Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand government reform | Hacker News Reader

Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand government reform

eatingpolicy.com

159 pointsrmason301 comments

I noticed that Stewart Brand recommended this piece (https://x.com/stewartbrand/status/1868407292418498605), so I've replaced the baity title with the neutral subtitle and re-upped it.

If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're posting thoughtfully, i.e. reflectively* and not reacting reflexively to one of the obvious triggers here. That's how the article is written (not counting the title), so please respond in kind and sail around the obvious icebergs.

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Re-upped means what?

I understood it as being posted to the Second-Chance Pool [1].

[1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...

Correct, except instead of adding it to the pool and waiting for the software to randomly place it, I did it manually.

One thing I learned while working closely with the (Brazilian) government is that the government itself exists only because a law says so, and the most important difference between public service and private initiative is that the private sector has laws regulating what it can’t do while public sector can only do things (and offer services) that are stated in law. In short, outside the government you can do whatever you need as long as it’s not explicitly forbidden while public servants can only do what’s explicitly permitted.

Governments are not designed (nor should they be) for efficiency. They are designed for safety, accountability, transparency, and universality.

Finally, I must say that I started working with government agencies with the misconception they are lazy, underqualified, people, and nothing is further from what I encountered. The people I worked with were smart, well educated, intelligent, and had an unparalleled sense of public duty I’ve never seen elsewhere.

> Governments are not designed (nor should they be) for efficiency. They are designed for safety, accountability, transparency, and universality.

And that's the way it should be, considering that government has that monopoly on the use of force.

Is there a chance we could write these attributes into a constitutional amendment ? A little гласность goes a long way.

> Is there a chance we could write these attributes into a constitutional amendment ?

If all parties acted only in rational ways, it'd already be there. This signals all parties do not act only within the limits of reason.

> A little гласность goes a long way.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. " - Federalist 51

Glasnost didn't end well. (Edit: for the ones implementing it, I mean)

I wonder if Gorbachev had any pathway available to him that wouldn't have lead to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union? By the time he rose to power their economy was in such serious trouble it was a choice between reform or perpetual stagnation, but I don't see any way for Gorbachev to make the necessary reforms without triggering a coup attempt against him from the hardliners which was arguably the moment Soviet power was broken.

'What if Gorbachev succeeded in reforming the Soviet Union' is an interesting alternate history scenario I think. I'm not sure it's a realistic one though, the problems he faced were likely insurmountable.

> I wonder if Gorbachev had any pathway available to him that wouldn't have lead to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union?

I'm sure a slow transition, the way he seemed to intend, would have been more stable. A slower, steadier process could ensure smooth transitions to the post Glasnost state for all hardliners and other stakeholders from whom buy-in would be required. The way it happened, rushed through by Yeltsin, accelerated collapse created a vacuum that was quickly filled by powerful criminals (which is usually what happens when governments collapse - and this is a cautionary tale for Americans, BTW).

> I'm not sure it's a realistic one though, the problems he faced were likely insurmountable.

The Soviet Union was broken, and would need to drastically cut expenses in order to provide for its own citizens, but the situation could be engineered to make sure any vacuum happened in the international space in such a way anyone who stepped in would deeply regret it. Think many Afghanistans worth of problems.

The USSR problem was that they didn't have a diaspora who knew how capitalism worked. Russia was eaten alive by robber barons foreign and domestic.

Compare it with the CCP who had Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore tycoons to help with the transition to a free market economy.

He had inherited an empire held together by brute force. When this force weakened, intentionally or due to economics, it fell apart. It is hard to maintain an empire and be humane at the same time. And he wasn’t always, but even that wasn’t enough to keep everyone aligned. In 1991 former fellows tried to correct him but they failed, and he lost both the throne and the country. Yeltsin later betrayed democracy twice plausibly to save it from the restoration. So did other fellow leaders. There was hardly any other possible outcome after that.

> I wonder if Gorbachev had any pathway available to him that wouldn't have lead to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union?

Whatever the Chinese have been doing for the last ~40 years? The CCP still holds power, but material comfort has increased for the Chinese people.

Poland has also done pretty well in going from Communist to free-market and democratic (notwithstanding people supporting the Law and Justice party).

It ended up much better than it might have? Some of the -stans were violent, but in areas without preexisting violence (pace Romania) the dissolution of the Union was remarkably peaceful.

I also work closely with the (Brazilian) government, and I can confirm that there are too many people who are smart, well educated, intelligent, and have an unparalleled sense of extracting money from government contracts

> while public servants can only do what’s explicitly permitted.

I think that is determined by structure of legal system, many systems the public servants can do whatever they want in pursuit of policy goals that has not been expressly forbidden, but of course should be able to make the case that it was in support of those goals.

Indeed - they have some very limited freedom, but the policy goals increase in detail on every level from the top and, with that, the set of allowable actions is reduced.

For instance, let's imagine you want to add a feedback form to a website - you need to track the data collected, make sure it's used only in the appropriate legal ways, that the infrastructure to host the data is procured within the budget already set up, and so on. They need to tread carefully not to step outside what government is authorized to do.

This is why I got involved in government work in the first place - free and open-source at least eased the procurement step - we only needed to prove the software was adequate and would not do anything not permitted by the rules that governed the adopting org.

> the public servants can do whatever they want in pursuit of policy goals that has not been expressly forbidden,

You're describing qualified immunity and it is a resounding failure in the eyes of basically everyone who doesn't benefit from it.

> You’re describing qualified immunity

No, that’s not what qualified immunity does. QI applies to civil liability, which only attaches to things which have been expressly forbidden.

You're right, I was erroneously conflating civil liability with generic personal consequences but the fact stands that the bits of government that have the most ability to act unilaterally in pursuit of doing their jobs without fear of personal consequence are some of the worst behaved.

> Governments are not designed (nor should they be) for efficiency. They are designed for safety, accountability, transparency, and universality.

This is in some ways talking about two different things.

Suppose you run the DMV like this. To do anything you need an appointment, to get an appointment takes 45 days, and appointments are scheduled back to back so even when you come for your appointment you have to wait for hours because previous appointments may have run over. In terms of minimizing the number of government workers this solution might be almost optimal -- they're all busy all of the time -- but in terms of wasting the public's time it's idiotic.

Now suppose you do the opposite. No appointments so you have to show up at 8AM and wait all day until someone can see you, because everyone shows up at 8AM, because if you show up at 3PM they'll be closed before you get in. This is also miserable.

What you really want is to allow appointments but not require them, and then give appointments priority. Then some proportion of slots would be unscheduled and filled with walk-ins, but those would also prevent anyone with an appointment from having to wait because they get priority, and appointments would be available two or three days out instead of weeks because you don't need a fully-packed schedule to prevent idle workers when any unscheduled slot just means they take one from the walk-in queue. Meanwhile if you absolutely have to get in today, you still have the option to get in line at 8AM.

Doing either of the dumber alternatives is the kind of government inefficiency that really pisses people off, and yet all three are basically the same in terms of how many government workers you need, because all three have them fully occupied with some combination of appointments and walk-ins.

Likewise, a lot of inefficiency comes from bad laws. Laws and regulations run the gamut from the obviously good (criminal penalties for homicide, ban on leaded gasoline) to the needlessly over-complicated (tax code, many business regulations), to the corrupt (certificate of need laws, many aspects of building/zoning codes, exclusionary financial regulations). The inefficiency here isn't just that you need too many government bureaucrats, though the more needless complexity there is the worse that gets. It's that the inefficiency bleeds into what the public has to do to comply with it, like wasting your time at the DMV. The government requires you to hire excessively many accountants and lawyers and compliance officers, or prohibits or bankrupts societally net-positive endeavors.

A body whose purpose is to ferret out and eliminate those kinds of inefficiencies has the potential to do good, because the government doesn't otherwise have a great accountability mechanism to prevent them, as evidenced by their widespread proliferation.

That mix of appointments and non appointments is how we do our health lab test centers!

The first comment on the blog is also illuminating:

> But I would urge you to take seriously the role of the courts in creating this mess. There are bad lawyers. But the good ones often are warning the agency about real hazards that can waste enormous amounts of agency effort. Go read a regulatory preamble from the 1970s. It’s a hoot. The agencies often took a few pages to say “here’s what we’re doing”, offered a minimal justification, and that was it. Now, a rulemaking is a multiyear saga, as the agencies jump through every hoop, and know the courts are at the end of the gauntlet. A lawyer who doesn’t warn the program staff what can happen if, say, you end up in front of a judge in ND Tex, is not doing their job. If you don’t document everything to the nth degree you are going to have to do it again. Period. An agency can spend hundreds of pages documenting its reasons, but if the court doesn’t like the way it handled a few comments? Do it over.

