being mistakes, oftentimes by an order of magnitude or in totality, yet those mistakes are never corrected in their public leaderboard. If you look at their own sources and receipts there's a significant number of mistakes on top of the ones they've fessed up to.
I agree that the government is bloated, and I'm not particularly happy with many of the political maneuverings on either side of the spectrum the last decade or three, but when it comes to Musk and Trump I think it's reasonable to consider that when there's significant evidence of lying from individuals with a history of lying for personal gain, you're probably being lied to, even if you really want the thing they're claiming to give you.
It's not about how much I trust them, but that they were the only ones with the cajones to do the job. And you can see how hard it was by the outcry. It's easy to give people taxpayer money, nye impossible to stop it.
Doing something isn't as important as doing it well in a situation that wasn't an emergency.
Not trusting the government but happy they are performing some action at all seems reckless.
> only ones with the cajones to do the job.
Trump doesn't have the balls to cut defense spending or to stop government subsidizes to farmers. Firing people and cutting aid to poor people isn't brave.
For those curious about a more thoughtful model of government reform--which is still sorely needed--the original US Digital Service team just published a bunch of interviews: https://usdigitalserviceorigins.org/interviews/
I was working for a federal contractor when we had a release go out that had a problem. Some digital service folks got sent in, arriving about the same day we figured out the environmental problem planted by the previous contractor for the program. The digital services folks were extremely useful in getting us in contact with other gov folks to speed up releasing the fix, but otherwise they didn't do anything. They took all the credit afterward though.
Thats what seniors do. For good and bad, but they can be invaluable. Lots of problems are primarily people problems.
I hope a similar oral history will be done for 18F – it ran very, very lean.
The US Digital Service has done a ton of great work in a thoughtful manner. Thanks Obama!
I'm a federal employee, working as a software engineer for the Department of Defense on embedded systems which are used on aircraft.
The first few months of DOGE were complete chaos. The senior executive service received conflicting information from one week to the next. Our operations were severely impacted without any benefit. We couldn't even go to test ranges for field testing.In addition to that, the five bullet points were a major security issue due to classification by aggregation.
Although DOGE is gone, we're still experiencing the fallout. There's more red tape than ever before. Everything requires multiple levels of approval - even ordering a replacement capacitor has to go up three levels of management. We're forced to bring defense contractors to our field tests because it's a fight to bring more than one federal employee, almost doubling the cost of any trip. It took half a year for us to even be allowed to mail equipment to various depots. Now, we're effectively forced to pay contractors for tasks we could do organically.
More privatization will drive up cost in the defense industry up significantly. I.E, an unnamed military contractor wants more than 5 million dollars for a line item breakdown for a quote they gave us.
Yo, probably the best way to push through that tape is to play with another DoD entity who pays for your trams travel while you pay for theirs.
This will get you around the contractor requirement and the red tape.
I work in a DoD innovation org at the staff ;-) if you have questions let me know.
> There's more red tape than ever before.
It's not the DoD, but this is happening out in the open at DHS where the secretary is requiring her personal sign-off on any purchase over $100k[0] when the previous limit was $25M.
0: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/acquisition-policy/2025/06/ab...1: https://archive.is/Ky7d5
> It's not the DoD, but this is happening out in the open at DHS where the secretary is requiring her personal sign-off on any purchase over $100k[0] when the previous limit was $25M.
This is EXACTLY what the PE firm did to my company after acquisition to "cut costs" and make numbers go up. I used to be able to sign off on my own purchase reqs up to $2000. That allowed me to easily acquire just about anything I needed and get my work done. Now I have to have EVERYTHING signed off on by upper management. As If I was an irresponsible spendthrift throwing money away on spare parts we actually needed. It's useless performative micromanagement by incompetent people. It's honestly insulting.
Government doesn't turn a profit, so the only way to get more money and prestige in the government is to have a higher headcount under you and more power. A good way to get more power is to add a bunch of red tape and also to slow down all the processes so you need more people and thus require a higher headcount which makes your management more prestigious.
All the incentives line up that this will only get worse.
"Unnamed military contractors" should be forced into competitive bids. Ditch the favoritism and let any US corporation bid on it and including bidding on the jobs where you need 3 layers of management to buy a capacitor when done by government employees. You can go out and buy a $500 Ar-15 on the private market that's about as good as an M4/M16 the military is paying thousands for -- that's the result of an actually free market for M-16/Ar-15 and the same thing can be brought to the rest of defense contracting.
Correct. The majority of "DoD waste" goes into expensive, overpriced purchases.
DOGE villainized the average federal employee rather than addressing the true waste - overpaying Defense Contractors.
Not defending DOGE, but it should be noted that much of what DoD pays for when it buys weapons is not the weapons, but reliable weapons and the logistics of supporting them under combat conditions. The apparently inflated unit costs often are given without looking at what's actually included contractually in those costs. Sure, any citizen can buy an AR-15 for $500, but that citizen isn't paying for a support structure that has to be able to deliver ammo or spare parts or spare units in a combat zone in time of war. Nor is that citizen paying for the guarantee that the contractor will be able to continue to produce all those things in the necessary quantities in time of war. Nor is the citizen paying for reliability guarantees about the weapon working under adverse conditions.
It's unfortunate that the reporting around such things doesn't actually dig into all this, but just gives quick sound bites without any real analysis.
I should have been more specific. I understand the sustainment cost of weapon systems and the like - which, while still too costly, is partially justified.
I was referring to the inflated cost the DoD pays for everyday items. I.E, having to pay double or triple the market rate for things like office chairs, computer headsets, and WIFI dongles. There's no sustainment cost. Just an inflated price.
Even those items have to meet more stringent requirements for DoD than similar items bought by private companies or individuals.
What does your last sentence mean? That a contractor charges an additional $5 million to detail what the charges in their quote are for?
I apologize in advance for not giving exact numbers - I'd rather not tie my posts to specific programs in the unlikely case that someone I work with reads my posts.
We received a quote containing two lines:
"Hardware Cost - xx million" "Software Cost - xx million"
There was no further information. No detail on how those numbers were derived, nor what we were paying for other than the "hardware and software needed for organic sustainment of the system in question. The defense contractor wanted over 5 million for any additional detail. We wouldn't know whether we receive documentation, schematics, etc without paying additional money. I don't mean that they wanted us to pay more for things like documentation or schematics. We wouldn't know what we are receiving until we pay.
We were providing engineering support for a DoD Program Office which normally deals in multi-billion dollar acquisitions. They treated ~5 million as pocket change. Over multiple system acquisitions, that adds up fast.
Isn’t this what competition solves?
https://archive.is/TiaSF
One thing that really disgusted me about DOGE is that we did have a very successful reduction in the scope of the federal bureaucracy 30+ years ago, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Rei... . But we didn't want a thoughtful, respectful plan for reducing the scope of government, we wanted a WWE bomb thrower.
Side note, I think Al Gore was one of the most effective politicians of the last 50 years who wasn't president and he got tons of shit for it: 1. He never said he "invented the Internet", but he did give critical federal support to the Internet in its early days when he was a Senator, and technologists who actually know what they are talking about credit him with this, 2. He implemented the most successful reduction in the federal bureaucracy since WWII, 3. He conceded the 2000 election for the good of the country - he did not foment an uprising to try to fulfill his narcissistic supply, 4. He made many people aware of the dangers of climate change (though this may have admittedly backfired as some people interpret anything that comes from a Democratic voice as a "liberal hoax").
In hindsight, #3 was one of the top 10 mistakes in the history of the US.
It was bound to happen, good-faith people have been getting the shit end of the stick for as long as time. Old news.
He said "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet, I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country", which is very very close to being indistinguishable from "inventing the internet"
If you care to educate yourself (though you'll have to excuse my scepticism), the Wikipedia article has more details, and more context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_tech...
In particular, this sentence:
> Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
The citation for that links to this email from Vint Cerf, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/m.... The joint letter from Cerf and Kahn start with this:
> Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
> No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
> very very close to being indistinguishable from "inventing the internet"
For a native English speaker, no it isn't.
Also fwiw, if you weren't working in the field at that time, experiencing the process of connecting to the then Internet, I don't think you can comment on this authoritatively.
What is the difference between creating something and inventing it?
Your own quote you posted didn't say "I created the Internet". It said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet", which when coming from a politician is most reasonably interpreted as creating the conditions and policies (e.g. funding and regulatory framework) to make the Internet possible, which, according to the inventors of TCP/IP, he did.
If you invent a new kind of bagel, not much of a difference.
For something on the scale of the internet, political alignment is absolutely critical for its creation, regardless of who invented it.
I create a Local Area Network by connecting and configuring devices to a local router, as opposed to inventing Local Area Networking hardware equipment and respective protocols.
I still feel like people are missing the deeper problem with DOGE. Yes, they’re dismantling the government, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It’s stupid, reckless and cruel. But most Americans want the government reduced, and so we end up arguing over “effectiveness”. Notice how half the comments here follow that track.
The deeper problem is that the richest man in the world bought his own department of the federal government of The United States and was allowed unchecked power within it. Nothing like this has ever occurred before in American history. The only thing that got him out was that Washington isn’t big enough for two egos as big as Musk and Trump, and one had to go. And since Musk’s people are still embedded in there, I would bet that he still has plenty of influence.
For those in the red tribe that support this, would you support George Soros or Bill Gates buying their own department and using it to rearrange the government to fit their will? Well, shit like that is now on the table. Good job.
You can look to the writing of major political actors on the right and see that they just want to hurt people. People wrote that they want federal workers to be traumatized. They want to make life so unappealing for people working for institutions they hate (the bureaucracy and universities being the big two) that people simply leave and the institutions wither and die.
I have friends who work hard for the federal government to do things that people love. That curator who works at the museum of natural history to bring joy to a child who gets to learn something amazing about our world? That curator broke down sobbing at work multiple times this year. That's what they want.
Your comment made me really, really sad. Please tell your friend that there is someone out there, someone random, someone who will never meet them, who appreciates them and the work they've done over their career.
If you are on social media, maybe reach out? Like museum pages. Comment. Did you go to DC on a school trip? Maybe post it's impacts, or what you enjoyed/remember? Or just 'imagine a job where you get to positively impact so many peoples' lives! You all are doing good things!"
We need to tell each other we are seen. We aren't alone. To keep our heads up. We will get through this together if we keep our heads up. Only when they can force us to cry alone do they win. They are weak and want unnatural things, which is why they are flooding the zone trying to break us all down separately and make us feel isolated/powerless. Every football team defense 'floods the zone' every field goal/extra point kick. It doesn't work. Don't let it work here.
We aren't brave and will just complain from the sidelines, but we can at least cheer on those not on the sidelines. It's never been easier to express support. Hit up peoples/institutions socials and tell them they are seen, tell them keep their heads up because we do support them.
Saying "red tribe" is a pretty dead giveaway of, say, a certain way of thinking.
George Soros or Bill Gates will never be able to buy their own department for reasons that the people with the tribalist lens can't seem to grasp: the democratic coalition is FAR more principled and fractured / diverse than the republican coalition. I can already hear people howl for evidence; for evidence, look no farther than the party platforms for the last few electoral cycles.
A lot of things that seemed impossible a few years ago are now old hat. The Democrats wouldn’t be so hamfisted, but never say never.
And my point wasn’t that the Democrats would. It’s that the Democrats could and may even be forced to, in order to win an election. If JD Vance is selling a department for $500M, from a game theoretical perspective, the Democrats may have no choice.
The whole problem is that all the norms that allowed the republic to function are being stripped away, and this is one of the biggest violations of our norms to date, yet no one has even mentioned this aspect.
> the democratic coalition is FAR more principled and fractured / diverse than the republican coalition.
_Currently_. On the other hand, realistically, it's impossible to imagine this happening under, say, Bush (either version of Bush), and yet now here we are. Things change.
This makes a fair bit more sense when you realize that hierarchy and the resulting feudalist structures are basically the core tenets of right-wing ideology. On paper, the right should have a harder time working together: The fascists, theocrats, and kleptocrats have wildly divergent worldviews. However, more fundamental than any of their specific views, they all believe in rigid power hierarchies. Which means to bring one branch of the right into the fold of whichever group currently holds the most power, all they really have to do is win over the upper echelons of the weaker faction, and then secure them a place (not necessarily even that highly ranked of a place) within their power structure.
Meanwhile, across the isle, a vague alignment in short term goals is basically all that keeps the left and the liberals together as a coalition. Whereas the right can say and do just about anything as long as it doesn't jeopardize their direct underlings' position in the overarching power structure, even small, strategic concessions can obliterate what little trust leaders have built up over the years.
Please note - Trump has a 92% approval rating amongst Republicans.
It is tribal affiliation and tribal news channels at this point.
Thinking otherwise is the luxury of assuming you have different problems, and of not checking your assumptions.
Obama did far more severe cuts and re-orgs in his second term.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/12/11/preside...
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/government-job...
Nobody cared because we weren't in the sensationalist era where one becomes a "nazi" for wanting a smaller government.
Did you know that Obama deported more people than Trump as well? Was he somehow a fascist for respecting the border?
Your certain way of thinking is simply ignorance.
This petty score keeping is an intentional dodge of the real problems: This administration is doing ham-fisted execution of their strategy and trying to go around the law wherever they can get away with it.
Any country that enforces immigration laws (almost all of them) will be constantly deporting people. Saying a lot of people were deported under Obama is an intentional dodge around the glaring fact that we have masked ICE agents doing ham-fisted raids and doing extraordinarily dumb things like detaining factory workers at an important battery plant just because.
> and doing extraordinarily dumb things like detaining factory workers at an important battery plant just because
Or people deployed and actively fighting wildfires.
Obama didn’t bring in an external, unvetted team of 20 year olds to run amok and abjectly humiliate the Federal workforce. He also kept services running. And he did it within the law.
Get all of that? That’s what he didn’t do that DOGE did do.
I don't think you realize how good your first link makes Obama look and how badly it supports your claims, did you even read it?
Half that article is about cutting healthcare costs for the American people, which is a good thing that Republicans haven't had any results on since Nixon.
The other half demonstrates very plainly that Obama worked with Congress to pass laws to streamline spending and cut out middlemen, and that's notable because DOGE completely circumvented congress who is supposed to be the sole possessor of the power of the purse.
That part of the article pointed out that Obama cut the deficit by trillions, which of course Republicans have refused to do in the last few decades (with the Big Beautiful Bill and Tax Cut and Jobs Act both ballooning the deficit).
The Clinton administration also worked with congress to implement its version of DOGE and had much more success: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-...
Bringing up deportations was not relevant to this discussion nor the article.
>and that's notable because DOGE completely circumvented congress who is supposed to be the sole possessor of the power of the purse.
Congress has the constitutional power of the purse but that refers specifically to raising and appropriating money[].
The executive has the power to actually go out and spend the appropriated money. Congress tried to usurp that power around the time of Nixon by stopping executive impoundment. But it's not clear if that's constitutional; it might be now under current SCOTUS interpretations but I wouldn't be surprised if SCOTUS reviews it and find that to be incorrect.
Personally I think congress usurping power of impoundment is a bright and clear violation of checks and balances built into the constitution that requires two branches to approve of spending before it can actually get spent. DOGE was a valiant attempt to bring us back into constitutional compliance.
[] https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Po...
Your own linked site says
"Congress—and in particular, the House of Representatives—is invested with the “power of the purse,” the ability to tax and spend public money for the national government."
But you said
"The executive has the power to actually go out and spend the appropriated money."
Explain
— U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 7, clause 1
and
— U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 9, clause 7
Says tax and appropriate.
Constitution supersedes what the website says, I'm not sure why the website later misquoted it, but thanks for pointing it out.
Article II says the president must faithfully execute the laws, which means implementing Congress' will, not his own.
Most of congresses appropriations can't be faithfully executed because they largely violate the tenth amendment, appropriating functions of the federal government outside the scope authorized by the constitution and reserved to the people and states. This is exactly what DOGE was helping to keep in check.
At the times when the federal government was mostly within the constraints of the 10th amendment, federal spending was under 5% of GDP in non war-time.
>Most of congresses appropriations can't be faithfully..
If a law violates the 10th amendment then it should be challenged in court. The president doesn't decide what is constitutional the courts do.
The courts don't decide what the constitution is, the people that wrote and amended it did. The courts can only interpret it, often wrongly, as evidenced by the fact they routinely contradict themselves. The president has a duty to ignore any unconstitutional court ruling, as his oath requires.
That's not how anything works. The Constitution literally says so.
If you want a king, just say so.
The constitution says POTUS can violate the constitution if SCOTUS says so?
No, but it says it’s his job to execute the law, not to use his discretion to pick and choose which laws to execute. The entire purpose of the constitution is to balance powers, not to ensure it’s never at any time violated. Any violation of the constitution is supposed to be corrected by the balancing force of other branches.
