Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to Lead Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to Lead Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

cnn.com

61 pointsdoppp50 comments

"The announcement of Ramaswamy and particularly Musk, who leads companies with existing, lucrative government contracts, raises immediate questions about potential conflicts of interest"

Absolutely no conflict of interest, between this and SpaceX. You can bet that he will try to cut grants and any programs designed to boost competition in rockets & space.

So I've listened to Vivek in interviews, and its clear to me at least that he

1) Doesn't like poor immigrants, considers them a net drain on national resources. 2) Believes that the profile of a desirable immigrant is Educated, English Speaking, Westernized (As far as American civics/ideals are concerned). 3) Doesn't think Americans are culturally capable of upskilling and retooling to bring back the semiconductor industry.

So given the above. What does his appointment spell for the tech industry. Do we expect an uptick in H1b-visa workers? Are we onshoring the semiconductor industry in the US?

Also primary source (interview): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

It seems like a long stretch from government efficiency to immigrant qualifications.

Yes, thats my suspicion. The department's unofficial mandate is rather open ended so I am trying to make sense of this with limited information.

What I love about this is that it has a defined mission and an expiration date. Everything should have this. Instead once they accomplish their original mission their only goal is to survive and the best way to do that is to grow and manage more things unrelated to the original goal.

I’m not sure DOGE is successful but the concept of creating a program where the goal is to delete itself by accomplishing a specific mission by a specific time is great.

It's a nice idea because there's certainly a lot of inefficiency in the federal government, however I'm skeptical a separate external commission of outsiders (no matter how smart and motivated) will be able to accomplish much in the ~6 months it will exist. Senior career bureaucrats inside large federal agencies are apex grand masters of manipulation, camouflage and political hostage-taking. They'll deploy malicious compliance, weaponized policy farming and media leaks in ways so viciously devious it'll make Alien Xenomorphs look like Care Bears.

It will exist for roughly 18 months. January 2025 to July 2026. Thrice as much time to do the “work”.

This feels like the proverbial "Heading the FBI Office out of Rural Alaska". A new Extra-governmental agency?

"As the first order of business, this commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months."

Could be legit, or could just be a report that is filed away. I suspect that is the reason for an extra-governmental agency. If they do something good, great, if not, easy to fire them.

It seems inefficient to have two people in charge of an agency. Wouldn't it be more efficient to not even create a new agency and just have Trump make these determinations? Otherwise you're creating more bureaucracy to eliminate other bureaucracy which is... inefficient.

It's very funny that the very first thing anybody knows about the department of efficiency is that it has two bosses.

Does Elon need to divest his business holdings to run a government agency that can directly affect his investment?

No, no, no. That's not how you do oligarchy.

Given that this "government agency" apparently is going to "provide advice and guidance from outside of Government" it wouldn't hit that divesting rule. Only if you're on government payroll does that apply AFAIK. But IANAL.

Of course not. He made an illegal lottery to buy votes and got away with it. Love to see US corruption in the face of everybody so the US stop attacking other countries using allegedly corruption.

Didn't a court rule it was legal?

What's the difference between this and the GAO? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...

I can't remember the GAO ever doing investigations on government inefficiency. Mostly I see reports from them on where projects are blowing out budgets or instances where the government isn't properly reporting to the public. They don't identify solutions to problems usually, just point out the problems.

The same as the difference between the Department of Redundancy Department and the Bureau of Standard Acronyms

http://www.alexandraerin.com/2015/05/fiction-the-redundant-m...

Where do you guys find these? I really enjoy reading these short stories people post on here

Javier Gerardo Milei (President of Argentina) has managed to do this simply by eliminating entire agencies.

How long ago and what has the outcome been? Curious to start learning more abut what we might be walking into.

Unemployment and recession. But after a year, inflation is back to the levels of when he got in power

> But after a year, inflation is back to the levels of when he got in power

Is that so? You mean this AP release from today is fake [1]?

  >BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Argentina’s inflation slowed to 2.7% in October, the lowest level in three years in a win for the libertarian government of President Javier Milei who came to power almost a year ago promising to pull Argentina out of a dire economic crisis.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/argentina-inflation-milei-economy...

Not to mention the countless other successes. Like ending rent control causing the housing supply to skyrocket, lowering rent prices across the board.

https://reason.com/2024/10/11/argentina-ended-rent-control-g...

Afuera!

> Here's another interesting fact from Argentina's rent controls, per the Journal: "In Buenos Aires—a city dubbed the Paris of the South for its broad avenues and cafe culture—many apartments long sat empty, with landlords preferring to keep them vacant, or lease them as vacation rentals, rather than comply with the government's rent law." The newspaper said that owners of many of those 200,000 units are now putting them on the market.

