211–220 of 1001 posts
The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?
> why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending? History has one answer for the deployment of reams of young fiery-loyalist men to the front lines: cannon fodder.
I recall an aphorism that government is self-governed 90% by norms and 10% by law. I don’t know if American law is being violated but certainly it is alarming to observe from the outside when the norms are totally disregarded. The US looks unstable and untrustworthy.
I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there are some great people in this department who really know what’s been going on and it’s been great t…
I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there are some great people in this department who really know what’s been going on and it’s been great t…
To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration.
She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50% of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her boss found her a job at another firm a week later thankfully. Then Friday she got called by the CEO to come back since it turns out they were not going to get cut. Obviously, she declined.
They are messing with real peoples lives and destroying businesses that help people.
Is the goal to save money? Balance the budget? If so, fixing tax loop holes and going after waste in the military will yield more than 10x what cutting USAID does.
FWIW I'm all for fixing government spending, but treating it like a CI/CD pipeline where you will just "rollback" is idiotic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(EDIT: Moved to comment I intended to reply to)
[flagged]
If you know more than someone else, two good options are (1) to share some of what you know, so we all can learn; or (2) not post. Snarky putdowns are not a good option.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Why are high level figures in these departments just letting them walk in and have access? Tell them to kick rocks until they have proper clearances.
Because Elon has the authority of the President who can override clearances. US government was simply never designed for scenarios like this.
Or it was designed such that the exutive branch may not appoint or use independent organisations or consultants to perform audits?
I dont think that is accurate.
I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there are some great people in this department who really know what’s been going on and it’s been great t…
I don't like Musk and have not for many years, but the left has been venerating some very flawed people for a very long time. It’s hard to be outraged now when we’ve been selectively told to ignore the past of others. Let’s not forget that Trump is the pied piper candidate promoted by the left to make it easier to win elections. I remember when Ron Desantis was successfully undermined by the news media casting him as…
A key tactic of the current administration is to pretend that all politicians are massively corrupt. This cynicism is easy to digest, but it normalizes bad behavior. Then when this team does it, they can pretend they’re behaving normally.
Anyone paying attention can recognize the difference, but to casual observers who like cynical takes it’s easy to take the “both sides bad” bait and become numb to it.
Regardless, the logic doesn’t even make sense. It’s literally the “two wrongs don’t make a right” fallacy to try to defend this by saying that you didn’t like something the other side did in the past. In the process, you admit this is actually bad too.