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You can double check everything at doge.gov it’s pretty easy to see the errors they are talking about.
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DOGE is political theater for rubes, while congress blows out the national debt for their billionaire tax breaks.
If anyone has been involved in any sort of internal data analytics this is basically what is expected to happen. Data that is used in a new way tends to turn up all sorts of limitations and soft points. Trump, Musk, etc should have been (read: probably were) well aware this was coming; for what it is worth they've surely seen it a few times in business life. That being said, I doubt it is much of a factor. The strate…
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That egregious spending bears a family resemblance to the malfeasance that cost Trump the 2020 election and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
I bet back in the day you were the complaining about 200000$ toilet seats in Iraq. Now that’s it’s not on your side of politics it’s a fabrication
I'll try.
I bet back in the day you were eating babies.
Fun!
I don't doubt there is waste in the federal government. I also don't doubt it is largely in programs that tend tend to be lavishly funded, not squeezed to death, so agricultural subsidies, construction projects, and defense. These are programs conservatives love. DOGE is concentrating its "waste, fraud, and abuse cutting" to ideological enemies. In other words, it isn't about finding and cutting waste or fraud; it's about the ideological capture and remolding of government outside of any framework of accountability or democratic input.
A lovely example of their creative approach to their alleged project:
> In another case, DOGE claimed $232 million in savings on a contract providing information technology support to the Social Security Administration. But The Intercept reported that only a sliver of the contract was canceled — a program to let users mark their gender as “X” — bringing the actual savings closer to $560,000.
They lie about what they accomplished, and what they did accomplish was just performative cruelty with negligible effect on the budget.
I’m not saying DOGE is definitively good or even that they are going to actually accomplish their mission (probably their cuts will become a piggy bank that gets raided by OTA’s at the end of the fiscal year). But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
What is on paper for government contracts is totally different from reality. Most of these programs accomplish nothing, are totally un-utilized, filled with employees who literally do not show up to work.
I could write a novel with examples but here are some notable anecdotes:
- Once, I built an intelligence solution for a large-ish intelligence program within a civil agency. After 6 months it was not used once but cost the government a cool ~12M$. Only after a full year did the program leadership finally take a look and discover, wait a second, none of these people have worked more than a week total in the past year. Only half got laid off, the rest are still gainfully employed elsewhere in the government. Many such cases!
- I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!
- Dozens of cases of the government spending on “XYZ tool” that sounds super critical. In reality they are paying $12M for a postgres database and an extremely basic data entry UI on top. Also, I can’t believe I am about to defend Sharepoint, but realistically something like tracking 10 SIM cards can go in an excel spreadsheet and doesn’t need a $12M “inventory tool.”
- Many cases of projects investigating bird flu in depth and tracking its spread as early as 2022. You would think this is critical with bird flu being a thing right now; however none of these $20M+ contracts have accomplished much at all.
You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same. The only way to go from GS-12 to GS-13 to GS-14 to GS-15 is just to spend recklessly. They are experts at justifying their budget and navigating internal hierarchies. However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.
(Disclaimer: “government” above refers to civil, exclusive of DoD)
US debt is 124% of GDP. That's not as high as UK debt after WWII, 270%, which impoverished the country that had been at the top of the world. But combined with an aging population that has more people than ever hailing from the historically low-achievement global south, you can expect some standard of living adjustment to occur. Your grandparents had a house by your age, and the economic ability to raise a family. Yo…
I love this reply. It's lots of serious words about the debt, and it ignores that Trump and the R party are currently trying to balloon the debt for their tax breaks.
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Their stated goals are lower taxes, less regulation, less government presence. What they want bigger is private riches through industry and church. They all believe this, voter and representative. What part do you think gets built back? Maybe the FBI, when they’re sure it can be weaponized against their enemies.
> What part do you think gets built back? I wouldn't even begin to guess. This has all moved so quickly that I've yet to find what seems to be a reliable source on what is actually changing. My point, though, was only that we've so far seen moves to reduce headcount and pause programs. That could be the first step to closing down departments entirely, but it could also be the first step to rebuilding their own versio…
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I love this reply. It's lots of serious words about the debt, and it ignores that Trump and the R party are currently trying to balloon the debt for their tax breaks.
In fact the reply specifically criticizes Trump I, the administration that passed those tax breaks. Whether you consider yourself either a Democrat or a Republican, this is not a problem that continued party politics can solve.
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Either that or, you know, we want to keep Hacker News about tech. Lots of us don't want /r/politics here.
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Is it transparent? Elon got angry when people merely listed the names of some DOGE employees. I still don't think we know the full list of people working under him (and according to court filings, the government claims he isn't even the administrator of DOGE but can't name who is). We also won't be able to get access to DOGE records until well after Trump is out of office [1]. That doesn't sound like maximal transpar…
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Either that or, you know, we want to keep Hacker News about tech. Lots of us don't want /r/politics here.
"NOAA scientists refuse to link warming weather to climate change" - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2469442-noaa-scientists...
Is this about Science OR politics OR politics changing science? And can you elaborate why it should not belong here?