DOGE is a complete farce, but I think there's an important to not just write this off as a stage show and the people buying into it as idiots. There are a lot of people who feel that government isn't working for them and so when they see things like "8 million dollars spent on condoms for Palestinians" they're already primed to get angry about it. Musk/DOGE's actions may all be for spectacle, but he's tapping into some very real emotions that he wouldn't be able to tap into if people felt the government was working for them. DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem. Even if Musk and DOGE are completely discredited, if we don't figure out a way to make it so the average citizen feels like they're getting their money's worth from the government, it's just a matter of time until someone else steps in to exploit that feeling for their own gain.
Re: this report that USAID was sending condoms to Gaza, that was actually in Gaza, Mozambique (which has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS), not Palestine. Maybe they knew, maybe not. Anyway, I know many people who have been parroting that stat, so it was effective propaganda.
This is straight from Elon's playbook at Twitter. Cherry-pick some things that sounds bad, find a few real bad things, mix those all together and pretend they are equal, then dribble that out to people while feigning outrage/shock.
And remove any suggestion that there was forethought. It's pure, unfettered trolling. He's desperate for attention from anyone.
Fascinating—if unfortunate—to see the world's 2 most powerful men basically functioning as walking test cases for classic outcomes when a child is not given appropriate attention/affection and also zero boundaries for socially-appropriate behavior.
It reminds me of the "treadmills for shrimp" thing that people used to say that research money was being wasted on about 14 years ago. Every intellectually lazy politician acted like we were spending all our research money on making sure that shrimp were exercising.
The "treadmills" were used to measure the effects of bacteria on shrimp metabolism. Understanding how bacteria affects metabolism, at least to me, sounds like a perfectly valid thing to research. Most people, if they knew the context around that would probably agree, but people are extremely lazy with this stuff, and are really susceptible to stupid catchphrases, so people thought it was a huge waste of money.
I'm pretty convinced that he's running a SQL query like `select * from transactions where recipient like '%gaza%'`, grabbing the first item that looks suspicious, doing absolutely no research on what that item actually was, and then typing out the first thoughts he could about it on twitter.
Frankly, something DOGE has shown me is how lazy Musk is. I know he's the CEO of like twenty companies, but if what he's doing with DOGE is any indication, he has absolutely no attention to detail and is completely averse to actually learning or understanding what he's talking about. Like, every effort in DOGE is coming off as decidedly half-assed.
It makes me glad I don't own a Tesla, because I would be terrified to see what kind of corners they cut, and how much of it would end up being completely half-baked and not ready to actually be used. I'm not completely convinced that NASA contracting out to SpaceX is a good idea anymore either.
if people felt the government was working for them
There's two things you need to make people feel the government is working for them:
* good social policies
* adequate education
One of the US parties has been working for decades to sabotage both, and with the help of the media they've successfully managed to deflect all the blame for it. So no, I don't agree that DOGE is a symptom of a larger problem -- unless you mean that the problem is 50 years of consistently undermining the government.
Those were mostly purple years; the United States isn't—at least, when functioning approximately according the the Constitutional rules, which has suddenly become an important qualifier—a unitary executive dictatorship.
The idea being that if common sense prevails and folks realize what a shit show/farce this DOGE thing is.... the underlying issues that allowed DOGE to exist in the first place will be unsolved.
My hot take is, social media alongside with TikTok showed the world to some people who usually wouldn’t venture out of their small bubbles. Eventually they see significant positive things about other countries, and a lot of negative about theirs. This subconsciously brings up “we have it worse for sure!” emotions in some people, that later translated into whatever it is right now when some people started targeting and exploiting these feelings.
I have no source, no data, nor examples to defend my point, it’s just the vibes.
Exactly. That's one thing that disappointed me about the US Democratic party after the first Trump election -- a complete lack of curiosity into why people voted for him.
Maybe people were voting for him because they were dumb? Or they were lied to?
But neither of those change the importance of understanding what those people wanted.
You can't win elections without understanding what most people actually want.
I think maybe 1 in 20 people I know have any clue about government waste, but they all have a "feeling" it's happening and it's the worst it's ever been. It takes very little these days for people to catch these vibes, and even littler to associate it with Democrats who are for social security.
This despite the fact that Musk is mostly firing investigators who were seeing if his company's were a budget waste. I guess we just have to assume agencies that say "black" are bad and what we really need to spend money on is luxury EV vehicles that can play angry birds. Surely not a conflict of interest.
There is no arguing with people who don't know what they want. This is all propaganda fueled hysteria.
> Maybe people were voting for him because they were dumb? Or they were lied to?
I cant tell if this is intentional irony or poe’s law.
