DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes • Hacker News Board

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

#871

Post by wat10000 » Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

cuuupid wrote: post #555

spiderfarmer wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. They exploit people like the one you’re responding to as mouthpieces for their broader campaign against the institutions that regulate their businesses. As long as they can claim they’ve stopped some money from being “wasted,” these people will look the other way and let them operate unchecked. Trump and Musk are both petty, vindictive, greedy, and narcissistic billionaires, known for grifting, deception, ab…

None of the existing cuts target deregulating SpaceX/Tesla, and the proposed regulatory cuts affect everything across the board and not just Musk's companies. When it comes to deregulation, we can pretend like this is new, or we can have an honest discussion and acknowledge deregulation in various forms has been a key component of the Conservative, Libertarian, and Liberal platforms for decades. Recently even the Soc…

> This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!

No it wasn’t.

> We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_.

This is like an arsonist setting fire to your house and saying we finally have a chance to renovate.

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

#872

Post by insane_dreamer » Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #187

MisterKent wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering because of the stated causes that money was going to were "woke" and "not America first" The general public's understanding of soft power, a global economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is not smart enough (or, doesn't have the ti…

“Soft power” and “hegemony” are fake concepts invented by credentialed elites. Americans are properly distrustful of those ideas. The point of a Republican democracy is so the public doesn’t have to decide the best way to build warships. But what values America should spend its money supporting absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic process.

If you think "soft power" is a fake concept, you have very little understanding of how American foreign policy actually works in other countries.

For the record, I don't like American foreign policy, and USAID is basically the CIA in disguise. But in terms of furthering America's goal of being the dominant power in the world, it absolutely works, and is _much_ more financially efficient than the cost of military intervention to establish supremacy.

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

#873

Post by onemoresoop » Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 2:51 PM UTC

insane_dreamer wrote: post #850

BurningFrog wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is much more than any DOGE savings DOGE is an 18 month project. Confidently asserting the end result after a few weeks is bold.

It's not a bold prediction. DOGE cut all the easier stuff first -- such as firing employees on probationary status, shuttering USAID. To achieve any meaningful cuts they have to gut Social Security/Medicare, Medicaid or the Military. SS/Medicare is off limits. Cutting Medicaid would not only break Trump's promise to "not touch Medicaid", but would directly hit his prime voter base. And cutting the Military won't be a…

He already got their votes, I doubt he would really care about his voters now, especially in his second term.

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

#874

Post by stainablesteel » Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

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…

1. it is, we're bound to pay $1T in interest and that will spiral us out of financial hegemony

2. this is the typical response i've seen to this and it's missing the point entirely. in government spending you typically pay off lots of groups, pay too much, and give some guy's friend's cousins shop some business because it puts money in people's hands. this is wasteful and can be cut out. it's not the point of DOGE to cut programs that people want, they just spend their money irresponsibly and that can be further optimized to deliver the same results for less money. just as was done with twitter

3. without even getting into it, trump didnt campaign on this. the healthcare system is big and complicated and it needs a lot of magnifying glasses to go through it, if you want that then find a candidate who supports it

4. they do, they pay a lot and those costs can be inhibitive. the taxes generated from this process doesn't pay for what we need, the problem is that government spending is way higher than what industries generate and this is backwards. private business is supposed to support the government through its taxes, not the government spending supporting businesses through nepotism

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

#875

Post by cuuupid » Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 2:53 PM UTC

pdfernhout wrote: post #593

dustingetz wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Contractors are hired by civil servants, these are not independent things.

I don’t think DOGE will fix this because the solution is easy but very counterintuitive — we would need around 30% raises to all federal employees at GS-12 and higher, to match market rates.

Right now they cannot hire civil servants that are skilled due to being unable to compete on comp; instead they have to reach to private sector, which will charge them 600 a head, while paying each contractor 200. Because GS only affords 120-130 for those positions, it becomes necessary to reach for contractors.

PWS contracts are the biggest suck on budget; eg there are more PWS contractors manning what would normally be FTE positions at Dept of State than total FTEs.

Unfortunately, it is so backwards to actually spend more and raise payscales to save money that I don’t think DOGE will land there as a strategy.