You might think giving one branch all the power to make sure the constitution is not violated might lead to a situation where it’s never violated, but what actually happens is the powers become unbalanced and the executive is free to violate the constitution at will.
Each branch can consider if law is unconstitutional. It takes all three in agreement to execute it.
The legislature is bound not to create unconstitutional laws. If the law does pass, the executive is bound not to execute it. If the law is executed, the court is bound to strike it (you can argue the court is also bound to strike it even if it's not executed, but Knife Rights v Garland for example found there is at least in that case no standing to challenge a non-executed law).
It's not that one branch has all the power so much as each branch has veto power to stop the unconstitutional law from actually coming into effect. The power to actually do something takes all 3 branches but the power to stop something only takes one. Even the founders understood this -- Jefferson helped block the Sedition Act and actively encouraged states to nullify and avert its enforcement. Obama and later presidents stopped the enforcement of many prohibitions on recreational intrastate commerce of marijuana, a blatantly unconstitutional federal law, which nonetheless still stands (enforcement of medical marijuana is defunded but not recreational). These increased our compliance with the constitution, without creating dictators.
>Each branch can consider if law is unconstitutional. It takes all three in agreement to execute it.
Where is this stated in the constitution?
The constitution states the bounds of the government, then gives the president no authority to outstep them. The 10th amendment is what you seek, it stops POTUS from executing extra-constitutional law as it would outstep the powers outlined for the federal government in the constitution.
That is, the constitution limits POTUS powers to ones explicitly given. If the law exceeds it, he cannot implement it, regardless of the opinion of the judiciary or congress. This is bound on all 3 branches, and due to the design of the constitution it only takes one branch blocking a law to stop it.
Now, you state we need to challenge laws before the president can stop enforce them. Riddle me this, why is it the federal courts won't even let you challenge the federal Switchblade Act, because they state no standing as it hasn't been enforced (by their definition) in over 10 years (Knife Rights v Garland) []. How could what you say possibly be true if the law isn't even allowed to be challenged? If what you said was true, and POTUS had to enforce the law, then there would always be standing by the people jeopardized by it to challenge it. The courts wont even let you do what you've asked.
[] https://kniferights.org/legislative-update/court-opines-feds...
> Each branch can consider if law is unconstitutional. It takes all three in agreement to execute it. The legislature is bound not to create unconstitutional laws. If the law does pass, the executive is bound not to execute it.
I agree the legislature is bound to not create unconstitutional laws, but the sole power the executive has under the Constitution as to the constitutionality of laws is his veto power, which was intentionally limited by the Framers:
You're saying that the President actually has an absolute veto; if he vetoes a bill, and Congress overrides the veto, you're saying the President gets the ultimate veto in that he can just claim the law is unconstitutional and refuse to implement it. So now you have to answer why the Framers would have limited the veto power if they had intended POTUS to have an ultimate veto through selective execution of laws.> Even the founders understood this -- Jefferson helped block the Sedition Act and actively encouraged states to nullify and avert its enforcement.
The Sedition Act expired as soon as he entered office, so I'm not sure how you figure he "blocked" it in any sense. Whatever Jefferson had to say about the sedition act was his right, but he didn't use any unconstitutional powers to work against it.
> Obama and later presidents stopped the enforcement of many prohibitions on recreational intrastate commerce of marijuana, a blatantly unconstitutional federal law, which nonetheless still stands (enforcement of medical marijuana is defunded but not recreational).
The scope of POTUS' power over the DOJ is circumscribed by Congress; Article II gives the President general executive power, but the specific scope of prosecutorial discretion is grounded in statutory law -- whatever discretion he has over prosecutions is granted by Congress. You concede that POTUS have not stopped enforcement of the law entirely, which would be unconstitutional; but they have used persecutorial discretion to focus resources, which is constitutional.
>You're saying that the President actually has an absolute veto; if he vetoes a bill, and Congress overrides the veto, you're saying the President gets the ultimate veto in that he can just claim the law is unconstitutional and refuse to implement it. So now you have to answer why the Framers would have limited the veto power if they had intended POTUS to have an ultimate veto through selective execution of laws.
Veto prevents the law from going on the books.
Unconstitutional 'veto' doesn't stop future administrations, it's much softer and merely reflects the president following his oath, but allows people to elect another executive who could then enforce the law. That is, veto power is for stopping constitutional or constitutional laws from going on the books. Refusing to execute doesn't strike from the books but allows execution of oath to follow the constitution.
Of course, I'm not sure your point about president not acting on good faith and thus refusing to execute constitutional laws -- in that case he could be impeached but if not it's a sign the whole system has broken down as at that point at least 2 of the 3 branches of government no longer respect the constitution.
>The Sedition Act expired as soon as he entered office, so I'm not sure how you figure he "blocked" it in any sense. Whatever Jefferson had to say about the sedition act was his right, but he didn't use any unconstitutional powers to work against it.
You're right that his time in office didn't actually block it, although Jefferson made clear that he believed the executive had the power to stop enforcing it, and had encouraged states to nullify it before he even took office and before it expired. I'll concede here the argument he personally was the one that blocked it was weak, although it clearly shows a founders take that the constitution permits the executive to follow the constitution instead of an unconstitutional legislation.
>You concede that POTUS have not stopped enforcement of the law entirely, which would be unconstitutional; but they have used persecutorial discretion to focus resources, which is constitutional.
If you prefer, you can switch to the Switchblade Act , which the federal courts have absolutely and unequivocally ruled has had the enforcement of the law "stopped entirely" (albeit in very twisted logic, they didn't count seizures that were then returned) for 10 years (Knife Rights v Garland). In fact the courts in that case basically found you couldn't even challenge a law that had been unenforced by the executive in 10 years, as they basically considered it as no one having standing as it basically doesn't exist as something jeopardizing anyone. Of course the main reason to challenge it is because it's unconstitutional (violates 2nd amendment) in the first place (thankfully executive took care of this before it went to courts, though would be nice if they'd double tap on it)!
I would think if the courts agreed with you, and the executive did have to enforce the laws, they couldn't have argued there is no standing to challenge the Switchblade Act, since the executive was bound to enforce it. The fact you can't challenge a law the executive has chosen not to enforce would seem to presume the courts have decided that the lack of standing stands on a legitimate machination of government, else it would be an absolutely preposterous premise that you won't be in jeopardy.
What violates the constitution is a matter of opinion. The courts makes those opinions.
If a court says a law is constitutional then it's considered constitutional when deciding whether to enforce the law.
It doesn't matter if you or the president disagrees. The courts opinion is what matters
Courts can be overruled by a higher court or Years later the Supreme Court can change their mind and issue a new ruling.
What matter is the current opinion of highest court to offer one about a particular law.
POTUS has no power to defy the constitution if the opinions requires unconstitutional activity. I.e. if congress passes a laws that says "no guns" and SCOTUS says "yes that's what the 2A says" the president has to ignore it because the 10th amendment blocks him from having the power to enforce it.
Nowhere in the constitution would it give him the ability to ignore the constitution if the other 2 branches violate it. You are inventing new dictatorial rights for POTUS.
>.e. if congress passes a laws that says "no guns" and SCOTUS says "yes that's what the 2A says" the president has to ignore it because the 10th amendment blocks him from having the power to enforce it.
No. Because the law would be constitutional since the Supreme Court said it is
You keep trying to argue that the president determines what is constitutional but the courts do. It doesn't matter what the president thinks is constitutional
Federal courts have argued they there isn't even standing to consider the constitutionality of an unenforced law (Knife Rights v Garland).
If the president was bound to enforce the law, how could the court possibly argue the constitutionality can't be considered because no one is in jeopardy?
The court basically decided you can't even challenge the Switchblade Act on 2A constitutional grounds because it's already been nullified by the executive as it's not been enforced in 10 years[].
Nullification of execution/enforcement was something even the founders (Thomas Jefferson) considers legitimate application of the constitution in regards to the unconstitutional Sedition Act.
[] https://kniferights.org/legislative-update/court-opines-feds...
>The courts don't decide what the constitution is
I said what laws are constitutional not "what is the constitution".
I was very specific and my argument was not long so can you explain what I said, by quoting me, that implied the courts decide the contents of the Constitution?
>The president has a duty to ignore any unconstitutional court ruling, as his oath requires.
The Constitution states “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties…”
The president's oath is to uphold the Constitution. Therefore by ignoring court rulings he's not upholding the constitution
Ignoring constitutional court rulings violates the constitution.
Ignoring court rulings requiring him to violate the constitution, is something he's required to do, under his oath which constrains his authority to a narrowly defined scope.
> Most of congresses appropriations can't be faithfully executed because they largely violate the tenth amendment
This is plainly untrue, as the constitutionality of these appropriations can only be established by a court. Bills signed into law are presumed constitutional and valid until an Article III officer decides otherwise. The system is: Congress writes the law, funds the law. President signs the law, executes the law. Court interprets the law, invalidates the law. You can't have the POTUS sign, execute, interpret, and invalidate laws.
Separation of powers is what made the government work. Right now the Article II branch is the one who usurped power, the Congress and SCOTUS abdicated power, and it's causing the government to fail at all levels. If you give the executive the power you want it to have, the entire thesis of the Constitution crumbles (as we are witnessing), so quoting it at this point is futile and meaningless until balance of power is restored.
Right now, what would happen if what you said is true, is every time a new executive comes in, he can invalidate not just the executive orders but all laws passed by the previous administration, on a whim; without review, evidence, or argument he can shut down agencies and choose not to enforce any laws that are politically expedient. That's not how to run a constitutional republic. It's certainly descriptive of another form of government, but here you were quoting the Constitution.
> At the times when the federal government was mostly within the constraints of the 10th amendment, federal spending was under 5% of GDP in non war-time.
You'd have to go back to 1929 to see that kind of spending level. Since then, we went through a great depression and got a New Deal for America, which means the Federal Government has a larger role. We can surely revisit that role, and that's kind of what's happening right now. But it's wrong to say that the spending levels circa 1930s are somehow ideal of more constitutional without presenting more evidence.
>Court interprets the law, invalidates the law. You can't have the POTUS sign, execute, interpret, and invalidate laws.
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388993 as to why it takes all three branches agreeing on the constitutionality of a law for it actually to be put in effect and why that doesn't create the kind of dictatorship you're envisioning.
>is every time a new executive comes in, he can invalidate not just the executive orders but all laws passed by the previous administration, on a whim; without review, evidence, or argument he can shut down agencies and choose not to enforce any laws that are politically expedient.
POTUS is bound by constitution, even if SCOTUS thinks following the constitution is unconstitutional. This doesn't create an unchecked executive -- the legislature can also check the executive by impeaching him if he violates the constitution.
>You'd have to go back to 1929 to see that kind of spending level. Since then, we went through a great depression and got a New Deal for America, which means the Federal Government has a larger role. We can surely revisit that role, and that's kind of what's happening right now. But it's wrong to say that the spending levels circa 1930s are somehow ideal of more constitutional without presenting more evidence.
Yes exactly, it was circa the 30s when the apparatus of the state really cranked up to exceed the constitutional constraints of the federal government. The courts would create a more lasting correction to the problem, but that doesn't mean POTUS isn't also bound to stop executing all the unconstitutional laws. A lot of this stems from fraudulent portrayal of intrastate commerce as interstate commerce, which means a great deal of the actions of DEA, ATF, FDA, EPA, etc cannot legally be funded nor most of the wildly unconstitutional provisions of the cherished tyrannical civil rights act.
> This doesn't create an unchecked executive -- the legislature can also check the executive by impeaching him if he violates the constitution.
The impeachment clause is for high crimes and misdemeanors and is supposed to be an extraordinary procedure that takes an immense amount of time. It's not realistic to rely on it to prevent a President from selectively enforcing or ignoring laws on a day-to-day basis, especially considering it has never been successfully used to remove any president from office even in the case where Trump used his office to extort a bribe.
Anyway here's what James Madison had to say about your proposal in Federalst 47:
> the state really cranked up to exceed the constitutional constraints of the federal government... this stems from fraudulent portrayal of intrastate commerce... a great deal of the actions of DEA, ATF, FDA, EPA, etc cannot legally be fundedSee, this is the problem with giving a single person the power to decide which laws to implement. You've made sweeping statements about "fraudulent" portrayals and the government exceeding constitutional authority, but these are just your own conclusory assertions. It's not clear that any constitutional constraints were actually violated, that portrayals of intrastate commerce were fraudulent, or that agencies like the DEA, FDA, etc. cannot legally be funded. These claims are unsupported, in fact they are anti-supported by decades of judicial review. Given your position, the President could just decide to shut down those agencies just on the flimsy basis you have provided. That's not how the system works.
I and others have realized that, despite your frequent appeals to the Constitution and the Framers, you do not appear to genuinely support the idea of a constitutional republic. Instead, you seem comfortable with a king-like authority, a single individual wielding absolute control over the government. That's a legitimate position, but you should be upfront about it rather than twisting the Constitution to fit your ideology. You're never going to squeeze a dictator-shaped peg into a constitution-sized hole -- doing so destroys the constitutional order.
It seems Congress took action on presidents withholding funds with Title X of the "Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974"
If a president wants to permanently withhold funds then they must ask Congress for a "rescission"(request to cancel the funds) within 45 days~~\
This was created because Nixon withheld funds from programs he didn't support.[1]
This law was challenged in a 1975 court case, Train v NYC, which the Supreme Court upheld the law and stated the full amount appropriated must be spent
[1]https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48432
Already addressed this
>The executive has the power to actually go out and spend the appropriated money. Congress tried to usurp that power around the time of Nixon by stopping executive impoundment. But it's not clear if that's constitutional; it might be now under current SCOTUS interpretations but I wouldn't be surprised if SCOTUS reviews it and find that to be incorrect.
>Personally I think congress usurping power of impoundment is a bright and clear violation of checks and balances built into the constitution that requires two branches to approve of spending before it can actually get spent. DOGE was a valiant attempt to bring us back into constitutional compliance.
It's constitutional because the Supreme Court ruled it was in the case Train v NYC. They are the ones who determine what laws are constitutional or not. You can disagree but their opinion is what is acted upon.
>the constitution that requires two branches to approve of spending
The president must sign spending bills and while he may be overridden with a veto that's the check and balance.
>It's constitutional because the Supreme Court ruled it was in the case Train v NYC. They are the ones who determine what laws are constitutional or not. You can disagree but their opinion is what is acted upon.
We're going in circles, I already addressed this.
>The president must sign spending bills and while he may be overridden with a veto that's the check and balance.
That's a check and balance.
The president has an oath to uphold the constitution.
The Constitution says the president has a duty to execute the laws.
Where does it say he doesn't have to if it violates the Constitution?
10th amendment
POTUS has no power to execute an unconstitutional lawHow does what you pasted imply that? It doesn't mention the president
If the "United States [government]" doesn't have the power, POTUS in his official capacity doesn't.
> DOGE was a valiant attempt to bring us back into constitutional compliance.
What garbage. I can guarantee the concept or discussion of "constitutional compliance" came up exactly zero times in Trump and Elon's discussion of deploying DOGE. Because if that was their true concern, there are other ways of figuring that out. Valiant? Our heroes...
People call Elon a Nazi because of the salute he did, stuff he has said about Jewish people, pro-white nationalist dog whistles, etc.
I feel like you also overlooked the context of Obama's severe cuts and reorg... it was coming out of the Great Financial Recession which was the worst economy the US had seen in ~100 years...
> Obama did far more severe cuts and re-orgs in his second term.
You fail to mention that Obama did this through legislation and actual proposals rather than giving random tech bros and billionaires access to government systems to stop payments on a whim. Did you even read your own links?
> Nobody cared because we weren't in the sensationalist era where one becomes a "nazi" for wanting a smaller government.
This is a strawman. No one is claiming that wanting government efficiency is the equivalent of being a Nazi. Although, there are plenty of other actions from Trump and his ilk that warrant that view.
> Did you know that Obama deported more people than Trump as well? Was he somehow a fascist for respecting the border?
I'm not sure what this has to do with DOGE but I'll bite: Did Obama send people to a foreign labor camp in El Salvador? Did Obama deport international students for the their protest against Israel? Did Obama create a detention facility called Alligator Alcatraz?
We did have depraved and corrupt government with Jackson and Grant. We didnt have the massive military impact in both terms of economics and power.
The long game is going to be brutal, and the country bumpkins will suffer the most.
> But most Americans want the government reduced.
I also want to lose weight but I still want to eat lots of burgers with fries.
People want all sorts of things but they don't really want all the nasty details needed to make them happen and they definitely do not want the negative consequences of their hasty decisions.
Most people love generic platitudes with no details though.
