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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

#851

Post by insane_dreamer »

christophilus wrote: post #206
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…

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…

There's no question this exists.

But firing a bunch of government employees doesn't fix this problem. Where there is waste, it mostly comes in the form of contractors bilking the government, not the government employees themselves.

Is DOGE going after the private sector and their bilking of the government?

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

#852

Post by insane_dreamer »

dustingetz wrote: post #462
bamboozled wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the narrative that some how “startups are efficient”. I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired. I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more success…

absolutely startups can be inefficient but government projects are at a wholly different order of magnitude. Some startups will crush $20M and then die, and yet the best ones, such as facebook, return 100,000x ROI on that same $20 mil. Govt projects will crush $200M, deliver nothing and then go to recompete so another vendor can have a turn.

The problem is not the government being inefficient and wasteful but the contractors -- aka private companies -- being inefficient and wasteful.

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

#853

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #487
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 blathering about the federal budget has been going on for 50 years. What I think if if you want a real discussion then you need to talk about the real federal budget separately from the retirement, income security, health benefits for and paid by the peons. So take away social security, unemployment, welfare, Medicare, VA and federal retirement benefits. And lets talk about what left. And pikachu there ain't any…

It's politics, same as ever. We're not talking about the best way to balance the books of America LLC, we're talking about "who gets what, when." That's politics.

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

#854

Post by base698 »

DrillShopper wrote: post #849
base698 wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. My main concern is the total debt and its interest, as you mentioned in point two. With DOGE, ensuring orders are followed to fix policy is crucial, but some of these cuts do seem more about installing loyal personnel than just reducing costs. I also worry about shifting staff to contractors. From friends that work in the DOD contracting they get paid 3-4x what an equivalent gov employee does. If contracts are cut…

> I also worry about shifting staff to contractors. From friends that work in the DOD contracting they get paid 3-4x what an equivalent gov employee does. If contracts are cut too that could be a much bigger win than the gov staff. Why would contracts be cut? If you're firing federal employees but the work still has to get done (as directed by the laws enacted by Congress which the president is obligated to faithully…

That's was I was trying to convey. They do seem to be cutting contracts and that is publicly what they are saying.

From personal anecdotes, I'm seeing a lot of people in my town at gov contractors laid off already.

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

#855

Post by insane_dreamer »

brightball wrote: post #543
cuuupid wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Didn’t he fire something like 200,000 people?

Yes, however:

- they weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing

- it was a measured, thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.

- most importantly, 3/4 of those were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended.

- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut to the rich

- lastly, there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned

So basically night and day compared to what is happening now.

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

#856

Post by evantbyrne »

slaw wrote: post #787
rat87 wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting for Trump is stupid. Im sure there are plenty of people with lots of schooling that voted for Trump. They made a stupid choice. Even if you agree with some policies Trump is the height of incompetence fraud corruption and abuse of power. Gutting effcient and useful goverment agencies to fund the Wall is stupid and wasteful. It also wont reduce illegal immigration.

Voting for Kamala was even more stupid.

It's wild to me, as someone who grew up thinking I was conservative, that conservatives hated Biden and Harris so much. Nobody ever brings the receipts either.

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

#857

Post by insane_dreamer »

whoitwas wrote: post #545
cuuupid wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Simply audit defense spending. It's the vast majority of government spending and hasn't been auditable in ages.

The problem with the military spending is on Congress, because they set the defense budget, not the White House (and certainly not DOGE).

But defense doesn't get cut because it props up a huge infrastructure across many states. No senator wants to be the ones to vote to cut that in their state.

The US economy is built, to some degree, on the military-industry complex, especially since we offshored all the other manufacturing.

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

#858

Post by lotsofpulp »

digitaltrees wrote: post #470
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…

It scales linearly because the same ratio of services to people continues. There aren’t suddenly less kids to educate, less elderly that need health care or less cases in federal court as the population grows. —- As someone that has been in healthcare for 12 years it’s broken because of the corporate structure and administrative state of companies. The payors and providers share the same incentive to raise rates beca…

> There aren’t suddenly less kids to educate, less elderly that need health care or less cases in federal court as the population grows.

There are fewer kids to educate, but all the school funding formulas are based on number of kids, so as there are fewer kids, there are less federal and state funds for the kids (but schools have a lot of fixed costs). And there is a lot more legally mandated costs for special education than in previous decades due to legally mandated “Individual Education Plans”.

This means less resources overall, and especially less resources for higher achieving kids. Rich people who can supplement their kids’ education will benefit, and lower class kids who used public education systems to break their families out of the lower class will be less likely to succeed.

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/03/education-enrollment-cliff-...

> By the numbers: The U.S. is expected to reach "peak high school graduate" in 2025, when around 3.9 million young people will graduate, per WICHE.

>By 2037, there'll be only about 3.5 million high school graduates, WICHE projects — a 10.7% decrease.

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

#859

Post by jhedwards »

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…

Could you help clarify something for me? When I looked into the federal workforce, just looking at raw numbers without much insight about the "inside", it doesn't seem particularly bloated or wasteful to me: it runs at ~5% of the federal budget and at 2mil people it is about 0.5% of the population.

It looks like you and some other commenters, however, are discussing government contracts, which are projects and programs paid for the government but implemented by third-party contractors. Is that correct?

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

#860

Post by tiahura »

jedberg wrote: post #406
xdavidliu wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the chopping block? I don't understand this question: how can the private companies in the industry be placed on the chopping block? By outlawing them?

By having a national health care system that would obviate the need for private insurance.

Pay your own bills.
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