It's one thing to reform regulatory agencies, but it's another to reform the courts. It seems like we now play racquetball with the courts, with each opposing administration appointing judges who are sympathetic to its viewpoints. This leaves the underlying system untouched and just points it back and forth, while the judges themselves are left with the same wicked problem of applying ambiguous laws to specific situations.

But I don't know if DOGE is really about analyzing government operations and producing recommendations for reform. For one thing, we already have the Government Accountability Office, and also the Congressional Budget Office. For another, personnel is policy. Musk and Ramaswamy aren't accountants. They're pundits. I would expect the primary difference between DOGE and previous attempts at government reform will be its strategy in engaging with the public.

> It seems like we now play racquetball with the courts, with each opposing administration appointing judges who are sympathetic to its viewpoints.

Judges having political alignments is one of those things that non-Americans point to when they want to argue that 'America is a silly country full of silly people'.

Officially they (generally) don’t. But judges are people; most judges around the world have a political alignment, even if they keep it better hidden.

It's not just judges-are-human-beings.

In most other countries, if there's a difficult political decision to be made, it's made through the political process.

Society wants abortion to be legal/illegal? Political parties make it part of their election platform, and if elected they change the law. Judges then interpret the law as written, and any bugs are ironed out by the politicians amending the law.

But in America, they face this difficult political decision - and it gets punted to a bunch of elderly judges? Who are appointed for life? Then for half a century the legality of abortion is basically decided at random, depending on which party is in power when these septuagenarians die?

It's the kind of blame-ambiguifying ("Can't do anything, law says so," "Can't do anything, courts say so.") that happens when the opposition to a given reform are perfectly happy to beat, bomb, and shoot anyone who dares to try to [integrate schools/secure voting rights/offer reproductive care/marry two people of the same gender/etc.].

What you're actually asking for is for America to finally undertake its own form of denazification, and hoo boy, if you think that things are rough now...

Remember, there was an actual insurrection by these folks 4 years ago. They literally entered the building housing our legislature and threatened the lives of our lawmakers. There is, like, zero question of why there's been a chilling effect on finding legislative remedies to American issues, even if you cut out the massive influence of lobbyists. No one wants to get Abe'd.

>What you're actually asking for is for America to finally undertake its own form of denazification

This is the kind of claptrap that makes it difficult to take the hard left seriously.

There is a direct line between the KKK, American Nazi Party, and Republicans and "moderate" Democrats who are just over the past few years aging (dying) out of office. The ideology of the latter is going strong. But I appreciate the insult; it's the kind of hysterical mischaracterization that tends to come out when one is close to prescribing the proper corrective action to right-wing malfeasance.

> They literally entered the building housing our legislature

Just for the record, there's nothing special about doing this. It's actually fairly surprising how open a lot of the buildings in DC are.

> and threatened the lives of our lawmakers

This part I don't get how more people didn't get shot. I mean I guess it lowered fatalities but when you get into a tug of war with the cops as the rope I don't get why shooting doesn't start.

> there's nothing special about doing this

"There's nothing special about breaking down the doors of the bank while it's closed in order to chase the staff and rummage through all of the drawers, people enter banks all the time."

The parent poster was obviously concerned with how and why they entered the building.

>when you get into a tug of war with the cops as the rope I don't get why shooting doesn't start.

I assumed this meant the cops were complicit.

The USA is hardly unique in that regard. Other countries have had similar policy issues with major court decisions causing sweeping policy changes. And how could it be otherwise? When litigants ask the court for a decision, the court has to give an interpretation. Judges can't punt the issue to anyone else, they have to come down on one side or the other.

When a policy issue like abortion ends up in front of the appellate courts it's precisely because the laws are unclear. The legislators did a bad job and wrote vague laws. So the outcome of such cases will always be kind of a toss-up, especially for the most complex cases that make it to the Supreme Court level. Instead of complaining about justices legislating from the bench, voters should insist that Congress write better laws. I understand that sudden changes to established policy can be tremendously disruptive but the anger should be directed at the root cause.

> And how could it be otherwise?

A great many countries use "civil law" where court decisions don't create a binding precedent.

Some other "common law" countries - like Canada and the UK - have a parliamentary system with first-past-the-post elections. So they don't get any nonsense like "government shut-downs" because of "deadlock" - and if the legislature wants to change the laws, nothing stops them.

Those differences have only minor impacts on this issue. Civil law courts still have to make decisions about ambiguous or conflicting laws. They follow a different process but the fundamental problem remains. And parliamentary systems do nothing to ensure that laws are clear.

> Those differences have only minor impacts on this issue.

Are you sure?

To me it seems fairly obvious that critical legal precedents like Roe vs Wade would not occur in a system that did not have the concept of binding legal precedent ?

You understand that with respect to abortion, the effect of Dobbs was precisely what you seem to be asking for? That is, Dobbs handed the issue back to legislators.

Maybe - but Dobbs is 50 years too late for anyone to say "American judges aren't political"

Some US states even elect judges and sheriffs, just like they elect politicians - complete with TV ads and tens of millions of dollars being spent by shady super-PACs.

All US states except Rhode Island and Hawai'i elect county sheriffs. There's nothing wrong with this, it is inherently a political office. Sheriffs are part of the executive branch and have no real judicial role.

Many of the most contentious things are about law in the books, it just happens to be law which was too generic/vague that is very difficult to change.

In particular, I'm thinking of the 14th amendment, and everything that came from that like the incorporation doctrine.

The key difference is that American judges are typically political appointees or elected officials. They are deliberately chosen for political reasons. In many other countries, judges are more like career civil servants. While they are technically nominated by the executive branch and appointed by a figurehead president, it's usually a scandal if politicians try to influence the outcome. In practice, judges are selected by panels that consist of judges and other legal experts.

It's also worth emphasizing, given their deliberate attempts to mislead the public, that DOGE isn't part of the government any more than General Motors is part of the military.

At best, it is a Presidential Commission [0] of some dudes he knows. Probably not even that, in that I doubt they'll actually do the work of meetings and notes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_commission_(Unite...

Another striking thing is the name similarity between DOGE and Dogecoin that Elon Musk is known to control. I find that absolutely arrogant and reckless.

>Dogecoin that Elon Musk is known to control

citation please

I don't expect the "DOGE" to ever be part of the government in any legal or official sense. I expect it to operate like a think tank or lobby, giving suggestions/orders to Trump.

"Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy delivered a warning to Republicans who don’t go along with their plans to slash spending as part of Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency."

Sounds like he is going to use his PAC to fund challengers in primaries that don't go along with his / Trump's plans.

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-politics-trump-7e26c829...

So, just like everyone else with resources and political opinions.

(Endorsing and funding challengers has been a standard political tactic for decades.)

I agree with this take. It also has the unique property of causing a lot of drama and sound-bites in the media on both sides of the left/right spectrum. One side applauds it for getting things done finally, while the other bemoans the end of democracy due to "collusion" between the president and non-elected private-sector rich billionaires that supposedly seek to make a profit out of all this.

That they stand to profit seems fairly uncontroversial given their willingness to participate. What other motive could possibly exist?

The motive of actually caring about the country you live in could possibly exist.

Possibly. I don't say that I think that's what's actually the motive.

A lot of people care that the country is governed well and lives within its means.

To me it's obvious that some of those people may be billionaires.

I also find it weird when people assume billionaires only care about getting more money. They are the people who can care least about money!

Whereas it seems obvious to me that zero of those individuals would be billionaires given their mere existence is proof that governance is malfunctioning. Moreover it's quite literally impossible to get valuable input from an individual who's day-to-day existence is so thoroughly divorced from reality that they couldn't tell you what a stick of butter costs.

Elon's primary day-to-day activity, and maybe biggest cause of his success, is organizing his companies for maximum productivity.

This is very relevant for organizing government organizations for the same goal.

Elon is a con man who has somehow fallen upwards through luck of birth and government subsidies.

He didn't start any of "his" companies, I'm convinced has little to no real engineering input into them, and only remains relevant through going viral for his brain dead takes on social media, which is incidentally one of the ridiculous "investments" that he is now running into the ground.

Have you seen his vacuum train idea? I think that says it all about his engineering expertise. Full self driving using only cameras is another one. Colonizing Mars? The surface temperature of Mars is from −110°C to 35°C, with a mean of -60°C. A rocket would take 9 months to get there.

A Snake Oil salesman of the highest degree. Quite similar to another person I won't mention.

1. Neither of us have any idea what Elon Musk's day to day activities look like.

2. If Tesla had been organized for maximum productivity they would have skipped the decade-ish rolling clusterfuck of engineering faceplants, manufacturing bottlenecks, bullshit software issues, and gross body fitment problems by nothing more complex than actually taking a while to learn how cars are made by companies with multi-generational pools of experience to draw on. It's not like cars had just been invented and major R&D was required to debug the process.

