221–230 of 316 posts
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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?
It doesn't matter what other countries do. We should want to step up and help. Leaders lead.
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.
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.
I don't know much about US spending but if it's anything like the UK I doubt that. There's plenty of waste. People only end up thinking there isn't, because it's extremely difficult to cut just the waste, so cuts are usually equally to waste and useful functions.
But that doesn't mean there's no waste! The problem is to cut the waste you pretty much have to spend a ton of money hiring highly skilled and motivated employees, and then fight decades of accumulation of cultural acceptance of the waste. Basically impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's preview I 100% agree (purview, by the way, not preview). > sometimes you need to update legacy systems I also agree, 100%. The problem with OCX and many similar systems is that they didn't try to update a legacy system, they tried to replace the legacy system. This is a very important distinction. Upgrading should be an in-place th…
Oops, thanks. Stupid dyslexia. Yah, the government has a big problem with trying to do big upgrades when a ship-of-theseus would work. I suspect this can be traced all the way up to how congressional appropriations work and the acquisitions/sustainment distinction, in addition to usual resume-engineering and second-system-syndrome.
After the looting is done, they need to clear any traces of the crime.
How exactly did "looting" take place? The trump administration did a bunch of cuts and he personally benefited from being in office, but that's not the same as looting, which implies embezzlement of government funds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Insurance companies don't make much money, actually. Hospitals, physicians, and pharma are at the top of the list (60% or so of total spending). Total insurance overhead is perhaps between 10 and 20%.
please cite your sources, we can't take your comment at face value without citations.
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?
This is effectively what DOGE did by "feeding USAID into the woodchipper" rather than developing a plan to gradually taper aid. Thousands of people in the middle of medical treatment just died. Thousands of children relying on USAID food and supplies just died. There are plenty of articles with first-hand accounts of this.
Worst part is, Musk and his boys did it this way for shits and giggles, or maybe for the adrenaline rush. Monsters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
The use of Signal or other disappearing message apps for government communications violates records keeping laws (that date from the age of memos) unless the user diligently screenshots and archives all messages. All written communication for government business is supposed to be saved. The CISA document you referenced doesn't seem to be clear on this point, although it is marked as not applying to sensitive communic…
Which if you then reflect on Bush II, well, they did delete all the emails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...
I also think it's so many cases like this last week, with OMB saying agencies can run whatever internal surveys they want and they don't have to report to the public. None of it is upstanding, up front. This seems so far beyond any "both sides" or "it's been like this". https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/07/opm-proposes-decen...
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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.
When I say personnel constraints, I mean there are almost not enough people to do the work that needs to be done.
When I say budget constraints, I mean the budgets and projects are funded so lean, that they're always having to cut sections out of projects to get what they can done with the budget they're given.
I have no idea where you've gotten this idea that the waste in government is from employing too many people, but in the areas I am familiar with, it's nowhere close to an accurate read.