When democrats that are curious about why people vote for Trump, conclude that the voters are dumb or naive, it’s kind of an unintentional demonstration of the kind of thinking that turns people away from the Democratic Party.
My point was that if they conclude that Trump voters are dumb or naive (i.e. the most dismissive judgement), even that still doesn't remove the need for Democrats to understand what those same people want.
The smug "some people are dumb, so I'm going to ignore them instead of being curious" elitism has lost the Democratic party two recent elections.
Any time the government tries to do something for The People, the wealthy and their mouthpieces get a portion of the population to believe the much needed help is actually evil socialism/communism and will destroy their way of life.
America has been propagandized to by the wealthy for a century and this is the end result. The world's richest person reforming the government for profit.
It's vibes based FUD around medicine and government spending from people that have done nothing to look into it but talk in a bar with their friends about it. They have no idea how to articulate what is happening, where we're spending the money, how it scales with other things we spend money on. It's just headlines.
It is absolutely possible to have feelings and still be an idiot for acting on them in certain ways. Someone who "feels" that vaccines are a hoax and they should drink bleach instead is still an idiot despite that feeling. There is also a sort of gray area where a person may act irrationally due to intense feeling in a way that's perhaps excusable (e.g., someone's relative dies and they start smashing things in a fit of grief), but it's still a bad idea. We have to hope that more people are the latter category and will wake up and realize what a mess they've made.
This strikes a chord with me, perhaps because I'm one of the people who "feel that government isn't working for them."
- government spending has been rampant and completely disconnected from available funds
- "shutdown" threats, typically a sign that a red line is being crossed, has been treated as political currency
- funds going from taxpayer (individual and corporations) to government, to be redistributed for an ever-increasing list of grants, programs, and studies
- locked-in mega spending areas of the budget showing plenty of warning signs of unsustainability, with nothing being done to address
Even if DOGE is "all for spectacle," I'm having trouble finding the downsides of DOGE's actions for generations coming after us. But maybe someone could help me understand why they feel differently?
It's not just spectacle. It's destroying government agencies with decades of institutional knowledge on how to run the richest and most powerful country in the world. None of us even know most of what these interconnected institutions do, a lot of which does affect our lives in a very real way.
Sure, a lot of these agencies are doing wasteful things and there is a lot of room for improvement. Meanwhile, it's a slow and humongous beast that's very difficult to reform.
However, thinking that these institutions have no value is a great mistake. So is thinking that a few teenagers can improve things by firing people and dissolving agencies in the course of a few weeks. Needless to say, there is no historical precedent for something like this working.
You can take the position that it will just get a lot worse before it gets better: "destroy everything and build it from scratch". It's often tempting but almost never a good idea, even for software will projects. On the level of a government, this idea is actually insane and I have no doubt that people will find out why, unless they stop breaking things.
The way DOGE is shutting down things is extraconstitutional. They are essentially saying they have the power to shut down Congressionally appointed agencies, which is explicitly against the Constitution. They are creating a situation where in future generations, whatever power comes in can change everything, creating immense instability. Congress is supposed to pass laws, and the Executive is supposed to implement them. They can't choose not to implement them, because it would allow them to declare a valid law null and void. This is known as "impoundment" and it was explicitly made illegal by Congress after Nixon, but the Constitution spells out why the idea is so absurd -- it's not a power the President has.
So what are the downsides of DOGE's actions? They are fully upending the Constitutional order of checks and balances. I personally thought it was an okay system, but really it seems like enough people are willing to ignore it, that the Constitution is effectively suspended.
I feel like what's happening right now is a double leg amputation while all you had to do was to treat the gangrenous toe. Or two parents discussing one's infidelity in front of their 7 years old kid.
Like sure it'll get you somewhere, but what will you break/lose in the process? And what will you gain?
It's not "all for show", I don't think Americans understand how they're unraveling decades of soft power, eroding the trust they were already losing on the international stage, &c.
I think tearing down organizations and infrastructure that do actual good in order to stage this show is a huge downside. The US is going to lose an incredible amount of legitamcy and soft power around the globe.
The administration has presented no plan to meaningfully cut costs, it is just producing propaganda that people eat up without thinking.
It sure seems like a lot of folks want change. I just wish we had used that momentum to build consensus and empower experts to improve things. Instead, the trolls got the attention and are leading us on a snipe hunt while the rich get ready for another tax break.
it's like saying "stop taking my taxes" and then later wondering why the roads are full of potholes, your tap water is no longer drinkable and your air quality sucks and your life expectancy is down.
oh, but maybe you don't care about any of that, for X reasons; those things may not be important to you, but other things are, like maybe not being swindled by your bank (CFPB) or being able to enjoy visiting a National Park. Or maybe there's nothing that you care about, but there are millions of other people who do care.