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

#876

Post by insane_dreamer » Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 2:54 PM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #179

JeremyNT wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2) is questionable. Most of the budget is spent maintaining global hegemony through military dominance. Whatever inefficiencies that exist on the civil side are nearly irrelevant.

You should look at the CBO's reports on this. Most of the budget is spent maintaining Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. The sleight of hand involved in the idea that the military budget is "most" of the spending is by calling large parts of the government's spending (but none of its military spending) "mandatory," and then slicing up the "discretionary" portion only, most of which is the military. However, the d…

That's because the SS/Medicare are not discretionary which means that those are basically predetermined and not set by Congress every year.

So when we talk about the "budget", what really matters as far as politicians are concerned, is the discretionary part, which they can control (and which in theory voters have some control over through their election of congressmen), and defense takes up at least half of that.

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

#877

Post by drawkward » Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 2:56 PM UTC

alienthrowaway wrote: post #381

JackYoustra wrote: post #299

Rule of law is what allows us to grow. Acemoglu won a nobel prize showing that institutions cause growth. Destroy institutions and you'll undershoot potential.

The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades at many American institutions, such as for-profit companies. Openly selling the country short for personal benefit is just one small step after many hundreds of them to get where we are.

>The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades

...in American culture

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

#878

Post by rob74 » Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 2:57 PM UTC

wruza wrote: post #817

SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOGE isn't really cutting things to fund others. Many of their cuts are going to be net revenue negative. Many will cost taxpayers more of their money. It's about gutting the civil service and staffing them with loyalists that will do what Trump or Musk want, despite what the law says. It's consolidation of power and corruption. Musk is also crippling many of the agencies that enforce regulations on his businesses.

Why doesn’t anyone do anything? They risk ending up as the rest of the world according to this, and everything they do is talking 1k+ threads. If everything people say here is true, US is in its own version of Perestroika.

Let's take the other two branches that could theoretically stop the executive from doing what it does:

- the legislative (Congress): both chambers have a Republican majority, and all Trump critics in the Republican party have long since been eliminated or have retired. Democrats are currently debating whether they should use the upcoming funding bill to force the Republicans to make concessions via inducing a government shutdown (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/15/democrats-co...), but many fear this could backfire (e.g. Trump could say something along the lines of "these bad Democrats are forcing me to fire even more people because I can't pay them anymore").

- the judicial: some courts have ruled against some of the actions of DOGE (as well as other executive orders), but Trump is mostly ignoring them. It remains to be seen how the supreme court (with its 6-3 conservative majority) will decide when these cases (eventually) bubble up to them.

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

#879

Post by onemoresoop » Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

Panoramix wrote: post #743

onislandtime wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we all agree that making the Gov more efficient is a good thing but this is about terrorizing federal employees for ideological reasons. There is no crisis to justify this. We do have a crisis in healthcare which is being ignored.

I am certainly not a supporter of this government, but I do find it unsettling to have massive amounts of ideologically fueled bureaucrats running the government. It goes both ways. The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction. I am losing hope that it will return to the middle one day.

> massive amounts of ideologically fueled bureaucrats running the government

You will have a different type of ideologically fueled bureaucrats running the governemnt, just look at what’s happening and who got appointed where. I mean, come on, Kash Patel running the FBI? Kash Patel was selling his own merch.

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

#880

Post by cuuupid » Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

scintill76 wrote: post #710

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…

Bringing up Palantir is funny to me. I don’t know enough gossip on Musk and Thiel’s relationship, but if I did I would bet it would solely determine the outcome of a hypothetical DOGE investigation into Palantir contracts. It seems from a sibling comment I’m not alone. If we’re right, DOGE isn’t going to eliminate government waste and corruption, just move it around. We’re not gaslit into thinking everything was fine…

I think for many people, this is the first exposure to audits and spending reduction in govt. So judging on an absolute scale, yeah DOGE is not doing a great job.

Judging on a relative scale to past attempts and the existing 5(!) agencies with the sole purpose of auditing and reducing spending, DOGE looks amazing and has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.

It is an immensely difficult undertaking and the bureaucracy will struggle, writhe, and set fire to everything around it before it can be put down. We should hope that DOGE is just getting started and picking up momentum rather than having settled.