3. Feel free to explain this: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article26445107...

How certain are you his primary contributions aren't column inches based on uncritical coverage of hyperbolic bullshit he said near a microphone?

Marc Andreessen describes Elon Musk's day to day activities quite well in the video below.

It's pretty astonishing (scroll down):

https://x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1868639726275875031

The notion that Marc Andreessen has nothing of substance to do and spends sufficient time monitoring Elon Musk's daily activities to provide objective reporting on the subject strains credulity but believe what you want. Care to address the glaring proof that maximized productivity isn't an obvious outcome of whatever the fuck it is that Elon Musk spends his time on or nah?

I thought his primary day-to-day activity was playing Diablo?

I believe that's night time!

But is this true? Is the number of cases where projects fail due to court actions really so many that all this proactive pre-documentation to the nth degree is necessary? Or is it rather that there are too many lawyers and administrators employed, and they are seeing this as an opportunity to justify their own existence?

Nearly every contract award is challenged. Even if the challenge is not protracted, preparing for the inevitable challenge makes the whole process so expensive that it severely impacts the number and size of contracts an agency is able to pursue.

I think a big contributor that made this a much bigger and messier problem was allowing or enabling or not-forbidding the non-enforcement of laws. As it stands, this occurs in far more instances than is necessary for practical reasons. From policemen personally ignoring crimes and police departments issuing directives to ignore certain offenses, to prosecutors choosing which crimes to prosecute, to judges 'interpreting' laws and case law, and finally to the president who decides to pardon whomever he pleases for unknown reasons.

Surely DOGE will increasing staffing and technology at courts so they’re not perpetually clogged, requiring difficult and unjust prioritization, right?

(Hint: no, they won’t)

> I think a big contributor that made this a much bigger and messier problem was allowing or enabling or not-forbidding the non-enforcement of laws.

That is something all legal systems have in common, alone because there won't ever be enough resources to enforce every little regulation, short of turning the entire country into an AI-enforced panopticon, and by that time people will vote with their feet (assuming they're still allowed to leave). Even the more autocratic/authoritarian systems all have had their share of selective enforcement - being a member of the ruling party or of the same religion/ethnicity (such as in Syria with the Alawites) will always bring its benefits.

> From policemen personally ignoring crimes and police departments issuing directives to ignore certain offenses, to prosecutors choosing which crimes to prosecute, to judges 'interpreting' laws and case law, and finally to the president who decides to pardon whomever he pleases for unknown reasons.

All of this is something we have in Europe as well. Low-level stuff that's technically illegal (say, running a red light, dropping a cigarette butt or chewing gum on the ground), police can but don't have to enforce. Actual crimes such as theft have to be enforced by the police, but DAs may choose to drop the case because of a variety of factors. And judges are literally there to interpret the law (because no law can account for the complexities of real life) and to determine if the letter and the spirit of the law are applicable to the case.

The key thing is that us Europeans generally trust our governments, whereas the US population doesn't even trust the government to the point that there is one single federal ID and drivers license card.

The federal government issues a variety of official identification such as passports and Global Entry cards. Citizens are free to use those if they like and they are accepted everywhere that matters. The federal government also has the Real ID program to ensure that state issued identification (such as driver's licenses) meets certain standards if people want to use those IDs for purposes beyond just driving.

The notion that a single federal ID card should be mandatory for everyone or that the federal government should handle driver's licenses is just stupid and reflects a total misunderstanding of how the USA is structured. We have a dual sovereignty system for good reasons and hopefully that will never change.

Them:

> The key thing is that us Europeans generally trust our governments, whereas the US population doesn't even trust the government to the point that there is one single federal ID and drivers license card.

You:

> The notion that a single federal ID card should be mandatory for everyone or that the federal government should handle driver's licenses is just stupid and reflects a total misunderstanding of how the USA is structured.

Seems to me they accurately described the reality and then you're substantiating their description...

From what I've seen so far, DOGE is explicitly about removing barriers to things Elon (and other billionaire trump supporters) want to do. The idea that they can't just pollute a lake, or put out a dangerous product, or exploit workers is simply outrageous! The 'efficiency' nonsense is the same play as is 'think of the children!' excuse for stripping away privacy rights.

Musk is certainly not just a pundit. He is an operator.

A pundit is "a person who gives opinions in an authoritative manner usually through the mass media". He clearly fits this definition. He does plenty of other stuff too, but "pundit" is a completely valid label to use.

This wasn't just claiming they are pundits, but using the label dismiss their ability to do anything else.

Yes, I literally said "not just a pundit", which is the implication made in the GC.

in the arena trying stuff

Jennifer is a smart, dedicated gal who has been working on this problem since the Obama administration. I _very_ briefly worked with USDS on the DoD-VA hand-off of medical records (the very early stages of trying to fix that train wreck), which had very clear bipartisan support at the time. It was not for lack of political will, nor severity of problem, nor through incompetence that the effort struggled. Most people, from the whitehouse to the hill, very much wanted veterans to stop dying or killing themselves on the waitlist. And yet, there was no smooth path. I saw a very brief glimpse of the problem and understand that there is a whole iceberg under the water line. She has been dedicated to the problem for years. I would listen to her and give her a whole lot of benefit of the doubt about the politics of it all, regardless of your political tribal affiliation. Some times you have to set othodoxy aside.

The disconnect here is that, if I hadn't read the article, I would assume Jennifer was saying "Elon Musk may be the hero we need, the outsider who can finally reform the bureacracy." But a careful reading shows she isn't really saying that. There is some polite language in her tone and an unwillingness to antagonize unnecessarily. If you put 2 and 2 together, then, she's saying that the most likely outcome is that Elon Musk won't be able to reform the government either (but good luck to him, hope something good comes out of it, etc).

I'm not sure if this is controversial but here's my take: if your thesis can be so completely misunderstood on a cursory reading of a topic like this, it's either poor writing, or you're not writing in good faith, and are engaging in a kind of plausible deniability with regard to an unpopular opinion.

For me, the underlying problem with the piece (which I did read) is that it seems to accept and run with the basic idea that DOGE etc is about government reform rather than lack of accountability and self-serving grift. The tone in general is something like "well this is what you get for ignoring the need for government reform, a sort of monstrous crude reformer" rather than calling out the fundamental problems with conflict of interest and mismanagement afforded by further problems with lack of public accountability. It seems to me to have the same basic problems in ethical reasoning as blaming the victim arguments, although the contours are different.

I'm generally someone who is for deregulation in a lot of government, but that's not what we're seeing with DOGE. The problems are not about the orderliness of the disruption, it's about the nature of it and the ultimate actual goals of those involved, which are not in the public interest. Government reform in this particular case, in my opinion is just a fraudulent cover story for blatant grift and self-serving financial and social aggrandizement. No con artist is open about what they're doing; there's always a cover story, which is the nature of the thing. This piece at least indirectly supports that fraud by accepting its motivations and methods — if not its tact and pleasantness — at face value.

It's either poorly written to me, or disingenuous.

Well, first off, the number of Federal employees hasn't changed much since the 1960s. It's payments to contractors which are more of a problem.

Second, only defense and entitlements really matter. Here's the top level breakdown of the Federal budget.[1]

Entitlements, such as Social Security, Medicare, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, account for about 65% of the budget. Defense, 14%. Interest paid, 13%. Everything else, about 9%. Most of the noise about cuts focuses on that 9%, but that's not where the money goes. About half the federal budget goes to old people.

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

The US military budget is only 14% under a very narrow definition. If a US Navy sailor is off the coast of Yemen, in "defense" of the US bombing Yemen so as to support the offensive in Gaza, and the sailor is maimed and flown back to the US - their medical bills are no longer coming out of the "defense" budget but out of the "entitlement" budget (or if not then the everything else budget).

Also interest did not come out of nowhere, we're paying interest on past military etc. spending, and have a deficit to overextend current military spending which we will be paying interest on.

So if we narrowly define "defense" spending and hand wave spending on veteran's benefits, interest on past military spending etc. it is shrunk to 14% of spending, but it is not 14% of spending.

I know this is how the government presents its spending numbers but it is done so to hide the true cost of the "defense" budget.

As the other poster said you are mistaken with how the money is allocated. With that said, the military is not a terrible place to spend money. You know when we say the dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government? What that means is the US can park an aircraft carrier strike group off the coast of any country in the world and project that full faith and credit. It's also an amazing jobs program for the working class. I know a number of people who were only able to attend college because of the GI Bill.

I'm sure there is some waste, but that's true of any large organization.

Nonsense. Healthcare for active duty military personnel is covered in the military budget regardless of whether they are deployed. Healthcare for retired military (including those medically retired) is primarily paid by the Veterans Administration which is classified as part of discretionary spending, not an entitlement. There is only a small overlap with Medicare. If you're going to complain about defense spending then at least get your facts straight.

