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 research Institutions where the dominant system for professors is soft money (no or partial tenure, salary is provided by research grants), there is a real crisis.
To try to make up the shortfall,we are submitting any more grants, doing less actual sciencee are submitting even more grants, and exacerbating the staffing issue at NIH.
DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government, doing what was lawfully passed legislation asked, and destroyed it anyway (instead of passing legislation to remove programs, the lawful way).
Yep. You used to apply for a few relevant grants ahead of time, wait for your talented grad student to wait a few months whilst they continue their summer project, and you'd have an answer on whether or not you can take them on right as they finish.
Now? You apply continuously for a whole host of different grants, some of which are tentatively related to your field, at least a year in advance and hope that at least one of them pans out so that you can hire a potential grad student who might just wait around enough for the funding to come through.
The competition for funding is fierce, and I'm seeing a depressing pattern of profs taking on post docs who secured their own funding and needed a complimentary signature, to then take it from them and kick them out as soon as the money comes through
Also about destroying the government's investigative/enforcement capacity. USAID's destruction was ideological, but protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential.
Don't you miss the simpler times when people could just frantically applaud Musk's genius and not be inconvenienced by the truth of how big of a role deception, grifting, and outright fraud played in his success?
The billionaires who don't like regulations and like the idea of a semi-starving population that are forced to work in inhumane conditions for the lowest possible wages. Also, destroying democracy seems to be desired by them as they wish to concentrate all the power into their own hands.
DOGE was run like a startup and many startups are run like Sh!t shows with them following the mantra of break things fast ask questions later.
Case in point i know someone at the NIH who in March 2025 wasn't fired with his hordes of colleagues who were. Yet, fast forward a year later he gets a notice saying something like we are sorry but you should've been fired last year so be prepared to be let go at the end of June (2026).
Thankfully i just saw my friend last week as the end of June has passed and now he says they might keep him. Talk about batsh!t insanity for him and his life.
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 thoughtless and shallow.
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 American patriot want to adopt that style? Even the people who sincerely advocate for "government like a business" draw upon a completely different type, one where the CEO is answerable to a board, the board answerable to a shareholders, and most of the shares are publicly circulating.
P.S. We're not even touching whether the business-person sucked at business, which in this case is also quite damning.
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.
> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government
Really? From what I've heard, DOGE was completely incompetent. Are you claiming they were actually extremely competent and simply couldn't find the waste?
Sounds to me like the claim is—with the perspective of somebody who has lived an entire professional life within the federal research award system—that it actually was highly efficient.
So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place.
What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?
I don’t have any reason to believe the grantmaking system is particularly inefficient. If I was in charge with saving money I would look at consolidating welfare and slashing the bureaucratic apparatus. Research grants wouldn’t even be in my top 10.
But this is what I mean, people are claiming that the government as a whole is efficient. I think that’s trivially false, and saying “doge didn’t find waste in research grants therefore the government is efficient, also doge is incompetent” is completely faulty logic.
But if Elons goons are a pack of bumbling morons, it’s possible they simply didn’t find the waste that exists, or they had different goals (I.e. dismantling and looting). That they didn’t really find much isn’t evidence that waste doesn’t exist.
i've had to work with many people recently who DOGE fired, and our leadership keeps bringing them on board... they are all useless...i can't believe we hired these people, undoing the good work that DOGE did. govt feels impossible to fix
I've seen both sides of it. It's an unpleasant discussion but the government did drastic overhiring and now there are thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs.
But how do you fix it? These thousands of people have these jobs that their families depend on for survival. It's not their fault that the government severely messed up their hiring pipelines. If you cut the fat and leave those people out to dry, they certainly are not going to find work anywhere else. It's a lose lose situation.
> thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs.
Anyone who has been in the military can vouch for this. That is the primary angle I'm speaking from. The offices and installations are filled with the kind of people I described.
If your mandate is to identify fraud or optimize a system, wouldn’t your success or failure be determined by the number of fraudulent cases you successfully prosecuted and won, as well as the amount of money you were able to recover?
Their god "genius" and leader promised[1] $2 trillion in cuts, if they haven't been achieve their stated goal, does that not mean that majority of the $2 trillion was being put to good use?
Running a government is nothing like running a company, because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating (example the military, food stamps, farmer subsidies) but are key to the successful operation of the government.
This is why it is often a terrible idea to have former CEOs ( who only care about revenue and profits) run governments or government arms
>because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating
True, very true. I don't want my government turning a profit, but I do want my government being accountable and efficient on how it spends my taxes and what it gives me back for them. If I keep paying more and more but get less and less quality, I want some audits and changes to be done to fix this. "Government not being revenue generating" is not the answer here.
What do you think the GAO was setup to do? When was the last time you read a GAO report, if you claim to care about how the government spends your taxes and if they spend it efficiently?
DOGE was a total non-starter for anyone who knows how the US government works. They tried to replace something that already existed(GAO) and made things even worse.
Well, they sure seemed to fail at finding much meaningful savings to be had. The government seems to be throwing money in the furnace at rates never seen before while actual outcomes seem anywhere from mixed to bad depending on your viewpoints.
"One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired."
> "The public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible," he continued. "In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions."
He also only very briefly worked with a single agency (VA), and his positives comments were about how the VA already had some open source Github repos and had a previous project to 'reduce claim times from "133 days to under a week"'. He was also critical of how they don't fire people with seniority, regardless of performance (which is enshrined in a reduction-in-force law from 1944) which explains why new and probationary employees were the ones let go when Trump's people took over. https://sahillavingia.com/doge
"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). "
These people [NIH, Grants] were not very skilled and the whole system was very corrupt. Good riddance.
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.
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.
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
There's actually a lot of waste. DOGE just didn't go after it. Check out DOD and all the 9- and 10-figure programs that get canceled without delivering anything, and whose work is often useless for follow-on work. OCX is a recent example, costing around $6 billion and took so long that the program it was supposed to replace ended up just doing the work instead. Essentially nothing of OCX will be retained. This isn't really unusual in the DOD.
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.
Yep. I’ve worked on some federal contracts and all the waste is in private contractors, not the government itself. There are structural issues with subcontractors many layers deep, each middleman taking a cut for doing little to nothing. It’s sick.
Heck, even before they do anything, there is a sizable industry (with just a few players) focused entirely on the incredibly byzantine (but originally well meaning) process of bidding for government contracts (and also the politicking of acquiring no-bid contracts).
Yeah but that’s a process issue that would require deep familiarity and probably acts of Congress to fix. That’s not something a few 25 year olds with no relevant experience can come in and fix in 100 days.
It's why smart government created USDS, to clean up the mess left by contractors who set up the original healthcare.gov by having competent people work directly for the federal government. USDS was replaced with the incompetent DOGE (now US DOGE Service) and then completely shut down due to the new organization's incompetence.
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 the fed landscape and it slightly irks me. This is just the modern form of the $400 hammer...
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.
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.
This is a profoundly dismissive and even circular take...or at least an intentional misrepresentation of what I said.
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.
I'm referring to things like the DOI rescinding the 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule that allowed private ecologically minded conservation groups to restore and preserve land through leases -- something exploitive resource extracting private entities were already able to do.
Instead the DOI declared their "lean" and "constrained" force would revoke letting private entities lease for conservation. Something at odds with lean employees trying to maximize conservation ROI. Why would they be begging to rip away conservation from private hands into unavailable public hands if they didn't already have the manpower, unless they're playing a political fuck-fuck game?
That reveals the true fuck-fuck game. DOI employees claim they are lean, out of employees, etc while actively pursuing actions that are counter to how those acting in such circumstances are in the interest of acting. But actually their management are rescinding rules that help offload conservation to private actors happy to do it, instead diluting the ability of the DOI to preserve resources by instead tossing additional tasks on already overloaded employees at which point they'll have their spouses on forums complaining and stirring up the voters to try and bring more employees under their grasp. Presuming they're successful, they will then again swamp said employees, and the cycle starts anew.
Which brings me back to my assertion:
>. 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.
If they were actually trying to unload tasks from employees they'd be happy that environmental groups were trying to take the load off DOI employees and paying them leasing fees to do it, but that's not in the interest of management, as that could reduce their headcount and ability to beg for more money. Thus you can witness from actual acts of the DOI, it doesn't matter how many resources and people they get, their management are acting in ways it will appear to employees like they're broke and thin on people because they're run on ragged edges (something not unique, seen in many other areas of government, that will keep expanding task for current employees to the point they always seem broke and stretched out).
Those jobs protects aren't necessarily wasteful in that they stimulate the economy and cutting them would have serious impacts for those states. The essential question is, could that subsidy to a state have more impact. For instance, rather than building tanks the military does not want or need, fund and hire more teachers, build things the military actually does need like ships, fund startups, fund science projects in those states, etc...