So when you say they "want smaller government" it's that they are literally agreeing with that statement verbatim rather then any plausible version of what that could be (and that's giving them credit: more cynically it's just "take away services from people who aren't me").
See Brexit for another national scale example of this: had anyone been forced to vote for a specific policy, it wouldn't have happened.
Though this is the exact opposite of the strategy of the Prime Minister at the time - he specifically did not want to make plans for Brexit so that very uncertainty could be used to scare people away from it.
He and the rest of the pro EU side feared that any concrete plans would make it look more like a reasonable option.
> (and that's giving them credit: more cynically it's just "take away services from people who aren't me").
It's like MS Word -- everyone agrees it's bloated, but everyone cannot agree on a subset of features that would be satisfactory.
Yea man, I cannot fathom why they would carry out actions like this knowing that their opponents could do the same thing next time they are in charge.
It’s almost like they’re governing with the expectation of never losing an election
Or they expect the other side to fold like a wet towel since that is all that they have seen since forever?
Exactly this. Democratic politicians are beyond incompetent.
Incompetent is the wrong word. They showed excellent strategy and cunningness when derailing Bernie Sanders's campaigns. They have repeatedly shown excellence in strategy when outsiders threatened them. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes to Mamdani's campaign. What trick will the Democrats pull out of their bag to derail him?
It’s a bizarre tactic. The DNC plays very dirty with their own members. On the outward public stage they “take the high road” and seem to constantly neuter themselves to prove how much they care.
Democrat voters didn’t turn out this past election cycle. Even in the face of Trump. They’ve truly made their base apathetic. “Hold your nose” is a tough strategy to sell long term.
I will never forget what they did to Sanders. Maybe he would’ve lost anyways. It’s likely. But that whole take the high road thing is only messaging. Internally they function nothing like a democracy.
> never losing an election
There are two ways: never loosing or ...
It’s pretty clear that’s the end goal — that there is never a Democratic president ever again and we have a Putin-style authoritarian system. They may get there.
> But most Americans want the government reduced...
Citation needed. Do elderly Americans selling their every worldly possession to pay for home healthcare after a medical crisis want reduced or increased government? Do single mothers unable to afford childcare want reduced or increased government? Do the people in Granbury, Texas suffering health effects from the noise of a Bitcoin mine want reduced or increased government? Do the Trump voters who want to round up and deport every last undocumented immigrant want reduced or increased government? Do the families stuck sending their chilren to failing urban schools want reduced or increased government? Do veterans struggling to access healthcare want reduced or increased government? Do consumers paying inflated prices to a proliferation of monopolies and private equity roll-ups want reduced or increased government?
People want everyone else's government programs reduced. The programs that benefit them are of course absolutely crucial to the lifeblood of the nation.
Having more federal government employees doesn't mean better access to affordable healthcare for the elderly. Those things are almost totally disconnected. As for veterans, the VA has been improving access to healthcare by making it easier for them to obtain services from private provider organizations.
Likewise, primary school funding and standards are largely state and local government issues. Cuts to federal staffing don't really impact that, either.
I'm not supportive of DOGE activities but if we're going to criticize then let's at least accurately connect cause and effect.
OP didn't specify decreasing government employees. They said decreasing government. And DOGE was promised to cut federal spending. In any case, I wasn't addressing DOGE, but the specific assertion that most people want less government.
The US has been heading towards this for a long time though. It's almost inevitable as a result of unrestrained capitalism, so the fact it was the wealthiest person in the world that got first crack at it make sense.
Everything is for sale, including government, if unregulated capitalism is the followed ideology.
This is the current state.
Unregulated being the key.
> But most Americans want the government reduced,
facts not in evidence
tldr: no they do not
Pretty clear a large portion of Americans want smaller government. But they also want the benefits (sometimes only for themselves) that comes with a larger government (and spending).
Yes, everyone wants infintie money without loss in spending power but also don't want to give anything to achieve that.
We live in reality, though.
It's all about how you ask the question; there would be a lot of people who want a thing _called_ small government, because they have been told that that is a good thing, but the _benefits_ of big government (ideally without the _costs_ of big government, but realistically most people in the US do not care about the deficit; if they did Trump would already have been deposed).
Sir Humphrey summarises it fairly well, as usual: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks
Just like the famous poll asked of right-leaning voters.
"If, instead of Obamacare, the government was to offer some form of Affordable Care Act, would you be for or against that?"
Response was overwhelmingly ... for.
A large portion of the electorate do not have an accurate sense of how big the government is or what it spends money on. DOGE is a living example. They believed (and musk boasted) they'd find trillions in wasted money. I think a lot of people just believe this must be true because they've heard stories in the past. In fact, DOGE found zero waste. Programs they cut were programs they just didn't like. And they fell short of their goals by multiple orders of magnitude. And are now rolling back some of those cuts because they were either illegal or hastily done. The bulk of federal spending goes straight back to constituents in the form of entitlements or to the military or to debt service. Discretionary spending is a fraction of total spending and covers hundreds of vital services. IGs already look for fraud which is pretty rare.
Exactly. I'm not concerned with the size of government. However, I would like to see better ROI - that is, a government that is more effective at delivery services. The "burn it all down" mentality never takes into account the vast amount of services provided by the government, and simply reducing the size of government won't help that.
>The "burn it all down" mentality never takes into account the vast amount of services provided by the government, and simply reducing the size of government won't help that.
People with that mentality tend to believe most services provided by the government are waste by definition (especially any "social" services) and should be privatized. At the extreme end, they believe the only legitimate role of government is violence - war, policing and enforcing contract law. But somehow not taxes.
Any of these people (Elon Musk , George Soros or Bill Gates) could be 1000x more effective than whoever is running these departments now.
Uh no ... the perspective of corporate businessman does not trivially or with difficulty translate to goverment statesman more so in the legislative branch.
I reject the implied inevitability of your statement.
A nice read of your claim is you dont trust regular state employees at all - I could see that. But don't way overshoot by going 100 light-years beyond that.
I'll leave to others to argue say if musk is running tesla or X well.
Good old hubris: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
>> The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it.
And now people are pushing for AI coding where no one is going to write a code but only read it (with auto accept changes).
I often find myself guilty of not reading the article but only the comments here myself, so in case this is you: Go take the time and read it, even if it's painful.
I read a lot of heavy stuff, but this collection of quotes makes me sick to my stomach.
And even more so: how this inhumane, perverted treatment of fellow human beings, regardless of whether you fantasize/reason that DOGE does net good for the planet, finds no mention yet in the comments here, at all. To add to that, these are people who have spent much of their life in public service, for the benefit of society.
To be honest, I don't even know what is worse; the quotes, or that.
Even if you don’t give a f*ck about decency, it is simply irrational to do it like that if it were about cost cutting. The only goal of this can be to create trauma and more violence, like one person in the article rightfully quotes. This is to provoke people into violence, plain and simple.
That was the explicitly stated goal of the creators of Project 2025. “We want to put them in trauma.”
Yes. They've said it even more blatantly.
“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
These people do not believe in America as it exists or the promise of what it could be. They hate us and they want to destroy what we have to create something fundamentally different.
Saying "bloodless" is telling.
Psychological violence is being committed and they're calling out physical violence.
It's a fantastic method of argument. But only a sociopath would use it.
The cruelty is the point.
> “The vibe they gave was ‘So, what is it that you do here?’ and ‘Why can’t AI do that?’” —TTS worker
From what I've read, this particular group of children naively thinks "AI" can and should do everything. As in, they think it's literally magic and have no clue how it or computing works. I remember reading about how one was asking on twitter how to use AI to convert word processor documents between formats, when that's a simple classic computing task. I'm afraid the next generation is going to think the only tool they need is a sledgehammer.
> when that's a simple classic computing task.
In fact it is not simple (e.g. convert PDF to MS Word or MS Word to Libreoffice without losses).
This should be the top comment.
Do your life perspective a favour and read the article.
If you're a US tax payer, do the future of your country a favour and read the article.
> I often find myself guilty of not reading the article but only the comments here myself, so in case this is you: Go take the time and read it, even if it's painful.
The problem isn't that we need another document showing how terrible these people are.
The problem is that we don't have people proposing effective, concrete steps to stop them.
Judging from many of the comments here and in other threads, it seems like no document is actually making people see how terrible these people are. Not even here of all places, where one could assume a decent capacity for rational thought. They either don't want to see the violence, or cannot see it, or condone or even support it. Which doesn't make rational sense, since it only leads to more violence, which I doubt can seriously be the end goal, to escalate us into extinction.
You don't even need to bring morals into it or care about anyone else than your own peers. It just doesn't make any sense other than self-harm and a comprehensible yet pointless expression of own pain.
Vote in enough Democrats in the midterms to take control of Congress. Most of what the president has been doing is only possible because Congress hasn't stepped up.
And nearly half the country's voting population don't care or are cheering it on.
You seem to imply that the current administration has approximately a ±0% net approval, but that does not seem to be the case.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
> The problem is that we don't have people proposing effective, concrete steps to stop them.
Here's an effective, concrete step.
NATIONAL BOYCOTT OF ALL NON-ESSENTIALS.
It's far easier and less painful for the participants than a general strike (cause, you know, you won't get fired from your job for not spending money), but will bring MAGA's handlers to the bargaining table in a week. The only thing those ghouls love is money, and they only thing that scares the shit out of them is not making any.
It's also never going to happen (because there's no fucking way the dems want the hoi polloi to have that kind of power - and thus, they won't lift a finger to organize or assist it.)
Maybe make the other side less horrible so people vote for them?
how could they be anything other than less horrible than the clowns currently voted in?
By being uninspiring and boring and losing because of it.
Republicans promised a bulldozer the size of a small city and they're delivering. Sometimes people prefer winning even if it means they lose.
They went big and the Democrats went home, offering "sensible policy" and "reasonable governance" and programs for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities.
None of that is bad on its face but it doesn't win elections. Especially when Elon is promising a Sandals resort on Mars.
Even if you disagreed with Bernie, the guy was willing to go big and bold and cared about what he was promising. It doesn't have to be universal healthcare. It can be UBI or building a solarpunk future or colonizing the bottom of the ocean. The Space Race. The Great Society. Morning in America. The New Deal. Something big and exciting and someone we believe really, really wants it.
The Republicans are promising front row seats to the end of the world and the Democrats are promising to check everyone's tire pressure. Understanding why the former can appeal more than the latter is the key to winning future elections.
By continuing to react and lose elections.
That’s a good question for the DNC!
I personally feel like I have done net good for society through my work and and how I’ve treated people and it felt like a slap in the face when Joe Biden personally said that I would be getting fired from my job at a federal contractor because I disagreed with him. I won’t ever forget what he did to me and I feel like people should be talking about this just as much as they talk about DOGE. I won’t speak too much about DOGE but I feel that it’s important to say my truth about the matter and that I feel a form of catharsis and justice in the dismantling of bureaucracy that infringed on my rights as a human being. I welcome anyone who would like to discuss this with me because I have much more to say on the topic.
You could post what you said exactly that got you fired here in this thread.
Got the exact quote and the context?
What's certainly not going away is that Government waste and bloat is a home-run bipartisan issue where the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine.
Everyone left and right instinctively knows this is, that it's a problem that they're both taxed directly for and (I hope) many people know they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime.
I don't know if this was in your lifetime, but Bill Clinton reduced government spending through the National Performance Review. Not only did he do it, but he did it in a planned and strategic way, that included an initial phase of research, followed by education and recommendations, which were send to congress for approval.
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
Reference: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...
That's true, although that also took an act of congress so it was very much a bi-partisan effort, something we're sorely lacking today.
The Republican party is literally in control of Congress and the presidency. Copying Clinton is something they could do. The fact that they don't appear to have made a serious effort to increase revenues and reduce spending in a sane and organized way raises questions.
The Republicans have this idea that cutting taxes and increasing spending will reduce the ratio of debt/gdp by increasing the denominator. It does increase GDP but I think it increases the debt faster, so it can't work. Happy to be proven wrong.
They do not actually believe that. What they believe is that cutting taxes will give them the short-term means to acquire assets that will become much more valuable after the nation has been destroyed, to which the escalating debt contributes. The crisis is a feature for them.
> raises questions.
It doesn't "raises questions" it "answers questions". Anybody who believes the republicans in America are "the party of fiscal responsibility" is a joke.
> The Republican party is literally in control of Congress and the presidency
And SCOTUS. They have seized power of all three branches and "checks and balances" are but a memory.
> They have seized power
Interesting way to say “they won a bunch of elections”.
The Senate still requires 60 votes to close debate and pass legislation, with rare weird exceptions like reconciliation. The 1990s had more bipartisanship, so Clinton skillfully got enough Republicans to support some of his moves.
Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
> Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
Biden passed the bipartisan infrastructure act as well as USICA subsidies. The first step act was bipartisan. The deficit reduction in Obama's time was bipartisan. The american rescue plan wasn't bipartisan, but republicans claim credit for its effects. You don't really have much evidence here.
And whose fault is that? Hint: one party has specifically focused on eliminating ANYTHING resembling bi-partisanship..
> Everyone left and right instinctively knows this
That’s the first sign that a large group of people are going to something thoughtless and destructive.
Looking around at actual data from both gov and think tank sources, this quote from Pew is a good summary: “While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years.”
But that’s not the whole story. The postal service is shrinking, the vast majority of those federal employees work for the VA, the amount of funding being directed by the federal employees has grown (because of budget growth), federal regulations touch more private sector activity than in the past, and state and local governments employ significantly more people than they used to.
DOGE’s focus on headcount was wrongheaded because the number of federal employees is not the problem. The problem is Congress (budgets and laws) and states.
Conventional wisdom is that federal payroll growth is massive, and that is just wrong.
> DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime
On what timeline? The week of the first round of RIFs? The first month?
I assure you, as someone who works with in the space where DOGE has played, it will NOT be a reduction in costs in the long run. In fact, costs will go up because of the indiscriminate nature of "cost reduction". When the only people with knowledge of a system are removed, the remaining people cannot run it - no matter what AI they are given. At that point, you have to either hire back the people you fired, with a serious delay of important work, or you stumble for years until it can be figured out at the cost of delays, protests, lawsuits, whatever.
Considering firing everyone a reduction in costs is a shallow, short-term view.
> the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine
The US government at the start of this administration was roughly the same as it was in 1970[1]. This, despite the addition of new departments (1970 is pre-EPA, for example), many new responsibilities, etc. And obviously the government has to perform all these services for 140 million more people than in 1970, a 70% increase.
Doing more with the same resources is a textbook definition of increasing efficiency.
1 - Seriously, you won't see the growth you describe in the data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
What metric are you looking at when you say "the size of government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector" - AFAICT, excluding 2020 and 2021 (which I think is reasonable), the federal budget has been between 17% and 25% of GDP for the past 50 years (where the fluctuations are more a function of variable GDP).
The number of federal government employees has also remained mostly flat for the past 50 years (and IIRC most growth in overall public sector employment comes from schools).
Comparing it to GDP doesn’t seem to make sense. Maybe to government revenue.
No, it does make sense. Most of the purported growth in government spending is just using raw figures, and not correcting for either inflation or monetary expansion. It is a convenient mistake.
No, the claim was that it has outgrown the private sector. GDP is in fact a good proxy for that claim.
Outgrowing government revenue is a different claim.
> they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
Don't worry – unless we stop giving out tax cuts as well, we'll still be running deficits until Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. For the average taxpayer, it's about fiscal sustainability - "smaller government" may as well be a feel-good abstraction compared to that.
Wait, has there actually been a reduction in federal spending in total? Or just in specific agencies?
No, federal spending is up by $376 billion.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
I do not instinctively know this, no. I encourage you to take an evidence-based approach. The deficit has largely grown over the past 25 years because of foreign wars, tax cuts, and pandemic response.
And how much of the work that they did will be out-sourced to private contractors at 5x and cost+ rates, lining the pockets of right-wing donor's corporate coffers?
People are having a tough period where they think their government doesn't care about them, to see so much wastage ignites the hard feelings that the "elite" has prioritised others than their own people.
I believe that is the reason why DOGE was supported by Trump, but I do think something like DOGE is needed but perhaps for better and less egotistical reasons.
> People are having a tough period where they think their government doesn't care about them, to see so much wastage ignites the hard feelings that the "elite" has prioritised others than their own people.
Have you considered that maybe a segment of the population feels that way because of decades of propaganda targeted at dismantling the government?
At least in the UK we had a decade of austerity done under the guise it was needed to "improve economic growth" or "balance the books" and that we were living beyond our means.
It achieved neither of that.
And there was.
It was the only thing to be optimistic about in this administration, but it sure didn't last long. We should all know that this was the last attempt that had a chance of addressing the national debt -- the only other way out is extreme inflation.
They didn't make any attempt to address the national debt. They lied to you. It was all bullshit.