>I'm one of the people who "feel that government isn't working for them."
In what way is that? I feel that a lot of people who say things like that expect the impossible and don't actually realize how extremely privileged their lives are from all of what a modern society offers them.
I also think the government is inefficient. The median effective tax rate (sales, both halves of FICA, state income, federal income, unemployment, property, gas, "sin" taxes, ...) in the US is in the 40%-50% range, and that's apparently not close to enough to pay for everything. We market ourselves as being a low-tax country, but that's a higher percentage than a median Brit pays (35-45%) and not much lower than Germany (50-60%). France kind of sucks on that front (60-75%), but it's about the worst offender, and at least in those countries you have free healthcare (the cost of which bumps taxes+healthcare to be worse in the US than France even). The US is very expensive if you're not very well-off.
I get that it's more complicated than this, but we went to war back when taxes were 2%. How is it that after 250 years of technological innovation we suddenly need half of everybody's individual output just to keep the country running?
So, what changes has DOGE found? For a couple I agree with (one strongly, one with reservations), my back-of-the-envelope estimates suggest that the median American spends $0.50/yr on penny minting and $50/yr on the EPA. I certainly wouldn't mind $50.50/yr in my pocket (nearly double that in equivalent pre-tax wages).
Pennies do seem useless, and I wouldn't even mind going up to quarters or dollars as the minimum divisible currency unit.
The EPA is a tougher call (if the proposal were actually making it more efficient instead of just gutting it and letting corporations run rampant). On the one hand, I'd be willing to pay much more handsomly than that to actually have clean water, clean air, soil near my home without lead or other poisons, .... On the other hand, $10B+/yr is a lot of money for what the EPA does, and I'm still unable to even buy lead and cadmium free dog bowls and coffee mugs without trusting the manufacturer's pinky promise or testing it myself. Somehow, the "don't poison us with things we definitely know are very toxic" directive doesn't apply if you figure out a new shape to mould that poison into. To achieve the same real-world outcomes the EPA has over the last couple decades, you wouldn't need near that much cash.
Even if I agreed with those whole-heartedly though, and even if DOGE finds an extra $2.5k/yr of my taxes being used on things which don't benefit me at all and I'm callous enough to not care about that money's potential impact on others (which looks like a reasonable upper bound given that the strategy seems to be gutting every department that Trump or Musk doesn't like, and those are a drop in the bucket of the federal budget), I still think the cost of DOGE exceeds those gains. Somewhat equivalently, I'd happily pay $2.5k/yr to make a shitshow like this never happen again.
Why though?
The big one is that Musk and Trump have a history of fraud and abuse for personal gain, and their current actions look much more like a dictatorial power grab than evidence that they finally want to do the right thing. Some examples:
1. Which federal agents are being let go? The ones who investigated Trump after he broke countless laws. He's not trying to hide it; he's seeking revenge on people even tangentially related regardless of how much benefit they do or don't have for the country, when he's the one who broke that many bloody laws in the first place. That matches the hypothesis of "vindictive and power hungry" much better than the hypotheses of "making America great again" or "no worse than the status quo."
2. One of the first things Musk did was download the personal details of every US citizen and inject his own code into the treasury. They already (seemingly) have the power to shut down departments on a whim. What purpose does this extra power serve? It's worse than the status quo (explanation already beaten to death on HN here, I won't elaborate), and it doesn't help with the "making America great again" promise. It _does_ give Elon and any unscrupulus programmers (luckily everybody in DOGE passed their background checks with flying colors...) enormous power though.
2a. He's shipping that data off to MSFT to process it with AI. What in the ever living fuck is going on there? It's hard enough to get the DMV or a court to treat you like a person, and we want to throw current-gen AI into the mix? Have you seen Google's customer support? If I have to make a new gmail account and lose historical data then that's unfortunate. If I'm added to one of the list of real, US citizens ICE has "accidentally" deported because of some hairbrained idea to use more AI in the government....
3. Which departments are being shut down? If you need a hint, it's only departments that help ordinary people and hurt large corporations. Picking on the CFPB as an example, DOGE successfully saved the US $0.8B/yr (yayyy!!), a department which in a single maneuver saved US citizens $4B/yr (5 full years of funding, for reference). Is that making America great again? Maybe you like defrauding vulnerable people by adding overdrafts back to their previously non-overdraftable accounts just to fleece them for a few hundred dollars, but that doesn't look like it adheres to either Trump's or DOGE's stated visions. It, instead, looks like a transfer of power from the people to the newly elected Trump and unelected Musk.
