Thinkudur chiddrun
Thinkudur chiddrun
DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
301–310 of 316 posts
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#302DOGE is one of the worst shitshows to happen to the US Gov in a long time (ever?), and in the end, there was zero accountability
(it was also possibly a very cleverly executed shitshow for the purpose of stealing a bunch of gov data)
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This important point -- business practices/goals are antithetical to governance -- is unfortunately not understood by the majority of Americans
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#304[flagged]
Yep. A lot of snark and shallow dismissals. And no acknowledgment of the fact that even if DOGE was unsuccessful, that doesn’t mean the government is efficient or without fraud. There probably still is a lot, and DOGE didn’t receive the support and cooperation it needed either.
> that doesn’t mean the government is efficient or without fraud
Don't really see anyone suggesting that.
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
>DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government For anyone that has worked on either side of government procurement it is obvious that this is not true. It's quite common for contracts to no longer make sense yet neither side wants to cancel them due to the paperwork involved. "Just put the money towards something else similar" Plus the many high profile examples like high-speed rail, rent subsidies.
You responded to a detailed/narrow example flagged as an example, with a reiteration of the rule. Worse still, the lack of significant savings DOGE, indicate that the government was generally efficient. This means that while specific cases may exist, the vigilance of the public and the set up of the US system had kept average performance in bounds.
Could there be any other reasons that DOGE did succeed?
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
A business has one boss who decides everything and is personally responsible if things go to shit. The employees pack up and leave to get another job. None of this is applicable to a government- unless any American wants to find out what it means to be a refugee at the Canadian border.
If you seriously make a go at it you Americans be accepted for asylum in Mexico. There is a guy (Gavin I think? Real lanky nerdy guy) from Washington who was constantly criticizing government officials (and even Mexican ones) that was granted asylum. I also of a guy who showed in in Paraguay, renounced his citizenship to become stateless, and then they just offered him citizenship because they didn't know what to do…
Perhaps at current rates, but receptivity to asylum-seekers and refugees tends to be very amount-dependent, even for relatively friendly destinations.
Historical examples in Europe circa 1933-1940 are not encouraging.
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
>NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan Even this assertion is heavily, heavily disputed: https://web.archive.org/web/20210706065130/https://www.washi...
Disputed by the person who approved the funding and has a major conflict of interest? The research clearly qualifies as gain-of-function, as natural viruses' functions were modified. >Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and a critic of gain-of-function research, told the Washington Post that the EcoHealth/Wuhan lab research “was — unequivocally — gain-of-function resea…
From the article text of its conclusion:
"the EcoHealth funding was not related to the experiments, but the collection of samples."
Pretty cut and dry?
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#308I 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?
> why exactly is the US responsible for feeding people in random countries around the world?
It was not as in not responsible, since international agreements between countries are de facto non-enforceable. Such programs though did help the US in gaining influence and soft power in those parts of the world
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Creating an executive agency to investigate the executive would be pretty stupid. It'll likely lead to "we've investigated ourselves and found nothing", even if the president wasn't vested in all executive power, as the executive branch consolidates. However, creating an agency in the legislative branch is another story. One of the duties of the legistive is to investigate the executive, is it not? (not that this mat…
The GAO is a "legislative agency"...
Fair enough, but wishing for an independent agency without creating its own government branch is still foolish.
Re: DOGE is done. What happened to its records?
#310One 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…
This was discussed pretty widely back when this all started. Creating a new department has a ton of overhead (government inefficiency) so they wanted to sidestep the process. The common narrative is that Trump didn't get anything done in his first term because he was hamstrung by all of the bureaucracy, hence why he is aggressively "shortcircuiting" things now, e.g. through executive orders.