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DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

nytimes.com

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Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#591

Post by CrossVR »

noirbot wrote: post #292
e40 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason these questions are not front and center is that the people with money don’t want to talk about them. And, the ensure we are kept busy with cheap gadgets, entertaining tv and movies and enough controversies that don’t matter to last a lifetime. Alsr, the population is less educated and able to actually think critically about these issues than they used to be.

Citation on that last point? The amount of people I know who were the first in their family to attend college, and sometimes even graduate high school, makes me question that people are measurably less educated.

The quality of high school educations have fallen, which is the most important to develop critical thinking. This is measurable when the education level of U.S. high school students is compared in global rankings.

On top of that social media has put people in echo chambers and force fed them outrage content. People who are outraged and surrounded by peers who are also outraged are less likely to think critically.

I personally think that the replacement of newspapers that invite critical thinking by yellow journalism and social media has had a more significant effect on critical thinking than the drop in education quality.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#592

Post by [deleted] »

dustingetz wrote: post #443
christophilus wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work” like that. They had teams and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a normal startup. I’ve never seen such bureaucratic waste anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them…

did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison.…

[deleted]

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#593

Post by pdfernhout »

dustingetz wrote: post #443
christophilus wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work” like that. They had teams and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a normal startup. I’ve never seen such bureaucratic waste anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them…

did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison.…

You might find this Washington Monthly article interesting as it echoes your point: "Fire the Contractors" https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/05/fire-the-contractor... "Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it. ... That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine ... have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#594

Post by possibleworlds »

cuuupid wrote: post #533
uses wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you’re 100% correct, these aren’t the right people and these aren’t the right methods. Completely the opposite actually.

There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years. It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution? We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big co…

> There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.

Provide proof of this claim please.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#595

Post by XorNot »

brightball wrote: post #536
qgin wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number 3 can’t be overstated. Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe. Global health insurance plans usually come in two flavors: 1. Global coverage 2. Global coverage excluding United States (for half the monthly premium of the first plan) The United States in an extreme outlier in terms of cost. This is separate from rationing care. This is separate from even population health (ex…

The way to attack the problem economically would have involved giving everyone in the USA an HSA that was funded to allow them to directly consume healthcare services with price exposure. It would naturally force competition on price. The ACA that we got instead cemented the separation of people from the price of their service and costs have ballooned even more than that were previously. The economic approach is the…

Why do Americans think competition on price is practical for health services? The most expensive services people receive tend to trauma care or for long term debilitating conditions. In both cases the ability to "shop around" is either literally impossible, or geographically limited (and the ability to travel is just another regressive tax).

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#596

Post by cuuupid »

Tade0 wrote: post #223
cuuupid wrote: post #84

I think impartial observers have not spent time in actual government bureaucracy. Basically everything will seem like “they’re cutting something important!” Or “they’re stopping critical research!” because every government contract needs justification; so naturally they will all sound good. The data and accounting itself is such bad quality in all cases that it is impossible to be perfect at this; there are entire in…

> However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse. Reading your comment I saw so many similarities to any large organisation which I worked for that I can't help but think it's simply on the same level. Hell, my first internship was 100% budget filler and, in line with my role, I was useless. Regarding inefficiency: I'm a contractor for a large organisation and have been for ov…

I say govt politics is so much worse because it is not like, a handful of people trying to get ahead by spending a lot, it is almost all of them.

They're also vicious, many times I have been cussed out by bureaucrats over stupid things like css padding on a table. There are lines that don't get crossed in corporate politics, none of those lines exist in government.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#597

Post by unclebucknasty »

ctrlp wrote: post #387
sxyuan wrote: post #248

For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this thread): 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average going back to at least th…

This framing is a bit far from the actual motivating issue underlying the federal "budget" itself. I think a better question is whether having a federal workforce of 4 million people managed by an unaccountable bureaucracy is in the best interests of any country. If you frame it as simply whether to spend money on this or that or if you're getting comparable value to other countries, then it is inevitable for the sid…

>As the recent political realignment suggests, most people don't want to be governed by this a federal bureaucracy

I don't believe this conclusion can at all be drawn from the many variables involved in the "political realignment".

From, Gallup [0], top 5 issues for Republicans:

Economy

Immigration

Terrorism and national security

Crime

Taxes

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-...

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#598

Post by EGreg »

Jeremy1026 wrote: post #525
EGreg wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a "MAGA" guy at all. (Except my last name LOL) But I do think the government should constantly be using tech and putting systems in place to accomplish three things: 1. Become more efficient (use AI to solve Bloom's two sigma problem) 2. Become more transparent (data.gov, blockchain) 3. Become more useful and friendly (online, not on-line at the DMV) When DOGE first asked people to help, I applied the next da…

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Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#599

Post by cuuupid »

zamalek wrote: post #567
cuuupid wrote: post #84

I think impartial observers have not spent time in actual government bureaucracy. Basically everything will seem like “they’re cutting something important!” Or “they’re stopping critical research!” because every government contract needs justification; so naturally they will all sound good. The data and accounting itself is such bad quality in all cases that it is impossible to be perfect at this; there are entire in…

Look, beyond unobjectionable facts that the government wastes money, that money isn't completely wasted: some percentage eventually becomes salaries for Americans (the rest in some rich person's pockets). For example, all the USAID jobs that are now gone. There are now billions-USD-worth fewer jobs in the American economy.

There are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers.

Administrative spending is also not that high, the majority of savings are in contracts. This is related to jobs because every employee you lay off, is one less person who can spend millions of dollars.

So in practice, there are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers and being sent abroad. And only some millions-USD-worth fewer jobs.

Re: DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

#600

Post by christophilus »

harimau777 wrote: post #544
cwalv wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average...? Why should it scale linearly with GDP? I can see an argument that it should scale linearly with population (maybe), but if GDP per capita increases, you could also expect better tech/productivity to allow gov spending per capita to decrease. > What do you think should be cut, an…

I'd argue that we shouldn't expect government expenses to be effected that much by advances in productivity. Government services largely exist to handle situations that are inherently inefficient (disability, national defense, civil rights, education, elder care, etc.). What's the argument that corporations should be laying a lower share of the GDP? Due to their greater proportionate wealth, corporations and the weal…

The tax code can be looked at as written by the rich to pad their pockets. But it can also be looked at as the main lever by which the government manipulates us to get what it wants: affordable housing, high employment, cheap energy. There are a lot of real estate, business, and exploration / mining tax breaks presumably because the government wants to incentivize that activity.

The book “Tax Free Wealth” covers this and points out that the tax code looks pretty similar across all western countries when it comes to the way the activity the code is trying to stimulate.

I personally don’t like the tax code being used for such manipulations regardless of the motive behind it.

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