4. Trump controls the house, senate, and supreme court right now. He could at least get off his arse and do that power grab the right way. Getting these changes signed into law would make it much harder for future presidents to revert them. That seems like a good thing if you're trying to make the country better (the stated purpose). A flurry of extra-constitutional executive orders, some of which will stick just because they have to work their way through the courts and because of the sheer volume, serves to increase personal power at the expense of the separation of powers in the government.
And so on. I can't point to a single thing being done and say it looks more like protecting the American people than it does creating a new dictatorship. Some of the actions might benefit me (e.g., I'm happy about the penny thing), but not enough by a long shot to overcome the downsides.
Anyone on "the other side" (problems with that framing aside for now) who doesn't understand and accept this is only serving to make the problem worse. This is the result of people's disillusionment with government from both sides of the aisle reaching a boiling point. Anyone could have seen it coming, and anyone who wants to fix it needs to understand where the other side is coming from, and not just paint them as evil stupid idiots.
Compromise. It's essential to peaceful co-existence of a group of humans of any size. At some point along the line, America seems to have lost that quality.
Y'all really doubling down on this whole "77 million people are white supremacists" huh?
You understand this means that the other 75 million people are actually looking to mutilate children, destroy the concepts of sex and gender, abolish all of the police, and are aggressively racist against white people, right?
75 million people don't care that the person they voted for attempted a coup by trying to have the results of an election overturned. They may not all be white supremacists, but they sure don't support democracy. And that's dangerous.
- Children aren't being mutilated and anyone who believes this is a willing mark or has a toddlers understanding of science
- the concept of "Gender" is actually very important to a lot of trans folks, as it turns out. My "Sex" is about as relevant to my day to day as my blood type, and I think people who obsess about my chromosomes are fucking weird
- We should abolish all the police - got me there.
- White people don't exist as a racial category with any meaningful definition except as a catch-all for groups meant to exclude. It's not a race, it's a country club with a pantone guide.
Hope that helps, and I hope you find whatever it is you are looking for.
Fwiw, the examples don't do a great job of that, imo. One of those descriptions is factually true, whereas the other contains mostly juicy propaganda talking points.
(And, as I pointed out, some real ones!)
But, to put a fine point on it, literally zero children are being mutilated (in the context this statement is typically brought about, "children being forcibly transitioned against their will by their parents, including surgery", which is deeply false), but there are white supremacists in the government, without room for equivocation or debate. Even in the context of absurdity, they are not equally absurd claims. You took an accurate portrayal of the right in America (perhaps assuming it was absurd?) and compared it against...the right's propaganda view of the "left". This is why it was not "Obvious".
And, to be clear; conservatives are already saying that! Your average trump voter thinks that there are litter boxes in schools! They literally think that! I'm not going to be nice and lie about their capacity for goodness while they seek to eliminate me and my pals (or, at best, casually don't care about voting for the folks who want to eliminate me and my pals, which, you know? Fuck em.)
> Y'all really doubling down on this whole "77 million people are white supremacists" huh?
> You understand this means that the other 75 million people are actually looking to mutilate children, destroy the concepts of sex and gender, abolish all of the police, and are aggressively racist against white people, right?
You seemed confused and upset that people assumed you believed the things in the latter statement, so I am primarily interested in getting you to understand why I (and a few others, by the looks) thought that.
It is factually true that Donald Trump campaigned on white replacement theory, surrounded himself with people who had ties to white nationalism, and continues to advance causes very important to white and christian nationalists. If you voted for him, you were either uninformed on those topics, informed but didn't care, or informed but agree. By and large, the trump voters I talk to on a daily basis seem to be in the first camp, but willing to defend trump regardless of what he is saying or doing.
It is factually false to suggest that Democrats want to "Mutilate children", or any of the examples you gave. Even the most harsh critic of the police that the democrats have, AOC, unequivocally said that she was against abolishing the police and preferred defunding them and moving their responsibilities to other social services. "Mutilating children" and "Abolish sex and gender" are thought-terminating cliches meant to mis-represent support for trans folk, and "Racist against white people" is a clownshoes bananapants nothing of a racist dogwhistle.
Republicans love to twist and exaggerate, but none of these reflect the policies - either stated or implied through policy - the nature of democratic support. What's more, the democrats have not universally adopted a single person to be the arbiter of their policy, as the GOP has at their last conventions, nor do democrats typically gather with such gusto around a single individual. (as a bernie supporter, I feel like I probably got as much of that as I was going to get, and it was not anywhere near as embarrassingly fawning as what trump receives.)
So, no, they are not equal in the slightest.
If you are prepared to argue that supporting trans kids is mutilating children, or actually saying "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work." or extending the olive branch to fucking apartheid is not an inherently white supremacist thing to say or do (or that it's not 'all that bad'), then I was misguided, and am comfortable ending the conversation here.