You’re confused becuase they set out to confuse you.
The waste isn’t in employees doing their jobs, it’s what they are doing.
IRS enforcement is a great example. Enforcement is the most expensive way to get tax compliance. The IRS spends lots and lots of money collecting small amounts of money from people with no political clout and limited value. But, because the congressional budget says so, they ignore really obvious and common tax avoidance, which encourages the behavior and drives more losses.
DOGE fired more people and made it worse. I’m running an estate waiting for a determination from them to close out tax obligations, a pretty significant amount. I escalated the issue with my US Senator’s office. I was told they have 2 staff capable of working the issue nationally, and to expect a 2-3 year wait after it being escalated. According to my attorney, these issues took 6-8 months previously.
There is a general misunderstanding about "waste" in firms, organizations, and governments. Perfect efficiency DOES NOT EXIST and even if it did, it is NOT EVEN A DESIRABLE STATE for these entities. Sometimes when you see "waste", and you relentlessly try to drive efficiency, you destroy the _system_ that makes the desirable parts possible in the first place.
Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term.
> 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 thing (edit: for large, complex systems), and is often deliberately incremental (think "strangler fig pattern" or Ship of Theseus). Replacing may or may not be incremental, but as the OCX effort was conducted, it was decidedly not in-place and that's largely why it failed.
It was a large system that tried to deliver everything in a big bang, instead of aiming for either a side-by-side (with the prior system) series of incremental releases to prove itself out or upgrade-in-place (possibly with subsystems done in a side-by-side release fashion, or just replaced). That big bang was always going to fail and the DOD loves to put out these contracts. Unsurprisingly, the DOD has not done any effective large scale IT replacement projects that did not either outright fail (like OCX) or significantly grow in their cost and timelines (as OCX did before it failed) even if they eventually succeeded in delivering a replacement.
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.
The DOD might be the one exception to federal waste in spending precisely because they cannot be audited. Every single other federal agency is audited nonstop. The DOD due to military and security reasons is not
None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway.
Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.
I agree with the sentiment here, however, back in the 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a reduction in military spending. Military bases were closing; many of my friends/peers were discharged from service, and so on. And then 9/11 happened and military spending has skyrocketed ever since. Coincidence? Hmmm?
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending
I do not believe anyone who has consulted in federal IT or worked on contracts is capable of making such a statement. All of the motivations for all parties are heavily bent towards waste, and in fact any attempt to make things more efficient (reduce headcount, for instance) would be recieved poorly by department heads and contractors.
As one example, a department head who reduces staff by 20% has just reduced their own next year's budget AND kneecapped their resume.
"There isn't really much waste in federal spending."
That's debatable, because of all the pork programs that are snuck into large, omnibus spending bills. However, even that could be sold as, "one man's trash is another man's treasure" type of scenario; ergo, no waste!
I challenge anyone to read through the budget proposals and see what was authorized, it's interesting to say the least.
I think flying apache helicopters to salute a musician at his home or beachgoers on 4th of July counts as waste, and are not really important to anybody. So are the remodeling of reflecting pool and ballroom construction.
Excellent quote. It's easy to draw conclusions one way or another, but the real challenge to fixing the budget is easily just as much trying to understand what the hell is going on with it.
I imagine it like if you were trying to clear hard disk space but QDirStat only gave obscure indications of what the files were and you had to go through a complex legal process to delete anything.
I think your analogy is good, but misses the mark by millimeters. Optimizing is easy when you have a giant directory in the root of the drive named "delete this later". It's difficult when you have hundreds of thousands of directories, each with 100 files, of which you actually only need 75-85. You can't just delete any whole directory, because then things break; you have to go through each one and evaluate the purpose of each file, which is an expense in itself.
Yeah. Anyone who has worked with government agencies (federal or state, doesn't matter) knows how much waste and grift there is. Not All Agencies(tm) of course, but many.
The issue is figuring out how to actually fix that. It's Chesteron's Fences all the way down. Someone smarter than I would need to figure out how to even start on the problem.
The big issue though is that everyday people get exposed to the obvious inefficiencies in their day to day interactions, and don't see much if any of the big picture. So in pop-culture the meme builds up that all government spending is inefficient wastefulness. No one really talks or thinks about the stuff that just works.
The same sort of problems are endemic in private industry too. As I came from a working class background and worked my way up I like to say "America is fraud from the bottom up" - since I was exposed to the lower rungs of it first. It was definitely a shock coming into the working world as a naive teenager.
It would take an entire cultural shift to get much traction, imo.
Because Bill Clinton pushed Democrats rightwards with his electoral policy of "triangulation". That was the start of establishment Dems embracing Reaganomics.
>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.
It sounds like you're arguing for the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job, which implies that there actually is waste is government spending.
>>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
And your response to the claim "there isn't really much waste in federal spending" is to say "what about 30 years ago, someone you probably liked got rid of a lot of things they said were wasteful"?
in short, if 30 years ago someone got rid of a lot of waste in federal spending it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste in federal spending.
I wouldn't know in one way or the other, I'm just following the age-old HN tradition of pointing out that the conclusion from observation does not necessarily follow. That is to say the person who said
>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
does not have to be actually making the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job.
Yeah, I don't agree with OP really. Cuts can be warranted, necessary and popular. It takes actual work to determine the best places to make cuts though. The DOGE cuts were completely vibes based and did basically nothing, especially since the big beautiful bill increased spending right after. Frankly, the main reason I hate the Trump admin is because they make policy 100% based on vibes, always choosing the most intellectually lazy way possible to implement their goals to 'fix' whatever problems they 'think' exist.
> 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, this does not negate your point since the Department of Education does more than advancing academic achievement?
Each state has its own rules for education. The Department of Education mostly funds programs based on federal law, but they can only regulate state's activities they’re breaking federal law, you can't solely blame the department for failures of multiple state governments.
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.
State governments administer education separately, the Department of Education's job is to make sure they are following federal law. The Department mainly administers federal programs that dish out funding to states.
Y'all really don't understand how education works in America and your comments make it clear for all to see.
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.
You’re wrong. The execution failed because it was backed by (white supremacist) ideology. COGE is a new attempt at the idea taking place in New York, and much better orchestrated.
There's plenty of waste. It doesn't matter how much you pour at the top of a leaky pipeline, very little of it will make its way down to the desired recipients.
You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare for what can at best be described as mediocre outcomes. The Netherlands spends $6000 and is near the tops of the charts when it comes to quality. What's the ratio of effectiveness per dollar we're looking at here? 5 to 1?
It doesn't matter whether or not people like it when you cut, you have to if your want your country to exist in 50 years. But just as importantly you have to get rid of the leeches in the middle of the pipe and make sure the money that's left is actually doing work for you.
> You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare
You’re using a number that includes private and public spending. There are problems with this topic, but it’s a different topic than federal government spending waste.
There are some real federal government spending inefficiencies, but you picked a topic that is predominantly private spend.
The socialized segment of US healthcare is almost entirely the over 65 population and those too disabled to work any job. Obviously, the spending on those groups will be higher than the entire population as a whole.
The spend is on private health insurance going to for-profit middlemen. It's not mostly on the government. People love to crow about Medicare and Medicaid (safety net government-run insurance) waste but the vast majority of "waste" is the record profits put up by private companies.
Through Medicare and Medicaid, the US spends more public money per capita on healthcare than any other country spends period. This is largely because Medicare/Medicaid were not allowed to negotiate pricing; they were legally required to accept whatever price companies wanted to set for a treatment.
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%.
I asked ChatGPT of course, and the response roughly corresponded to my expectations so I went no further. Doctors make way more here than elsewhere (British doctors aren’t making 500-750k a year), pharma makes most of its money here, and hospitals charge an arm and a leg - it all checks out, no? Alternatively, if insurance were straight up responsible for doubling health care costs in any easily attributable way, we could easily get rid of it and would have done so by now. The only reason it can continue to exist is that it occupies a no-man’s land of utility.
Isn’t healthcare is the prime example of government run programs being much more efficient and efficacious than privatized ones?
The US has a massive tangled hodgepodge of private companies, having poor coverage, very high prices, and quite poor outcomes. Meanwhile there are numerous European countries with public healthcare systems that are far cheaper and provide much better outcomes.
And when there is a profit motive, and no meaningful competition, there is also no motive to be efficient or effective. This is what you'll find in many of the large DOD contracts.
So it's a compounding effect. It's down to whether the overseers of the contracts care enough to rein in the contractors, or to do just enough to stay on this side of legal. And the contractors certainly aren't doing charity work, so they'll balloon the costs up to the point of significant pushback and then tighten it down a bit.
