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DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

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

#41

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare

You’re using a number that includes private and public spending. There are problems with this topic, but it’s a different topic than federal government spending waste.

There are some real federal government spending inefficiencies, but you picked a topic that is predominantly private spend.

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

#42

Post by asveikau »

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?

Because Bill Clinton pushed Democrats rightwards with his electoral policy of "triangulation". That was the start of establishment Dems embracing Reaganomics.

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

#44

Post by tyjen »

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."

That's debatable, because of all the pork programs that are snuck into large, omnibus spending bills. However, even that could be sold as, "one man's trash is another man's treasure" type of scenario; ergo, no waste!

I challenge anyone to read through the budget proposals and see what was authorized, it's interesting to say the least.

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

#45

Post by tremon »

asdff wrote: post #19
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…

The issue is deciding importance and most people are too stupid to understand nth order effects. So that will turn into the usual pitchforks.

People don't pick up pitchforks because they don't understand something; people pick up pitchforks because they're told to pick them up. The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.

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

#46

Post by gruez »

madhacker wrote: post #38

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

How exactly did "looting" take place? The trump administration did a bunch of cuts and he personally benefited from being in office, but that's not the same as looting, which implies embezzlement of government funds.

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

#47

Post by HiPhish »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #7

I admit I was a little bit curious about DOGE and its outcome, as a software guy I've seen huge amount of bureaucratic inefficiencies, sometimes wondering how some companies could survive wasting all that money for nothing. I've also often be irritated by the slow and sometimes absurd processes of French administration, and I am pretty sure the whole thing is far from running as efficiently as it could. That said, I…

Chesterton's Fence, even if there is actual inefficiency there might be a reason for that. It might not be a good reason mind you, but even a bad reason is still a reason. You cannot cut inefficiency without understanding the reason first. It would take multiple years of research to understand and uncover all the inefficiency that has built up over the years. Otherwise you just end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

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

#48

Post by BurningFrog »

dgellow wrote: post #4
throw0101d wrote: post #2

Perhaps a GAO look-see is needed? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Government_Accou... May be worth noting/reminding of the 17 inspectors general that were fired on the first Friday (2025-01-24) of Trump 2.0 administration: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspec...

Perhaps the current government shouldn’t be in power and everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption

Overthrowing democratic rule feels like an overreaction.

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

#49

Post by asveikau »

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…

I had an edit in my comment about military spending being an exception but I decided to leave it out to not distract from the core idea.

Though there is nuance there too, as some wasteful military spending seems to be more of a jobs program for specific congressional districts.

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

#50

Post by johnrgrace »

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…

The US has made an active policy decision for decades to be the world police, flowing from that policy spending on world policing isn't automatically waste unless it's highly inefficient.
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