Now, if you want critiques of the democrats? Well, my friend, I have them in store. Perhaps a less absurd, more fitting diss would have been "the other 75 million people are actually looking to ethnically cleanse gaza?" (The republicans want to do that as well, but at least it's a fair diss on the democrats and their actual positions!)
They voted for people that are working to reinstitute Jim Crow apartheid, are pushing for ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the hostile annexation of Canada, canceled federal celebrations of MLK Jr. Day, put tattooed white supremacists in charge of the US Military apparatus, think "there are good people" on both sides of a white supremacist terror attack on Americans, turned Guantanamo Bay into a concentration camp while furiously deporting immigrants of color yet opening the door to white people aggrieved by the aftermath of the fall of South African Apartheid, and constantly boost/reply/repost white supremacist propaganda including normalizing white replacement theory. Just a short list of real things off the top of my head.
It's possible that their perspective on the outgroup is not entirely "fair and balanced."
As a white American the concept of "racist against white people" is laughable. The right's obsessive persecution complex while enjoying the bounties of the greatest empire of human history is childish in the extreme. Like toddlers, but with the power to destroy all of human civilization.
> “We tested bleach,” he said at one point. “I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes.”
> “A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world,” Trump began, clearly thinking the question himself, “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too. It sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”
To read this in any other way than "The president suggested we blast people with UV rays or inject them with disinfectant - such as bleach, the disinfectant he just mentioned as being effective" feels like a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics, bordering on willful ignorance. Cross your eyes and maybe I'm being flippant about "bleach", wherein he only merely suggested injecting "disinfectant", which renders him a genius, I imagine?
He ranted about two common disinfectant strategies for inorganic materials and suggested they use them on people, because he's not particularly bright.
Edit: Also worth mentioning that the following day when asked what he meant by that, he did not say "I did not ask about injecting bleach", he said "I asked about that sarcastically".
> I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen … I was asking a sarcastic, and a very sarcastic, question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside. But it does kill it, and it would kill it on the hands and that would make things much better. That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters.
So it would appear not even Mr. Trump agrees with your statement.
I refer to this incident colloquially as "The time trump told us to inject bleach", which would be more accurately described as "The time the president of america was so balls-on stupid that he rambled for five minutes about doctors using bleach and UV disinfectant to fight Covid, a ramble so incoherent that the CDC had to issue a warning to ignore what it appeared he was suggesting."
I have no desire to treat the "intelligence" behind that statement - or those with full throated support of his incredible genius - with any authority.
The "White Power" was the evil (though, quite stupid in its own right) part. The "Bleach" was the "stupid" part of my comment, and I stand by it.
You mean the time a president (a non medical expert who doesn’t claim to be) tried to theorize about mechanisms by which a covid treatment could be delivered using ordinary language? And all of those mechanisms are real forms of treatment in other contexts?
Communication is a two way street, and the fact that people heard “inject bleach” means that’s what Trump communicated. That we are arguing about this years later proves the point. You can say that’s not what he meant, but that’s what he communicated. He had experts there that day who are eloquent and have precise command over the science and the English language, unlike him. He chose to sideline them because his ego wanted attention, so he confused the nation at a time we were in need of clarity. He played no role except to make everything worse. His absence would have been the best thing he could have done for everyone that day. Failure of leadership at a critical juncture.
These communications were from Trump directly to people, they heard it with their own ears. And you can't even make it out to be a partisan thing because Trump's own experts in the room reacted with visible shock when he made those statements. I think it's fair to say if the President had done his job and let experts do the emergency communicating, no directives approximating "inject yourself with bleach" would have been understood by the general public. And that's why the failure lies with him.
> Miscommunications happen. Now you’ve been corrected. Stop repeating false claims.
I have not repeated this claim. My point is because miscommunications happen, the person in charge should have left it up to experts instead of just riffing, because now his sloppy words will live on forever.
I think not only compromise, but more importantly communication. Like it or not, the other half of the country is also part of the country, and you cannot claim to be in support of the public without covering half of the public. The first line should be consensus, and when consensus isn't possible a carefully balanced compromise should be attempted.
If the left or the right disagree on even language and core cultural issues, they both need to find ways to communicate and evolve that allows for a peaceful coexistence. The notion the other party is a stupid or evil adversary incapable of enlightenment is poisonous, it forbids communication. Even if your adversary is indeed stupid and/or evil, it is far better to talk to them and if not change their mind, explain yourself in a language they understand (that includes a language they don't find outrageous or absurd!), leaving open the door to seeing your point of view. Even if they want to destroy you, it is a much better strategy to show you're not all that bad than escalating or just giving up. Of course, there are always voices that profit from discord, and human nature is perhaps attracted to antagonism. But we shouldn't let that go out of control, for the benefit of everyone.