At this point, spending isn't the only problem, either. We need to increase revenues.
It's thought that the IRS foregoes collecting hundreds of billions of dollars each year[0]. That's a significant chunk of the Federal government's discretionary spending each budget cycle.
People who say they want to run the government like a business seem to ignore the fact that no business has ever remained financially sound without steady revenues. It simply cannot be done.
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
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.
It all started off as obvious bullshit: in 2024 Elon Musk was claiming that he could cut $2 trillion in waste, fraud, and abuse. He then walked that back to $1 trillion in cuts, but he didn't even get close.
there are two big exceptions to this, the military and healthcare. playing world police is incredibly wasteful and so is funding a system based on submitting to the demands of big pharma and for-profit hospitals.
the problem is 50 years worth of propaganda convincing americans that all this is good and necessary and if you disagree that makes you a communist/welfare queen/terrorist supporter/woke activist. at least now with gen z even the far right agrees that foreign wars are a bad idea.
The US has made an active policy decision for decades to be the world police, flowing from that policy spending on world policing isn't automatically waste unless it's highly inefficient.
It’s money well spent if you view the cost of not doing it as another war that leaves half the world’s industrial capacity in literal ruins as happened several times before.
I’m not saying this is true, but it’s the motivation.
A war that was very good for what the US economic juggernaut has become. We may be significantly better off maintaining great relationships with our Western Hemisphere countries and let the oceans protect us.
MIC gets paid handsomely to make sure this gets perpetuated. But goes back to even Smedley Butlers time, using the military and intelligence services to ensure capitalists have cheap access to resources. Supercharged with the second Iraq war as mercenary companies took over military work and contractors "rebuilding" the country.
Trump is a continuation of this well played track, with the a large sprinkle of fascism, grifting and destruction of the federal government as a goal.
Depends on your definition of wasteful. Americans expect their government to be able to waves hands DO SOMEthing about various things in the world. Maintaining that capability is expensive.
I don't know if that desire is caused by intentional propaganda or if it's just who we are as a people because of our history.
Maybe it's not right, but it's what Americans expect from our government right now.
A large portion of people don't want to be part of social security. I'd rather die in a ditch than take social security -- when I was broke I instead just went homeless and did day labor rather than take a dime. I looked into filing the forms to permanently separate from social security but apparently there is religious discrimination here and it is only allowed for religions that existed before 1950, if I want to make the Church of Fuck Social Security then it magically isn't allowed because government decided at a magical date constitutional protections on religious discrimination don't exist.
You wouldn’t even take social security benefits despite (I assume) having been forced to pay social security taxes?
Even Ayn Rand took social security benefits. Some people point to that as hypocrisy, but I feel if the government forced you to pay into a program it is moral to take back from it (though not more than you contributed), even if you morally object to the program overall.
I can understand preferring to handle your own affairs rather than pay into SS. But why would you be so opposed to it that you'd rather die than receive SS payments?
Yes, I went out of my way to live in a place with no public roads, no public utilites, no fire, and no police and in a house built with no government inspections. Whenever there is a way to avoid interacting with public services I do everything I can to avoid them.
At least you're consistent! But I do have to question your claim that "a large portion" of people are like this, or even that they just want to avoid SS and never mind the rest. That's an extremely niche position.
The 28th amendment was affirmed by Biden near the end of his term, which states that the "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." DEI programs that offer benefits only to women are unconstitutional.
NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan via grants issued to EcoHealth Alliance. Which, even if you do not think lab leak theory is likely, is extremely reckless and incompetent.
So, at best, they're funding illegal research. At worst, their research inadvertently led to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.
Exactly how many grants are necessary to make up for that, and why would you trust the agency issuing grants for illegal research to manage such a program?
In the 90s, I was running out of space on my 2GB Win95 machine. I decided to delete files. But I was not ready to part with my games which were consuming the bulk of the hard drive. I noticed every application folder had those .ini files and they were everywhere.
So I deleted them, and saved a few megs overall. Win win. Everything worked just fine... Until I restarted. That's doge.
I remember they were HP Bobcats. We had two of them in a student lab and user directories weren't on a separate partition... so things filled up. And they kept getting filled up.
One of the people who ran the lab found that he could get back a couple of hundred kilobytes by running strip on all of the various things he wrote.
find . -type f -executable -exec strip {} \;
... or something to that effect. It worked.
So he ran it in the root directory too and was pleased to find many megabytes more of space was available.
... Did you know that .so files are executable? ... And the kernel too?
Things that were statically compiled worked. But anything that was dynamically compiled failed. And when the machine was rebooted... it was really unhappy with being unable to find the linking information for the kernel.
Had to go beg a tape reinstall of the OS to get it working again.
(and then there was the story of the guy who bought a NeXT and thought that the "bin" guy was taking up too much space)
With the default arguments in the 1990s strip wouldn’t strip “linking information” it would just strip debugging symbols. You wouldn’t have been able to debug a core dump say but dynamically linked binaries would have been totally fine.
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 gave way too much credence to Musk and his clique, turned out the efficiency theatre was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a different style of operation.
I am not sure they even tried to cut waste in a meaningful way, or if they had the competence to do so.
Chesterton's Fence, even if there is actual inefficiency there might be a reason for that. It might not be a good reason mind you, but even a bad reason is still a reason. You cannot cut inefficiency without understanding the reason first. It would take multiple years of research to understand and uncover all the inefficiency that has built up over the years. Otherwise you just end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
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.
We had a significant reduction in government workforce during the Clinton administration.
The stark difference is that THAT effort was handled with careful planning and through the proper channels. The way any mature, thoughtful, and responsible person would approach something like this.
One thing has been made very clear with Trump's terms - if there is no detailed plan on how they intend to do something, it's going to be a disaster. You can't just wing things and expect everything to work out.
Unless you just want to disrupt, punish, hurt, etc., in which case this is working as planned...which some may claim was the actual plan all along.
One 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 sankey diagram like dataset in a public git repo that anyone could access and audit. There is certainly lots of waste, but there is also loads of government spending where the value is not obvious.
We already have that in the GAO. We also have personnel who's job is to root out fraud: inspector generals. The budget is constantly audited scrutinized for excess and waste, except 2 departments: defense and Medicare. The former is pork for the politicians' home states. The later is so complex it relies on the healthcare industry to help write the rules. And they can't help making sure they get paid the most.
Yes, the GAO exists. But under the current administration, it's basically like a security guard that just sits there and watches crooks do bad shit, reports it, and then nothing happens.
And the Trump administration would similarly hamstring any newly created transparency organization. Not that the current congress would ever pass such a thing. And anyway, the Supreme Court has made sure that even if congress passed a law to make a(nother) government transparency agency, they can't make that agency truly independent and protected from presidential interference.
> massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes.
That existed! The links the various DOGE apparatchik kept posting as 'evidence' were from publicly available databases of spending, contracts, etc. The 'receipts' site was just a poor, partially-understood scrape of that data!
People don't pick up pitchforks because they don't understand something; people pick up pitchforks because they're told to pick them up. The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.
>The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.
What was bad faith about it? As someone who literally only heard of this drama because of this comment, so far as I can tell the controversy is that they omitted some white immigrant neighborhoods (eg. little italy), and Mamdani backtracked on it?
no no, they mean some other thing, which is different in totally unexplainable ways and – most importantly – doesn't make one feel stupid for not knowing it existed
Death and suffering on an unfathomable scale will be the ultimate legacy of these people. I wish they would be confronted with their crimes in front of a tribunal, but they’ll probably get away with what they did, at least in a legal sense.
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 am I responsible for this person's death? He had fallen on the subway tracks all on his own, it was his fault. All I did was extend a hand to him, let him climb halfway up, and then kick him in the face back down. So why is everyone looking at me now? The outcome is the same it would've been if no one jumped in to help. Why aren't you calling the bystanders murderers too?
A patient is in the middle of surgery. The surgeon is informed that the patient's insurance no longer covers the procedure. Should the surgeon leave the patient sliced open on the operating table, pull their tubes and IVs, and slam the door on the way out?
This is exactly analogous 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.
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.
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.
I read "looting" as installing a non-controlled StarLink terminal to silently pilfer protected data about Americans without going through existing infrastructure and leaving an audit trail.
The problem with DOGE is it fired the bureaucrats but didn't eliminate the bureaucracy.
Thus we're stuck in a situation where the systems that used to work are crippled by lack of resources and we're in a decidedly more inefficient world and nothing to show for it.