It's probably time to rethink where you are getting your news and analysis from.
Which news sources do you recommend?
https://www.csmonitor.com/
https://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/s-9097
https://www.economist.com/
There are many more. But why not start with these?
Musk was absolutely the wrong guy for the job. He doesn't have the patience to spend 4 years carefully poring over government expenses, nor the security clearance (AFAIK) to address pentagon spending. Plus, I don't think he's humble enough to bring in people who actually know what to look for.
The most incredible piece of logical gymnastics I remember from civics/history class in high school was that during economic downturns, we need government to spend more to help people, and during economic growth we of course also need more government to manage all the new growth. At no point do we cut the spending we've added, because it would always hurt those who have jobs.
People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
That's not a fair---or accurate---summary of Keynes.
The claim is that the government should act as a stabilizer: spending to drive aggregate demand during downswings (especially ones caused by external shocks) and regulating during up-swings.
In other words, "more" refers to different things and in different proportions in different phases of the business cycle; it's emphatically not a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" sort of thing.
> The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
In many cases, because they're slashing things that we are realizing that we do need, and we're going to pay even more to reconstruct the things they've destroyed.
The only way to effectively reducing spending and waste is by doing things slowly and carefully, evaluating the impact of the changes you are going to make carefully. This happened successfully in the 90s, but DOGE is not doing things that way.
The OMB has been trying to slowly and thoughtfully cut spending since the 70's, and they've struggled to see success. I think in terms of cutting spending, the slower it happens the less likely anything productive will come from it. It's why companies tend to cut whole departments at once, and the government desperately needs a way to cut funding from things that aren't working to reallocate it where the money is needed.
From what I've seen the DOGE cuts have been incredibly efficient in isolating poorly spent (or corrupt) money. Lots of corrupt foreign programs or government donations into partisan political groups. Most of the time when someone says they shouldn't have cut money, they're talking about an NGO or some research that benefits their particular partisanship at the cost of fairness or scientific rigor; which is exactly what we shouldn't be funding.
The Clinton admin was successful in the 90s. They cut costs enough to pull the US entirely out of the deficit. They did things slowly and methodically over 5 years, making sure the things they cut were unnecessary before cutting them. They also followed the law, avoiding the legal issues and consequential costs that DOGE is incurring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Clinton...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
Federal spending is up during this administration, the deficit is at modern-day averages, and the bills recently passed by this administration are going to increase it even further. The slash-and-burn style of cuts that DOGE is sloppy and ineffective. They are Chesterton's fencing themselves -- cutting things that they later find to be important. And on the other hand, not spending the time to actually seek out waste that is hard to find. A tech company works very differently than the government does, and they are slowly starting to discover that the hard way.
> They are Chesterton's fencing themselves
Which is incredibly ironic for people who claim to be "conservative."
MAGA isn't anything like conservative. They just claim the title to dupe people.
That was my point.
Another incredible thing you maybe didn't study in civics class is that the US had an "exorbitant privilege" it's now pissing away. The ability to borrow at extremely low rates from the rest of the world, because the US was so productive. We will miss it when it's gone.
You didn't learn that in civics/history class; you made it up.
>People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
Right. And those hundreds of millions went to tax cuts/benefits for the wealthiest (top 10%) among us, and less benefit to the bottom 10%, as well as trillions (3.8, in fact[0]) more in debt to actually pay for those cuts.
Yeah. We need more of that, right?
[0] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61422-Reconciliatio...
I wonder if any of them knew what is a Doge, in Venezia style, not the acronym. It could not end well.
Did anyone figure out about the social security fraud claim? I figure the 135 year old people were a dumb mistake, but surely they must have found a bunch of people who were cheating? We didn't hear anything so maybe not, but would be good to know.
Yes, that was covered a while back by Planet Money I think when interviewing one former DOGE worker. It turns out there are different lists of people, in different formats, maintained by different departments, for different purposes. What happens is, one group comes up with a list of people who are supposedly ripping the govt off. They send that list to another department, who comes back and says, no, some of those people are supposed to get benefits, some of these forms were just filed incorrectly, some records are out of date, some ancient database has a short integer that rolls over, etc.
Like any complex bureaucratic process, there will be errors, and they know that, so there are checks to correct those errors. And you need a lot of people (with a lot of tribal, historic, or contextual knowledge) to deal with that complexity. But you don't hear that full story. You hear a sound bite of a partial truth selectively repeated by people who want to pass off a specific narrative.
Another way to think about it: think of the oldest legacy computer system at a company you're aware of. Now realize the US government has computers going back to 1965, and paper records from way, way before then.
Any downside to DOGE canceling unused seats, software licenses or phone lines?
Depends on the contract. Anytime you do something fast and drastic, you fuck up, and those are often expensive.
As the saying goes, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.
Broken eggs being necessary but not sufficient. Very easy to break a bunch of eggs and not get an omelette, just a mess.
This looks more like they razed the chicken coop to make an omelette.
>"Making the mother of all omelettes, Jack! Can't fret over a few eggs"
Sadly, the competence and conviction of DOGE does not match the namesake of that quote. They do match the insanity, though.
This too has the potential to lower your operating expenses.
Only until it's market day and you have no eggs too sell.
Thing is, eggs also get broken when you drop a box of eggs on the floor. This is closer to that than to the omelette.
Careful! People have gotten in trouble for using that expression before. https://www-vilaweb-cat.translate.goog/noticies/linterrogato...
You dont have to smash the windows tho. And you dont have to spill eggs all over the carpet and walls.
The popular sayings are not an argument. They somt count as one.
DOGE came in promising to trim $2T from the federal budget. After all its hack and slash, the government has spent $400B more than last year.
Don't make an omelette with bad eggs.
If you fire someone, you get to save on even more software licenses!
Lyn Alden had a good, terse analysis of why DOGE was unlikely to be effective in this newsletter[0]. The math was simple, the folks behind DOGE must have themselves known that their stated mission was impossible.
It starts with these paragraphs, if you want to seek to it:
"This is the goal of the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. This is an advisory commission rather than an official government department. Musk has famously vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending—roughly 30% of last year’s federal budget.
Although this sounds good on paper, achieving such a target will be quite challenging, given the composition of government spending. Last year, the government spent $6.75 trillion, with $4.1 trillion (61%) classified as mandatory spending."
[0] https://www.lynalden.com/full-steam-ahead-all-aboard-fiscal-...
Classifying some spending as "mandatory" is a ruse to make people ignore the potential for any savings there.
The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything? Paying for things that are ineffective or unnecessary? Would it be better to means test certain benefits so that the government isn't making big social assistance payouts to recipients with a net worth over a million dollars? Is there any Medicare fraud?
The next largest and almost as big is social security, so what happens if we means test that program, or even just get rid of the reverse means testing in the existing program which makes larger payouts to people who made more money?
These things would all reduce "mandatory" spending, potentially by a significant amount, and there is nothing preventing that from happening except for the false insistence that it can't be done.
The problem with means-testing benefits is that it often will cost more to means-test than to just accept nonzero fraud rates past a very minimal point, and there is a significant amount of friction introduced when you add more friction to people who do not have time or energy to spare.
e.g. if I ask you to submit receipts for literally everything that you bought in the last week, in order to give you a $20 stipend weekly, you will probably not bother, even if you could use the $20, and it will probably cost more than $20 to pay me for the time processing that.
I'm not saying there's no waste, but I am saying that the optimal amount of waste to reward is nonzero.
They do say that the US is a country where people will happily spend $10 to ensure no one gets $1 they weren't entitled to..
Half the country is willing to get punched in the face as long as they know their opponents are getting kicked in the nuts. It’s all about hurting the other team more.
"A Republican will happily eat dogshit if he thinks a Democrat will have to smell his breath."
Right, which is why broadly-available old-age insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security work. Everyone pays in their own money, to which they are entitled. So there’s not really any reason to spend that extra $10.
It’s also why “Medicare For All” runs into opposition. It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health care before paying a dime into the system.
So then lets say a healthy 22-year-old graduates from college at the top of their class. Life's looking up for them. They've already got a job lined up that starts in two weeks and they're excited and energetic about entering the workforce and living on their own as adult.
Then suddenly, some random guy in a mustang doing 150 in a 30 jumps the curb and runs over our optimistic 22-year-old, and continues speeding into the distance. A random onlooker witnesses the event and calls an ambulance, who rushes them to the hospital. Thanks to the hard work ICU doctors and surgeons spanning days, our 22-year-old miraculously lives, but is in bad shape. They're never gonna walk again, and they're gonna need weeks of physical therapy just to retrain the fine motor skills required to write and type.
All of this, for a variety of factors is gonna cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. On top of the massive hospital bill they're about to be saddled with.
I take it that our now not-so-healthy 22-year-old should just go fuck themselves then? They've never paid a dime into the system so why should they be entitled to health care?
>I take it that our now not-so-healthy 22-year-old should just go fuck themselves then? They've never paid a dime into the system so why should they be entitled to health care?
No, no one is entitled to the labor of others, not in this scenario where they are 3rd party to the damages. That doesn't even remotely make sense no matter how bad of a sob story you attach to it.
This isn't actually a sob story, and I'm not saying he's entitled to labor of others. What I am asking is how your proposed system handles a case such as this.
And while it may be an edge case, these are large, broad systems that directly impact the lives of millions of living, breathing people. Such systems must be robust and well-examined.
And I'd also like to ask what a society would look like, that invests so heavily in the education of it's young generation, and relies on them to bring innovations and new ideas to the table, only to cut them down the moment they need any sort of assistance. It certainly seems to me like a huge waste of resources.
What if healthcare was just an investment in our society? Our young 22-year-old gets healthcare covered not because he's entitled to it but because society is invested in his well-being in order to continue existing and improve itself. Because the ROI of the young being kept healthy and able to work and pay into the system is greater than the cost of the ICU doctors and surgeons and wheelchairs and physical therapy.
The voluntary way of capturing future ROI with present investment is loans (or if you don't care about ROI, donation). Now I'm not saying that is necessarily the only option but it's the one you're gunning for based upon your economic argument.
Based on your criteria it's the most textbook case for an individual loan imaginable, your argument is the 22 y/o needs a loan for some healthcare, that he can more than pay it back, and that both parties will benefit. In the absence of charity, some kind of trade, family or friend assistance, then in any rational market (US market is regulated to hell so no guarantee it works there unless you free that market) it's a no brainer and as sure as an apple will fall from a tree, someone would be happy to make that trade although the kinetics and packaging might be up for debate.
I don't see how you can possibly presuppose a requirement for public assistance, in that scenario, in order for the health care to happen. Public assistance is only economically necessary to complete the health care if there is negative ROI and all donation or voluntary options are exhausted.
>No, no one is entitled to the labor of others, not in this scenario where they are 3rd party to the damages. That doesn't even remotely make sense no matter how bad of a sob story you attach to it.
Absolutely! We should just Brian Kilmeade[0] those folks too, since they're just a burden on society, right?
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/09/17/...
It's interesting to me you jumped right past charity, loans, work-trade, or any other variety of options and instead went straight to your preferred method of doing things -- either violence (tax man with guns) and if not that you question if they should be executed.
I'm just advocating putting the violent methods aside.
People say that charity should happen instead of taxes. Will you commit to giving all money from future tax cuts to charity?
The practical reality is that charity does not meaningfully solve these problems at scale.
Of course not. At scale you basically need to remove the government from the situation, they're the one regulating health care into a gigantic blimp. Once health care is completely deregulated and the costs drop you won't need to spending anything close to "all [future] money."
Now if you offered me a deal, I could substitute all my taxes, or even everyone's taxes, for charity, yes I would take that in a heartbeat. In all likelihood I think I would probably donate about 10% of my income to charity if there were no taxes, but the government is so terribly ineffectual it might actually beat the 20-30% I pay now.
Have you though? There have been tax cuts in the past. Did you take your savings and give to charity?
Look like the effective tax rate has went up rather than down since I started working in 2010, most of which I was closer to the top 1% than the middle 20%. []
There is no savings I can identify there, nor in my tax records, which have only increased in % as I've made more money. And all well above the 10% of the income I would pledge to donate to charity if taxes are eliminated. But yes I have donated to charity on occasion (sometimes formally, sometimes directly in cash to people that needed it), despite the fact I keep getting taxed harder every year and despite the fact the government robs me of ~20-30% of my income under its own bloated forcible charity scheme.
[] https://www.concordcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/...
If no one is entitled to the labor of others, why would we engage in charity?
Work-trade when it's someone's health is slavery, so we're going to go ahead and pull that off the table.
Loans are, more or less, how we've gotten into the awful state we are currently in in the US with unpayable medical debt.
I propose an alternate approach: medical care is a civil service that you can voluntarily provide, like fire prevention or undrafted military service. If you do, you are paid the rate the society agrees to for the work. We all pay for it with taxes. If we want more of it, we raise taxes and incentives. This removes several perverse market effects and sets up a minimum standard of care divorced from individual circumstance to level out the effect of bad luck a bit.
This is, more or less, a model that many countries are currently enjoying.
>If no one is entitled to the labor of others, why would we engage in charity?
Because some people want to help others beyond what they're forced to do. There is a long history of charitable health services in the US and worldwide, you might rightly ascertain they can't possibly provide all of medical care, nonetheless it's non-zero enough to dispel the notion it can't be provided in the absence of an entitlement.
> medical care is a civil service that you can voluntarily provide,
Civil services are funded by people working to pay their taxes. Work-trade when it's someone health is slavery, so work-trade when it's to not have to go in a tiny cage dragged away by an IRS agent has to be slavery too, especially when you consider the health implications of that.
Therefore the public / civil service options are tossed out by your own criteria.
Loans, again, if those aren't allowed you can toss out any government option because that's a huge part of how the government is funding itself.
Using your own criteria only charity or cash payments would be allowed. Not sure I agree with that one, but that's what you're leaving us with.
I think if you're arguing "taxes are slavery" you are coming from a vantage point that is far too libertarian to have a constructive conversation. We can probably just short-circuit that by saying "The only way people in the US get jailed for taxes is by committing fraud; we correctly left debtor's prison in the past" and be done with that, yes?
Taxes aren't slavery; they're how we operate modern, functional, post-feudal societies (and whether they are actually "paying for" services or are "redistributing supply and demand more equitably by curtailing the spending power of the ones who have too much so that the ones who have too little can have access to resources at all" is an implementation detail for macroeconomists and operators of fiat currencies).
You do raise the interesting question of funding it by buying bonds though. I don't see an issue with that; the argument against loans is a practical one, not a theoretical one ("the private debt incurred upon patients is, in essence, an involuntary one-sided loan granted to them, and we've seen that lead to massively unfair outcomes"). Voluntarily loaning the government money seems to work great and is miles distant from involuntarily-accrued (or accrued under duress; "sure, that procedure is optional because you always have the option to die") medical debt.
>"The only way people in the US get jailed for taxes is by committing fraud; we correctly left debtor's prison in the past" and be done with that, yes?
False. You can be jailed for "tax evasion" which could be as simple as simply saying "yes I owe taxes, no I won't bother calculating and I have put all my money in bitcoins and I'll never give them to you." That needn't be fraud -- everything about that could be 100% accurate and true with no intend to defraud yet still criminal. (btw we still have debtor's prison -- you can be jailed for not paying child support debts and the absurd argument often used you're jailed for violating the court order to pay the debt rather than owing the debt is little more than a legal parlor trick).
>Taxes aren't slavery
They are by your definition, where I need to trade work to pay for them to improve my health (get thrown into a prison, a den of disease and mental health problems). Of course, we could get into a semantic debate about slavery, but it's clear you've already defined slavery not to be literal chattel slavery, i.e. as black people in chains working the cotton fields, rather you appear to be referring to being forced to work under threat of violence which in this case you take the violence to be a threat to your health.
>You do raise the interesting question of funding it by buying bonds though. I don't see an issue with that; the argument against loans is a practical one, not a theoretical one ("the private debt incurred upon patients is, in essence, an involuntary one-sided loan granted to them, and we've seen that lead to massively unfair outcomes"). Voluntarily loaning the government money seems to work great and is miles distant from involuntarily-accrued (or accrued under duress; "sure, that procedure is optional because you always have the option to die") medical debt.
I also find this to be one of the most interesting solutions. Hypothetically if a 22 year old were to have some illness, it's totally conceivable that a bunch of lenders could bid for a race to the bottom so the 22 year old could get a loan low enough that it would easily be both a net positive for him and for the people who helped loan the money that saves him. Of course, if charity or some other option is available instead, all the better.
In any case, the biggest enemy for both of us is overregulation of the health system. Once medical licensing is eliminating and medical regulations eliminated, fights over how to pay become much lower stakes.
