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DOGE is done. What happened to its records?

ms.now

211–220 of 316 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all.

Are you saying that the priorities of the Department of Education have been misplaced, or that it was a mistake to have a Department of Education at all? "Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.

Pick your definition of academic accomplishment if you like.

What have we got to show for spending $3 trillion?

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

#212
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?

Every other country is responsible. But in proportion to their wealth and power, and the US is far and away the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world so we bear an outsized share of the responsibility for keeping the world stable and safe. We built the international order around free trade to suit us, and it works exceptionally well to enrich us, so we have a strong motivation to ensure the stability of that international order by reducing the causes of international conflict and civil disorder like hunger or disease.

Regardless, even if your amoral nihilism were correct rather than the hallmark of a morally repulsive psychopath with the imaginative capacity of a tapeworm, there were two things DOGE did wrong. First, much of the actual damage they caused was not from the US cutting aid per se, but rather how quickly and with such little warning they cut aid. DOGE denied aid recipients that were relying on the US to keep people alive with life saving medicine and food a reasonable opportunity to make alternative arrangements. People are dying not because the rest of the world is incapable of supplying ARVs to HIV patients in Africa, but because we took those critical life saving drugs away in a manner that made it impossible for the people depending on us to adapt. We killed many those people. You can't just stop taking ARVs and be OK, and someone make a few hundred dollars per year in rural Africa is not well positioned to find alternative suppliers. Many thousands of HIV positive pregnant women who would otherwise have been able to give birth to a child without the child contracting HIV now have to figure out how to survive HIV themselves and how to care for a child needlessly infected with HIV. Many of these people are now dead because of our negligence, arrogance, and stupidity. Because of your negligence, arrogance, and stupidity.

And it didn't even save us any money to do it that way, it was nothing less than abject cruelty and racism. DOGE let perfectly good drugs and food we had already paid for go to waste in warehouses rather than allow it to be delivered. For literally no reason, it saved us not a single penny and instead deprived many innocent people.

Above all, cutting aid like this was unbelievably stupid and self-defeating. Because even if psychopaths like you are objectively correct about reality (you aren't), when the world's richest man and the world's richest country murder millions of the world's poorest people for literally no reason, that makes us look really bad to the rest of the world. And then they do not cooperate with us. See, e.g., Trump begging the Europeans he so frequently attempts to bully for help with Iran. Idiots like you and Musk have trashed America's hard-earned reputation as benevolent superpower. That will cost us trade deals. It will force our allies to hedge against us by making trade deals with China instead as a counterbalance, as Canada has begun to do. The US is so phenomenally wealthy we can afford to be sociopathic assholes to the rest of the world for a little while at least, but it is difficult to overstate just how naive, ignorant, and outright moronic you are if you think that doesn't come at a price to American interests that far outweighs the negligible amounts of foreign aid spending DOGE illegally cut.

And I won't even get into the illegality of an unelected jackass impounding congressionally authorized spending because you do not seem like the sort of person who has any concept whatsoever of the value or importance of the rule of law and respect for the constitutional order.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all.

> The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which administers research grants, is a division of the Department of Education. Given your point, how much of this funding was dedicated to research? Even if $500 million (its much more, but I digress) has been invested in research since 1980,…

Is there any evidence that the education research has been of any benefit to educational results?

The dollars spent is not evidence of accomplishment.

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

#214

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…

[flagged]

You are largely misinformed, and if you are going to make such a wild (and defaming) claim, perhaps you'd back it up with some evidence.

Not only are they highly skilled, they are completely dedicated. They are straining to meed the needs of researchers right now, with staff volunteering on the weekends, against policy, to help out where they can, because they believe in their mission and are highly motivated and competent at doing it.

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

#215
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?

Because feeding starving children is the right thing to do.

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

#216
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.

>When you actually cut, nobody likes it.

Yep, the section of people that lose out will make a noise.

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

With *cumulative taxation (state+ fed) being in the region of 60% or about 2/3 of one's income where do I even start to untangle the huge mess of govt spending - waste or otherwise?

Cumulative= income tax Fed + State, inflation, payroll tax, Regulatory burden, Capital gains tax, tarrifs, sales tax, property tax, city tax, school tax etc.

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

#217
Yet there are people still giving money to Musk, using X, Grok and other products which are run by a guy who decided to kill millions of kids worldwide.

I know your acquaintances are on X and it is 'ecosystem that is hard to leave', but sometimes it takes a bit of courage to stop contributing to vicious people. And by using his platforms, you are directly doing that.

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

#218

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…

This.

I live outside DC, lots of friends who are contractors in IT/software. More than a few have been on the same contract, doing the same work, for years or decades. It's effectively a full-time permanent position, or could be. Not sure how there's any efficiency there when the contracting firm's owners need to make a cut.

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

#219
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> as a business This is doubly-bad when the guy at the top's "business" has a nearly 1:1 mapping to the governance of North Korea : An unaccountable dictatorship where the head directly owns everything and cannot be fired for incompetence, he executes/fires people on a whim, and meanwhile relatives and courtiers spend most the time sucking-up and backstabbing to end up with the power when he dies. Why would any Ameri…

This is a tangent, but people who advocate for "government like a business" are mental. Businesses want to profit and grow. The government should never be looking to profit off of taxpayers who are already funding the government. It's always a scheme from the wealthy guy to become more wealthy, and they do a good job of getting people to repeat their nonsense.

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

#220

I admit I was a little bit curious about DOGE and its outcome, as a software guy I've seen huge amount of bureaucratic inefficiencies, sometimes wondering how some companies could survive wasting all that money for nothing. I've also often be irritated by the slow and sometimes absurd processes of French administration, and I am pretty sure the whole thing is far from running as efficiently as it could. That said, I…

I believe the current administration is a ploy to dismantle and destroy the government from within. There was no serious plan to address any of our problems. They are ideologues waving their little MAGA books and threatening anyone perceived as reactionary by weaponizing the Justice Department. Their only answer to any issue is that we simply didn’t believe in the Leader hard enough.
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