Relevant example for the HN crowd - nondilutive funding through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is much harder to get, because SBIR is a shell of its former self and startups doing interesting, cutting edge research are finding it much harder to navigate the process. The funds are still there, but the program administration has made it nearly impossible to access.
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.
I'm very curious about how many other projects like this OPM retirement processing overhaul there are. I also wonder how this outcome will perform long-term.
It seems like the National Design Studio still has very close ties to Musk and is continuing a lot of what DOGE started.
One of the big issues - assuming good intent - was the dismissing of existing expertise on where the issues really are and jumping to the assumption that everyone in the system is corrupt and ripping off the tax payer. A simplistic model that can feel satisfying to promote on social media but is obviously naive. Jennifer Pahlka has worked on making our government more efficient and gives a much more educated view on what the real issues are. It's always baffling to me how Musk has all the resources one could imaging but loves to talk out of his ass instead of getting himself the maximum-validated information available to argue anyone. https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-making-government-mor...
> everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption
This is absolutely what should happen, but what will almost certainly happen is that the most openly corrupt president the US has ever had will blanket pardon everyone who remains loyal to him for the remainder of his term and there will be no federal level criminal legal consequences for any of these people.
And this is kind of the optimistic outcome, the one where the corrupt people in power don't find a way to extend their power indefinitely, which is certainly their plan (their incompetence may stop this from happening).
I never understood the presidential pardon. It's like America is basically admitting it has no faith in their own justice system. Or want a cheat code to skip it lol.
The US form of government is highly based on the existing British one and the British King had the ability to pardon and so that was copied over.
I do think it makes a lot of sense to do things like mass-pardon people for things that are no longer crimes (i.e. weed legalization) but I really don't see how singling out cases is correct since the supreme court already can do that.
To be fair, the power was added as a failsafe to be used for legitimate clemency in cases of judicial overreach which is also a concern. I do believe it was added with good intentions.
But like many aspects of US federal government, the people who drafted the rules naively presumed the people invoking them would have some level of integrity and a shame response that would stop them from using it for openly corrupt purposes.
They were, of course, wrong.
At the very least they should have ignored Hamilton and made it so that Senate approval was required for the pardons... though even that wouldn't be enough of a check today because we now know that Congress is capable of completely abdicating its power to the executive branch.
Calling the current regime "democratic rule" feels like a stretch. Wouldn't democratic rule first require that the ruler respects other democratic institutions such as the press, the courts, and the Constitution?
Like trying to storm congressional buildings when the democratically decided election was going to be confirmed? then maybe pardoning everyone involved in doing that when it failed the next time coming to power?
In part because of the destruction DOGE has caused any future democratic ruler will have a very tough time. It’s already neigh impossible to undo most of the damage the Trump party has caused, but it’s absolutely impossible to fix what DOGE destroyed, particularly without the evidence.
A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.
> A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.
And the Republicans will blame them for it, despite them being the cause of it.
If I had a dollar for every time Republicans blamed Democrats for the national debt despite the deficit consistently falling under Democrats and rising under Republicans...
Where's the actual systems of transparency and digital modernization of government programs?
It wouldn't be hard to show transparency into budgets and how the money is spent. Actually track it and make certain non-confidential things public. But as it stands the system scams the public taxpayer by labeling everything confidential and then hiding the data. It feels to me how criminals operate at the highest level.
So, is there a blacklist out there of all the DOGE goons? I remember a picture of a couple of grinning DOGE goons at a California facility trying to unleash a lot of water to help with the California fires except that it wouldn't help at all. Ah, found it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
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.
In any democracy, transparency is important, meaning you need to know what happens
to taxpayers' money. So, this government decided to put down a cloak of silence around it. That in itself is not only suspicious - it is highly illegal. The sooner the people get rid of this authoritarian regime the better.
It _is_ criminal and illegal. It's how authoritarian coups of democracy works: move fast and break things. It looks like America needs to find out the hard way how much worth breaking it actually accumulated.
The total lack of records, all the Signal usage during this sad era is such a deep deep cutting treason. Just valentpy hostile to everything, to the citizenry, to history, to democracy, to America.
The British burned the White House. This is a far worse, a far more grevious sundering of our history, our heritidge. (And Elon Musk is the worst killer with the most blood on his hands of anyone in the 21st century, for Thanos snapping USAID and others our of existence.)
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 communications anyway: "Sources may use TLP:CLEAR when information carries minimal or no
foreseeable risk of misuse". https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
It does seem like members of both political parties have had issues following the law on this point though - after all, Hillary's famous personal email server was an issue for the same reason.
I remember Hillary's email server as being an outrage because it might not have been secure. It didn't seem like she was actively deleting all the emails illegally.
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...
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 research Institutions where the dominant system for professors is soft money (no or partial tenure, salary is provided by research grants), there is a real crisis.
To try to make up the shortfall,we are submitting any more grants, doing less actual sciencee are submitting even more grants, and exacerbating the staffing issue at NIH.
DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government, doing what was lawfully passed legislation asked, and destroyed it anyway (instead of passing legislation to remove programs, the lawful way).
> What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.
Yep. You used to apply for a few relevant grants ahead of time, wait for your talented grad student to wait a few months whilst they continue their summer project, and you'd have an answer on whether or not you can take them on right as they finish.
Now? You apply continuously for a whole host of different grants, some of which are tentatively related to your field, at least a year in advance and hope that at least one of them pans out so that you can hire a potential grad student who might just wait around enough for the funding to come through.
The competition for funding is fierce, and I'm seeing a depressing pattern of profs taking on post docs who secured their own funding and needed a complimentary signature, to then take it from them and kick them out as soon as the money comes through
"DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government…"
Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.
>Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.
Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).
Also about destroying the government's investigative/enforcement capacity. USAID's destruction was ideological, but protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential.
> protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential
Don't you miss the simpler times when people could just frantically applaud Musk's genius and not be inconvenienced by the truth of how big of a role deception, grifting, and outright fraud played in his success?
Anyone who thought this guy was a genius is probably still frantically applauding.
And racism.
And who does this ultimately benefit?...
The billionaires who don't like regulations and like the idea of a semi-starving population that are forced to work in inhumane conditions for the lowest possible wages. Also, destroying democracy seems to be desired by them as they wish to concentrate all the power into their own hands.
DOGE was run like a startup and many startups are run like Sh!t shows with them following the mantra of break things fast ask questions later.
Case in point i know someone at the NIH who in March 2025 wasn't fired with his hordes of colleagues who were. Yet, fast forward a year later he gets a notice saying something like we are sorry but you should've been fired last year so be prepared to be let go at the end of June (2026).
Thankfully i just saw my friend last week as the end of June has passed and now he says they might keep him. Talk about batsh!t insanity for him and his life.
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 thoughtless and shallow.
> 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 American patriot want to adopt that style? Even the people who sincerely advocate for "government like a business" draw upon a completely different type, one where the CEO is answerable to a board, the board answerable to a shareholders, and most of the shares are publicly circulating.
P.S. We're not even touching whether the business-person sucked at business, which in this case is also quite damning.
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.
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.
> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government
Really? From what I've heard, DOGE was completely incompetent. Are you claiming they were actually extremely competent and simply couldn't find the waste?
Sounds to me like the claim is—with the perspective of somebody who has lived an entire professional life within the federal research award system—that it actually was highly efficient.
So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place.
What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?
I don’t have any reason to believe the grantmaking system is particularly inefficient. If I was in charge with saving money I would look at consolidating welfare and slashing the bureaucratic apparatus. Research grants wouldn’t even be in my top 10.
But this is what I mean, people are claiming that the government as a whole is efficient. I think that’s trivially false, and saying “doge didn’t find waste in research grants therefore the government is efficient, also doge is incompetent” is completely faulty logic.
They're saying that the federal government that DOGE "investigated" was already highly efficient.
Elon's goons are mostly a pack of bumbling morons sent on a mission to steal data for private purposes.
But if Elons goons are a pack of bumbling morons, it’s possible they simply didn’t find the waste that exists, or they had different goals (I.e. dismantling and looting). That they didn’t really find much isn’t evidence that waste doesn’t exist.
i've had to work with many people recently who DOGE fired, and our leadership keeps bringing them on board... they are all useless...i can't believe we hired these people, undoing the good work that DOGE did. govt feels impossible to fix
I've seen both sides of it. It's an unpleasant discussion but the government did drastic overhiring and now there are thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs.
But how do you fix it? These thousands of people have these jobs that their families depend on for survival. It's not their fault that the government severely messed up their hiring pipelines. If you cut the fat and leave those people out to dry, they certainly are not going to find work anywhere else. It's a lose lose situation.
> thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs.
Surely this is easy to prove, right?