> You can be jailed for "tax evasion"
Not even remotely related. Yes, if you fail to bother to calculate your taxes you can be liable. If you do calculate them and you can't pay them, the government works out a payment plan. These trains of thought more or less died with Thoreau arguing why he shouldn't pay taxes (while living on borrowed property owned by his rich neighbor).
> Once medical licensing is eliminating and medical regulations eliminated
Independent issue to paying for medicine. If I understand correctly, your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could. Those regulations are paid for in blood (or in this case, snake-oil); agree to disagree that lowering the constraints wouldn't just return us to the bad practices that required the constraints in the first place.
> If I understand correctly, your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could. Those regulations are paid for in blood (or in this case, snake-oil); agree to disagree that lowering the constraints wouldn't just return us to the bad practices that required the constraints in the first place.
The "agree to disagree" isn't necessary because it isn't relevant.
People can argue that quacks used to show up to rip people off and then skip town before people caught on that snake oil is snake oil, but they couldn't really do that anymore because now we have the internet which allows your past victims to notify your future victims even if they live in a different city.
But that argument is boring. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, because the laws that really make medicine expensive aren't the ones that require you to register as a doctor so they can more easily investigate quacks. They're the ones that e.g. the AMA has lobbied for to limit the supply of doctors. And we could get rid of those regardless of whether we also get rid of the other ones.
Which laws are you talking about?
The train of thought didn't die with Thoreau. It lived on in the minds of those such as Murray Rothbard, and to the extent as it applies to universal healthcare, also known fringe character (and nobel economist) Milton Friedman. Of course Locke himself (a major inspiration for the US constitution, which very narrowly constrains what the federal government can spend money on), I suppose too old as he's the oldest of all of them, only justified taxes so far as they allowed the government to enforce negative rights, that is rights for one person not to molest another rather than positive rights like an entitlement to get something from another such as care.
>your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could
Really all the above. Probably even more so due to stuff like the intertwining of the insurance and pharmaceutical and medical industries with regulatory apparatus creating all the worst regulatory capture incentives to rent-seek patients with the free market destroyed.
Oh noes! I've been Poe's Law'd again!
Mercy, mercy me!
Or are you just spouting ridiculous tropes? Charity? Work-Trade? Loans? Paid by whom in that scenario?
I'd expect you're more in line with Kilmeade than McCain. Why don't you just admit it? It's all out in the open now, no need to hide any more. You'll be broadly lauded for your economic smarts!
Please.
Your thesis is that people so broadly support additional tax money going to fix the 22 year old that it could be legitimate law, but somehow so few support it that charity or other alternatives (if the very people that support it weren't forced by law) would be a ridiculous trope?
You're defeating your own argument.
No. My thesis is that we can reduce total healthcare spending by having a single-payer system that covers everyone.
It's not additional tax money, it's money that doesn't need to go to corporate jets and huge pay packages for the C-Suite and large dividends for the shareholders of insurance companies, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers.
And the tens to hundreds of billions we save on that can pay for that 22 year old.
But we can't have that, now can we? Better to Brian Kilmeade 'em, eh?
But you just said it's a ridiculous trope that people would want to charitably donate to the healthcare of others. How would you get the majority to support a single payer system when electing to help others is such a ridiculous trope that you flippantly dismiss it?
> But you just said it's a ridiculous trope that people would want to charitably donate to the healthcare of others. How would you get the majority to support a single payer system when electing to help others is such a ridiculous trope that you flippantly dismiss it?
A lot of people have a broken sense of fairness where they're only willing to help someone else if everyone else is required to do it too. It's one of the things causing the world to burn.
Some of this is even learned behavior. A lot of the dumbest econ 101 classes teach people that giving to charity is irrational. (It's not irrational. It's something you do because you want to do it, like eating cake or buying a fast car. Once your basic needs are met, the purpose of having money is to use it for the things you want to use it for. It's not irrational to want to do something good instead of something insalubrious.)
>But you just said it's a ridiculous trope that people would want to charitably donate to the healthcare of others. How would you get the majority to support a single payer system when electing to help others is such a ridiculous trope that you flippantly dismiss it?
Are you really that ignorant of the issue, or are you just being deliberately obtuse?
We as a society already pay way more than we would with a rational single-payer system. That's not hyperbole either.
What's more, not having employers and employees pay insurance premiums would more than offset any additional taxes.
But you knew that already, because we've known this to be the case for most, if not all, of your life.
I'm done explaining the facts of life to you. Perhaps you should ask your dad.
> corporate jets and huge pay packages for the C-Suite and large dividends for the shareholders of insurance companies
And armies and armies of middle-folk who are adjudicating from afar whether a given medical procedure is justified or not.
The way the US practices paying for medicine is, counter-intuitively, very expensive because we pay a lot of people to find reasons to justify not paying for it. If we took their salaries and put them into actual service provision, and cut down the vast web of categories and sub-categories to salami-slice the nickels and dimes, we'd spend far less on employment of arbiters and on paperwork and we'd have more money to pay for more services (and no a priori reason to believe the system would oversaturate).
That's just status quo bias. Countries with fully socialized healthcare systems make the same "everyone pays taxes and then everyone gets it" argument for including the healthy 22-year-olds and you can make the same "this person doesn't deserve public money" argument for not providing government benefits to people who have their own wealth.
Moreover, it doesn't have anything to do with whether you could modify those programs to cost less money if your primary goal was to lower spending.
I am describing factors that have produced the status quo in the U.S., not arguing that the American status quo is correct.
It's very easy to make that case: healthcare should be a human right, and our society should provide it to every person to the extent that it can.
We can just decide to make things public services. No one ever says "wait a minute, kids shouldn't be get to use roads for free before paying a dime into the system." It sounds ridiculous! But for some reason, people buy that logic when it comes to healthcare and college.
> healthcare should be a human right
If you are by yourself, who is obligated to fulfill that right?
We are not by ourselves though. Sure compared to 1000AD we might be being a little... precious. But hopefully we can enjoy the fact we invented all this technology to make our lives better and dream for bigger rights than is possible in a dog eat dog barbaric world.
Note that the Bill of Rights does not enumerate any rights that anyone else is obliged to provide. (Neither does the Declaration of Independence.)
I don't understand this response. A "right" by definition is about your interactions with other people.
By definition? I don't agree. Rights are a part of human nature, endowed by the Creator (or Evolution if you prefer).
For example, since slavery was legal before the Civil War, does that mean the slaves had no right to be free?
No right to be free from what? If you are by yourself, who is there to enslave you? It doesn't matter how how rights are endowed; the entire concept is meaningless except with regard to other humans.
You have a right to be free from somebody trying to kill you. You do not have a right to force him to do your bidding.
Both of those rights govern exactly what I said: your interactions with other people. But anyway, no one is proposing anyone be forced to do someone's bidding.
> no one is proposing anyone be forced to do someone's bidding.
The proposed right to health care does exactly that.
> It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health care before paying a dime into the system.
What is so hard about it?
It’s objectively hard, as demonstrated by the fact that Medicare For All is not the law.
I’m describing why it has not been enacted in America, not making an argument about how I think things should be.
I think you've identified the symptom but misidentified the cause.
The majority in the US (as of 2022, according to Gallup) believe healthcare should be universally provided.
The majority also believe it should not be a government responsibility.
Broadly speaking, the US position is "Our current system sucks and we should be providing people healthcare detached from presence or absence of individual insurance... But also the government cannot be trusted to successfully execute on complex national projects."
“ hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health care before paying a dime into the system.”
Is it also hard to make the case for them to have police protection or being allowed to use a public park before paying a dime into the system?
> It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health
The economic future potential of a healthy 22-year-old is way higher than an aged 68-year-old. I don't think it's very hard at all to make the case we should be spending money on keeping the 22-year-old healthy, in fact I think it's very easy to tilt so far into claiming it's so that you'd be justifiably accused of cruelty ("what if everyone over 70 were tossed into the Soylent Green vats," etc.)
It's quite true that means testing has an efficiency cost. One of the best ways to improve the efficiency of social security would be to convert it into a UBI.
But that's a very different question than whether it would lower the budget, and we're talking about programs that are paying out a lot more than $20. If doing means testing means you can stop paying $1000+/month to someone who is already a millionaire, that's still a savings even if it adds $20 in overhead. Meanwhile we're already paying the cost of doing the means testing, because we do it in reverse, and removing that would increase efficiency and lower spending.
Moreover, other taxes require keeping track of that stuff regardless. You already have to track the value of your assets for the purposes of capital gains tax and property tax. Doing that calculation to begin with isn't free, but the incremental cost of copying that line from the other tax forms onto the Medicare form would cost far less than it does to pay benefits to people who don't need the money. And it also has an efficiency benefit whenever it isn't a cash payment, since insurance is a moral hazard -- if the government is paying for something then you take it even if you value it at a third of what it costs, whereas if you're paying your own money you don't buy things that cost more than they're worth, so having less insurance coverage for people who could afford to pay out of pocket increases efficiency.
> means you can stop paying $1000+/month to someone who is already a millionaire, that's still a savings even if it adds $20 in overhead.
Only if these hypothetical millionaires you are stopping make up more than 1/50 of the people you are means-testing. You are not only paying for those who fail the means-test, but for all those who are passing it.
> Only if these hypothetical millionaires you are stopping make up more than 1/50 of the people you are means-testing.
Then why don't we use the non-hypothetical numbers? More than 10% of retirees are millionaires and the $1000+ in payments is actually $2000+ on average and even more for the people who made enough money to be millionaires.
One reason those programs are not means tested is because it means that everyone can depend on them. Once they are means-tested to only apply to poor/middle class people, they will begin to be aggressively cut like the other means-tested programs.
Also worth noting net worth "over a million dollars" is not extravagant for a Medicare-age person who did not have a pension, for example. This is basically a median home and $600k in savings. Not poor, but also not likely to be able to pay anything close to rack rate for health insurance for an older person.
I’d also add that there’s a powerful benefit to having something like Medicare as a right of citizenship: it builds social cohesion and avoids the stigma which is often attached to social programs. Some landlords go to great lengths to avoid section 8 tenants, for example, and that has a substantial negative cost to society.
> I’d also add that there’s a powerful benefit to having something like Medicare as a right of citizenship
While not attached to citizenship, there already is something built in. New immigrants to the US often have to have a financial sponsor (I did, on my K-1 fiance visa). That sponsor has to agree (and demonstrate ability) that in the event that the new immigrant claims public benefits in the first ten years of their residence in the US (Medicare, Social Security, etc.) that the government is entitled to recoup those benefit costs from the sponsor.
The Medicare budget is approximately $1400/month for each person over 65. A completely plausible means testing approach isn't "if you have a million dollars you have to go pay a billion dollars for healthcare" but rather that if you have that much money you have to pay the $1400 to get Medicare. Someone with $600,000 and earning 5% APY would be getting more than that in interest, not including appreciation or imputed rent on the $400,000 house, and would stop having to pay the full rate if their net worth fell below the threshold anyway.
> you have to pay the $1400 to get Medicare
This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits. (Although it would help offset costs to have a lower-risk pool of insureds come into the program, in addition to the other societal benefits.)
> earning 5% APY would be getting more than that in interest
Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
> imputed rent on the $400,000 house
They live in the house, which lowers their monthly expenses to a level where they can pay them using Social Security and the interest from their savings.
Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years. And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
> This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits.
Whether something would have a particular policy outcome and whether you have the votes to pass it are two different things. Moreover, you could obviously require wealthy retirees to pay for Medicare without allowing younger people to do it. Stranger things have happened.
> Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
They do have another way to pay living expenses. They have $600,000+ plus a house, and as soon a they only had $599,999 plus a house they would no longer have to pay the full rate for Medicare.
> Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years.
You can just as easily make the contrary argument. These programs were never funded -- social security started out making payments to people who never paid in and there isn't anywhere near enough in the "trust fund" to make existing payouts. The people paying the taxes to make up the shortfall were too young to be eligible to vote or not even born when those promises were made, so by what right does an older generation have to bind them to a promise it made to itself and then never actually funded?
> And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
How about we do this and trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military so that we can lower the taxes on the secretary to the same rates paid by Warren Buffet?
> and there isn't anywhere near enough in the "trust fund" to make existing payouts
They were funded. But administration after administration constantly "borrows" from it, and then (in one party's case) points to the shortfall as proof of a "failure".
> They were funded.
No, they weren't. There was never a point in the history of social security where you could continue making the payments to existing retirees on the basis of the saved up money they paid in themselves so that a future generation could decide that they would prefer to both not pay into and not receive social security.
There have been years when working people paid more into the program than retirees withdrew, i.e. when less than all of the money paid by the current generation went immediately to the previous generation, but that money was never even close to enough to fund the promised future payouts.
Moreover, Congress "borrows" the money in the sense that the Social Security Administration holds it as government bonds rather than cash, but then the Social Security Administration gets the interest on the bonds.
The problem is, that was never even close to enough money either way, because the program was configured from the outset to transfer most of the money from current working people to current retirees instead of investing it at interest in order to make the future payments to the people paying into it. This could have been slightly better if the "trust fund" was invested in stocks rather than government bonds because they pay more interest, but it still wouldn't have been near enough. And if even that was the case then the government in those past years couldn't have spent as much money because it would have lost that huge sink for government debt, in which case all the people currently collecting social security would have had to have paid higher taxes for the level of government services they received.
Meanwhile using the money from existing workers for existing retirees not only doesn't actually fund the program, it only even fails to implode as long as you a) never intend to wind the program down and b) the ratio of working people to retirees never decreases. But the ratio of working people to retirees did decrease, because people started having fewer kids and living longer, so now the unfunded "trust fund" isn't just insufficient to make the payments to the people who are currently paying in, it's soon not even going to be able to make the payments to the people who are currently retired, because it's now shrinking rather than growing as a result of more people collecting for each one paying in.
>And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
Yes, there are issues with Social Security and Medicare. Not least of which is that, at least for the next thirty years or so (at least until the baby boomers are mostly all dead -- not because I wish them ill, but because later generations are smaller, constraining the pool of contributors to SS/Medicare).
A simple fix (that would give us ~50 years to figure out how to do this better) would be to remove the income cap on SS/Medicare contributions. Currently, that's $176,100[0]. Doing so would keep SS/Medicare solvent long enough to figure out how to structure the safety net appropriately, without jeopardizing the health/well being of those who paid in expecting it to work for them too.
[0] https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc751
That is not actually a simple fix. You're proposing a 15.3% tax increase -- on top of all existing taxes -- on everyone who makes more than that amount of money. They're obviously going to lobby against that or otherwise take measures to thwart it using tax avoidance strategies etc., making it both less effective than anticipated and no easier to pass than actually reforming the programs.
On top of that, tax incidence is more complicated than "well the people paying it have higher incomes". Federal revenue has been a stable percentage of GDP since WWII, whereas that's an enormous increase in government collections exceeding all historical precedent, and the money had previously been going somewhere else, and the somewhere else (investment markets) would notice it going away. In other words, a tax hike that big would crash the stock market and the housing market etc.
There is no simple fix for this. People voted for a government willing to write them a check it couldn't cash and your only real choices are "don't give that much to wealthy retirees" or "take it from the economy at the expense of the kids".
>That is not actually a simple fix. You're proposing a 15.3% tax increase -- on top of all existing taxes -- on everyone who makes more than that amount of money
No. Not even close. It's not increasing anyone's taxes. It's just making them fairer. Most folks have to pay those taxes on all their income. Why should it be any different for the folks with the highest incomes?
What's more, I can say from experience that not paying SS/Medicare taxes over the arbitrary limit makes exactly zero material difference in my quality of life.
Whereas keeping SS/Medicare solvent while we figure out a better way will have a significant positive impact on my life and the lives of millions of others.
> It's not increasing anyone's taxes.
Don't be disingenuous. If there isn't anyone paying more than they are now then there isn't any additional government revenue.
> Most folks have to pay those taxes on all their income. Why should it be any different for the folks with the highest incomes?
The way social security works is that you pay in proportion to your income and then you receive social security payments in proportion to what you paid. There is a cap on both of these. You're proposing to only remove the cap on one of them. That's the same "fairness" argument for not solving the problem by making social security payments according to need or in fixed amounts, so if you're not concerned about that fairness equation then you already have a way of solving the problem without raising taxes.
> What's more, I can say from experience that not paying SS/Medicare taxes over the arbitrary limit makes exactly zero material difference in my quality of life.
This is what I mean by tax incidence. It's not your life which is affected. You're just putting the extra money in your IRA or whatever. But at scale that has consequences for other people. What do you expect happens if you take literally trillions of dollars out of capital markets?
How much will the optimization and means testing cost? Will it end up starting an entire division of workers to review and verify? There is no free lunch. This is like optimizing by shaving single digit milliseconds in uploading artifacts for your build time, but 10 minutes is spent somewhere else.
