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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?

#111

Post by alwa »

slopinthebag wrote: post #94
SubiculumCode wrote: post #74

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 Really? From what I've heard, DOGE was completely incompetent. Are you claiming they were actually extremely competent and simply couldn't find the waste?

Sounds to me like the claim is—with the perspective of somebody who has lived an entire professional life within the federal research award system—that it actually was highly efficient.

So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place.

What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?

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

#113

Post by markhahn »

asveikau wrote: post #42
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?

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

it wouldn't be a triangle if it meant embracing one of the poles.

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

#114

Post by bryanrasmussen »

gruez wrote: post #85
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I wouldn't know in one way or the other, I'm just following the age-old HN tradition of pointing out that the conclusion from observation does not necessarily follow. That is to say the person who said

>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

does not have to be actually making the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job.

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

#115

Post by fluoridation »

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.

I think your analogy is good, but misses the mark by millimeters. Optimizing is easy when you have a giant directory in the root of the drive named "delete this later". It's difficult when you have hundreds of thousands of directories, each with 100 files, of which you actually only need 75-85. You can't just delete any whole directory, because then things break; you have to go through each one and evaluate the purpose of each file, which is an expense in itself.

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

#116

Post by markhahn »

mothballed wrote: post #92
wat10000 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The level of unprovoked violence used to enforce social security I find unjustifiable just to satisfy my material requirements.

I'm curious what you mean by "violence" here.

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

#117

Post by monknomo »

mothballed wrote: post #86
sedawkgrep wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hang on, isn't that true in private for profit companies too? Is not the path to VP from director typically grabbing more teams that report to you?

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

#118

Post by hilariously »

flockonus wrote: post #77
SubiculumCode wrote: post #74

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.

There's no need to do work for the jackbooted thugs at this point.

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

#119

Post by EthanHeilman »

ajmurmann wrote: post #54
Jtsummers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are correct and DOD contracts also have been coopted by the political system to fill other needs like funneling money to senators' districts.

Those jobs protects aren't necessarily wasteful in that they stimulate the economy and cutting them would have serious impacts for those states. The essential question is, could that subsidy to a state have more impact. For instance, rather than building tanks the military does not want or need, fund and hire more teachers, build things the military actually does need like ships, fund startups, fund science projects in those states, etc...

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

#120

Post by 0xy »

daheza wrote: post #28
hnuser123456 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 28th amendment was affirmed by Biden near the end of his term, which states that the "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." DEI programs that offer benefits only to women are unconstitutional.

They cut much more than DEI programs. They aggressively and ignorantly cut jobs and grants which could have benefited the planet and saved lives. https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...

NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan via grants issued to EcoHealth Alliance. Which, even if you do not think lab leak theory is likely, is extremely reckless and incompetent.

So, at best, they're funding illegal research. At worst, their research inadvertently led to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.

Exactly how many grants are necessary to make up for that, and why would you trust the agency issuing grants for illegal research to manage such a program?

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