Anyone who has been in the military can vouch for this. That is the primary angle I'm speaking from. The offices and installations are filled with the kind of people I described.
What’s the sample size here? Sounds like anecdotal evidence to me.
> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government
Wish we could see the evidence for that.
> What's the evidence for that?
If your mandate is to identify fraud or optimize a system, wouldn’t your success or failure be determined by the number of fraudulent cases you successfully prosecuted and won, as well as the amount of money you were able to recover?
Their god "genius" and leader promised[1] $2 trillion in cuts, if they haven't been achieve their stated goal, does that not mean that majority of the $2 trillion was being put to good use?
Running a government is nothing like running a company, because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating (example the military, food stamps, farmer subsidies) but are key to the successful operation of the government.
This is why it is often a terrible idea to have former CEOs ( who only care about revenue and profits) run governments or government arms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_X6VmsMWiI
>because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating
True, very true. I don't want my government turning a profit, but I do want my government being accountable and efficient on how it spends my taxes and what it gives me back for them. If I keep paying more and more but get less and less quality, I want some audits and changes to be done to fix this. "Government not being revenue generating" is not the answer here.
What do you think the GAO was setup to do? When was the last time you read a GAO report, if you claim to care about how the government spends your taxes and if they spend it efficiently?
DOGE was a total non-starter for anyone who knows how the US government works. They tried to replace something that already existed(GAO) and made things even worse.
A weird question to ask in a thread about the destruction of evidence.
DOGE's record.
> What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.
Well, they sure seemed to fail at finding much meaningful savings to be had. The government seems to be throwing money in the furnace at rates never seen before while actual outcomes seem anywhere from mixed to bad depending on your viewpoints.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-gover...
"One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired."
sahil also said:
> "The public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible," he continued. "In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions."
He also only very briefly worked with a single agency (VA), and his positives comments were about how the VA already had some open source Github repos and had a previous project to 'reduce claim times from "133 days to under a week"'. He was also critical of how they don't fire people with seniority, regardless of performance (which is enshrined in a reduction-in-force law from 1944) which explains why new and probationary employees were the ones let go when Trump's people took over. https://sahillavingia.com/doge
I mean, they're hardly blameless.
There's no need to do work for the jackbooted thugs at this point.
"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). "
These people [NIH, Grants] were not very skilled and the whole system was very corrupt. Good riddance.
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.
Unfortunately I have some insights I can not will not, must not talk about.
But from another perspective, the reviewers: an idiot and google is a very dangerous combination.
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.
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
There's actually a lot of waste. DOGE just didn't go after it. Check out DOD and all the 9- and 10-figure programs that get canceled without delivering anything, and whose work is often useless for follow-on work. OCX is a recent example, costing around $6 billion and took so long that the program it was supposed to replace ended up just doing the work instead. Essentially nothing of OCX will be retained. This isn't really unusual in the DOD.
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.
Yep. I’ve worked on some federal contracts and all the waste is in private contractors, not the government itself. There are structural issues with subcontractors many layers deep, each middleman taking a cut for doing little to nothing. It’s sick.
Heck, even before they do anything, there is a sizable industry (with just a few players) focused entirely on the incredibly byzantine (but originally well meaning) process of bidding for government contracts (and also the politicking of acquiring no-bid contracts).
And who is responsible for making sure federal contracts don't go to wasteful contractors?
Yeah but that’s a process issue that would require deep familiarity and probably acts of Congress to fix. That’s not something a few 25 year olds with no relevant experience can come in and fix in 100 days.
Sure but this whole thread reads like it's absolving the government giving these contracts and blaming private companies.
It's the frog and the scorpion fable.
It's why smart government created USDS, to clean up the mess left by contractors who set up the original healthcare.gov by having competent people work directly for the federal government. USDS was replaced with the incompetent DOGE (now US DOGE Service) and then completely shut down due to the new organization's incompetence.
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 the fed landscape and it slightly irks me. This is just the modern form of the $400 hammer...
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.
While your point is perfectly valid, there's a little more nuance to the $400 (or $600) hammer story:
https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...
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.
This is a profoundly dismissive and even circular take...or at least an intentional misrepresentation of what I said.
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.
I'm referring to things like the DOI rescinding the 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule that allowed private ecologically minded conservation groups to restore and preserve land through leases -- something exploitive resource extracting private entities were already able to do.
Instead the DOI declared their "lean" and "constrained" force would revoke letting private entities lease for conservation. Something at odds with lean employees trying to maximize conservation ROI. Why would they be begging to rip away conservation from private hands into unavailable public hands if they didn't already have the manpower, unless they're playing a political fuck-fuck game?
That reveals the true fuck-fuck game. DOI employees claim they are lean, out of employees, etc while actively pursuing actions that are counter to how those acting in such circumstances are in the interest of acting. But actually their management are rescinding rules that help offload conservation to private actors happy to do it, instead diluting the ability of the DOI to preserve resources by instead tossing additional tasks on already overloaded employees at which point they'll have their spouses on forums complaining and stirring up the voters to try and bring more employees under their grasp. Presuming they're successful, they will then again swamp said employees, and the cycle starts anew.
Which brings me back to my assertion:
>. 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.
If they were actually trying to unload tasks from employees they'd be happy that environmental groups were trying to take the load off DOI employees and paying them leasing fees to do it, but that's not in the interest of management, as that could reduce their headcount and ability to beg for more money. Thus you can witness from actual acts of the DOI, it doesn't matter how many resources and people they get, their management are acting in ways it will appear to employees like they're broke and thin on people because they're run on ragged edges (something not unique, seen in many other areas of government, that will keep expanding task for current employees to the point they always seem broke and stretched out).
hang on, isn't that true in private for profit companies too? Is not the path to VP from director typically grabbing more teams that report to you?
Depends on the company, but there is another possibility, to produce more profit rather than more reports.
You are correct and DOD contracts also have been coopted by the political system to fill other needs like funneling money to senators' districts.
Those jobs protects aren't necessarily wasteful in that they stimulate the economy and cutting them would have serious impacts for those states. The essential question is, could that subsidy to a state have more impact. For instance, rather than building tanks the military does not want or need, fund and hire more teachers, build things the military actually does need like ships, fund startups, fund science projects in those states, etc...
I had an edit in my comment about military spending being an exception but I decided to leave it out to not distract from the core idea.
Though there is nuance there too, as some wasteful military spending seems to be more of a jobs program for specific congressional districts.
I guess it depends on what you see as waste.
As a programmer I see waste all the time where people are doing work that could be clearly computerized for better speed and accuracy.
You’re confused becuase they set out to confuse you.
The waste isn’t in employees doing their jobs, it’s what they are doing.
IRS enforcement is a great example. Enforcement is the most expensive way to get tax compliance. The IRS spends lots and lots of money collecting small amounts of money from people with no political clout and limited value. But, because the congressional budget says so, they ignore really obvious and common tax avoidance, which encourages the behavior and drives more losses.
DOGE fired more people and made it worse. I’m running an estate waiting for a determination from them to close out tax obligations, a pretty significant amount. I escalated the issue with my US Senator’s office. I was told they have 2 staff capable of working the issue nationally, and to expect a 2-3 year wait after it being escalated. According to my attorney, these issues took 6-8 months previously.
There is a general misunderstanding about "waste" in firms, organizations, and governments. Perfect efficiency DOES NOT EXIST and even if it did, it is NOT EVEN A DESIRABLE STATE for these entities. Sometimes when you see "waste", and you relentlessly try to drive efficiency, you destroy the _system_ that makes the desirable parts possible in the first place.
Big Tech is just as guilty of this. It’s just not the public’s money.
Consent matters.
Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term.
*edit: spelling
> 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 thing (edit: for large, complex systems), and is often deliberately incremental (think "strangler fig pattern" or Ship of Theseus). Replacing may or may not be incremental, but as the OCX effort was conducted, it was decidedly not in-place and that's largely why it failed.
It was a large system that tried to deliver everything in a big bang, instead of aiming for either a side-by-side (with the prior system) series of incremental releases to prove itself out or upgrade-in-place (possibly with subsystems done in a side-by-side release fashion, or just replaced). That big bang was always going to fail and the DOD loves to put out these contracts. Unsurprisingly, the DOD has not done any effective large scale IT replacement projects that did not either outright fail (like OCX) or significantly grow in their cost and timelines (as OCX did before it failed) even if they eventually succeeded in delivering a replacement.
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.
The DOD might be the one exception to federal waste in spending precisely because they cannot be audited. Every single other federal agency is audited nonstop. The DOD due to military and security reasons is not
None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway.
Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.