Changing the deal of social security after people spent a lifetime paying into it seems like a non-starter.
That's on top of the fact that it would require Congress to change the law to make that happen, no department of government efficiency can do it.
Right, but DOGE was told by the current government that they weren't allowed to touch Medicare. This is covered in the article I linked.
Is the current government known for following rules and consistently adhering to previous declarations?
This is quite the comment.
1) You start off saying the mandatory spending is a ruse.
2) You provide no evidence for it.
3) You ask some pretty basic (still good) questions that each department already undergoes.
4) You conclude the spending must not be mandatory after all, just by the mere existence of your questions. Almost assuming the worst case answer to each question you raised.
Do you understand this is Seagull budget planning? I am no government defender, but I am consistently flabbergasted by people who think government fraud detection started and ended with DOGE. Do you guys seriously write "Are we paying for unnecessary things" as though it's an insightful question nobody in government has looked into before? Even after we have confirmed DOGE did fuck all and likely made this whole process even worse?
> Do you guys seriously write "Are we paying for unnecessary things" as though it's an insightful question nobody in government has looked into before?
It isn't a novel question, which is how we know so conclusively that the answer is "yes, the government is paying for many unnecessary things". The people receiving the money keep lobbying to prevent it from being eliminated, so the primary thing preventing it from being eliminated is government authority to actually change things. Whether or not that's what DOGE did, it's the thing a government efficiency operation could and ought to do.
> The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything?
Yeah, it's over paying for private equity vultures who overcharge to extra maximum profit from healthcare. But that's reform that sorely needs to happen by the government reigning in those private companies not to the government. By trying to "drown [the government] in the bathtub" like Norquist advocated, project 2025 asshats are damaging our country.
Some things are mandatory only if you love your neighbor.
> But that's reform that sorely needs to happen by the government reigning in those private companies not to the government.
So the government passes regulations that cause private equity asshats to jack up prices, e.g. by making it infeasible to start new companies to compete with them, and then the government overpays to buy things from them, but this is somehow not the government's doing?
Bad regulations passed at the behest of private asshats are still bad regulations and the solution is still to repeal them.
> Some things are mandatory only if you love your neighbor.
And some things aren't mandatory at all, like having the government overpay for stuff which is nevertheless classified as "mandatory" spending.
> So the government passes regulations that cause private equity asshats to jack up prices,
Nope. That's not what I said, but nice try.
It means we don't allow for-profit companies to run our healthcare. Public. Accountable. Non-Profit.
How are you supposed to get an accountable government agency? Is the VA or the DMV or the DEA actually accountable right now, and if so then why are they so bad?
Accountability comes from the ability to reject something objectionable, i.e. it comes from having other alternatives that subject the provider to competitive pressure. That's not what you get from a government agency, nor is it what you get from a consolidated market where the incumbents have captured the government. It is what you get from a competitive market, which is the thing we currently lack.
I'm adding the rest of the context from the post I linked since it's clear almost no one is reading it:
"Mandatory spending includes entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which are legally required to provide benefits to eligible recipients. Even if DOGE wanted to, this spending can’t be cut. To change these programs’ funding, eligibility, or benefits, Congress must vote to amend the laws, a daunting task in the current polarized political climate.
Compounding the issue, President-Elect Trump recently stated his unwillingness to touch Social Security or Medicare. In addition, the Republican Party included protecting these programs as one of twenty promises in its 2024 GOP Platform.
If the incoming administration follows along party lines, that leaves discretionary spending (26%) as the only realistic target to trim spending."
Mandatory according to who? Congress? DOGE has more actual, real power than our elected congress at this time.
> the folks behind DOGE must have themselves known that their stated mission was impossible.
this assumes these people aren't actual complete dumbasses in this domain
(they are)
> Musk has famously vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending—roughly 30% of last year’s federal budget
And yet with what he's done, federal spending has increased $400B this year.
Striving for efficiency is laudable, but that wasn't the goal. It was to dismantle institutions that the Oligarchs and their minions wanted to destroy.
The story of Athens as told by Sparta
The honest real question is what to do? We are at a turning point in history. Right now you are either polarized or asleep. The question is not only what can you do but what will you do. Now, not tomorrow. I personally am starting to get active locally in my city government. Commenting on the downfall isn't enough. Do something.
Still looking for the people on hn who eight months ago said that this would be a good thing to come out and admit not only that they were wrong, but the model of the world and their way of absorbing info that led them to such a conclusion is also wrong. Looking at you, geohot.
There are multiple generations of folks who've been trained to believe that Ronald Reagan was delivering divine wisdom when he said "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem" / "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."
I know many folks that don't have any animus to individual people. They just have been brainwashed since early childhood...
Republicans think the government is the problem but currently control all three federal branches and multiple states.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261941#43268908
Man I love being right.
Yes. I'm not for calling out individual people, those who probably had hope and some may be young and didn't have the warning flags going off. I can only imagine they're disappointed and had no malice.
But people who have some level of fame who put their name behind it, and who had some influence in inspiring others down this wrong path most definitely need to address it. If you truly believe the intelligence of tech people over others in every field which led you down this path, follow the proper postmortem process.
They will never admit they are wrong.
It's a point of pride to fight tooth and nail arguing a wrong point. I worked with a guy who out right admitted that he will argue with you even if he knows he is wrong. It's not a discussion, its a fight they must win. They will die on their hill of macho pride. THEY MUST DEFEAT YOU.
Smart people admit they are wrong and learn, then move on for the better. The stagnant macho person will never learn anything and just wants status quo in perpetuity, so long as it benefits them.
They might act like it's a macho thing to argue against you, but let's be real, it can be painfully embarrassing to admit you're wrong, especially if you were really dug in already. Since it's about avoiding pain, it's the weak route to take to continue to defend a position you know is wrong.
Embarrassing how? We aren’t in the schoolyard anymore although I guess plenty of people mentally are.
What pain? If you feel pain from being wrong or having someone point it out you have thin skin. It's akin to being called stupid which is such a weak insult.
That's... exactly my point? They put up the defense because they are "thin skinned". It only looks all strong and macho on the surface when they continue to argue back.
Conversations around this administration and the people related or in support of them always bring me back to the Alt-Right Playbook.[1]
Usually I have a specific video in mind that is relevant, but this feels like a good time to link the whole series. It’s a good, informative, and (depressingly) humorous look at the alt-right - and while it doesn’t offer much in solid solutions, I think being able to understand how they operate and where they’re coming from allows us all to have a better chance in mitigating them and stopping the tide of fascism.
[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnz...
Doge was a reward for the tabulator manipulation. See you in another 8 months.
It was a reward for the biggest campaign donation in US political history. Musk didn't rig the election, he's not that competent or powerful. Occam's Razor tells us what happened was the Democrats went with a strategy that has never worked before (changing candidate mid-race), and they ended up predictably losing. That's it.
It's happened once post-ww2. Doesn't seem to be a large enough of a sample to make a point about the strategy.
You're also ignoring the candidates themselves
geohot has/had a weird obsession with Elon for a few years now. He copied what Elon did a lot and is sort of like an Elon Stan. Which led to him agreeing and competing with Elon a lot. However, after geohot interned at Twitter/X I think he moved on from Elon and liking his views etc.
But I suspect for most them their real desire was simply long lasting harm to the federal government and pain and suffering inflicted on those who work for the government.
I'm not sure why you think any of them would believe they were wrong. I don't think any of them were hoping for some kind of transformation other than destruction.
Hard not to read your view as a textbook example of projection, given your username.
> simply long lasting harm to the federal government and pain and suffering inflicted on those who work for the government.
sounds about right
Why do you suspect this? Is it your view that right wingers are inherently evil as opposed to, say, having different opinions about how things should be done? I urge you to find some empathy.
I have friends who are gay, trans, non-Christian, or brown. Not all right-wingers say that they aren’t fully people but many do, and the more libertarian ones aren’t exactly rushing to shut that down. It is very hard to trust a group of people unwilling to recognize my neighbors as fully human.
In the federal space, we’ve seen purges of women and minorities, shutdowns of groups which work on things like civil rights or pollution in poor communities, widespread refusal to pay money as promised, and attempts to punish organizations for 1st amendment activities. There is zero expectation of good-faith from anyone who supports that.
Conversely I distrust people with a view of educating kids on an array of issues in gender and sexuality.
Unfortunately your/US views have become simplistic (yes simplistic) along two hyper extremes. Both sides are wrong at this stage. Just wrong in different ways.
Are you saying that respecting other people and letting them live their own lives without affecting you is worthy of distrust? Because I have directly seen what’s taught in schools here and it’s basically the golden rule without the quiet exceptions.
The golden rule is to treat people how I would like to be treated, and I welcome opinions from my friends and family on my life choices. I might not agree, and if I disagree strongly enough I might resolve to find a community where people are more aligned with me - but I'd expect that community to also have opinions on what's a good or a bad way to live your life.
Uh, good for you? I do as well.
You say that not all right wingers are bigoted, and then go on to proclaim the entire group doesn't recognize minorities as being human. Have you spoken honestly and in good faith with right wingers?
Let me clarify my point: I’m not saying every Republican is the same on every one of those issues, I’m saying that the people who disagree are not standing up to the people rejecting the idea that certain groups deserve full rights.
I have a number of family and a few remaining right-wing acquaintances (all of the libertarians I knew are voting straight-ticket for Democrats against MAGA) – not “kinda liked Reagan” but people who’ve had worked published in national media or been invited to dinner at Rupert Murdoch’s estate. Privately, people express concern or distaste for anti-liberty actions - but not in public, never to the point of standing up for a group being targeted. Like the Mexican woman who cleans their house, she’s great even if her husband was originally undocumented, so of course ICE shouldn’t go after them – but they won’t speak up on behalf of anyone they don’t know personally, even just to call for due process.
I left the Republican sphere during the Bush years when it became obvious that for all of the talk about ethics and the rule of law during the Clinton administration, there wasn’t a desire to hold their fellows to that same standard. Sadly, it’s only gotten worse since then – as we can see from the blatant lawlessness this year where even people who might share goals like reducing government spending or reconsidering industrial policy should feel safe saying there’s a better, legal way to do it.
I have had many such conversations (Texas is a fun state) and while many don't consider themselves bigoted, their policy preferences amount to, essentially, "but I'd rather we not treat people equally."
They don't "hate gay people". (They have gay friends!) But they don't think gay people should be able to marry or adopt children. Sometimes Leviticus comes up.
They don't "hate Black people" (They have black co-workers!). They just think the disparities in the justice, education and financial systems are all Black people's own fault.
They don't "hate immigrants" (They love Mexico!), they just think they're not assimilating, taking American jobs and draining tax payer resources.
Trans people seem to be the only group they'll outright admit to hating.
Oh, and Democrats. They really hate Democrats.
As I said, Texas is fun.
This is an odd comment, do you not know any right wing people? Especially in the non-coastal parts of the country?
This opinion comes from having many conversations with (real, not online) people who literally state that they consider that the government is inherently evil and it's sole function is to rob people of their liberty and hard earned money. I've spent a considerable amount of time doing business travel and working in parts of the country where I've heard people, in an public office conversation, voice that support for public radio is literally fascism to nodding agreement among their peers. I once mentioned an experience I had in the beginning of the pandemic and the response was "oh yea, that's when people still thought it was serious right?"
I don't think these people are inherently evil, they believe the government is evil and that those who work for it are working to undermine everyday Americans. If you actually had a conversation with anyone deep in the MAGA community you would know that harming the federal government, for them, is seen as a victory and virtuous.
It's baffling to me that anyone can still not understand the foundation of the MAGA community and growing extreme right. For years they have increasingly felt that their way of life has been robbed from them (and to be fair, it has been, rural communities in the US are in trouble), and they sincerely believe that this is caused by sinister forces working in the federal government, immigrants, the global elite, and "radical" woke leftists that want to harm their children.
To be fair, many are evil and hold evil opinions about their fellow humans. How do I find empathy with someone who doesn’t subscribe to the same reality and does not value lives of even their own neighbors?
I think if you actually spoke with them, many would make the same claims about the left. Many right wingers see the left as being equally evil, that doesn't mean it's true.
Where does the empathy come in to play?
I can’t find empathy for racists, bigots, nor fascists. Both sides are very much not the same. Enough with the false equivalencies.
You can read Project 2025 and see for yourself that inflicting pain and misery on federal workers was the ringleaders' plainly stated motivation.
Empathy is always good, but in this case, within your "right winger" party you've got powerful factions with active and explicitly stated intentions to dismantle the federal government.
I'm not sure why empathy was even envoked here, what should we feel bad about and how is that related to DOGE
Empathy doesn't always mean the feeling is bad, it's more of a general connecting - always a good thing.
I said it would be a good thing and still do. Dismantling USAID alone was worth it. It's easy to spend taxpayer money, it's harder to make cuts, no matter how you do it you'll be the bad guy. But government needs to live within its means.
Dismantling USAID has condemned hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to literal death through a loss of famine relief and life saving medications for diseases like HIV and tuberculosis. It has diminished the soft power of the United States, destroyed the credibility of the country for a generation or more, and didn't even save that much money. It has profited the average American not at all and likely made everyone less safe.
I have no idea what kind of person thinks that was a good idea.
Borrowing billions of dollars when you are $37 trillion in debt and giving that borrowed money to people who hate you is insane. And most of that money goes to warlords and dictators. USAID needed a complete overhaul. And do you accuse the countries who don't give aid of causing famine and death? Why just America? You are welcome to give out of your own pocket if it assuages your guilt.
The $37t is debt owned by the public and government. The US government debt is $7t.
>money to people who hate you is insane
-Do all the people who receive the money hate us?
-Why does it matter if some people receiving help hate us? Why is this insane?
>And most of that money goes to warlords and dictators
How do you know?
>Dismantling USAID alone was worth it. I
Why?
>But government needs to live within its means.
Which is what? No deficit? That's not possible so if you will allow some debt then why not USaid but other programs are left?
see my response above.
I responded to your comment with some questions
The venn diagram of that group and the group that immediately, with zero evidence, following the Charlie Kirk incident, declared war on “the left” is a circle.
> with zero evidence
I mean… what additional evidence would it take? Police, DBI, his discord messages, the texts to his trans boyfriend?
I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. At the time of the original post, where people were condemning “leftists” and saying “this means war against the left,” there was zero evidence. No one had been caught (I guess they may have piled drived a poor janitor or something at this point), no idea who it could even be. This was days before it was revealed to be some MAGA splinter group.
One of the strange joys of this site is reading the insane takes of otherwise intelligent right-wingers as they try to bend reality to fit with their beliefs.
At the very best you'll get "the left forced them to do it" but blank denial of reality and invention of entirely fake parallel worlds is much more likely.
They've been doing that for climate, renewables, COVID, Trump etc. far longer than for DOGE with no sign of giving up.
It helped. Not enough, needs to be a permanent office that is simply antagonistic to government spending.
Waiting for history to vindicate us is usually a losing strategy. If we fail to persuade people in the moment, the fault is ours, not theirs.
It reminds me of Ancient Greece and the Sophists: they mastered persuasion as an art at the expense of reason, logic, and truth.
I thought it was a good idea in spirit although I wasn't sure how effectively it would be done. To be honest I'm still not sure how effective it was. Almost all criticism I've seen of DOGE has been from those biased against it already. Obviously federal employees will be negative about a program designed around reducing their scope and funding...
All you have to do is look at the non-serious initial claim of $2T savings. That is wildly high, and told you that the people running it had no interest in success. It’s like if we have a startup founder here saying they’re going to have AGI by Christmas and be the first $10T company.
That's a non-sequitur. Plenty of serious AI companies have made predictions about AGI or replacing programmers which have not come to fruition. That doesn't mean they don't have interest in success.
I said serious in the sense of something they seriously believe they can deliver. Those wild predictions on unrealistic timeframes are for the stock market.
For an example: Sergei Brin, Sebastian Thrun, and Elon Musk were all interested in self-driving cars. Musk has been making materially misleading statements promising to deliver L5 in the next year or so many times since 2013, and still doesn’t have more than L2. Waymo did not promise things they couldn’t deliver, treated safety as a top priority, and is expanding L4 taxi services around the country. They’re all interested, Waymo is serious, but Musk’s strategy has made him enormously rich and I think that’s always been his top priority.
Your argument was about success not interest in success.
The spirit of the "program" leaned in the right direction, but Elon was absolutely the wrong guy to put in charge of it. Misplaced incentives, lack of interpersonal skills, lack of respect and empathy, lack of organizational skills when he does not have strong, professional lieutenants that will implement changes.
Edit: and who TF would have thought putting "big balls doge kid" in a position of power would be a good thing? That kid, along with whomever hired him, would be tossed out of any professional corp env swiftly.
> The spirit of the "program" leaned in the right direction ...