If we're wrong about something, it's to our profit to learn from an adversary. This is the main lesson I think we should be taking -- even if being wrong is painful or sometimes isolating. Also logically, don't isolate those who think a little differently from your cultural heterodoxy, for the case they might have good reasons you just don't understand yet.
I think the old customs of being, and of course appearing, respectful were in part norms created for this. By behaving respectfully you're showing a willingness to learn and be wrong. By shouting, offending and imposing your opinion you're demonstrating you might be closed to other possibilities even if they are wrong, sometimes for very misguided reasons like ego, pride, or power. It's clearly then particularly important to act respectfully with those who are your adversaries or with whom you disagree (since perhaps you'll be more inclined to hear those who you already mostly agree with).
In summary: communication, compromise and respect.
Remember when there was a bipartisan bill to fix immigration that had a good deal of compromise in it, and it was all set to pass until Trump told the republicans to tank it so that Biden wouldn’t get credit for it?
The real question is when does something break that causes near-universal outrage. Unless something breaks in the near-term that most people care about, nothing will change.
Near universal outrage is arguably part of what saved the ACA in 2017, though obviously infighting and incompetence by the GOP leadership was big piece as well— then again, outraged constituents jamming phone lines helps stoke those fires, particularly when it's card-carrying party members who are saying "yeah we'll vote GOP again next time, but not for you; fix this or you're getting primaried."
The real trick is that the outrage has to be enough to break through the right wing media smokescreen that's currently gaslighting half the country with "yeah well everything is about to get more expensive, but you actually want this, it's patriotic to be excited about higher household prices because it's all in service of making America great again, whatever that now means!"
And critically, it's not just Fox/OAN/Newsmax that are the problem, it's also the army of thousands of podcasters and influencers who repeat these talking points. Many of Joe Rogan's 11M listeners likely trust what he tells them considerably more than they trust what a talking head on cable says.
The flip side is that if dismantling a federal agency doesn’t break anything, and doesn’t cause near universal outrage, perhaps the federal agency can/should be dismantled at least temporarily?
Obviously a dangerous game to play, but it’s always safer to do nothing and sink slowly than to start ripping apart the hull at sea in order to fix the leaks. Both strategies have nonzero danger.
Heh yeah to be clear I'm not saying the consequences won't be catastrophic. I'm saying that the gambit does have a success criteria: If we nuke half the federal government and there are no noticeable differences, then the premise that it was all waste is vindicated. A high risk gambit, to be sure.
I think you would need to wait tens of years to notice the effects of the US becoming unimportant, and China and
Putin taking its place, as possible effects of removing USAID
The numbers they claim to save are like trying to turn your household budget around by cutting out a weekly latte.
If you really want to make big financial changes, you need a lot more income, or cut serious costs - like a car payment or downsize your house. In the case of DOGE, I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
If they do cut $2T, there will be a huge recession — worldwide impact, but potentially has EU and China (and India?) all trading more with each other than at present, so plausibly results in China having a larger nominal GDP after the dust settles.
I kinda expect the senators to prevent it, but we will see.
> I haven't seen them touch DoD or any of the massive medical programs, etc.
Have you considered that they are going after the low-hanging fruit, getting in "reps & sets" before they attack programs that have vastly greater inertia and potentially bi-partisan support? DoD and healthcare cover a ton of jobs, and might actually trigger pushback from Congress, in ways that annihilating the CIA's propaganda arm (which is basically a handful of overpaid bougie Dem-leaning "journalists") doesn't.
They are doing tremendous damage for something that is supposed to be a stage show. Among everything they've done over the past three weeks, HUD is being gutted as we speak and the company a friend works at lost $100 million in contracts practically overnight.
Its an inverse Robin Hood attack. Take from the poor to give to the rich. The middle class is about to get moved from business class to coach.
https://www.rawstory.com/gop-budget-2671154997/
First- Many of the cuts haven't been legally conducted and, rather, represent waste themselves as they are going to disrupt activities and create litigation. So we, the people, will pay at least as much and have less productive results and have to pay for legal fees.
Second- Federal contracts are usually bid on the free market. There's an RFP, bidders, and the best fit wins. It's usually lowest cost while meeting requirements. I'm not sure why selling to the government is not a "real customer."
Third- It's reductive and inflammatory to say that not detailing out the contracts were for was because you would have seen it as wasteful corrupt spending. How would the prior commenter have even known what you see as wasteful and corrupt?
