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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?

#141

Post by gowld »

rileymat2 wrote: post #124
kridsdale1 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A war that was very good for what the US economic juggernaut has become. We may be significantly better off maintaining great relationships with our Western Hemisphere countries and let the oceans protect us.

There is an ocean in the middle of the "western hemisphere". Did you mean "Americas continent countries"?

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

#142

Post by gowld »

gruez wrote: post #34
tancop wrote: post #24

Earlier 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…

>and for-profit hospitals. but only 36% are for-profit? https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership

Medical services are for-profit, not the hospitals. The hospitals funnel money to for-profit vendors.

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

#143

Post by budsniffer952 »

georgemcbay wrote: post #20
dgellow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption This is absolutely what should happen, but what will almost certainly happen is that the most openly corrupt president the US has ever had will blanket pardon everyone who remains loyal to him for the remainder of his term and there will be no federal level criminal legal consequences for any of these people. And this is kind of the opt…

You can rest assured Trump is going to preemptively pardon everyone associated with him. On an ungodly scale.

And why wouldn't he? Biden preemptively pardoned his family, which was unprecedented, and Democrats said it was fine.

This is now the world we live in, and why these precedents are bad.

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

#144

Post by Hikikomori »

johnrgrace wrote: post #50
tancop wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

MIC gets paid handsomely to make sure this gets perpetuated. But goes back to even Smedley Butlers time, using the military and intelligence services to ensure capitalists have cheap access to resources. Supercharged with the second Iraq war as mercenary companies took over military work and contractors "rebuilding" the country.

Trump is a continuation of this well played track, with the a large sprinkle of fascism, grifting and destruction of the federal government as a goal.

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

#145

Post by Starman_Jones »

ivraatiems wrote: post #40
nananana9 wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

Through Medicare and Medicaid, the US spends more public money per capita on healthcare than any other country spends period. This is largely because Medicare/Medicaid were not allowed to negotiate pricing; they were legally required to accept whatever price companies wanted to set for a treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

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

#146

Post by icedchai »

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.

Yep. I’ve worked on some federal contracts and all the waste is in private contractors, not the government itself. There are structural issues with subcontractors many layers deep, each middleman taking a cut for doing little to nothing. It’s sick.

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

#147

Post by maximilianburke »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #93
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…" Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.

>Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.

Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).

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

#148

Post by retornam »

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.

> What's the evidence for that?

If your mandate is to identify fraud or optimize a system, wouldn’t your success or failure be determined by the number of fraudulent cases you successfully prosecuted and won, as well as the amount of money you were able to recover?

Their god "genius" and leader promised[1] $2 trillion in cuts, if they haven't been achieve their stated goal, does that not mean that majority of the $2 trillion was being put to good use?

Running a government is nothing like running a company, because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating (example the military, food stamps, farmer subsidies) but are key to the successful operation of the government.

This is why it is often a terrible idea to have former CEOs ( who only care about revenue and profits) run governments or government arms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_X6VmsMWiI

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

#149

Post by ThinkingGuy »

kotaKat wrote: post #139
SubiculumCode wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

While your point is perfectly valid, there's a little more nuance to the $400 (or $600) hammer story:

https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...

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

#150

Post by benj111 »

Aurornis wrote: post #41
nananana9 wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

> 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.

It's still $8000 per capita just for socialised healthcare. So still more than NL. The US has the worst of both worlds.
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