More frustrating, to me, is that some parts of the 9% include enforcement officers and mechanisms on payments and oversight of the rest of the budget. And, for some reason I can't really understand too well, it is a very popular thing to cut spending/funds for the likes of the IRS.

For my part, I've grown rather distrustful of any effort to make things more efficient. Generally, in all things, but particularly with the government. I don't necessarily want efficient; rather, I would prioritize completed. At the least, progressed.

You see this in corporations that have labeled some organizations "cost centers" versus the rest of the company. The spreadsheet workers love lowering the spend in cost centers. And then are rather flat footed when it comes to why places had those cost centers in the first place.

An aspect of spending on financial enforcement that most people don't understand but is well-understood by government auditors is that too much enforcement has a negative ROI to the government separate from the cost it imposes on the economy.

Most financial recoveries via enforcement is not waste or corruption in the traditional sense, it is from insufficient financial compliance processes. The requirements for these processes are fuzzy, so you can always squeeze a little blood from this stone if auditors try hard enough. People react to this pressure by engaging in ever more compliance activity, without much concern about its effectiveness for its nominal purpose. So far so good.

The government realized many decades ago, as an organization that buys trillions of dollars in goods and services from the private sector, that these compliance costs it was creating were effectively being billed back to the government, in many cases in excess of any value created by the compliance processes. In most cases, we are already way past the point where spending more money on enforcement is productive but it is politically popular so it happens anyway. The optimal amount of fraud and waste is not zero, and to the extent things look like waste it is usually because compliance processes have required it to look that way to avoid enforcement actions.

A much better approach would be to revisit the effectiveness and utility of the compliance processes the government creates through enforcement actions, which currently has few if any limiting principles in practice. These are not free, either to the economy or to the government which has to pay for those compliance costs when it buys things.

You are restating the optimization problem of how much to tolerate?

Agreed that it is common for folks to discuss eliminating fraud/non-compliance as the target; and the reality is that you should spend up against fraud/non-compliance up to the point that you do not lose more to those than you are now spending on fighting them.

This is unsurprisingly general in application. It explains why people neglect maintenance costs, for example. Since there will be some level of neglect that can be tolerated and the opportunity costs of constant maintenance checking can be severe.

Bringing it back to this, though, my understanding is that most increases of funding to the IRS has positive returns. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/irs-expects-to-collect-... is a quick find for what made me think this. I would not be shocked to know this is overstated, but would be a little surprised. Do you have contrary reads?

What we need is a legislative budget. Currently there is no limit to the number of laws a person may be subjected to. The amount of law increases every year and will continue to increase until the whole system collapses. We have seen this happen with the fall of the soviet union for example.

Personally, I think the limit should be 200k words. Perhaps half fed half state/local. Moby Dick is 206,052 words long. Even if the limit were a million words, that would be about the length of the harry potter series.

I'm curious what you are arguing here? Yes, the number of laws applicable to people has gone up. The number of things that people can individually do has also gone up. Networking effects are real and don't have a word limit on them.

Correct. DOGE is a joke. Musk will DOX some people and their job titles showing he has no clue what he's talking about (throw in some pedo accusations while he's at it). Then maybe he'll save a few million (out of a 6-7T), but shout it from the roof top like he's a genius and keep saying more will happen next year like he's done with FSD.

This is a good take, but I wonder if there's a difference between "goes to old people" vs "is spent on things concerning old people" as in how much of that money actually reaches old people directly or indirectly. Given that "half a budget" is around 3 trillion and there are 60 million old people in the US this gives $100k for a household of 2 people which I doubt they receive. Quite possibly there's a big room for optimization too.

End of life care is crazy expensive [1]. Things like assisted living, hospice, and medical care for end of life is where a vast majority of the costs end up. Could the actual care be made more efficient? Maybe. The irony is the GOP spread lies about death panels when the ACA was being debated, and we may end up with them here if we go down a path of deciding who gets what EoL care in the name of efficiency.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...

Maybe the federal government shouldn't be in the business of EoL care at all?

Ok, I'll bite. How do you fund EoL care w/o the federal government involved?

you don't. You let people die in a manner according to their own means without blowing through several hundred thousand of public funds on their way out.

If given the choice of 100k EoL care, or 100k for their grandchildren, most people would choose the latter. Add a layer between and it becomes a prisoners dilemma problem. If you forgo treatment, your children still get billed 99.9k instead of 100k.

So no plan. Simply let people die in the street. Got it.

You don't need to be so extreme.

You can let people die in their own home with palliative care without providing every drug and surgery imaginable.

Homelessness does not seem particularly related to EoL care.

Given healthcare costs that doesn’t seem wildly high after accounting for the administrative burden you’d expect for administering that amount of money.

Social Security also goes to disabled people as well as "disabled" people. That population is almost 10 million people.

How is this thoughtful? (I can see how it's reflective.)

The last time the Dems controlled the Presidency and both houses of congress was the first two years of Obama's first term (Jan 2009 - Jan 2011). And prior to that the first two years of Clinton's first term (Jan 1993 - Jan 1995; which had limited success, for the same reason this will have limited success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv... ).

The last time the Reps controlled both houses and the Presidency was the first two years of Trump's last term (Jan 2017 - Jan 2019). Prior to that the first 6 years under Bush II (Jan 2001 - Jan 2007).

And the last time Dem appointees controlled the Supreme court was in 1969.

So I really, really cannot trust the thoughtfulness of any opinions or marshallings of fact in the linked article.

...I've now read the entire article and stand by my more general point. This person is looking at government from one limited perspective, as someone who has worked with people who've tried to work in it and reform it in the past. The fundamental barrier to government reform is in Congress, nowhere else. There's nothing special about Musk's ability to convince Congress to do things it doesn't want to do. Even if he threatens to primary them. Most of these people are in relatively safe districts. They have the name recognition in their districts. They can point to the things they've done for their districts. Most of them are not in any danger from a Musk-funded primary opponent.

The only thing that would truly reform government in more than bits and pieces would be enough Congress people, in both houses, who are not only of the same party, but are basically also of the same sub-caucus within that party. Fat chance getting that. Without that all you get is horse trading, which leads to the bits and pieces reformations.

>> The fundamental barrier to government reform is in Congress, nowhere else.

The most salient point here.

I had a huge conversation with a friend of mine last night at a Christmas party our mutual couple friends have every year. We both agreed on this and one thing we both understood was the fact that Republicans talk about smaller government, but at no time, either when they've had the presidency or been in control of congress have they ever reduced spending.

If you want to really reign in government, you either have to raise taxes to account for all the social program spending, or you have to reduce spending. Both are political suicide and no candidate ever wants to be on record saying they'll do either.

As an independent, I see both sides making the situation worse, but only one side saying they want smaller government, but then doing nothing to stand behind that principle.

When Republicans talk about "small government" what they mean is less social safety net and more privatization and they have been very successful at this.

They created the current "student loan" system for college, burdened USPS with the pension funding changes, and have held multiple states out of Obamacare expansion, they will definitely continue down that path and they might kill a lot more during this presidency.

So you'll definitely get smaller government, just might not be what you think it should be.

This time they campaigned on ending social security and medicaire and somehow got all the people who depend on them to vote FOR them. Fear rules them.

The people that voted for them expect that social security and medicare will only end for the "others", not for them, that's why they voted. They want to see their "enemies" suffer.

Replacing class war with culture war was the smartest move conservatives ever made, by the time these folks that voted against their best interests notice the mistake, they will go down the drain with everyone else, it will be too late to change course.

I never claimed to know what crazy cultists believe. I know they fear whatever they're told to. They won't notice, they'll blame others even when the guns turn on them and they're sent to die.

I’m still pissed they ripped out my local usps blue box during the Trump administration and never put one back on the spot after Biden got in. Now its probably never happening. Taking trips all the way to the post office sucks compared to walking it to the bin. Apartment so no way to do outgoing mail with the flag on a mailbox like a home.

>Apartment so no way to do outgoing mail with the flag on a mailbox like a home.

Australian here. I literally never realized that's what the flag was for until your comment.

I thought it was so the mailman would lift the flag to notify people that the mail has been delivered.

>As an independent, I see both sides making the situation worse, but only one side saying they want smaller government, but then doing nothing to stand behind that principle.

it sounds like you're saying the side that consistently lies about something is slightly better because at least they're saying what you want to hear?

It reads to me like they're saying the side that consistently lies about something is slightly worse because at least the other guys are honest.

I think the bigger point may be that GP considers it a choice between two evils - hence being an Independent!

haha that's 2024 american politics 101 it seems

It's political doublespeak, meant to appeal to people's preferences.