Can we at least agree that NGOs like Chelsea Clinton's Difficult to Verify Third World Orphan Feeding Service should be audited?
The argument from the right, which I have not seen anyone on the left address directly, is that a very large portion of government spending is laundered to well connected people by way of contracts to NGOs and other kinds of organizations where there is little or no verification that the money is actually being used as claimed. Often tax filings reveal that by its own admission, the organization in question is spending nearly all the money on overhead like travel and administration. Combine this with the fact that so many people go into government jobs with modest salaries but come out being worth 10s of millions of dollars and I have a hard time believing that anything but a wrecking ball is going to fix the system.
We are adding trillions to the national debt every year so we don't have money to waste.
Many politicians go into office promising reforms but until very recently it was always just slight nibbling around the edges, if anything.
Can you provide a basis in fact for the argument about a large portion of government spending? I'm asking because I think the argument is specious.
First- 49% of national spending goes to Social Security, Medicare and interest payments. The first is a direct payment, the second is very heavily regulated and has a bounty program for fraud waste and abuse, and the third is paid directly to bondholders.
Second- I'm almost certain that most, if not all, government contracts have auditing rights included. So we could audit them if we want, in fact almost every government agency has an inspector general to do just that.
Is it the one where you posted the dogegov.com website? Because that's the wrong website and not affiliated with the US government. That's probably why it got flagged. The real website is doge.gov, though that site isn't exactly great; it's basically a mirror of the @DOGE account on X. The "savings" section of the site says "receipts coming soon, no later than Valentine's Day," which is today.
Edit to add: doge.gov is exactly the site we're talking about here; it was offline a bit earlier, presumably while they cleared up the mess from their unsecured DB.
I think it's just time for you to stop digging. Every post is more inane than the last, and the last was you posting a link to a scam site and claiming it's an official government outlet. Just consider that if you can't tell the difference in that, you might be in over your head here.
> I posted a link to where DOGE is publishing their cuts in response to the comment you are replying to and it was flagged and removed instantly.
You posted a link to a non-official crypto meme website that contained no useful information about what is actually happening with DOGE the government agency.
> Without knowing what your friend's contacts were for, though, I can't tell if that's $100 million in waste that was cut, or not.
The reason we can't tell if what is being cut is waste or not is because the ones doing the cutting are not being transparent and have no accountability.
It isn't an audit if it's just Elon saying "Good" or "Bad" at each thing he looks at and then sometimes posting on the social media site he owns that he "Found a bad one!"
Maybe I'm looking at it wrong but where is the transparency on which spending they have decided to cut and what exactly that spending was being used for?
Edit: That also doesn't seem to be the official website, which is doge.gov
The title of the website you linked is "THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY COMMUNITY MEME PROJECT"
It has a section on buying/trading crypto, and the linked X account is @doge_eth_gov which has been suspended.
Dude, you just linked to an unofficial fake site designed to trick excited visitors into buying a cryptocoin without looking at the fine print [0], and its "data" is all stuff that has been public for years.
While I agree that the task of figuring out where the real site is (let alone good+real data from it) is much harder than it ought to be... isn't that itself just another data-point? It indicates the whole thing [1] is being managed in a kind of unprofessional chaotic stupidity.
__________
[0] "#DogeGov has no association with the official DOGE Organization. This token is a community-driven meme project designed to raise awareness of government spending and over-regulation. It has no intrinsic value or financial return expectations and operates without a formal team or roadmap. The token is intended solely for educational and entertainment purposes."
[1] "Department" is too misleading but "a private Presidential Commission undergoing a bizarre corporate-inversion to gut an real department and crawl inside its corpse" is too long to say.
Uh, that's not a government website, and even if it were, clicking around shows vague numbers associated with vague categories. There's no useful information here. There's no transparency here.
That's the problem, there is no amount of money that separates something "appropriated by congress" or "slush funding in USAID". USAID was given 50B a year, can spend it on ANYTHING it wants, there is no further congressional approval required. I do think we need to get back to a point where a congressmen needs to approve each check over 10k.
Heck, it would at least give them something to do, and feel the money roll and make their choices in Congress mean something again.
Two things that frustrate me about this line of argument is a failure to recognize the scale being discussed and an implicit assumption that something that isn't trivially obvious doesn't exist.
On the scale- We're talking about millions of checks a year. You've effectively proposed to ask every congressperson to spend all day signing checks. By doing so, you've also eliminated the time they spend working with constituents on issues, understanding the facts or background of decisions they've made, or even working to find compromises.
On the assumption- There isn't a dollar figure, but there are quite thorough rules. (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46497) This spells out how the rules are established and what governs it. You can quite easily look up the authorizing legislation for USAID and see the allowed purposes for funds. Definitionally- that makes it not slush funding.