Congressional oversight in combination with incorporating CBO[0] work products to perform the oversight obviates the purported need for DOGE.
> ... Elon was absolutely the wrong guy to put in charge of it. Misplaced incentives, lack of interpersonal skills, lack of respect and empathy, lack of organizational skills ...
A more succinct way to describe this is; corruption.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_Office
It was an effort in spirit only. It was aimed almost entirely at damaging those agencies that Trump hated and that Musk wanted to muck up so he could gain advantages from less government oversight and regulations. In the end it had almost no effect on overall government spending, but it certainly helped Trumps aims to damage the government departments he didn't like, undo what Biden had done, and gain some advantages for Elon's companies.
It’s still completely insane that people still think it was anything other than this. I can understand if you’re a musk fan you could have thought he was being serious on the bullshit (otherwise how could you be a musk fan?) but think today there was any plan or “spirit” behind it is pure delusion.
The spirit of the program did not lean in the right direction at all.
It started and ended with malicious intent and demonstration of power. Classic Trump.
The correct spirit is how it was done under Clinton / Gore. Slowly, thoughtfully, carefully, properly planned and delicately executed.
(and this says nothing of party politics or the quality of president that Clinton was, this is only commentary of that particular action as comparison)
The program started from ignorance of the functions of the federal government and the people who work in it. People who don’t know anything drank and believed the koolaid. Their actions might make sense if the propaganda was true. But it isn’t.
The whole thing seemed to me to be a quid pro quo for Elon to get Trump elected via Twitter. I'm fairly sure everyone but DOGE knew it would not accomplish anything.
He also lacked the authority to realize the full vision, being only a guest of Trump. Hence the inevitable conflict when it came to the big beautiful bill.
a16z and certain Sequoia partners specifically supported this during the 2024 election.
If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
Or raise the money and spend it frivolously.
This happens more often than not anyway. Overpriced office space, expensive furniture, extra layers of management because we're "structuring to scale the organization", fancy and expensive titles for people who barely do anything. I worked at one place that raised 70 million, then spent 10 renovating a rented space, only to close up barely 1 year later. I had left by that point.
Action Jack
Yes, except this was real, not fiction. I witnessed it more than once. During the dotcom days, a company I worked for raised 8 mil... then blew 25% on renovations. I still remember getting a tour of the "space", where the new logo (which probably cost 6 figures to design) was unveiled.
If they were burning $5M a month, not renovating an office for $10M would’ve bought two additional months of salary and operational costs. I assume the bulk of the other $60M went to salaries?
My company just spent $10M renovating an office but we’ve been in business for several decades and have been profitable every year for the past decade, I’m not sure about prior to that. It’s not always a bad idea to spend money on office space.
Tenant improvements (office remodels) are $75-$150/square foot these days depending on the level of finishes and FFE (furniture, fixtures, and equipment), and can go higher if you’re building out dozens of offices instead of open office space with perimeter private offices or want high end architectural lighting, aesthetic flourishes, etc. I know you can wire up a basic office with lights and receptacles for about $15/sqft if you use union labor and basic 2x4s/recessed cans for lighting.
My state allows 1 occupant per 150 gross sq ft of floor space (interior partitions, columns, and other items that occupy floor space are counted in gross square footage), so an office tower with a 22,500 sq ft floor plate allows for 150 occupants. At $100/sqft, you’re looking at $2.25M to build out a single floor of an office tower.
Depending on the market, the landlord might offer an allowance for tenant improvements or ‘pay’ for the improvements and they get paid back later over time through rent payments.
Yes, that sounds right. There were roughly 400 to 500 people near the end, if I remember, so $5M monthly burn is in the right ball park. This was over 15 years ago when salaries were much less. Usually waste in one area, like office space, means waste in other areas. So, yeah, the office space alone wouldn't buy much time. You'd need a whole change in attitude.
Oh this was 15 years ago? $10M is pretty extravagant for ~500 people, considering construction labor was nearly half the price it is now back in 2010, probably 60-65% of today’s wages.
Yeah, it was around 2010 - 2011. It was a very nice building!
How does one find these jobs where the founders are planning on lighting a pile of money on fire and not working ever again? Would love to burn some money myself.
It’s easy, just look for the startups with ads plastered everywhere and box office seats at your local professional sports league stadium.
Or to really piss them off, raise money and become ramen profitable and stay that way.
so like the average silicon valley startup right now?
"right now"?
> If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
And maybe (just maybe) raise your voice in _actionable_ support for dismantling the complexes these money ghouls use to wage war against you and regular society.
Peaceful protests, calling your reps, voting, and donating to organizations that have lawyers in the courts and lobbyists on Washington repping your interests are all super helpful relatively low effort steps that have impact when done en masse.
Respectfully, I've not seen any of these actions make a measurable difference in the last 10 years.
> I've not seen any of these actions make a measurable difference in the last 10 years
I've literally gotten language I drafted written into state and, twice now, federal law.
If you pick a hot-button issue, no, you probably won't move your elected. But on issues they didn't even consider to be on their plate? You can get attention. (Better yet if you can convince them you have other motivated voters beside you.)
Unfortunately, my (Republican) senator doesn't seem to agree with me (a Democrat) on even the smaller issues. Yet he theoretically represents every resident of this state in the Senate, including the ones that didn't vote for him.
Also helps when you’re a private equity investor and can bribe I mean contribute to politicians so they listen to you
> helps when you’re a private equity investor
It does. But every single case where I got to draft legislation occurred before I made money and before I’d given anyone any money. (I never gave either of the federal electeds I worked with money.)
I called about a bill that wasn’t getting attention. The elected thought it was interesting, but their staff were overworked. (They’re always overworked.) I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work. In a minority of cases, they introduced those into the working copy of the bill, and in a minority of those cases the bill actually passed.
Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
> I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work... Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
I'd argue that time to do free work, and especially the ability to do is legal drafting, is something that the upper classes have a lot more access to than others.
You don't think any election in the last 10 years has made a measurable difference? Elections are the result of voting en masse.
In the gerrymandered district in which I live, no.
You’re seriously claiming you had zero competitive elections of consequence where you live? No local elections? Referenda? Competitive primaries?
Some school district and property tax measures. That’s why I vote (and just for the general principle of it). Even my state and local reps are gerrymandered into lifelong stability.
> Even my state and local reps are gerrymandered into lifelong stability
Your leverage is in surfacing primary challengers. Even if they win, it’s a drag on time, energy and capital.
Elected will pay attention to groups that can petition for and support a primary challenge. Even if they’re gerrymandered.
They win with 80+% margins. They don’t even bother campaigning themselves and delegate it to their staff. The party wants it this way and is actively hostile to any primary challenges.
I have better things to do with my time than charge at windmills.
> They win with 80+% margins
Yes. I’ve lived in these districts. They still don’t want a challenge.
> The party wants it this way and is actively hostile to any primary challenges
Of course. They’re hostile because they don’t like it. Not much of a threat if you’re going to do something they like.
> have better things to do with my time
Then say this. Of course civic engagement takes time and effort.
Civic engagement when the deck is stacked that bad against you is just pissing your time away. We only have so much time in this earth to accomplish things.
I have seen not making these actions not make a measurable difference.
That is an issue, but it's important to signal to those paying attention that the resistance is there and to not give up.
We've entered Civil War II and I fear it will have to get much worse before there's any chance of turning things around. Regardless we can never give up.
What signals make you so certain that we are in another civil war? Just curious.
The invasion of the Capitol, to overturn an election that they claim was fraudulent, followed by the pardoning of the invaders, is kind of a doozy. It suggests that one side or the other (or possibly both) is rejecting democracy and willing to use violence when they don't get the result they want. Not just the individuals involved, but the tens of millions who supported pardoning them.
Or alternatively, they were in fact correct, and tens of millions on the other side subverted democracy, at least temporarily (and would surely do so again if not prevented).
Either way, it sounds like you've millions of people each convinced that millions of others are about to start a civil war. Which sounds like it makes that war practically unavoidable.
The national guard rolling into multiple major US cities is serious warning sign.
The army and national guard had started preparing during the Obama years.
[1]:https://youtu.be/JEjU-X57Wrc?t=5815
It seems sometimes that they have mapped out how things are going to play out years in advance and are ready. After all what is the American government but just a group of fellow countrymen with all the data and resources?
yeah and the ones with the resources want to make sure they keep the resources and the rest of us get as little as possible.
It's practice. Our next October surprise very well may be a false flag attack that will be the pretext for martial law.
10 years ago that would sound crazy but today it's very real. I wish very much to be wrong in my prediction.
Yeah, doesn't sound crazy (and it wouldn't have sounded crazy 10 years ago, at least not to my ear) and I'm afraid you are most likely correct.
My current (irrational?) fear is this:
1. Trump declared a Venezuelan gang as a terrorist organization.
2. Since then, Trump has ordered the military to conduct extrajudicial killings of people suspected of being in that gang who were on boats. He is implicitly asserting that military action is allowed without Congressional approval if the target is a terrorist organization (it probably isn't legal, and he's put out no justification for it).
3. He just declared Antifa a terrorist organization. He has a history of blaming things on Antifa and has mused about declaring other leftist organizations as terrorists.
Now connect 2 and 3.
The military preemptively deployed to multiple US cities isn't a great sign.
Generally speaking, we don't deploy our military in peacetime. So unless there's a natural disaster in Chicago or D.C. right now, there aren't but so many conclusions to draw...
Well, the President of the Heritage Foundation (the ones behind Project 2025, which is the playbook they're following) has said: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/03/heritage-...
They call it a revolution. They keep using that word, I do not think it means what they think it means.
People keep saying this. But the fact is it doesn’t matter.
Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district. Most people aren’t.
And then we have the Supreme Court giving the President unlimited power.
> Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district
I’ve knocked on doors for judicial elections in Manhattan where a single tenants’ association’s turnout out swung every election on the ballot. (In another case, the judge who went to Koreatown with us after a meet and greet swung our eight top to turn out, which was more than the margin for an off-cycle mid-week judicial primary.)
There are always elections on the ballot that matter. And civic engagement isn’t limited to voting.
Local politics and civic engagement might help getting a speed bump installed in front of the town grocery store, but it doesn’t stop unaccountable, non-identifying masked ICE thugs from swooping into your neighborhood and black-bagging your friends and neighbors. National politics overrides state and local.
Or women bleeding to death because doctors are afraid to perform life saving abortion because they might get arrested.
The (Republican) governor of GA has been spending years and millions of dollars to get the Hyundai plant in GA that would bring 8500 direct jobs and no telling how many indirect jobs to GA. That was delayed an almost ruined by ICE.
It was such a bad fuckup that Trump tried to beg the Koreans to stay after being arrested by ICE. They refused.
The GA voters overwhelmingly voted for Kemp over a MAGA endorsed candidate during the primaries and even a Republican governor can’t block the federal government’s jack booted thugs
There's more than national politics
and yet the center of political power oscillates – with real consequences – every two and four years... coincidentally around the time we have elections!
And those same purple states have decided where it oscillates - like I said.
Whether you are a Republican or Democrat in California it doesn’t matter who you as individual votes for for President. If you are in Los Angeles county, it also doesn’t matter who you vote for in the general election as your representative.
The primaries matter though. California sends the same number of Senators to DC as West Virginia and half as many as North and South Dakota combined even though they don’t have nearly the population.
How long and what strike of luck will it be based on timing that you think this country will see a liberal Supreme Court? Especially since justices nominated by Democrats refuse to leave when a Democratic President is in office? But then again, we are in this mess we are in today because the Democrats were too cowardly to pressure Biden not to run sooner.
If it didn't matter they wouldn't get so upset about you doing it.
Never listen to anyone telling you that your voice doesn't matter.
Like... here's a story about me getting a kind of boring corporate law (related to limited liability companies) changed in Italy. Tons of people rolled their eyes at me and said it'd never happen, but I kept poking away at it, and it did happen:
https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt...
Also, local politics matter a bunch in the US. There is a ton of good you can do in your community with just a handful of people.
If anything, I get upset at how naive the left is, how they think that “this isn’t who we are”, and how out of touch they are. They try to play fair - the right plays to win.
Right now, the governor of California is trying to meet Texas gerrymandering with its own. But liberals are clutching their pearls with “two wrongs don’t make a right” and arguing about things like this in their committees
The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/dnc-mee...
> a16z and certain Sequoia partners specifically supported this during the 2024 election.
Support for DOGE before it was implemented is not a bad thing. Ro Khanna (Democrat from Silicon Valley) supported it too. https://khanna.house.gov/media/in-the-news/opinion-democrats...
It is the act of supporting DOGE after the dumb implementation (e.g. 1/28/2025 Fork in the Road letter) that would concern me (which I think a16z has continued to do).
In my opinion, Elon Musk approached DOGE all wrong because he is used to running companies where payroll is the #1 expense, and cutting workers is how he has always cut costs at his previous companies when they were strapped for cash (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla). He did’t realize that the US Government is mostly an insurance company, so cutting office staff is a drop in the bucket. A tragedy of his own juvenile ignorance.
What was the pitch for DOGE? I get that govt agencies are insanely bloated. I don't get how DOGE intended to fix that even at the start, and the scammy charts they kept publishing weren't giving confidence. Was looking at it optimistically too, cause Musk did debloat Twitter.
> Support for DOGE before it was implemented is not a bad thing.
Of course it is. It shows terrible judgment this was easily foreseeable.
> Support for DOGE before it was implemented is not a bad thing
A reminder that before it was implemented, it was called DOGE. It was never a serious thing, and supporting it may not have been bad, but it was hopelessly naive.
Should be obvious. If you want a smaller government, you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide. Venture capital / private equity / etc. owned companies will stand in line to get those contracts.
And with deregulations, "move fast and break things" startups can move even faster.
What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd. They enjoy social freedoms which the current gov. would rather see go away...so, talk about selling their soul to the devil.
It often comes down to freedom for me, not freedom for everyone.
also known as power.
> What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd.
SV workers, sure. But "socially liberal" is absolutely not my impression of SV venture capitalists.
There are quite a few socially liberal VCs, perhaps even most. But there are also more libertarians, which is quite common among those who make fortunes managing money rather than building things.
Privatization of those functions results in the government paying consultants more than they would pay staff, with less institutional knowledge, and far less efficiency than if the functions were directly in the government.
Generally, the government doesn't do things that private industry could do on their own. There are specific times where this isn't true. For example, there were small commuter buses in San Francisco for a while that the existing MUNI service could not accomplish. But these are quite rare!
For example, private industry is never going to fund basic research that is the foundation of the US's wealth and strength, except through taxation. The idea is ludicrous.
We could have private highways, private roads, perhaps, but we would be handing off public decisions to a private company that is almost certainly a monopoly. There are only rare cases where roads and highways are not inherently monopolistic.
SV venture capital is not one type of person, there are both liberal and libertarians among them. The libertarian variety got suckered in by the Dark Enlightenment propaganda and thought they could be the puppetmasters controlling the world with propaganda. They should have looked to what happens to their ilk in places like Russia before backing someone who wants to turn the US into an autocracy like Russia:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/business/russian-oligarchs-de...
They cosplay as socially liberal but they want to be free from the responsibilities of belonging to a decent society.
> What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd
Silicon Valley has had a monarchist element for at least a decade now. I've been commenting on it for a while. It masked itself in the language of libertarianism. (Note: not all libertarians are monarchists.) But 2024 outed them (Andreessen, Musk, the All In crowd, et cetera) for the bastards that they are.
I mean it was barely masked. They dropped mentions of the dark enlightenment like name dropping Curtis yarvin/mencius moldbug pretty frequently if you listened to their talks.
Sam Harris is the only intellectual in that space that I know of who was repulsed by their actual views and pulled back but maybe there are others.
The libertarian party itself got taken over by a less sophisticated group of these guys in a Mises Caucus mask from a coup orchestrated by the overstock.com ceo in 2022
The monarchists bent wasn't masked, but the racism was. I still remember the controversy around Yarvin being removed as a speaker at Strange Loop. A lot of people could not understand why what he said was racist.
I do not think the racism was masked anymore than the monarchist bent. Monarchists are just more palatable than racists.
I have been railing against these people for over a decade.
My experience with every friend or acquaintance denying their racism pretty much came down to “no one is actually that bad, you’re being ridiculous”
Between that and the people telling me Project 2025 was a caricature of a cartoon villain and would never happen last year, I am losing my mind at all the people confiding in me hat in hand that maybe, these people might actually want to bad things
It was really obvious what these people wanted. They advertised it. They wrote entire books about their plan. But all they had to do is say “no, that’s not true” in a single interview and everyone bought it because the alternative was mentally painful
You can have members of this group straight up admit to lying[1] and yet I have people who I can show the video of them admitting to lying who then still try to claim the lie is truthful.