If you take 100 random Trumpers, and ask them the below, you'd likely get yes for each one. but you can obviously see how they contradict each other. so you end up keeping everything the same, and re-allocating funds from one small thing to another.

"Do you want smaller government?" "Do you want our military to be strong?" "Do you want to take care of our veterans?" "Do you want seniors to have their social security and medicare?"

Trump said he won't touch medicare or medicaid. Said he wants to increase military spending and not touch social security. That accounts for around 70% of the budget.

How do you make the massive changes he thinks DOGE needs to make out of the last 30% of the budget?

We're going to have to come up creative ways to get there like means testing for social security. If you're hell bent on "rich people paying their fair share." then how about we means test those rich folks and roll THEIR Social Security benefits down to people who actually need it?

> then how about we means test those rich folks and roll THEIR Social Security benefits down to people who actually need it?

Best way to get otherwise reasonable people to stop supporting social nets. Making a welfare system designed to support only the least well-off is the first step to removing it.

>Best way to get otherwise reasonable people to stop supporting social nets. Making a welfare system designed to support only the least well-off is the first step to removing it.

Isn't that what it already does? I live in a very rich very blue state and even here the qualification criteria for just about any state program more or less exclude any poor household that's trying to get ahead (single mom with a full time job, two employed parents multiple kids or elderly dependents, etc). I know the adjacent less rich less blue states are even worse.

Well, "more market" has been a non-partisan program for a while now.

The myth is that social security is a retirement program, not a welfare program. The fear is that if you start means testing it, is no longer an entitlement, and people will perceive it as a welfare program instead of a retirement program, and that will be the beginning of the end.

> How do you make the massive changes he thinks DOGE needs to make out of the last 30% of the budget?

Given they aim to eliminate 33% of federal spending they will need to cut 110% of that part of the budget.

> Trump said he won't touch medicare or medicaid. Said he wants to increase military spending and not touch social security.

Whenever you see a definitive-sounding Trump quote, take a moment to see if he's also said the exact opposite before you make any conclusions. Here's a good overview of this particular topic: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/donald-trump-m.... He's said he definitely won't cut entitlements, but also that he might, and he tried to make cuts when he was in office but didn't try that hard.

If you're trying to predict what he's going to do you can look at past actions, or what personnel he has put in place. Just reading what he says is useless.

>If you're trying to predict what he's going to do you can look at past actions, or what personnel he has put in place. Just reading what he says is useless.

I'd just like to reflect on how absolutely batshit crazy America is to have voted this guy into the most powerful political position in the world, again!

The whole thing is actually very impressive. Nobody actually knows what he stands for, other than he claims he's the best at it. Even after he did none of it when he was in the same position before!

> We both agreed on this and one thing we both understood was the fact that Republicans talk about smaller government, but at no time, either when they've had the presidency or been in control of congress have they ever reduced spending.

Absolutely. If Republicans were what they said they were, I’d still hate their rhetoric and a lot of their preferred social policies but I could put all of that aside if it meant reigning in the size, scope, budget (zeroing out the deficit and chopping away at the debt to bring it down over time rather than explosively growing it) of the Federal government and call myself a card-carrying member of the Republican Party. But that’s not the case, and I don’t really want to be associated with either of them in any way, shape or form.

If Elon Musk can do what nobody else has and convince Congress to downsize the Federal government, good for him. You can’t even scale the mission creep of the Federal government next to anything else because it has so thoroughly mission crept itself so many times people can’t even imagine it being any other way. I’m not holding my breath though, and in anticipation of Trump being sworn in and taking the Oval Office for himself once again and all the “crazy” things Musk says he wants to do with DOGE, real or not, I think people have just kind of forgotten that during his first term, Trump was very much a “what have you done for me lately” kind of boss who would fire people who weren’t performing at the level he wanted at the drop of a hat and sometimes in very inglorious and humiliating ways that came out of nowhere, even people who had bent over backwards to prove their loyalty to him during their time working for him.

I don’t think Musk is immune to that either; he has a lot of money and that money can be leveraged into power, but the Office of the Presidency has real power that Trump doesn’t need to spend any of his own money or Musk’s money leveraging because it is paid for by taxpayers with the Executive power vested wholly in him post-Noon on January 20th 2025.

I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42426235 because it's about the article content and should be at the top level.

One can be both thoughtful and wrong, no? She apparently has years of working in the space, I thought the piece was well-written and substantive, it doesn't obviously reduce to canned arguments or ideological talking points, plus Stewart Brand recommended it. That's enough for me.

Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency in 2020-22.

> Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency in 2020-22.

No, they didn’t.

They did control all those at the same time from noon Jan 20, 2021 until noon Jan 3, 2023, though.

No they didn’t either. There were only 48 Democratic Senators and 2 Independents who were convinced to caucus with the Democrats.

I don’t know how that gets spun as having a majority or control guts it’s irked me ever since the news started reporting it as such

Of these four, which were more reliable votes on important Democratic policy priorities: Bernie Sanders, Angus King, Joe Manchin, Kristen Sinema?

Now which of the four were Democratic Party members at the time, and which were independents who caucus with the Democrats?

The problem with Democratic policy priorities wasn’t that their razor-thin Senate majority rested on independents who had been caucusing with Democrats for quite a while prior to 2021 – 30 years, between the House and Senate, for Sanders.

Can’t go down this line of discussion unless you and I can agree that in the 117th Congress of the United States there were these many Senators of each party affiliation.

50 Republican Senators

48 Democratic Senators

2 Independent Senators

And that integers can be ordered on a number scale which allows for integers to be placed on a deterministic scale where the number 50 is larger than the number 48 and thus cannot be considered the majority in any system where the two numbers are part of the same super set.

If you can agree to those statements of fact I can go into the nuance with you, but if you want to call that a Democratic majority and treat it the same as having an actually majority, then I have no interest in further discussion

> Most of these people are in relatively safe districts.

I don't think that any of them are in safe districts. I think that they are in districts that are invulnerable to partisan attacks (i.e. they will not change from Republican to Democrat or from Democrat to Republican) but they're all vulnerable to principled attacks because almost none of them are very popular or inspire much turnout. They just bus the same old people in, and show up to the same churches, and that's enough to get them through another primary.

If the new administration's principle is "cut social spending", though, which it seems to be for some reason, there's absolutely nobody vulnerable to that. Everybody wants to cut government waste and corruption, but there's no such thing as cutting spending. Without cutting actual waste, cutting services, neglecting infrastructure, raising taxes, or cutting imports/growing exports, the only way to cut government debt is to raise private debt, and people in the US are already in debt to their eyeballs.

And the mobility scooter brigade that has always given Trump its biggest mandate did not do it to get their Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and VA benefits cut. If they could cut it off for just black people or just Mexicans, fine, but if they see cuts, they're going to punish administration-backed challengers, not take out incumbents.

I have no idea why a lot of pundits on the right seem to this this election was a mandate for crypto (our next systemic crash) and cutting social spending. Or privatizing the Post Office, after what happened in the UK? They might get away with that because it's bipartisan, but it will weigh the party that does it down for decades. If they actually do any of this, they're going to get killed at every level and the White House is going to turn over again in 4 years.

Or they won’t?

After botching the handling of Covid and trying to overturn an election the electorate seems to have only been angry at Trump for 1 election before deciding to give him another go. You must have seen the videos of Trump supporters lamenting that he wasn’t hurting the right people when they were harmed by his policies, and their only feelings on it were that it was an honest mistake and he’ll fix it with time.

Nothing about our current political winds is in the realm of predictability as far as how the electorate will react

>And the mobility scooter brigade that has always given Trump its biggest mandate did not do it to get their Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and VA benefits cut.

Yeah,it has always puzzled me why people vote against their own interests, but for some reason they do. And not only once, repeatedly. Maybe it's "ok, I'll get less money, but these guys I hate will get even less, or they'll get deported, so it's a net positive"? No idea...

America will never cut social security. Never in the history of mankind have people starved quietly.

>Never in the history of mankind have people starved quietly.

It’s more like never in the history of mankind have a group of people capable of wielding power starved quietly. Yelling on the internet doesn’t do shit.

We have yet to see if the current tranche of Americans will wield power or not in that direction given they’ve recently voted in the one of two parties who even discusses cutting social security as a serious idea

The problem is the only suggestions for reform that I have heard from Musk and others are firing people and eliminating programs. If there is a push for other kinds of reform that makes things clearer and simpler then I would support them. However, since SpaceX and Amazon have argued the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional, I have little hope that the reforms they propose will be the kind I would like to see. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/18/nx-s1-5192918/spacex-amazon-n...

It's certainly funny how popular "Defund the" is when it ends with, "[agency with a track record of actually providing service and value to both individual Americans and the country as a whole]" instead of "police". Turns out, conservatism is selective when it comes to preservation of institutions. One guess what the qualifier is.