I agree with the sentiment here, however, back in the 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a reduction in military spending. Military bases were closing; many of my friends/peers were discharged from service, and so on. And then 9/11 happened and military spending has skyrocketed ever since. Coincidence? Hmmm?
Trump was famously elected as the big isolationist candidate and we know how that went...
“Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons“
It’s essentially self-evident that someone receiving money or benefits paid for by others considers those benefits to be “important.”
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending
I do not believe anyone who has consulted in federal IT or worked on contracts is capable of making such a statement. All of the motivations for all parties are heavily bent towards waste, and in fact any attempt to make things more efficient (reduce headcount, for instance) would be recieved poorly by department heads and contractors.
As one example, a department head who reduces staff by 20% has just reduced their own next year's budget AND kneecapped their resume.
"There isn't really much waste in federal spending."
That's debatable, because of all the pork programs that are snuck into large, omnibus spending bills. However, even that could be sold as, "one man's trash is another man's treasure" type of scenario; ergo, no waste!
I challenge anyone to read through the budget proposals and see what was authorized, it's interesting to say the least.
I think flying apache helicopters to salute a musician at his home or beachgoers on 4th of July counts as waste, and are not really important to anybody. So are the remodeling of reflecting pool and ballroom construction.
this is non sequitor.
why isn't there really much waste in federal spending? because when you cut, nobody likes it.
well, no. there is pork.
a better example might be: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half" - John Wanamaker
Excellent quote. It's easy to draw conclusions one way or another, but the real challenge to fixing the budget is easily just as much trying to understand what the hell is going on with it.
I imagine it like if you were trying to clear hard disk space but QDirStat only gave obscure indications of what the files were and you had to go through a complex legal process to delete anything.
I think your analogy is good, but misses the mark by millimeters. Optimizing is easy when you have a giant directory in the root of the drive named "delete this later". It's difficult when you have hundreds of thousands of directories, each with 100 files, of which you actually only need 75-85. You can't just delete any whole directory, because then things break; you have to go through each one and evaluate the purpose of each file, which is an expense in itself.
Fair point, although I get the feeling you may underestimate the state of disorganized chaos that my filesystems sometimes become.
Yeah. Anyone who has worked with government agencies (federal or state, doesn't matter) knows how much waste and grift there is. Not All Agencies(tm) of course, but many.
The issue is figuring out how to actually fix that. It's Chesteron's Fences all the way down. Someone smarter than I would need to figure out how to even start on the problem.
The big issue though is that everyday people get exposed to the obvious inefficiencies in their day to day interactions, and don't see much if any of the big picture. So in pop-culture the meme builds up that all government spending is inefficient wastefulness. No one really talks or thinks about the stuff that just works.
The same sort of problems are endemic in private industry too. As I came from a working class background and worked my way up I like to say "America is fraud from the bottom up" - since I was exposed to the lower rungs of it first. It was definitely a shock coming into the working world as a naive teenager.
It would take an entire cultural shift to get much traction, imo.
Why did Bill Clinton execute the largest Federal cuts in the 90s and everyone said they were needed?
Because Bill Clinton pushed Democrats rightwards with his electoral policy of "triangulation". That was the start of establishment Dems embracing Reaganomics.
it wouldn't be a triangle if it meant embracing one of the poles.
Clinton benefited from an era where if a voter was going to hear how bad your idea was then he got a chance to defend it.
His cuts were actually considered and targeted. He didn’t just hire a billionaire to take a chainsaw to ‘woke’ gov programs.
But the original claim was
>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.
It sounds like you're arguing for the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job, which implies that there actually is waste is government spending.
>But the original claim was
>>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
And your response to the claim "there isn't really much waste in federal spending" is to say "what about 30 years ago, someone you probably liked got rid of a lot of things they said were wasteful"?
in short, if 30 years ago someone got rid of a lot of waste in federal spending it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste in federal spending.
>it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste in federal spending.
Was Clinton particularly thorough in eliminating waste? Is there reason to believe that no new waste materialized in 3 decades?
I wouldn't know in one way or the other, I'm just following the age-old HN tradition of pointing out that the conclusion from observation does not necessarily follow. That is to say the person who said
>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
does not have to be actually making the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job.
Yeah, I don't agree with OP really. Cuts can be warranted, necessary and popular. It takes actual work to determine the best places to make cuts though. The DOGE cuts were completely vibes based and did basically nothing, especially since the big beautiful bill increased spending right after. Frankly, the main reason I hate the Trump admin is because they make policy 100% based on vibes, always choosing the most intellectually lazy way possible to implement their goals to 'fix' whatever problems they 'think' exist.
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending
What makes the federal any different than any other organization?
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, this does not negate your point since the Department of Education does more than advancing academic achievement?
Each state has its own rules for education. The Department of Education mostly funds programs based on federal law, but they can only regulate state's activities they’re breaking federal law, you can't solely blame the department for failures of multiple state governments.
Is there any evidence that the education research has been of any benefit to educational results?
The dollars spent is not evidence of accomplishment.
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?
test scores have actually gone down in a number of states I don't think whatever the department of education is doing is actually working.
State governments administer education separately, the Department of Education's job is to make sure they are following federal law. The Department mainly administers federal programs that dish out funding to states.
Y'all really don't understand how education works in America and your comments make it clear for all to see.
By what yardstick should we then measure the DoEd's performance-per-dollar, or determine whether it represents "waste"?
Because it seems to me that a chief indicator that waste likely exists is an inability to show ROI.
>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.
You’re wrong. The execution failed because it was backed by (white supremacist) ideology. COGE is a new attempt at the idea taking place in New York, and much better orchestrated.
>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons.
"[Pushing MAGA initiatives] is important to somebody for good reasons." Yes, zealots love pushing their ideology.
In about 15 seconds I found the following:
Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology
Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology
An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching
These are pure waste pushed by religious zealots.
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...
There's plenty of waste. It doesn't matter how much you pour at the top of a leaky pipeline, very little of it will make its way down to the desired recipients.
You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare for what can at best be described as mediocre outcomes. The Netherlands spends $6000 and is near the tops of the charts when it comes to quality. What's the ratio of effectiveness per dollar we're looking at here? 5 to 1?
It doesn't matter whether or not people like it when you cut, you have to if your want your country to exist in 50 years. But just as importantly you have to get rid of the leeches in the middle of the pipe and make sure the money that's left is actually doing work for you.
> You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare
You’re using a number that includes private and public spending. There are problems with this topic, but it’s a different topic than federal government spending waste.
There are some real federal government spending inefficiencies, but you picked a topic that is predominantly private spend.
It's still $8000 per capita just for socialised healthcare. So still more than NL. The US has the worst of both worlds.
The socialized segment of US healthcare is almost entirely the over 65 population and those too disabled to work any job. Obviously, the spending on those groups will be higher than the entire population as a whole.
That it is does nothing to prove inefficiency.
The spend is on private health insurance going to for-profit middlemen. It's not mostly on the government. People love to crow about Medicare and Medicaid (safety net government-run insurance) waste but the vast majority of "waste" is the record profits put up by private companies.
Through Medicare and Medicaid, the US spends more public money per capita on healthcare than any other country spends period. This is largely because Medicare/Medicaid were not allowed to negotiate pricing; they were legally required to accept whatever price companies wanted to set for a treatment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
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 asked ChatGPT of course, and the response roughly corresponded to my expectations so I went no further. Doctors make way more here than elsewhere (British doctors aren’t making 500-750k a year), pharma makes most of its money here, and hospitals charge an arm and a leg - it all checks out, no? Alternatively, if insurance were straight up responsible for doubling health care costs in any easily attributable way, we could easily get rid of it and would have done so by now. The only reason it can continue to exist is that it occupies a no-man’s land of utility.
Isn’t healthcare is the prime example of government run programs being much more efficient and efficacious than privatized ones?
The US has a massive tangled hodgepodge of private companies, having poor coverage, very high prices, and quite poor outcomes. Meanwhile there are numerous European countries with public healthcare systems that are far cheaper and provide much better outcomes.
Here’s one of a million sources:
https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-syst...
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
When there is no profit motive, there is no motive to be efficient.
And when there is a profit motive, and no meaningful competition, there is also no motive to be efficient or effective. This is what you'll find in many of the large DOD contracts.
So it's a compounding effect. It's down to whether the overseers of the contracts care enough to rein in the contractors, or to do just enough to stay on this side of legal. And the contractors certainly aren't doing charity work, so they'll balloon the costs up to the point of significant pushback and then tighten it down a bit.
At this point, spending isn't the only problem, either. We need to increase revenues.
It's thought that the IRS foregoes collecting hundreds of billions of dollars each year[0]. That's a significant chunk of the Federal government's discretionary spending each budget cycle.
