Oh no. Now we will never identify those millions of dead people that DOGE claimed were receiving social security.
At least we cut those wasteful USAID programs to stop children getting HIV.
DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
61–70 of 316 posts
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#62Any 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.
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Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Insurance companies don't make much money, actually. Hospitals, physicians, and pharma are at the top of the list (60% or so of total spending). Total insurance overhead is perhaps between 10 and 20%.
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s money well spent if you view the cost of not doing it as another war that leaves half the world’s industrial capacity in literal ruins as happened several times before.
I’m not saying this is true, but it’s the motivation.
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#65Any 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.
“Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons“
It’s essentially self-evident that someone receiving money or benefits paid for by others considers those benefits to be “important.”
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#66In the 90s, I was running out of space on my 2GB Win95 machine. I decided to delete files. But I was not ready to part with my games which were consuming the bulk of the hard drive. I noticed every application folder had those .ini files and they were everywhere. So I deleted them, and saved a few megs overall. Win win. Everything worked just fine... Until I restarted. That's doge.
Also in the 90s...
I remember they were HP Bobcats. We had two of them in a student lab and user directories weren't on a separate partition... so things filled up. And they kept getting filled up.
One of the people who ran the lab found that he could get back a couple of hundred kilobytes by running strip on all of the various things he wrote.
find . -type f -executable -exec strip {} \;
So he ran it in the root directory too and was pleased to find many megabytes more of space was available.
... Did you know that .so files are executable? ... And the kernel too?
Things that were statically compiled worked. But anything that was dynamically compiled failed. And when the machine was rebooted... it was really unhappy with being unable to find the linking information for the kernel.
Had to go beg a tape reinstall of the OS to get it working again.
(and then there was the story of the guy who bought a NeXT and thought that the "bin" guy was taking up too much space)
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#67Any 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…
My spouse works in the DOI and while there maybe some inefficiencies, particularly in process, it isn't the people themselves which are the problem. Her group operates on razor-thin budgets and personnel constraints. They suffer the frustrations because they believe in the work.
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#68Where's the actual systems of transparency and digital modernization of government programs?
It wouldn't be hard to show transparency into budgets and how the money is spent. Actually track it and make certain non-confidential things public. But as it stands the system scams the public taxpayer by labeling everything confidential and then hiding the data. It feels to me how criminals operate at the highest level.
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, I don't agree with OP really. Cuts can be warranted, necessary and popular. It takes actual work to determine the best places to make cuts though. The DOGE cuts were completely vibes based and did basically nothing, especially since the big beautiful bill increased spending right after. Frankly, the main reason I hate the Trump admin is because they make policy 100% based on vibes, always choosing the most intellectually lazy way possible to implement their goals to 'fix' whatever problems they 'think' exist.
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#70Is DOGE gone though? https://xcancel.com/spikebrehm/status/2072422555101561154
I'm very curious about how many other projects like this OPM retirement processing overhaul there are. I also wonder how this outcome will perform long-term.
It seems like the National Design Studio still has very close ties to Musk and is continuing a lot of what DOGE started.