They are apparently pro police but anti-FBI, which is basically the Federal Level police force in charge of finding corruption in politicians.

The problem here is it feels like Police for thee but not for me.

> FBI, which is basically the Federal Level police force in charge of finding corruption in politicians.

This is false.

You are false.

It's certainly not ATF, ICE or Secret Service who police corruption. It is and always has been FBI.

FBI seems highly involved in prosecuting by corruption to me. Do you disagree with that sentiment?

Yes, although -

My bull case is not that I particularly like their reforms, but that they demonstrate that substantive rather than incremental changes are possible at all.

Also perhaps that they rip out things that are supposedly doing something useful but sufficiently terrible at it they're not meaningfully helping, such that somebody not-them can later at least attempt to introduce a replacement that does.

Or: The vetocracy problem is very much real and reducing that could, in the medium to long term, be a huge win on net even if the things they do having reduced it in the short term are absolutely not the kind I would like to see either.

> they demonstrate that substantive rather than incremental changes are possible at all.

Substantive-not-incremental change has always been possible, but it's mostly avoided for being a bad idea. Only when we identify an opportunity to make substantive improvement, clear and well understood, should it be used; the default is substantive destruction which is rarely more helpful than harmful.

In software terms, they're looking to rip out entire modules, because they don't understand the business logic that demands those modules. Such substantive change would be pretty idiotic in almost all cases. Refactoring is virtually always the better choice, even if it's hard and takes a long time.

Ripping out a module entirely, only to find it was necessary after all, tends to lead to the same module being rebuilt piecemeal as the missing logic is identified and being as bad or worse than before. In the end, you still need to refactor it if you want it to be good. If you can't afford to refactor, (and you don't have well understood problems,) you're better off not changing anything.

I think that generally refactoring attempts have either failed or simply ended up bolting a bypass on the side that only helps somewhat, and most of the rest of the articles on the same site as the submission we're discussing contain at least one example thereof.

Nonetheless, I largely agree with your metaphor(s) as a projection of how a bunch of things are depressingly likely to go wrong in the short term.

I'd agree with that, because refactoring is hard, especially if you don't intimately understand the domain, and I think "effective government" is much less understood than "high quality software" as a whole, so it's extremely hard to refactor government. Additionally, there are more politics involved in gov't refactoring than code refactoring, so even provably good ideas can get shot down. All the same, I endorse "learn more about the problems and get better at refactoring" over "rip things out" virtually always.

SpaceX and Amazon, among other businesses, have challenged the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Their primary argument centers on the separation of powers principle. They contend that the NLRB's structure, with its independent agency status and limited presidential control over member removal, violates this principle.

Specifically, these companies argue that the NLRB's structure grants excessive power to the agency, allowing it to make decisions without sufficient presidential oversight. This, they believe, undermines the checks and balances system and infringes on their rights as employers. They contend that the board's ability to create rules and regulations that have the force of law, encroaches on the legislative branch's power. Additionally, they raise concerns about the NLRB's adjudicative role, which combines executive and judicial functions, blurring the lines between the two branches.

By challenging the NLRB's constitutionality, these companies aim to limit the board's authority and influence over labor relations. They argue that the current structure of the NLRB is outdated and no longer serves the best interests of workers or employers. Ultimately, these challenges raise important questions about the balance of power between the federal government and private businesses, and the role of independent agencies in regulating labor relations.

Can we make a strategic vs tectical distinction when it comes to reforms?

It looks like the kind of "reform" and deregulation that these Billionaires want, is whatever will put more money into their pocket, their businesses, and those of their rich friends. Unfortunately, lots of poor voters erroneously think they will get something out of it, but that's unlikely to be the intent or the result.

This is a pretty good take on what is likely to be an effort that mostly is in the interests of the extremely wealthy people running it, and is a reply to the posted article:

https://resnikoff.beehiiv.com/p/you-don-t-have-to-hand-it-to...

Also some useful history around "we're just going to eliminate all the waste! Easy peasy!"

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-fraudulence-of-waste-...

If anyone thinks there's anything good coming out of this for those who aren't multi-millionaires and billionaires, I have some land on the Moon to sell you.

That's not a good take at all. The author tries to make out as if Elon Musk is nothing more than a crony capitalist, pointing out that SpaceX has $15B in govt contracts. This conveniently ignores the reason SpaceX has those contracts in the first place, which is because they have consistently been the best available supplier to NASA/DoD/etc.

You can contrast what SpaceX has been delivering with Falcon and Starship vs what Boeing has been delivering with Starliner to get a tiny glimpse into how silly a claim it is that Musk is doing this to gift himself government contracts. Or compare how little the other billionaire-funded space company (Blue Origin) has delivered, even though they were actually founded before SpaceX. Musk doesn't need to (somehow) give his company a leg up via DOGE, his company is already the best provider available by a huge margin.

From there, the author says:

> consider the track record of Musk’s Boring Company, which is responsible for several of the worst municipal infrastructure boondoggles of the past few years.

In what sense is that true, even a tiny bit? TBC delivered the Las Vegas loop first phase for a cost of $31M per mile, which is significantly cheaper than what anyone else is digging tunnels for. A significant portion of that is station cost, which obviously becomes much less of the overall cost if you build longer tunnels. They completed this project in about 15 months. This was their first real project, before they had much opportunity to iterate on TBM designs (which if you look at the history of SpaceX, iteration speed is clearly a strong point in favor of Musk-led companies).

You can compare that to Cali's high speed rail project, which has a Phase 1 projected cost of $106.2B for 494 miles of track, which works out to $215M per mile, and that's not even a tunnel. They began in 2015 (before TBC was even incorporated) and there is not yet a single mile in operation.

The arguments about the relative costs of the Las Vegas tunnel versus the cost of the CA rail project are interesting. You mention that the bulk of the cost is actually in the stations, yet tell us the per mile cost. How many fully accessible stations integrated with existing transport infrastructure are to be built on the high-speed rail project? The Vegas tunnel is currently unidirectional isn’t it? That would be less useful for the high speed rail project. It’s a bit different to consider a largely pleasure route which can largely be routed anyway from a transport project which is much less restricted in where it can be routed. A rail project has additional costs and complexities like laying track and signalling. I’ll assume your argument is that these are unnecessary, we can just use existing autonomous cars to solve this. In which case might we be better comparing cost by passenger throughput rather than per mile.

The LVCC Loop is bi-directional – it has two tunnels, one for each direction. I'd say the main reason routing is less of an issue for the loop is not because it is "leisure" (strange phrasing, the LVCC Loop is also public transit) but because it is an underground tunnel, which is kinda the point – tunnels have significantly less issues with routing assuming you can get the digging cost to be much cheaper than status quo, which is the purpose of TBC (and so far I'd say they have demonstrated significant progress in this goal).

Definitely agree that a high-speed rail project and an electric car ferry tunnel project are not apples-to-apples comparable, my point is rather that even if you want to call TBC projects "boondoggles" (which again I struggle to see how that is the case even in isolation), the idea that you'd call them boondoggles in the presence of municipal infrastructure projects like CAHSR betrays incredible prejudice (or myopia) on the part of the author.

I stand corrected on the directional nature.

By routing I mean that the choice of destinations for the first phase at least is less constrained than what would it’s possible with a high-speed rail project connecting existing cities. Leisure isn’t the best phrase I agree but for example there is a difference between the ridership of the San Francisco cable car versus the buses and light rail of the Muni. I am not saying that people do not commute on the cable car but I would expect the vast proportion of riders are not commuters. I’m but sure how else to phrase that.

By and large I don’t know that have any disagreement with ether the original comment or the reply. I agree completely that we have to be careful when comparing a high-speed rail project to the Las Vegas loop. Whatever your opinion of the former

The Vegas loop is also connecting existing infrastructure, not sure why that would be less constrained in terms of destination than any other public transit project.

Again though, the reason I was comparing the two is because The Boring Company delivered what they promised on budget and in 15mo, which to me sounds like a success story, not one of the "worst municipal infrastructure boondoggles in recent years", especially when compared to CAHSR which is about a decade behind and $80B (or 250%) over budget (so far).

This in turn is why, in my judgement, the response posted by the davidw is not a "good take".

It's really an apples to kiwis comparison. The California project is certainly worth studying for how far off the rails it's gone, but the LV stuff is a toy project that's not really going to solve any real transportation problems long term.

Where it's really at in terms of learning how we could do better is to study places like Spain that are building the Madrid metro as well as long distance, high speed trains for relatively low prices. It's a thorny problem and it's not just "stuff costs less in Spain in general".

But what we'll get is more of this huckster selling us flashy stuff and not delivering, as well as California continuing to not deliver either.

