Musk, Ramaswamy vow 'mass head-count reductions' in U.S. government | Hacker News Reader

Musk, Ramaswamy vow 'mass head-count reductions' in U.S. government

washingtonpost.com

9 pointsAnon8416 comments

Useless if not induced by job _amount_ cuts in gov. Eliminate paperwork by eliminating stupid paperwork and not moving it into computers or some artificial stupidity. Eliminate office ass covering by making clerks responsible for decisions and cut rerouting responsibility jobs. Such things.

Obviously cut on lawyers and lawsuits negating and postponing all decision making.

I'm just glad this is happening while I'm capable and not dependent on the government. I think all the libertarian small government folks will finally start to figure out what a government is when it stops being one.

Most of these advocates for reducing this number of employees think there's an office full of people collecting checks and not doing anything when in reality many of these government employees I see are cops, firefighters, soldiers, civil engineers, judges and DMV employees. If I need any of those people I certainly wouldn't want to find out I had to wait longer because their jobs were cut.

The US Army alone constitutes 400k+ employees. Overall the military is more than 1.3 million active duty staff.

Explore the numbers: [https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/]

trump - if you haven’t followed one of the core reasons folk voted for him - is a peace President and will end all the Wars. hence defense budget will he slashed by like 95% (when the Wars end no need for all that) and most of the military will also be let go or moved to volunteering as necessary :)

There are 2.4M workers in the US government.

If the country has 258M adults, then 1 in 100 people are "administers" for the other 99. Just seems strange to me.

Elon reduced twitter by 80% and it still runs today. (It had some glitches during the transition, obviously)

Is there a possibility that all bureaucracies are 80% overstaffed?

We’ve heard there will be “hardship”. Will any disruption in the delivery of Social Security checks and veterans’ disability checks signal an incompetence further than forgivable hardship? If the excuse comes from the richest man in the world, most Americans will say, “he didn’t get that way by giving out money.”

Sure, that can happen, but there's still a question: Do we need to have 2.4M employed to distribute those checks?

Just look at Argentina's overnight transformation. It's literally Musk's playbook. One can argue that most governments and most public institutions and most publicly funded NGOs (which is weird) are stuffed full of inefficiencies and wasteful policies. It's not the people themselves, they are fully capable of producing values (and they want to) if placed in the right spots, it's the architecture and the system that evolved over the decades. When the government is the single biggest employer of the country, it's time for a cleanup.

2.4m seems low to me. It takes a huge amount of time to investigate fraud. I’m a “Law and Order” kind of guy.

Less than 2.3M, but who's counting?

Examine the numbers yourself: [https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/]

The VA is the largest at over 400,000 employees. But all the DoD components add up to more. I'm sure firing all the VA staff and all the soldiers/sailors/airmen will work out great.

Thank you.

I hope we can rebalance what it means to be compensated for disability. Sen. Duckworth lost both legs and has a rating of 20%. I think about that whenever I hear a veteran describe the process of shopping for a high rating.

How much hardship will the 2 DOGE Czars experience?

>> Elon reduced twitter by 80% and it still runs today. (It had some glitches during the transition, obviously)

Both advertisers and users are abandoning Twitter / X in droves [1]. It is failing as a business [2] and has failed at every high profile event that has been hosted recently (e.g. political campaign events) [3].

It does not look like a business that is growing and thriving. It looks like it is on life support and dying.

>> Is there a possibility that all bureaucracies are 80% overstaffed?

There is always room for more efficiency and improvement, but the heavy-handed sledgehammer, top-down approach that Musk took with Twitter is definitely not the best way to do it.

Instead, a bottom-up approach is probably better. Who knows better where the waste is than those who work in the organizations and carry out the processes? Ask them where the waste is and what needs to happen to make it more efficient. Firing a bunch of people and axing whole organizations is likely to break things and cause major systemic problems just like it did with Twitter.

[1] https://qz.com/twitter-x-ad-revenue-tumbles-elon-musk-grok-1...

https://www.deseret.com/business/2024/10/02/x-twitter-loses-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/x-sees-largest-user-e...

[2] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-revenue-falls-x-payme...

[3] https://gizmodo.com/x-twitter-down-outage-elon-musk-threads-...

It "runs" but it lacks a lot of business support. You can see what happens when there is no trust and safety department.

Most federal employees are not administrators or bureaucrats in any reasonable sense of the word.

I mean, Twitter still exists, for some value of 'exists'. North Korea and Sudan still exist, too, if that's the measure of "how much mismanagement of a company/country is too much" we're using.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com