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

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

#131

Post by chadd » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

The problem with DOGE is it fired the bureaucrats but didn't eliminate the bureaucracy.

Thus we're stuck in a situation where the systems that used to work are crippled by lack of resources and we're in a decidedly more inefficient world and nothing to show for it.

Relevant example for the HN crowd - nondilutive funding through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is much harder to get, because SBIR is a shell of its former self and startups doing interesting, cutting edge research are finding it much harder to navigate the process. The funds are still there, but the program administration has made it nearly impossible to access.

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

#132

Post by BatteryMountain » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

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…

And who does this ultimately benefit?...

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

#133

Post by 0xy » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #103

The total lack of records, all the Signal usage during this sad era is such a deep deep cutting treason. Just valentpy hostile to everything, to the citizenry, to history, to democracy, to America. The British burned the White House. This is a far worse, a far more grevious sundering of our history, our heritidge. (And Elon Musk is the worst killer with the most blood on his hands of anyone in the 21st century, for T…

The Biden administration authorized use of Signal, so I'm not sure how you think this is any kind of 'gotcha'.

Both sides routinely use Signal and encourage its use. CISA said in December 2024 that Signal "better protected [government] officials".

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

#134

Post by estearum » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:20 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

Also: https://sam.gov/

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

#135

Post by estearum » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:20 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…

www.sam.gov

knock yourself out

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

#136

Post by gowld » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

kridsdale1 wrote: post #56

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…

Big Tech is just as guilty of this. It’s just not the public’s money.

Consent matters.

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

#137

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

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.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-gover...

"One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired."

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

#138

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

hilariously wrote: post #125

markhahn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Generally you can infer they mean taxation.

Or what happens to them if they try to "opt out" of paying those taxes.

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

#139

Post by kotaKat » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

SubiculumCode wrote: post #82

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…

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.

This. Why the hell are we propping up private "veteran owned" companies that repackage a few things into a Pelican case and call it a revolutionary new product and sell it for tens of thousands over MSRP?

(I've seen one too many local 'defense contractors' building 'enabler kits' which are literally just a couple laptops in a Pelican case for way too much money.)

I keep seeing this with little tiny IT companies in the fed landscape and it slightly irks me. This is just the modern form of the $400 hammer...

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

#140

Post by jchw » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #115

jchw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 purpo…

Fair point, although I get the feeling you may underestimate the state of disorganized chaos that my filesystems sometimes become.