People who say they want to run the government like a business seem to ignore the fact that no business has ever remained financially sound without steady revenues. It simply cannot be done.
[0]https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...
> There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
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.
It all started off as obvious bullshit: in 2024 Elon Musk was claiming that he could cut $2 trillion in waste, fraud, and abuse. He then walked that back to $1 trillion in cuts, but he didn't even get close.
there are two big exceptions to this, the military and healthcare. playing world police is incredibly wasteful and so is funding a system based on submitting to the demands of big pharma and for-profit hospitals.
the problem is 50 years worth of propaganda convincing americans that all this is good and necessary and if you disagree that makes you a communist/welfare queen/terrorist supporter/woke activist. at least now with gen z even the far right agrees that foreign wars are a bad idea.
The US has made an active policy decision for decades to be the world police, flowing from that policy spending on world policing isn't automatically waste unless it's highly inefficient.
It’s money well spent if you view the cost of not doing it as another war that leaves half the world’s industrial capacity in literal ruins as happened several times before.
I’m not saying this is true, but it’s the motivation.
A war that was very good for what the US economic juggernaut has become. We may be significantly better off maintaining great relationships with our Western Hemisphere countries and let the oceans protect us.
There is an ocean in the middle of the "western hemisphere". Did you mean "Americas continent countries"?
Including South America too, yes. I'd not characterize it as the middle, it's mostly centered around the landmasses on most maps.
MIC gets paid handsomely to make sure this gets perpetuated. But goes back to even Smedley Butlers time, using the military and intelligence services to ensure capitalists have cheap access to resources. Supercharged with the second Iraq war as mercenary companies took over military work and contractors "rebuilding" the country.
Trump is a continuation of this well played track, with the a large sprinkle of fascism, grifting and destruction of the federal government as a goal.
>and for-profit hospitals.
but only 36% are for-profit?
https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership
Medical services are for-profit, not the hospitals. The hospitals funnel money to for-profit vendors.
Depends on your definition of wasteful. Americans expect their government to be able to waves hands DO SOMEthing about various things in the world. Maintaining that capability is expensive.
I don't know if that desire is caused by intentional propaganda or if it's just who we are as a people because of our history.
Maybe it's not right, but it's what Americans expect from our government right now.
A large portion of people don't want to be part of social security. I'd rather die in a ditch than take social security -- when I was broke I instead just went homeless and did day labor rather than take a dime. I looked into filing the forms to permanently separate from social security but apparently there is religious discrimination here and it is only allowed for religions that existed before 1950, if I want to make the Church of Fuck Social Security then it magically isn't allowed because government decided at a magical date constitutional protections on religious discrimination don't exist.
You wouldn’t even take social security benefits despite (I assume) having been forced to pay social security taxes?
Even Ayn Rand took social security benefits. Some people point to that as hypocrisy, but I feel if the government forced you to pay into a program it is moral to take back from it (though not more than you contributed), even if you morally object to the program overall.
I can understand preferring to handle your own affairs rather than pay into SS. But why would you be so opposed to it that you'd rather die than receive SS payments?
The level of unprovoked violence used to enforce social security I find unjustifiable just to satisfy my material requirements.
Do you take that attitude towards all other government services?
Yes, I went out of my way to live in a place with no public roads, no public utilites, no fire, and no police and in a house built with no government inspections. Whenever there is a way to avoid interacting with public services I do everything I can to avoid them.
At least you're consistent! But I do have to question your claim that "a large portion" of people are like this, or even that they just want to avoid SS and never mind the rest. That's an extremely niche position.
Well, computing and AI technology is going to be nationalized and state owned in a couple years. Good luck.
I'm curious what you mean by "violence" here.
Generally you can infer they mean taxation.
Or what happens to them if they try to "opt out" of paying those taxes.
The 28th amendment was affirmed by Biden near the end of his term, which states that the "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." DEI programs that offer benefits only to women are unconstitutional.
They cut much more than DEI programs. They aggressively and ignorantly cut jobs and grants which could have benefited the planet and saved lives.
https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...
This government thinks bike lanes are DEI: https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportat...
They just slap DEI on any policy they disagree with.
NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan via grants issued to EcoHealth Alliance. Which, even if you do not think lab leak theory is likely, is extremely reckless and incompetent.
So, at best, they're funding illegal research. At worst, their research inadvertently led to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.
Exactly how many grants are necessary to make up for that, and why would you trust the agency issuing grants for illegal research to manage such a program?
>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...
In the 90s, I was running out of space on my 2GB Win95 machine. I decided to delete files. But I was not ready to part with my games which were consuming the bulk of the hard drive. I noticed every application folder had those .ini files and they were everywhere.
So I deleted them, and saved a few megs overall. Win win. Everything worked just fine... Until I restarted. That's doge.
Also in the 90s...
I remember they were HP Bobcats. We had two of them in a student lab and user directories weren't on a separate partition... so things filled up. And they kept getting filled up.
One of the people who ran the lab found that he could get back a couple of hundred kilobytes by running strip on all of the various things he wrote.
... or something to that effect. It worked.So he ran it in the root directory too and was pleased to find many megabytes more of space was available.
... Did you know that .so files are executable? ... And the kernel too?
Things that were statically compiled worked. But anything that was dynamically compiled failed. And when the machine was rebooted... it was really unhappy with being unable to find the linking information for the kernel.
Had to go beg a tape reinstall of the OS to get it working again.
(and then there was the story of the guy who bought a NeXT and thought that the "bin" guy was taking up too much space)
With the default arguments in the 1990s strip wouldn’t strip “linking information” it would just strip debugging symbols. You wouldn’t have been able to debug a core dump say but dynamically linked binaries would have been totally fine.
Until the last two words, I assumed you posted in the wrong story :-D
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 gave way too much credence to Musk and his clique, turned out the efficiency theatre was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a different style of operation.
I am not sure they even tried to cut waste in a meaningful way, or if they had the competence to do so.
Chesterton's Fence, even if there is actual inefficiency there might be a reason for that. It might not be a good reason mind you, but even a bad reason is still a reason. You cannot cut inefficiency without understanding the reason first. It would take multiple years of research to understand and uncover all the inefficiency that has built up over the years. Otherwise you just end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
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.
We had a significant reduction in government workforce during the Clinton administration.
The stark difference is that THAT effort was handled with careful planning and through the proper channels. The way any mature, thoughtful, and responsible person would approach something like this.
One thing has been made very clear with Trump's terms - if there is no detailed plan on how they intend to do something, it's going to be a disaster. You can't just wing things and expect everything to work out.
Unless you just want to disrupt, punish, hurt, etc., in which case this is working as planned...which some may claim was the actual plan all along.
One 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 sankey diagram like dataset in a public git repo that anyone could access and audit. There is certainly lots of waste, but there is also loads of government spending where the value is not obvious.
We already have that in the GAO. We also have personnel who's job is to root out fraud: inspector generals. The budget is constantly audited scrutinized for excess and waste, except 2 departments: defense and Medicare. The former is pork for the politicians' home states. The later is so complex it relies on the healthcare industry to help write the rules. And they can't help making sure they get paid the most.
Good thing trumps on that fraud by bolstering the IGs and not just gutting them across all agencies...
Yes, the GAO exists. But under the current administration, it's basically like a security guard that just sits there and watches crooks do bad shit, reports it, and then nothing happens.
And the Trump administration would similarly hamstring any newly created transparency organization. Not that the current congress would ever pass such a thing. And anyway, the Supreme Court has made sure that even if congress passed a law to make a(nother) government transparency agency, they can't make that agency truly independent and protected from presidential interference.
> massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes.
That existed! The links the various DOGE apparatchik kept posting as 'evidence' were from publicly available databases of spending, contracts, etc. The 'receipts' site was just a poor, partially-understood scrape of that data!
People do this all the time
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iu44ub/up...
https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
https://sankeymatic.com/gallery/federal-budget.html
Also: https://sam.gov/
There is also Michael Lewis's book "Who Is Government?" if you want more meaningful stories.
You might be interested in this:
"So you want to reform democracy" - Joshua Tauberer https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-...
The issue is deciding importance and most people are too stupid to understand nth order effects. So that will turn into the usual pitchforks.
People don't pick up pitchforks because they don't understand something; people pick up pitchforks because they're told to pick them up. The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.
>The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.
What was bad faith about it? As someone who literally only heard of this drama because of this comment, so far as I can tell the controversy is that they omitted some white immigrant neighborhoods (eg. little italy), and Mamdani backtracked on it?