> more of this huckster selling us flashy stuff and not delivering

But... the LVCC loop has literally been delivered? They are continuing to build it out and more stations will be opened in the very near future. You might want to take a step back and ask if bias is clouding your judgement at all.

Moving people around in automobiles underground is a fun Disney-esque ride, but not a serious transit system.

No True Scotsman.

If busses are from Glasgow and trains from Edinburgh, then that loop thing is indeed from Tahiti.

https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/teslas-in-tunnels-i...

https://san.com/cc/vegas-loop-faces-numerous-trespassers-and...

Think about the capacity of an automobile vs a bus or a subway with several cars.

I'm too busy thinking about the capacity of nothing at all, which is zero.

Are the costs for the loop based on phase one or do they also include the planned extensions of the system? How many different land owners were involved in this phase? How well does the loop integrate with existing public transport infrastructure?

The loop is being extended as we speak, I'd expect more stations to open up in the next few months. Not sure how much existing public transport infrastructure Las Vegas has, but I would expect connecting anything available would be desirable for everyone involved. To my knowledge a lot of the stations are being paid for by casinos/hotels who want to be connected to the network. I assume if the city of LV wants further connection points, TBC will be happy for to build those too.

Change has directionality it isn't change || !change. In this case change would be weighted toward enabling corporations, and bolstering security required for that. I consider that negative change.

I would like to see change to strengthen communities, improve education, and bolster human health. These will be all be further eroded and decrease through DOGE change.

I think that faith in "disruption" is one of those modern business myths, that's applied in hindsight to famous entrepreneurs. I don't think it's something you can plan, hire, or even hope for. There are two analogies that give me pause:

1. The "insurgency" problem: The people who can overthrow a government are never the same people as, or are even willing to cooperate with, the people who can govern.

2. The "second system effect" described by Fred Brooks. The workings of a bureaucracy seem analogous to a massive, complex software app that must be kept running while it's being completely re-written from scratch.

Please pardon my attempt to rephrase your questions in microecon terms

2. Tech debt is a community ("public") good in the short term and an externality (community antigood) at longer time scales

1. The devs who are responsible for fixing bugs are not always the guys who wrote the code

I'm thinking 1 is more like: "The devs who can write a new system are not the same as the devs who can keep a system running."

That's definitely true in my experience. The people you can hire to write a totally new system are out there in abundance. But finding a guy or gal good at maintenance is actually surprisingly difficult. Good maintenance devs are worth their weight in gold.

Yes! Was trying to keep the 2 points tightly integrated but your thinking is definitely closer to analog31's interpretation of the political economics.

There can be a cyclical aspect to the situation: the new hire gives up fixing legacy and rewrites the base out of anger. Probably many other archetypes that I missed, all of which resemble the basic setup. One might also generalize "coding culture" to "culture around legal codes".

To pile on your point: meanwhile, the suboptimal job market conditions (shall we say) preps the engineering culture for vicious spirals

These are all good points, but the people I'm talking about at a high level are more like managers, not devs. The managers haven't even expressed an interest in managing anything.

Ah you are the OP? Thank you for getting the conversation started in a promising direction!

Apologies for fixating on the analog instead of the referent, wish you would expand more on this snipe :)

>the hacks to get it done this time actually make it harder on an ongoing basis.

The thing with disruptive tech these days is that they are more or less inevitable once component manufacturing has enabled it to be built in bulk. This is because no one is rolling their own factory and creating end product from raw material input anymore. They want a $new thing it better be something they can assemble from mass market components today they can order to create inventory of end product for customers.

Even going back to the ipod. Was it really disruptive, or was it inevitable we’d get mp3 players when the cost of their components hit a certain price? I think the latter although the legend is of course the former. I’m not sure when the last time we had something truly disruptive and unpredictable emerge.

Recent quote I saw based on the life of the investigator who set up the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1850:

> If you tell a farmer you’re collecting signatures to cap the salaries of government employees, and you’re a smooth-talking confidence man, the farmer will sign almost anything, even the deed to his own land. This kind of swindle is called “the boodle game”.

which feels closer to what DOGE is doing than any real reform.

In what way?

They told them they'll cut spending. They intend to eliminate social security and medicare that most of those who voted for him depend on. Additionally, they want to remove regulation and regulatory bodies that protect consumers from corporations.

And with what evidence?

Every public pronouncement they've made about it. The Krugman piece linked elsewhere in these comments examines a few in more detail if you don't find them instantly indicative of non-seriousness without further context (but you should).

Vague generalizations mean nothing. Also here's another prediction from the esteemable Krugman:-

"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

The American government can’t do anything because Congress has delegated all its power to the administrative state. But because you can’t really have unelected bureaucrats doing whatever they want, Congress subjected administrative actions to endless judicial review.

To fix this, we need to end the filibuster so Congress can actually make laws. It’s much harder to legally challenge the real laws made by Congress than the fake laws made by administrative agencies. Then we need to repeal the Administrative Procedure Act, and rely on the Congressional Review Act to ferret out bad administrative rulemaking.

The framers really did understand what they were doing. People like it when they can vote and immediately see results. If they don’t like the results, they can vote a different way next time. People don’t like it when voting doesn’t change anything, because all the actual work is being done by unelected people fighting with lawyers in courts.

We also need to end gerrymandering, otherwise Congress and the state legislatures will continue to be un-elected as well. This is the only way to bring back a government that's willing to govern in good faith.

Gerrymandering is a red herring because it cancels out. For example, this year democrats won a larger share of house seats than their share of the popular vote. The alternatives are worse, having maps drawn by unelected and unaccountable redistricting commissions: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-failed-promise-of-ind...

That seems to me like a cherry picked metric, and in any event, canceling out isn't the point of democracy. And gerrymandering means that redistricting is also being done by an unelected and unaccountable body -- the legislature.

I'm willing to accept the risk of fair elections. This is even with the understanding that it would probably change the behavior of the parties in unpredictable ways.

Give me back my vote!

But I don't doubt that there will continue to be relentless pressure on our elective system. Democracy is fragile, and can be overthrown without violence through gradual erosion of its institutions. This is not a fault of democracy per se, because any government can be overthrown.

> That seems to me like a cherry picked metric

It’s not. Gerrymandering arises when politicians vote with their party—it doesn’t make much sense otherwise. But if the net effect of gerrymandering doesn’t change the party representation in Congress, that’s largely a theoretical problem.

> And gerrymandering means that redistricting is also being done by an unelected and unaccountable body -- the legislature.

What’s the alternative? Relying on “neutral” judges or commissions to make such politically important decisions is just bunk. If there was any such thing we wouldn’t need democracy. They wouldn’t produce “fair elections,” but would instead introduce an easily manipulated process (e.g. like in California: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-democrats-fooled-cali...) that was opaque and resistant to voter pressures.

Some of your statements contain kernels of truth. But remember Chesterton's Fence. With the CRA, would we really want ~the MTGs~ non-expert politicians who are beholden to their constituents and/or donors/lobbyists/interest groups reviewing implementations that are tech-heavy?

Your position seems to have a strong nondelegation-doctrine bent, but another way of looking at it is that your position would have Congress reassign the Judiciary's review power to the Legislature itself.

I want a healthy democracy. That means that people should feel like the government is doing what they want.

Look at the current transition. A recent poll showed it has a 59% approval rating—for a candidate that’s not that popular. But he got on stage and campaigned with a bunch of people who had specific policy visions, and then appointed those same people to run the government. What you see is what you get.

I don’t really care whether what judges and lawyers and paid experts have to say about those policies. If the people don’t like them, they’ll vote for a different slate the next time around.

> To fix this, we need to end the filibuster so Congress can actually make laws. It’s much harder to legally challenge the real laws made by Congress than the fake laws made by administrative agencies. Then we need to repeal the Administrative Procedure Act, and rely on the Congressional Review Act to ferret out bad administrative rulemaking.

A nice-sounding idea that actually has potential, but it's missing some crucial steps:

3. Expand the House to accommodate the near-tripling of U.S. population.

4. Streamline the House's discharge-petition procedure to sh*tcan the Hastert Rule.

(The Hastert Rule, after former speaker Dennis Hastert: When the GOP controls the House, the speaker will almost never bring a bill to the floor unless the bill is supported by a majority of the Republican caucus, even if the bill would have enough total votes to pass. That effectively disenfranchises every voter in a district with a Democratic representative.)

One way to ditch the Hastert Rule would be to reform the discharge-petition rule, so that signers' names would be kept secret by the clerk AND a bill would be brought to the floor with, say, 1/3 plus 1 of the House membership.

5. Reform the House districting process (as has been said elsewhere in this thread).

6. Yes, ditch the filibuster — AND the blue-slip rule that allows any senator to put an indefinite hold on a presidential nomination (e.g., as Sen. Markwayne Mullin recently did to promoting Lt. Gen. Chris Donahue to four stars).