If you are reading this comment and had seen these actions and events and had waved them off previously, then my opinion is that you were actively ignorant to save yourself the mental anguish
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jd-vance...
I agree they were not masked for people who can see through the masks, but the abstractness of their argument style gave them a level of plausible deniability that you just don't see anymore. For example, whereas before they would express their racism by pointing to literature like "The Bell Curve", now they just say stuff like this: https://www.thenerdreich.com/curtis-yarvins-racist-slurs-hav...
>you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide
Most of what DOGE cut was stuff no one wanted or needed in the first place. Just scroll their twitter feed, cutting this stuff shouldn't be termed as "smaller government".
If you take their claims at face value then you might believe that, however, if you look into it even just a little you find that they drastically misrepresented what was cut.
Utter and complete disgrace, I hope people don't forget what was done here.
> I hope people don't forget what was done here
Read some of the LeopardsAteMyFace stories on reddit, and there are tons of federal workers that voted for this, and still are on the Kool-Aid, even as they are financially struggling.
One federal worker that voted for Trump, had his wife die during the mess, crossed multiple layers of hell to be rejected aid, dropped into poverty levels ... he still thinks that it was not Trumps fault. Trump just need "guidance", "temperance"...
Side note: he is also heavily religious so the overlap was not hard to spot, between religion and zealot worshiping.
You can't forget what you never knew. Nobody's paying attention and nobody cares. If you disagree, then explain how we got here in the first place.
It’s easier to destroy than to build
I see hollowing out of institutions but no one is building anything
The whole point of Doge was to fire the agencies that were investigating all of Musk's companies that were breaking laws. That and getting rid of competent people who might stand up to the orangefuhrer.
I think the self-dealing and getting rid of oversight was a very welcome bonus, but I think they genuinely thought they were the good guys coming to clean up government. Their methods were tragically ineffective as every serious person predicted.
We have fiscal issues, clearly, and they thought they were doing good work, but it was an absolute failure and many of the issues still remain, and were exacerbated by what DOGE did.
That’s what C- brains bring to a project.
Well, the guys on the ground might be useful idiots [1]. But at the top there's no way they thought they were doing anything but dumping stuff into the trash.
Which when the EPA / etc are the only organizations large enough to stand up to you is uh very good for you.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
In other words, their heads were so far up their own asses they couldn't distinguish between self-dealing and public good.
"You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!"
Kakistocracy edition
Do you have an example of a cut to something that was investigating Musk? I'm not saying you're wrong - I have no clue and I'm truly curious.
It's impossible to prove intent. With the exception of the NHTSA, the following agencies were gutted, each whose jurisdiction covered his business interests. In the case of the NHTSA, about half of the team that oversees autonomous vehicle safely was let go [1].
NHTSA, CFPB, DoT (FAA), DoE
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/21/musk-doge...
Starship ban was immediately lifted once Musk got in power. Look the dates.
https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-spacex-doge-faa...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/28/faa-clears-spacex-for-starsh...
One internet search away: https://qz.com/elon-musk-doge-nhtsa-tesla-neuralink-spacex-f...
Which one was "investigating" musk?
https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2025.02....
Broken link.
Apologies, it seems to move every few months. https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/dem...
Generously, two of those I would classify as "investigating" with only one actually using that word but the investigation started in 2023 and I've heard nothing of it.
He and his businesses have had several interactions with the federal government of varying antagonism but this is nothing like Trump firing Comey.
I think that it's pretty apparent that the pdf you linked is a pretty partisan document that makes a lot of tenuous links between Musk recommending firing the low level employees and his interactions with the heads of those agencies.
It is not unreasonable to expect that someone given this level of trust over the government should not have even an appearance of a conflict of interest. The mere fact that he himself is someone who is the beneficiary of billions of dollars of spending is an actual conflict.
I don't disagree with that at all but the appearance of a potential conflict of interest is a far cry from the assertion that the op made which is an exaggeration of the document linked which is an exaggeration of the appearance of conflict of interest.
I agree, but either way it's disqualifying.
It is upsetting to me that people have so much trouble sifting fact from opinion or narrative.
The fact is that DOGE made cuts to NHTSA. It is also a fact that DOGE made cuts to a bunch of agencies, not just ones related to something Elon was doing.
There isn’t even any evidence that DOGE was more aggressive about cutting things related to Elon vs other government waste.
Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government. The opinion is that the reason is to cut people specifically going after Elon.
And to be clear I gave no opinion on what Elon did or didn’t do. My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious.
What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
> What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
How doge isn't a plain dictionary definition of corruption? A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
It used to be that in such cases that private citizen then must give up their rights to their businesses (or some other way of avoiding conflict of interest).
The one they did the most damage to was probably USAID. They didnt have anything to do with Elons businesses. Meanwhile the FAA was still blocking starship flights.
Damaging USAID irreparably damages the US soft power around the globe. As Elon’s businesses are not limited to US borders, I wonder if there is perhaps a bigger picture here.
> A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
Except he had no power to do this? In the end the executive branch had to authorize anything coming out of DOGE. Like it or not, elected officials (Trump) rubber stamped the cuts.
He didn't pull the trigger himself, so I'm sure it was all fine.
Not saying anything about the actions themselves just pointing out what’s objectively true.
What would a platform that incentivizes rational analysis look like? Social media as a whole definitely does not. Social media incentivizes immediacy, hot takes, and strong opinions. The nature of the medium produces that sort of content and getting deeper, more thoughtful content requires a different medium. I wonder what that might look like.
What’s more concerning to me is that my very cold take got downvoted into oblivion and that aside from yours, all the responses are irrational.
And this is not Facebook. There is no algorithm driving views and hot takes. This is ordinary, everyday people choosing to be irrational because self-righteousness is its own dopamine hit incentive, even in the absence of external incentives.
HN _is_ social media. It is the medium, not the algorithm that encourages the behaviour.
Like how a garbage can close to the door is more likely to be used than one on the other side of the room. The people who change their behaviour in those situations aren’t making a thoughtful, rational choice not to use a garbage can on the other side of the room. It is subtle, quick, and mostly unconscious.
“The medium is the message.” This is what that old quote was getting at.
So you said
"Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government"
Then
"My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious"
It doesn't matter if the person is bias or not, what matters is it they backed their opinion up with facts
> There isn’t even any evidence that DOGE was more aggressive about cutting things related to Elon vs other government waste.
I mean, they were scraping the signage off USAID offices on day one of DOGE, while Musk walked away with $0 of his own grants cut. There was no process at all for determining whether any of his billions were waste fraud or abuse. Surely all the money he's getting from the government is well-deserved and prudent.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
I suspect Musk didn't know what his own goals were. The whole thing seemed more about emotion than logic.
I believe you're correct that he viewed the bureaucracy as a sort of foe, but that idea is somewhat paradoxical. You need employees to do anything. Fire everyone and Trump ends up nearly powerless.
He sort of figured out the basics of how the government worked as he went along, but a little late at that point: https://www.reddit.com/r/mmt_economics/comments/1jdkz81/elon...
This is a nice story but just doesn't hold up to the evidence of what was "cut".
The reason people lie it as a story is because it makes everything have a logical sense to it. It brings reason to the disorder, and people hate chaos so cling to this Machivaleian mirage of a plan. An evil plan is better than chaos. Even if it is not true.
However there _is_ an underlying reason to _some_ of the DOGE vandalism, and that is that Elon Musk's personal social media feed is a brain destroying fire hose of far right racism and conspiracy theories. One of the big boogey men of the far right racist conspiracy theories was USAID. So that is why USAID was shut down with the consequent loss of thousands upon thousands of lives. Because Musk believes bullshit he reads on the internet.
Made me sick to read that. It really makes me despise Musk, and Trump, and Vought, for their psychological violence towards our federal employees, and causing so much destruction that will take a long time to rebuild and restore.
I hit my senator very hard with information when this happened. It was clear to anyone with a brain and understanding of physics that they had no plans of doing anything other than installing crawlers and access control permissions.
Our leadership is so inept it hurts.
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.
Elon 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.
"serious" at a superficial level. He never understood what he was doing, and went around smashing things indiscriminately, often in a way that was more expensive (e.g., laying off federal workers who were paid for doing nothing for months, then rehired when someone realized that they were in fact doing something valuable).
Trump 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-c...
They were, but the actual cuts needed (to entitlements) are politically impossible to make.
Which is why they went the non-democratic/illegal route by avoiding congress.
So they did a thing they knew wouldn’t work? AKA not serious about solving the problem. The OBBBA budget bill did make some cuts though, anyway.
These are sad stories but you have to wonder how many such stories you might collect from any mostly-functional organization. Certainly there were people who had unjust firings, toxic interactions before Trump and Musk. People who work at big tech companies also have experiences like this (layoffs while on maternity leave, while getting treated for terminal illnesses etc.). This isn't a sign of any grave malice and is inevitable in a large org. What I do wonder is whether DOGE achieved any significant savings, and that is not addressed in the article.
> What I do wonder is whether DOGE achieved any significant savings
I don't think you actually wonder this because this information is easily and widely available with essentially zero effort.
Not only were there no real cost savings, but it was painfully and mathematically obvious that it was impossible for this approach to produce that kind of outcome.
> What I do wonder is whether DOGE achieved any significant savings
The answer is no.
Apples and oranges.
The fallout of a few employees being screwed by Google or similar is a lot different than the fallout of everyone being screwed by government.
Your concern for an illusory fiat ledger is noted.
> whether DOGE achieved any significant savings
They achieved something impossible: More federal spending even after reduction in work force.
Indeed the article is less an article and more a random collection of gripes and quotes. The third paragraph betrays that they're not really doing any analysis...
> The government would likely end 2025 with about 300,000 fewer employees... The total figure amounted to one in eight workers... In recent weeks, hundreds of the employees DOGE pushed out have reportedly been offered reinstatement.
"Hundreds" coming back is portrayed as if it offsets the 300,000 gone. They continue:
> The true scope of DOGE’s attack on the federal government remains unknown. While there is no reason to think it achieved meaningful cost savings or operational efficiencies...
and then go on to complain about an immigrant database, which has nothing to do with the reduction in the federal workforce. Simple quick math would suggest $60 billion or so a year in savings from the workforce reduction. Of course the larger savings is in the whole programs that were eliminated, not just the salaries and benefits savings.
DOGE saving $2 trillion / year is indeed impossible. That kind of savings would require a national conversation about what federal roles we no longer need. But DOGE likely achieved hundreds of billions a year in savings. USAID alone had a $50 billion budget that was mostly eliminated, though a few billion just moved over to State.
> But DOGE likely achieved hundreds of billions a year in savings. USAID alone had a $50 billion budget that was mostly eliminated, though a few billion just moved over to State.
A lot to unpack here ----
If you're an institutionalist: Does the executive now hold power of the purse?
If you're a humanitarian: was $50B for millions of lives and god knows how many more of massive quality of life improvement worth it?
If you care about evidence: "Likely hundreds of billions a year in savings" is insufficiently rigorous to throw around such large numbers. I've heard its as low as $2B and likely lower.
USAID was also a key channel for gathering open source intelligence in developing countries, and provided cover identities for CIA agents. There was certainly some waste and corruption but eliminating it completely was a massive own goal from a soft power perspective.
>She was literally wailing, inconsolable, because she could not get into a childcare facility she could afford on such short notice. She literally had to choose between her little child and working.
People need to understand that the world doesn't revolve around themselves. Your employer doesn't have to bend to your every will and need. She also had the opportunity to get 8 months of severance if she was that short on money.
This is the quote that bugged me the most too, as it's an obvious attempt at pure emotional manipulation. Working from home as a federal employee was always a limited time privilege, not some sort of fundamental right.
And it sounds like she actually did find a place to drop off her child: "Her explaining to her manager the way her child cried and begged Mommy to stay home broke me." Yeah, most employed adults have to leave their children somewhere when they go to work.
The comments here are crazy. Excuse me if I don't find Wired and a bunch of disgruntled ex-fed employees to be a credible unbiased source. The US Govt is so clearly bloated and inefficient it had to be trimmed and optimized. At least some here recognize that cuts in the 90's also worked. And I'm old enough to remember people crying bloody murder then too. People hate to be pulled off government's gravy train.
I think the main point is the manner in which these cuts were conducted. These were chaotic, very quick, and reckless. Very little empathy was shown. They were conducted by 19-23 year olds with the world's richest man (who bought his position) in charge of them.
Sure, but if they weren't done quick they wouldn't be done at all. Have some empathy for the middle class that has to carry this terrible tax burden.
This is not true, as it's been done before by a previous government, the Clinton administration, which actually did post a budget surplus in the 90s. Their method was to go slowly and methodically, so you are not correct to say that it cannot be done unless it's done quickly.
However, you're also wrong about "what's been done" -- this year the government will not only post a deficit but the highest deficit in US history. So to the extent that you support this administrations effort to cut the deficit, they have abjectly failed to do so. So perhaps it's more true that you cannot cut costs if you try to do it quickly, because doing it quickly has not worked. My prediction is in the next 4 years, the deficit will increase every year.
Moreover, you stated in your earlier reply that it is "obvious" the government was "inefficient it had to be trimmed and optimized". This is not obvious.
For starters, you (and also DOGE) neglected to define "efficiency", so we are left wondering what is being optimized. Efficiency is a weasel word -- it doesn't mean anything on its own -- so using it without measuring anything is immediately suspicious. How can you say you've made it more efficient by cutting spending if you don't have a metric for efficiency?
I'll give you a metric: in 2024 there were as many government employees as there were in 1970, despite the population growing by 140 million people, a 70% increase. Population explodes, yet government does not... that's efficiency. So no, it's not "obvious" the government as it existed in 2024 is inefficient.
Look at these two charts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_employees_in_the_Un...
First chart shows where the extra work is being handled, it's at the local level. That's what should be happening, so nothing to correct there.
Second chart shows what is actually growing: government dependents. So when you say "Have some empathy for the middle class that has to carry this terrible tax burden." I direct you to the following collection of lamentations of middle class people, his supporters, pleading for the President to stop the economic damage he's doing to the middle class: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace
Actually what you're suggesting is that we have to save the middle class by cutting lower class social support systems. But Trumponomics (all tariffs all the time, crony capitalism, mob-like strongarming of private companies) is driving a reduction of the middle class to the point where they need more social services.
Even if you take Trump, Musk, etc at their words -- that the government is horribly bloated and that DOGE has saved $206B -- this still doesn't look in totality like a sound economic decision:
1. The deficit has increased with Trump in office.
2. The rate at which the deficit is getting worse has increased with Trump in office.
3. That's in large part due to an increase in government expenditures more than enough to offset the claimed savings.
4. Even if that entire $206B were actually being distributed to taxpayers somehow, it's on par with the increase in grocery prices just since Trump took office, resulting in a net loss for taxpayers (you pay for groceries with post-tax income).
5. The things being cut first are those which help anyone with a middle-class or lower income. E.g., the CFPB more than paid for itself for years from the perspective of anyone other than a malicious bank just from one policy change limiting abusive fees banks are able to charge.
6. Even if you believe that all such departments need to be neutered and downsized (a bit weird that we need to reduce their power, impact, and effectiveness just to make them more "efficient", but whatever), it's objectively costing more in lawsuits and hiring critical personnel back than it would have to think for a moment before firing literally everyone.
7. Even at $206B with sane economic decisions elsewhere in the government, it's still not enough to move the needle on anything, and it's a far cry from the $2T in advertised cuts that were used to trick the American people into allowing this chicanery into our government.
And so on. Nothing about the current administration would qualify as increasing government efficiency even squinting at it in a modern art museum.
And that's if you take them at their word. At a bare minimum, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, DOGE themselves have admitted to many of those advertised cuts being mistakes, oftentimes by an order of magnitude or in totality, yet those mistakes are never corrected in their public leaderboard. If you look at their own sources and receipts there's a significant number of mistakes on top of the ones they've fessed up to.
I agree that the government is bloated, and I'm not particularly happy with many of the political maneuverings on either side of the spectrum the last decade or three, but when it comes to Musk and Trump I think it's reasonable to consider that when there's significant evidence of lying from individuals with a history of lying for personal gain, you're probably being lied to, even if you really want the thing they're claiming to give you.
But you trust the richest elite in the world, Elon Musk, and Trump who has lied multiple times about serious issues?
It's not about how much I trust them, but that they were the only ones with the cajones to do the job. And you can see how hard it was by the outcry. It's easy to give people taxpayer money, nye impossible to stop it.
Doing something isn't as important as doing it well in a situation that wasn't an emergency.
Not trusting the government but happy they are performing some action at all seems reckless.
> only ones with the cajones to do the job.
Trump doesn't have the balls to cut defense spending or to stop government subsidizes to farmers. Firing people and cutting aid to poor people isn't brave.