Do you mean something like the longstanding Government Accountability Office, which was formed by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921?
no no, they mean some other thing, which is different in totally unexplainable ways and – most importantly – doesn't make one feel stupid for not knowing it existed
www.sam.gov
knock yourself out
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...
oh it's much worse. Projections are around 14 million mark. i.e. something around the region of a 100 Hiroshimas
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o
Death and suffering on an unfathomable scale will be the ultimate legacy of these people. I wish they would be confronted with their crimes in front of a tribunal, but they’ll probably get away with what they did, at least in a legal sense.
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 am I responsible for this person's death? He had fallen on the subway tracks all on his own, it was his fault. All I did was extend a hand to him, let him climb halfway up, and then kick him in the face back down. So why is everyone looking at me now? The outcome is the same it would've been if no one jumped in to help. Why aren't you calling the bystanders murderers too?
Because feeding starving children is the right thing to do.
Because we're rich and powerful and we believe the world should be a better place.
It doesn't matter what other countries do. We should want to step up and help. Leaders lead.
A patient is in the middle of surgery. The surgeon is informed that the patient's insurance no longer covers the procedure. Should the surgeon leave the patient sliced open on the operating table, pull their tubes and IVs, and slam the door on the way out?
This is exactly analogous 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.
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.
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.
I read "looting" as installing a non-controlled StarLink terminal to silently pilfer protected data about Americans without going through existing infrastructure and leaving an audit trail.
Well, for one, we know there were DOGE members that exfiltrated social security data for personal use [1]. And that's only what we know of so far.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-se...
The problem with DOGE is it fired the bureaucrats but didn't eliminate the bureaucracy.
Thus we're stuck in a situation where the systems that used to work are crippled by lack of resources and we're in a decidedly more inefficient world and nothing to show for it.
Relevant example for the HN crowd - nondilutive funding through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is much harder to get, because SBIR is a shell of its former self and startups doing interesting, cutting edge research are finding it much harder to navigate the process. The funds are still there, but the program administration has made it nearly impossible to access.
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.
Is DOGE gone though? https://xcancel.com/spikebrehm/status/2072422555101561154
I'm very curious about how many other projects like this OPM retirement processing overhaul there are. I also wonder how this outcome will perform long-term.
It seems like the National Design Studio still has very close ties to Musk and is continuing a lot of what DOGE started.
One of the big issues - assuming good intent - was the dismissing of existing expertise on where the issues really are and jumping to the assumption that everyone in the system is corrupt and ripping off the tax payer. A simplistic model that can feel satisfying to promote on social media but is obviously naive. Jennifer Pahlka has worked on making our government more efficient and gives a much more educated view on what the real issues are. It's always baffling to me how Musk has all the resources one could imaging but loves to talk out of his ass instead of getting himself the maximum-validated information available to argue anyone. https://cnliberalism.org/posts/podcast-making-government-mor...
Perhaps a GAO look-see is needed?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Government_Accou...
May be worth noting/reminding of the 17 inspectors general that were fired on the first Friday (2025-01-24) of Trump 2.0 administration:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspec...
Perhaps the current government shouldn’t be in power and everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption
Perhaps that’s what the 2nd Amendment is for
Movements/causes that use violence are less successful (23%) than those that use non-violence (45%):
* https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-no...
* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978...
At least per historical surveys (600 movements since 1900).
And yet, 100% of states, successful and unsuccessful, use violence for various purposes
> everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption
This is absolutely what should happen, but what will almost certainly happen is that the most openly corrupt president the US has ever had will blanket pardon everyone who remains loyal to him for the remainder of his term and there will be no federal level criminal legal consequences for any of these people.
And this is kind of the optimistic outcome, the one where the corrupt people in power don't find a way to extend their power indefinitely, which is certainly their plan (their incompetence may stop this from happening).
I never understood the presidential pardon. It's like America is basically admitting it has no faith in their own justice system. Or want a cheat code to skip it lol.
Complex systems don't pop out of thin air.
The US form of government is highly based on the existing British one and the British King had the ability to pardon and so that was copied over.
I do think it makes a lot of sense to do things like mass-pardon people for things that are no longer crimes (i.e. weed legalization) but I really don't see how singling out cases is correct since the supreme court already can do that.
> Complex systems don't pop out of thin air.
You've obviously never been part of an SAP/ERP implementation. /s
To be fair, the power was added as a failsafe to be used for legitimate clemency in cases of judicial overreach which is also a concern. I do believe it was added with good intentions.
But like many aspects of US federal government, the people who drafted the rules naively presumed the people invoking them would have some level of integrity and a shame response that would stop them from using it for openly corrupt purposes.
They were, of course, wrong.
At the very least they should have ignored Hamilton and made it so that Senate approval was required for the pardons... though even that wouldn't be enough of a check today because we now know that Congress is capable of completely abdicating its power to the executive branch.
You can rest assured Trump is going to preemptively pardon everyone associated with him. On an ungodly scale.
And why wouldn't he? Biden preemptively pardoned his family, which was unprecedented, and Democrats said it was fine.
This is now the world we live in, and why these precedents are bad.
Overthrowing democratic rule feels like an overreaction.
Calling the current regime "democratic rule" feels like a stretch. Wouldn't democratic rule first require that the ruler respects other democratic institutions such as the press, the courts, and the Constitution?
Democratic rule primarily means that those who win elections get to rule.
That's really the by far most important aspect!
Like trying to storm congressional buildings when the democratically decided election was going to be confirmed? then maybe pardoning everyone involved in doing that when it failed the next time coming to power?
This American administration is full of criminals
I can't think of one person in this administration who is not a criminal.
Bold of them to assume they kept records (aside from random Signal chats) in the first place...
Some folks I know in academia have their funding cut and so a good stream of research is stopped. Wonder how prevalent it is across academia.
first, eliminate record-keepers.
In part because of the destruction DOGE has caused any future democratic ruler will have a very tough time. It’s already neigh impossible to undo most of the damage the Trump party has caused, but it’s absolutely impossible to fix what DOGE destroyed, particularly without the evidence.
A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.
> A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.
And the Republicans will blame them for it, despite them being the cause of it.
If I had a dollar for every time Republicans blamed Democrats for the national debt despite the deficit consistently falling under Democrats and rising under Republicans...
Where's the actual systems of transparency and digital modernization of government programs?
It wouldn't be hard to show transparency into budgets and how the money is spent. Actually track it and make certain non-confidential things public. But as it stands the system scams the public taxpayer by labeling everything confidential and then hiding the data. It feels to me how criminals operate at the highest level.
Needless to mention it was 100% theater and absolute destruction of government was simply the point
US Treasury is borrowing $155 billion every month is now paying $24 billion a week in interest
* https://fortune.com/2026/07/10/us-treasury-borrowed-155-bill...
And at least $21 TRILLION of the $40 TRILLION national debt is from militarization
* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
So, is there a blacklist out there of all the DOGE goons? I remember a picture of a couple of grinning DOGE goons at a California facility trying to unleash a lot of water to help with the California fires except that it wouldn't help at all. Ah, found it: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Wonder if the remember to delete all the public data they pilfered.
the comments on this website are sometimes indistinguishable from r politics
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.
Doge was a scam, of course.
This government is criminal. Why?
In any democracy, transparency is important, meaning you need to know what happens to taxpayers' money. So, this government decided to put down a cloak of silence around it. That in itself is not only suspicious - it is highly illegal. The sooner the people get rid of this authoritarian regime the better.
It _is_ criminal and illegal. It's how authoritarian coups of democracy works: move fast and break things. It looks like America needs to find out the hard way how much worth breaking it actually accumulated.
Oh no. Now we will never identify those millions of dead people that DOGE claimed were receiving social security.
At least we cut those wasteful USAID programs to stop children getting HIV.
Given that DOGE was itself illegal, my guess is that the records were illegally disposed of.
This behavior will continue on behalf of people like Musk and Trump until a real consequence is introduced.
The total lack of records, all the Signal usage during this sad era is such a deep deep cutting treason. Just valentpy hostile to everything, to the citizenry, to history, to democracy, to America.
The British burned the White House. This is a far worse, a far more grevious sundering of our history, our heritidge. (And Elon Musk is the worst killer with the most blood on his hands of anyone in the 21st century, for Thanos snapping USAID and others our of existence.)
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 communications anyway: "Sources may use TLP:CLEAR when information carries minimal or no foreseeable risk of misuse". https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
It does seem like members of both political parties have had issues following the law on this point though - after all, Hillary's famous personal email server was an issue for the same reason.
I remember Hillary's email server as being an outrage because it might not have been secure. It didn't seem like she was actively deleting all the emails illegally.
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...
Thinkudur chiddrun
Didn't they find one department was paying for like 10k licenses of WinZip?
I don't know. Did they?
I guess you could say....
They doged the bullet.