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DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

ms.now

181–190 of 316 posts

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

#181

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…

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I've seen both sides of it. It's an unpleasant discussion but the government did drastic overhiring and now there are thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs.

But how do you fix it? These thousands of people have these jobs that their families depend on for survival. It's not their fault that the government severely messed up their hiring pipelines. If you cut the fat and leave those people out to dry, they certainly are not going to find work anywhere else. It's a lose lose situation.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating True, very true. I don't want my government turning a profit, but I do want my government being accountable and efficient on how it spends my taxes and what it gives me back for them. If I keep paying more and more but get less and less quality, I want some audits and changes to be done to fix this. "Government not being revenue generating" is not…

What do you think the GAO was setup to do? When was the last time you read a GAO report, if you claim to care about how the government spends your taxes and if they spend it efficiently?

DOGE was a total non-starter for anyone who knows how the US government works. They tried to replace something that already existed(GAO) and made things even worse.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOGE was run like a startup and many startups are run like Sh!t shows with them following the mantra of break things fast ask questions later. Case in point i know someone at the NIH who in March 2025 wasn't fired with his hordes of colleagues who were. Yet, fast forward a year later he gets a notice saying something like we are sorry but you should've been fired last year so be prepared to be let go at the end of Ju…

Of all the things a 250 year-old federal government serving hundreds of millions of people across the entire spectrum of services should be run like, "a start-up" is pretty close to the bottom of the list. I'm impressed we managed to arrive on an idea more detached from the fundamentals of public governance and less worthy of trust than running government "as a business." It takes real, concerted effort to be that th…

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

#185
post #6

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

What makes the federal any different than any other organization?

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

#186
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

sahil also said: > "The public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible," he continued. "In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions." He also only very briefly worked with a single agency (VA), and…

I mean, they're hardly blameless.

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

#187
post #71
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…

We already have that in the GAO. We also have personnel who's job is to root out fraud: inspector generals. The budget is constantly audited scrutinized for excess and waste, except 2 departments: defense and Medicare. The former is pork for the politicians' home states. The later is so complex it relies on the healthcare industry to help write the rules. And they can't help making sure they get paid the most.

Good thing trumps on that fraud by bolstering the IGs and not just gutting them across all agencies...

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

#188
post #75

I would like to personally thank Elon, "big balls" and the rest of DOGE for causing hundreds of thousands of deaths [1] by shutting down USAID! Also an honorable for bringing the screwworm to the US. Good job everyone, you guys did it! [1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

why exactly is the US responsible for feeding people in random countries around the world? if the US is responsible for those deaths then surely every other county who didn't step up to feed them is equally responsible right?

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I've seen both sides of it. It's an unpleasant discussion but the government did drastic overhiring and now there are thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs. But how do you fix it? These thousands o…

> thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs.

Surely this is easy to prove, right?

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

#190
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

Overthrowing democratic rule feels like an overreaction.

Like trying to storm congressional buildings when the democratically decided election was going to be confirmed? then maybe pardoning everyone involved in doing that when it failed the next time coming to power?
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