> I've reported on a similar situation in San Francisco, which has more than 52,000 vacant units. Many owners would rather keep them empty than rent them out under the city's rent-control terms

So it's just a bunch of oligarchs owning far more land and buildings than they should withholding supply artificially. Then they can artifically ease off of it to make things look better for their preferred candidate even though rent prices aren't that much better. Even the article admits rent prices are still going up year over year, it's only when adjusted for inflation that it looks slightly better (which, also ironic given that his policies seem to have sharply raised inflation). So your average person still gets fucked.

I don't know what "artificial" is supposed to mean here. Landlords respond to incentives; if letting out a unit means they'll be stuck with a rent controlled tenant (or in the US, stuck with a tenant-favorable legal environment that will leave them on the hook for damages and missed rent) then the smart thing to do is STR or use the apartment as your own guest home etc.

The smart thing for the government to do would be to make sitting on rental property illegal.

Without rent control, my friends and I could not afford to live in SF. It’s one of the only things keeping the city from being completely captured by the wealthy.

Just to be clear, that's monthly inflation, not annual. Annual is still 193%

Expanding on this, ("monthly rate" Vs "month by month projected annual rate" figures)

"When he was elected" (December 2023) he came in on the November 2023 annual inflation rate of 160.9%.

At the end of December 2023 the annual inflation rate was 211.4%

From the AP News link:

    On an annual basis, inflation in October (2024) was 193% compared to 209% reported in September (2024).

As a chart, see: https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/inflation-cpi

and select time frame of interest, 1YR is tight, 3YR shows the rise and fall.

The inflation rate is headed toward the 'low' of November 2023 but hasn't quite yet descended there yet.

It's been less than a year. Inflation lags deficit money creation by about 13 months.

sure, just wanted to point that out since someone who didn't read the article could have easily assumed that was an annual number, as in the US we are used to 2ish percent annual inflation being the target.

It is interesting that nobody contested the unemployment and recession (-4% of GDP) part.

as pgdozin and defrost explained, annual inflation was around 160% 1 year ago and now is 193%.

About a year. Paste on how it's going:

>How is it going so far? If we were giving out report cards, Milei’s tenure would get a B+ to A- grade. Unusually for Argentina, the country has been running a fiscal surplus since the beginning of the year, inflation is down substantially, but the economy is not yet displaying clear signs of a recovery. However, inflation has come down not just because the fiscal accounts have been turned to a surplus, but also because the economy is in recession and the currency is appreciating in real terms. https://globalamericans.org/explainer-mileis-economic-progra...

I'd say reasonably well given the problems in the country. The US is a very different situation.

Trump has clearly and repeatedly said he will delete the dept of education.

I just don't understand why it's so hard for people to stay on top of trump's platform.

This will simply be an opportunity to further their political aims by de-funding things they don’t like: FBI investigated trump for illegally retaining secret records. I guarantee there will be a review of their funding. EPA gets in elons way by requiring that he not poison wildlife and people. That agency will be axed or gutted or beheaded.

Starve the beast has been a republican strategy for decades. It doesn’t mean lower spending or financial prudence. It means starve the government programs you don’t like because they conflict with your ideology.

Note that trillions of dollars of spending on weapon systems is off the table. Things like the Abrams tanks the army doesn’t want or need. The trillion dollar boondoggle of the f35 1.7 trillion to upgrade nuclear weapon systems (the only purpose of which is to eliminate all human life)

This will be the biggest shit-show our country has ever seen. It’ll be an austerity program run by insane ideologues. We’ll be luck if it’s just a joke. But it’ll probably lead to a recession by July of 2025.

The government is going to be brutally gutted like Twitter. Our nation’s deep institutional knowledge destroyed for no good reason. Sad.

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, Americans are about to get the government they deserve, and get it good and hard.

Yes, every 4 years the American people get the President they deserve.

As in do(d)ge Tesla cars after Musk removes all safety regulations for self driving cars?

R U shittn me?!

DOGE?

Of all things?

Such pork-barrels. Much wow!

( https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=dogecoin&iax=images&ia=imag... )

If any entity needs some effort put into process streamlining and efficiency, it's the US government. But, seriously... Why, oh why, did it have to be called "DOGE"?

>Why, oh why, did it have to be called "DOGE"?

Doesn't it depend on how you pronounce it? Over here, we pronounce it 'doge'.

> Why, oh why, did it have to be called "DOGE"?

Because Musk thinks it's funny.

He sure got a gift for naming things. Between his S3XY cars and the Big Falcon Rocket from back in the day.

if the focus is actually eliminating “fraud and improper payments” then i’m all for it. but i don’t expect they’ll try to or be able to accomplish anything that practical.

I’ve already nicknames this the “Department of Government Efficiency Department” in my head.

Original announcement: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1134728848747...

Elon runs an efficient and innovative business off of government contracts. He is probably the right person to define what those contracts should look like.

Cost-plus is garbage.

Once, I mentioned to a friend that if you were to list all US counties by average income, the two northern Virginia counties would be in the top 5. He said 'that's because the government has never had a recession.' I guess that might finally happen soon, and if it does, a lot of resentful people are going to have schadenfreude at rich bureaucrats losing their jobs.

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