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?
Clinton benefited from an era where if a voter was going to hear how bad your idea was then he got a chance to defend it.
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…
That's the thing. The waste isn't in Federal beuracracy, it's in Federal contracts to private industry without strong self-interested oversight. The privatization trend takes a highly motivated group (companies) to milk money from an inefficient overseer.
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.
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You wouldn’t even take social security benefits despite (I assume) having been forced to pay social security taxes?
Even Ayn Rand took social security benefits. Some people point to that as hypocrisy, but I feel if the government forced you to pay into a program it is moral to take back from it (though not more than you contributed), even if you morally object to the program overall.
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.
>But the original claim was >>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. And your response to the claim "there isn't really much waste in federal spending" is to say "what about 30 years ago, someone you probably liked got rid of a lot of things they said were wasteful"? in short, if 30 years ago someone got rid of a lot of waste in federal spending it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste i…
>it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste in federal spending.
Was Clinton particularly thorough in eliminating waste? Is there reason to believe that no new waste materialized in 3 decades?
> 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.
Government doesn't turn a profit, so the main way for middle management to gain influence and seniority is to have more employees. Thus you have the interesting situation that they always have razor-thin budgets for employees in order to maximize the employee count under them and they spend a huge portion of time doing inefficient processes.
DOGE fired a whole bunch of NIH staff that processed high scoring grants to get them ready for Notices of Awards (the official document that starts moving funds, etc). Meanwhile, the administration now requires final approval of any grant by non NIH political staff. Consequently, Science is slowing down (and that is outside of other shenanigans). What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more. For the many medical re…
> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government Wish we could see the evidence for that.
Well, they sure seemed to fail at finding much meaningful savings to be had. The government seems to be throwing money in the furnace at rates never seen before while actual outcomes seem anywhere from mixed to bad depending on your viewpoints.
In 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 {} \; ... or something to that eff…
With the default arguments in the 1990s strip wouldn’t strip “linking information” it would just strip debugging symbols. You wouldn’t have been able to debug a core dump say but dynamically linked binaries would have been totally fine.
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.
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I can understand preferring to handle your own affairs rather than pay into SS. But why would you be so opposed to it that you'd rather die than receive SS payments?
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.
Well, for one, we know there were DOGE members that exfiltrated social security data for personal use [1]. And that's only what we know of so far.