DOGE is done. What happened to its records? • Hacker News Board

Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

#31

Post by j2kun » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

j2kun wrote: post #25

bs7280 wrote: post #11

One of my biggest criticisms of DOGE that I have not heard elsewhere is - why can't we have a "Department of Government Transparency". Giving Elon the ability to judge, jury and executioner any congressionally approved spending he wants has its own legal issues, but I do think there is a lot of value in having a massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes. I envision something similar to a massive sank…

People do this all the time https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iu44ub/up... https://usafacts.org/government-spending/ https://sankeymatic.com/gallery/federal-budget.html

There is also Michael Lewis's book "Who Is Government?" if you want more meaningful stories.

Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

#32

Post by nananana9 » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #6

Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

There's plenty of waste. It doesn't matter how much you pour at the top of a leaky pipeline, very little of it will make its way down to the desired recipients.

You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare for what can at best be described as mediocre outcomes. The Netherlands spends $6000 and is near the tops of the charts when it comes to quality. What's the ratio of effectiveness per dollar we're looking at here? 5 to 1?

It doesn't matter whether or not people like it when you cut, you have to if your want your country to exist in 50 years. But just as importantly you have to get rid of the leeches in the middle of the pipe and make sure the money that's left is actually doing work for you.

Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

#33

Post by felixgallo » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

bs7280 wrote: post #11

One of my biggest criticisms of DOGE that I have not heard elsewhere is - why can't we have a "Department of Government Transparency". Giving Elon the ability to judge, jury and executioner any congressionally approved spending he wants has its own legal issues, but I do think there is a lot of value in having a massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes. I envision something similar to a massive sank…

Do you mean something like the longstanding Government Accountability Office, which was formed by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921?

Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

#34

Post by gruez » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

tancop wrote: post #24

asveikau wrote: post #6

Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

there are two big exceptions to this, the military and healthcare. playing world police is incredibly wasteful and so is funding a system based on submitting to the demands of big pharma and for-profit hospitals. the problem is 50 years worth of propaganda convincing americans that all this is good and necessary and if you disagree that makes you a communist/welfare queen/terrorist supporter/woke activist. at least n…

>and for-profit hospitals.

but only 36% are for-profit?

https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership

Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

#35

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #29

dfee wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is non sequitor. why isn't there really much waste in federal spending? because when you cut, nobody likes it. well, no . there is pork. a better example might be: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half" - John Wanamaker

Excellent quote. It's easy to draw conclusions one way or another, but the real challenge to fixing the budget is easily just as much trying to understand what the hell is going on with it. I imagine it like if you were trying to clear hard disk space but QDirStat only gave obscure indications of what the files were and you had to go through a complex legal process to delete anything.

[deleted]

Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

#36

Post by yoyohello13 » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

izend wrote: post #21

asveikau wrote: post #6

Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

Why did Bill Clinton execute the largest Federal cuts in the 90s and everyone said they were needed?

His cuts were actually considered and targeted. He didn’t just hire a billionaire to take a chainsaw to ‘woke’ gov programs.

Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

#37

Post by TitaRusell » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #23

asveikau wrote: post #6

Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending. There's actually a lot of waste. DOGE just didn't go after it. Check out DOD and all the 9- and 10-figure programs that get canceled without delivering anything, and whose work is often useless for follow-on work. OCX is a recent example, costing around $6 billion and took so long that the program it was supposed to replace ended up just doing the work instead. Ess…

None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway.

Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.

Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

#38

Post by madhacker » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

After the looting is done, they need to clear any traces of the crime.

Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

#39

Post by gruez » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

yoyohello13 wrote: post #36

izend wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did Bill Clinton execute the largest Federal cuts in the 90s and everyone said they were needed?

His cuts were actually considered and targeted. He didn’t just hire a billionaire to take a chainsaw to ‘woke’ gov programs.

But the original claim was

>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

It sounds like you're arguing for the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job, which implies that there actually is waste is government spending.

Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

#40

Post by ivraatiems » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

nananana9 wrote: post #32

asveikau wrote: post #6

Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

There's plenty of waste. It doesn't matter how much you pour at the top of a leaky pipeline, very little of it will make its way down to the desired recipients. You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare for what can at best be described as mediocre outcomes. The Netherlands spends $6000 and is near the tops of the charts when it comes to quality. What's the ratio of effectiveness per dollar we're look…

The spend is on private health insurance going to for-profit middlemen. It's not mostly on the government. People love to crow about Medicare and Medicaid (safety net government-run insurance) waste but the vast majority of "waste" is the record profits put up by private companies.