You ade alleging that. What you do with an allegation, is you prove it, and then you make the cuts. You don't make the cuts in dark of night and then say, "trust me, receipts coming later." This isnt the shoot-fucking-first-ask-questions-never wild west, its a goddamn democracy.
All the relevant documents I should be able to link to have been purged from various Federal sites due to “DOGE” shenanigans.
Congressional appropriations are how money is allocated, regardless of party in charge of Congress or the Executive. If the money is misspent there’s a range of tools available to Congress AND the Executive to correct the problem. But if we're just going to let a group of people decide on their own what is or isn't fraud then, regardless of your political belief system, we're simply fucked.
I'd love to have those answers too but it seems like DOGE doesn't care about transparency as much as they claim to want that. Elon keeps touting open source and transparency but the transparency is only in the form of poorly researched, cherry picked tweets from him which are often false. I could actually get behind DOGE if they were properly publishing all the financials of the agencies that they're auditing and programs that they're cutting. Without that, it's completely unaccountable.
The receipts still aren't there, even though they had said they'd be up there before Valentine's Day (now they just say "coming over the weekend", I wonder if they'll make that deadline or have to update the text again...).
Transparency would have been most important before they started randomly cancelling contracts, but it seems they didn't bother.
Who is the "they" you're talking about? Assuming you mean "the establishment executive branch agencies", it's not like you're getting that answer from Trump and Musk either.
We have no idea what they're actually cutting, whether that $100M would have gone to something genuinely useful, or if it was going to some wasteful project.
Well, we do sorta find out, when we hear about a single mother being unable to provide food for her children because she's capriciously and arbitrarily lost her SNAP benefits.
DOGE is a train wreck, and like in any train wreck, a lot of innocent people get hurt, and no one knows what's going on in the midst of the chaos.
I agree with you, but I feel like this argument is kind of lost in a place like HN where even if the $100 million was going to ensure that orphans got warm beds and enough vitamins, someone would come along and say "yeah but why is that the government's job?" and ignore the point that, well, if you want to debate what is and isn't the government's job, you should probably do that in such a way that doesn't disrupt the lives of people who were accepting legally distributed aid.
They could've done the advisory role investigating and proposing improvements with a normal review process as promised instead of just going in there and being a bull in every china shop smashing things up regardless of whether or not it's useful.
Instead, you're getting to debate whether or not something was a good idea after it was already destroyed.
If you believe the system is fundamentally broken, and has become an instrument graft to funnel taxpayer dollars to DC bureaucrats, NGOs, special interests, political allies, propagandistic media, etc., that would be a much less effective way to fix it.
I realize many people don’t believe this, and believe instead that government corruption and waste in the US is non-existent or acceptably low, and we shouldn’t rock the boat.
But if they don’t believe that, their actions make sense.
I don't think this counts. The most detailed it gets is this:
Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS for $505 Million. What exactly is that? People with AIDS already have housing options. They have the same options as other people. There is literally nothing in that line item that explains why half a billion is needed for that. Where's the report, wheres the description of number of employees to administer, and an explanation of why thats needed.
Another thing: In the period between 2012 and 2019, the
number of full-time equivalent (FTE) employees
at HUD declined from 8,576 to 6,837, a
reduction of 20 percent. This loss of staff
presented serious risks to HUD’s ability to meet
the needs of its customers, protect against
cybersecurity threats, and deliver on the
mission.
Where is the backup of that statement - "HUD’s ability to meet
the needs of its customers, protect against
cybersecurity threats, and deliver on the
mission. "
Protecting against cybersecurity should literally be handled by a different org within fedgov!
Also why 2000 more employees? Are they also taking an elevator down the limestone mountain and riding around on bikes to file a loan?
The stories coming out of DOGE are like this, how do you expect me to read this PDF without a ton of cynicism?
It is totally inappropriate for a tax base to fund something over $1M that has nothing backing up what it is for. Let's get rid of FRAUD and ABUSE!
I should note that I try to avoid flagging unless the entire comment is an outright attack and there is nothing of substance whatsoever in it. The "these are things they don't want to answer" is partially fitting that criteria, but I simply focused on the implicit question.
I figured a comment like that is better (and a bit funnier) to to simply disprove than hide. And I didn't need much work to disprove it. Any little nudges to help peope realize that "yes, a good 95%+ of government budgets is publicly viewable" is a good step forward.
it may be a stage show, but it has real consequences. A huge number of NIH grants awards have not gone out. Already, I am facing a 15% shortfall in my budget from a grant that was all set to be awarded. This is not tenable kind of behavior form a major institution, and DOGE dog and pony show disgusts me.
