61–70 of 76 posts
The “Department of Government Efficiency” isn’t a real government office and as such has no actual power. Musk and Ramaswamy won’t be able to do anything, and the budget is controlled by congress, not the executive.
removing collective bargaining would be a fair and gradual upstream strategy the public sector would adapt to and reform itself around. after spending over a decade consulting in the public sector, I concluded public servants of any kind should not have collective bargaining. it's capture and it creates the perverse incentives at the root of most complaints about it, with existential consequences for the whole societ…
Do you want a general strike?
removing collective bargaining would be a fair and gradual upstream strategy the public sector would adapt to and reform itself around. after spending over a decade consulting in the public sector, I concluded public servants of any kind should not have collective bargaining. it's capture and it creates the perverse incentives at the root of most complaints about it, with existential consequences for the whole societ…
If employees, even of the government, want to get together to push for a change in their workplace, what right do we have to prevent that?
> What DOGE should tackle is fraud, which is a known problem. You know how you stop/reduce fraud? More regulation, the exact thing these folks want to avoid. Some fraud is good, it enables processes to be efficient, so I doubt DOGE will tackle this.
More regulation does not stop fraud. There’s so many levers already they were to pull them. It’s an enforcement problem. Re-fund the police.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want a speedy government and speedy paperwork, it might be worth asking if we could increase headcount to handle tasks, preferably in parallel if possible. A comment like this is kind of bewildering on a tech news site full of software entrepreneurs. Instead of handling more paperwork with more people, why don't we find ways to automate the paperwork processing using computers? Every other competitive industry…
Home inspections are notoriously claimed to be pointless. Until housing turns into a lemon market.
The government is a vast enterprise in many senses, but it isn’t a business operation in the same way a corporation or an LLC is a business. Applying traditional business thinking to government frequently fails because the purposes and goals are not the same. Government is neither for-profit nor non-profit. Its remit is entirely different from any other kind of structure.
The article seems to present the notion that the fundamental measure of efficiency is the administrative quotient viz. the ratio of the number of staff to overall spending. It follows that the simplest way to improve efficiency is to increase spending whilst keeping headcount the same.
If so, the American federal government is the most efficient in the world, with no serious competition.
There are endless anecdotal examples in both directions.
American federal government institutions are expected to operate at immense scale while protecting and preserving the rights of the people who have business before it. There’s a certain amount of important inefficiency that this demands. Maintaining humans in the loop is one such thing that some in the tech circles think inefficient, but our government is designed to be by and of the people, for the people, so there’s a strong case to maintain people in the loop.
On the flip side, our laws allow inefficiencies to be introduced at the demand of private parties. Lobbyists have done a fantastic job at curtailing certain kinds of efficiency reforms at the IRS for decades because it served private interests. That is only recently changing, and only for specific populations.
Federal spending was $6.7T USD. Cutting 1/3 of that? Probably impossible. That said, 5% might be possible. That would cover half of the interest payments on the federal debt in a year. It also depends if they're going for one-time or continuing reductions. Obviously the latter is preferable. And cost-shifting to the future doesn't count.
Download this: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/hist01... Outlays jumped over $2T in 2020 (3rd column, 127th row). We all know why. Outlays have not come down to anything close to pre-COVID levels. We all know why. Cutting $2T from a $6.7T budget would not even return to 2019's pre-COVID outlays. Seems doable to me.
Federal Net Outlays as Percent of GDP have been around 20% since ~1980:
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
They jumped to 30% in 2020, and are on a downward trend, with 2023 being at 22%.
Technically true not down to 20% in 2019, but not as horrendous as many people think.
Let's get millions unemployed and pass those onto our sweet corporate overlords and give them million dollar per year comp packages. Yay! Make Corporate America Great Again!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The House creates the budget, the Senate votes on it, and the president then signs it into law. Usually, the executive branch will come up with a dream budget that can be considered their starting position in budget negotiations.
The Administration creates the budget and submits it to congress. This is why the Administrative office of "Management and Budget" exists. This happens every year and has for as long as I've been alive. I believe you're referencing "budget resolutions" which are not law and have a more complicated relationship to the process. https://www.usa.gov/federal-budget-process
... who promptly pronounces it "dead on arrival".
Which isn't actually true. They still use the executive branch proposal as a baseline. They, too, are supposed to authorize payment for the programs that they've passed laws to create. Usually, there's somebody in the room whose constituents benefit, and they can insist that it continue to be funded.
And of course this time around, the President will have a Congress who is controlled by his own party, so the relationship will be less hostile. In all likelihood they will end up putting back some programs instead.
Having been involved in such projects on the corporate level, I do agree that driving efficiency and reducing costs, even when everyone wants and tries to do them, is rather difficult, and very slow to implement. However, once you go down the track and commit to it, a major benefit is it raises the awareness of the importance of frugality and efficiency, and future projects do become more efficient. So maybe if you c…
The deficit is big because lawmakers actually want those programs for their constituents