241–250 of 454 posts
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They shouldn’t be taking pay cuts, for one. The government should be paying competitively and fairly.
How would this happen? More taxes? More government bonds to increase the national debt (an irresponsible, conservative favorite)?
I’ve seen a lot of positivity surrounding login.gov on HackerNews. I’ve never used the service and am unfamiliar with the quality of its implementation. Many commenters here point to login.gov as an example of the US government shipping good software. [1] 1. From the end-user’s perspective, what makes this a quality service? Is it simply better than other government alternatives, or does it compete with equivalent mo…
I couldn't even login to ssa.gov before it was integrated with login.gov. Every year or two I'd give it a shot, it told me my account was locked, I had to visit a Social Security office to get it unlocked. I tried that once; the local office wasn't able to help. Fast forward a few years and the login process has been delegated to login.gov. I was able to prove my identity in the normal way (asked a bunch of questions from my credit report) and finally login.
So let's start with: it works.
But it's at least as good as any SSO that I use elsewhere (Okta, Apple, Google). It supports multiple factors (security key, passkey, TOTP, etc), something that, e.g., Fidelity only barely offers.
Besides that, it's visually appealing, having a nice modern look.
Presented with the noblest of intensions, no doubt, but a symptom of an extremely disconcerning trend: the beginning of the endstate where the US government is completely privatized.
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Also, support for the DOGE mission is entirely orthogonal to DOGE's actual goals and what they are doing so far. Sure, maybe there is broad support for making government more efficient, but that is not in any way what Elon Musk is trying to do. So if there is broad support for DOGE those people are entirely wrong to believe they are aligned with Elon, and entirely wrong about supporting DOGE as the means to achieve t…
I haven’t seen the main impetus for the layoffs brought up yet: the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week, twice. People are acting like DOGE is attacking tech support recklessly with a chainsaw. This appears to be a targeted cut of insubordinate or redundant individuals.
What a wild take!
Only some of sooo many reports all over the media 5-6 days ago that you somehow missed:
"Key US agencies tell staff not to answer Musk email on what they did last week"
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0qrj20g5vo
"Elon Musk’s Federal Worker Emails: Agency Leaders Can Decide If Employees Must Reply, White House Says"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/02/25/elon-mu...
And the latest from today:
"Some government employees are instructed — again — to not respond to 5 things email as Musk doubles down"
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/5-things-email-nati...
D+ grade headline. His full offer and message: “If you worked for 18F and got fired, Group together to start a consulting company,” wrote Cuban. “It’s just a matter of time before DOGE needs you to fix the mess they inevitably created. They will have to hire your company as a contractor to fix it. But on your terms. I’m happy to invest and/or help.”
Only go back if the management has changed. In this case, that means "If doge is gone".
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That's not how govt contract works. Repeat providers will win almost all contracts because they know how to navigate the "red tapes" and they know the inner people. Competition? lol...
I am very aware of this, which is why I mentioned corruption in my comment, and how the only solution is to make the government smaller. Should have read the comment to the end.
These veteran private vendors just happened to know the road leading to a signature vs new competitors who are still learning the ropes.
The more important piece here is that the government ends up not owning anything because it farms out everything to the private, including Government land, critical govt function.
If you think that everything will be done correctly and the critical function won't get abused well then um.... You're looking at things unfold in real time.
It's interesting that:
In the US, people want to protect themselves from the government.
In the EU, people want the government to protect them.
Very profound mindset that leads to the difference in attitudes.
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Private companies are funded by willing participants and have economic incentives to be efficient. The incentives for your electric company and other government programs for efficiency are not nearly so clear. It seems reasonable to favor efficiency wherever possible.
Private companies have economic incentives to charge as much as they can get away with and pass that excess to the owners of the company. This includes participating in collusion with peers and regulatory capture to artificially raise the rate in the market far beyond what efficiency would dictate. Private companies are inefficient by definition when individuals are able to extract millions to billions of dollars fro…
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Reagan or not, what you can see clearly in the comments here and many other places is that what would be considered fairly extreme libertarian talking points have become common parlance these days. Taxation as "theft", the necessity of the threat of termination and other economic deprivation in order to coerce people to doing good work, the assumption that profit inevitably produces more efficiency, and that efficien…
The Ayn Rand types deserve to be reminded that she spent her final years on welfare.
Nobody refuses free government help even if they hate the government, just as no one pays extra taxes even if they love the government. The point is always to distribute their belief more widely so that everyone has to live with it.
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The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. The exception is companies propped up by government regulation. The problem with modern big companies is that the exception has become the rule. Regulation is so pervasive it's become a "what the hell is water" situation. People don't even recognize that the dysfunctional companies are protected from failur…
I'd argue the difference between private companies and government is that in government that spending is public. Spend a few mil on something of marginal utility, politicaly controversial, or funding a study for something that seems obvious? Congratulations! Fox News found it on USASpending.gov (maybe not now that 18F is dead), and is drumming up outrage. Now your fielding phone calls from senators who are looking to…
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I’m not moving goalposts, that’s what DOGE is attacking. It’s 100% part of efficiency. And it’s absolutely happening. DOGE is addressing “fraud, waste, and abuse”.
This thread discusses DOGE laying off a small agency that made useful online tools for people to access government functions at much lower costs than private contractors were previously charging the government. It is not obvious that this is an example of "fraud, waste and abuse". Other decisions they have made include laying off anyone unfortunate enough to be on a probationary period because they were recently deem…