7. Change the Senate rules to create a shotclock timer: The Senate is deemed to have approved every passed House bill and every presidential nomination if the bill or nomination isn't rejected within, say, 90 days OR there's a 60-senator vote to extend the time.

I agree with all of that except districting. I don’t trust judges or “independent commissions.” That should be the lesson of the 20th and early 21st century—there is no such thing as a neutral, objective body when it comes to large scale, politically significant decisions. The current districting process isn’t perfect, but inserting unelected decision makers into the process would be worse.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is easy, simple, and wrong.

And then there's the Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (not sure it's a law), which states, simplified, that a simpler system cannot control a more complicated system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)

And the corollary to that called the "Principle of Subsidiarity" which states (paraphrasing) that "Responsibilities must be minimally delegated upwards"

I'm reminded of [Things You Should Never Do Part 1](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...) , but substitute all those rulings and laws and interpretations for all the bug fixes, i.e. they support and provide service for edge cases, i.e. marginal people, organizations, and places. That's what the lawsuits are for; not to protect the ruling but to protect the people who weren't being served. Let's tear it all out just to build it again, adding all new bug fixes for all the same reasons.

I would welcome DOGE focusing on how much velocity it will increase and how many lines of bad policy it will remove. Likewise, cutting inefficient people should instead be replacing them.

It is so hard to make progress within gov, so focusing on firing and demoralizing makes the environment even more afraid to move, and inefficiency even more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As a counterpoint, I'm happy for the pro-AI discussions as these systems have been difficult to move forward. Many senior people are working to figure out how to legally do it, so dictates cutting red tape for them, not headcount, is welcome, and would let them focus on the project phases they actually want to do.

We work with multiple groups at the federal level, and while some people our peers interact with I do wish were out of the way, those are a minority, and more of a symptom. The ultimate problem is the procedures being tasked, the underlying mandates & regulations driving them, and lack of ability to succeed despite these. Imagine if your IT department was largely run by lawyers who fear jail time for any sign of malpractice because that's what the law says and they've built up defensive practices over the years as different situations came up. Of course the default is 'no'! The solution is not to stop having an IT department, but to fix the policy problems and rotate leadership for the new culture.

>I'm happy for the pro-AI discussions as these systems have been difficult to move forward.

What needs does government have that you think would be better performed by AI?

At the federal level, most things are big, underfunded, understaffed, underpaid, and over regulated, so programs are low quality, behind, and slow. I stay away from state level, and expect there is less data and $, and even more problems.

Think fairly basic data extraction, data cleaning, workflow automation, moving to the cloud, getting basic modern security.

I'm not trying to be troublesome, just really trying to understand the opportunities...

Basic data extraction and data cleaning? You can't trust AI to do anything without hallucinating or ignoring possibly important data.

Workflow automation, in what way? Once again, can't be trusted.

Moving to the cloud? How does AI help with that?

Getting basic modern security. Again, how does AI help with that?

It may help to think about baselines. The status quo is being late or bad, understaffed, low budget, etc. It is not comparing to perfect code written by top CS grads with all the time in the world.

Developers need help writing basic code, and for fancier tasks, help writing models better than their bad rules & bad ML.

Also, data is frustrating in these contexts. For example, consider data cleaning, where AI is a pretty clear win for spotting bad input errors, performing entity resolution, extraction of dirty data, etc. Federal level is by definition pretty big, and data comes from all sorts of terrible systems, often staples together from a hodgepodge of them. The shift to ML/AI here has been going for 10+ years, eg, Trifacta.

A little more out there, a lot of forms and data sources dealing with people is text, not just nicely structured data, so being able to more easily work with that is going to keep a lot of people busy for awhile.

Related to the last point, and I stay away from this side, but gov is also ultimately very much a service industry. Automating citizen interactions, and cheapening the cost to do it well, is a big deal.

I loved the article. And as a non-profit leader, I recognize the challenge of coming into an existing system, learning it, identifying things that need to change, and trying (vainly mostly) to change it.

My dream (but impossible) reforms for Congress would be:

- You can only run for political office if you have (personally) written and passed legislation at a lower level (city, county, state). I understand we need staff to help us draft legislation, but you must be a legislator, not a figurehead, to serve. No idea how to enforce this on any practical level other than a draft tracking system. GitHub for politics?

- If you do not pass one piece of legislation while in office each year, you cannot run for reelection. Your job is to work on legislation, negotiate, and pass laws. If you block a piece of legislation, it does not count. Once out, you must repeat the process - go back to 1.

- Congress get compounded bonuses or raises for passing legislation in consecutive years and can also make a special Legislator All-Star team. Trading cards will be released in schools so young kids can grow up celebrating the amazing legislators in hot streaks. CSPAN will keep a statistical database of legislators accomplishments and reframe politics around class sports narratives, like comebacks and underdogs and unlikely team-ups.

Seems like this incents net-new legislation, and should also reward either removing or updating legislation.

It would also require a constitutional amendment. Haha

You sound not well too,

I don't want legislators to write new legislation, I want them to repeal existing legislation. I want 535 guys like Thomas Massie and Ron Paul but they fail your criteria.

You don't sound like a human.

Very interesting and non partisan description of the near hopelessness of trying to make government more effective!

It would have been a lot more interesting to explore why the US government is so resistant to any kind of reform compared to other forms of government. Especially in the last 40 years.

I suspect not having proportional representation plays a large role. New parties can't get into government, so any change has to happen inside the existing parties.

The filibuster. You need 60 Senate votes to do almost anything and for the last 40 years the only time anyone came close was Obama in 2009 which gave us the ACA.

I would venture, that the same factors which make the US resilient also contribute to its stagnation.

The US government is now the world’s second oldest government. The system of checks and balances prevents large shifts in government. The lack of realistic external competition motivates complacency. Geography, and history prevent separation.

How are we stagnating? We’re growing every year, it’s like the number one policy goal of most governments is to make the economy grow each year. 10 years ago you might get predicative spell correct for text now we have generative AI like ChatGPT. Fuck we cured sickle cell anemia and got a FDA approved treatment out like 2 years ago, and other branches of science keep trucking along.

We’re having a problem with distribution of this wealth but by no means is the US stagnating

The fortune 50 is thriving, but if you talk to a school teacher or any other “median” professional - they have seen a large quality of life decline in real dollar terms over the last 50 years.

In the public sphere, the problems I learned about in grade school are still the top problems of today… except worse. Our government has become incapable of addressing public policy issues across the entire political spectrum from school shootings to immigration reform.

Other countries are growing faster. It goes beyond America, the Western empire no longer dominates the global economy.

When the US president goes to Vietnam he has to treat them as equals.

>Other countries are growing faster

Other countries have grown faster by copying from the most developed countries (and taking advantage of international trade facilitated by the US) which only works for significantly-less-developed countries.

The US was 25% of the global economy in 1960 and it is still 25% of the global economy.

>Fuck we cured sickle cell anemia and got a FDA approved treatment out like 2 years ago, and other branches of science keep trucking along.

The US's life expectancy was recently eclipsed by Cuba lol, medical science is absolutely not the field you want to try and champion as exemplary of American exceptionalism

Did I say that the US “increased life expectancy by more than other nations” or did I say “ Fuck we cured sickle cell anemia and got a FDA approved treatment out like 2 years ago…”

The person I was replying to stated that the US was stagnating. One of my counter examples was the fact that we cured a disease that was genetic and previously considered incurable, via our innovation.

What your describing is a problem but it’s not one of innovation, it a problem of wealth distribution which I also highlighted

Usually I am against one-liners like yours, but in this case I really think this is the only response. DOGE is a lobby group with no plan and therefore no prospects of success. There isn't much to talk about. The Republicans have been disingenuous about any efficiency or economic reform for my entire lifetime and even assuming Trump & Co are serious I doubt they have the numbers to get Congressional support for big reform, so there will be at most small incremental changes that will probably be rolled back in a few years.

I'd like to be wrong, but if there is anything here I don't see it. It is going to take a lot more than buzz and conversation to handle the unmanageable pork-barrelling beast that is the US bureaucracy.

Adopting a skeptical approach is indeed wise in politics. However, there's a significant opportunity to align bureaucracies with modern technologies. Politics, as a field, seems unusually resistant to technological advancements that could enhance democratic processes. This reminds me of the early days of IT, when it was merely a peripheral division in most organizations. Over time, IT evolved into a core strategic function, transforming how businesses operate. Could a similar shift happen in politics?

My perspective is that if done correctly, the federal budget should stay roughly the same. Although I am worried about the federal budget being more devoted to debt servicing overtime. Perhaps it would be possible to boost service level while reducing budgetary load.

The reason is simple. Fast and efficient bureaucracy requires adequate and well trained manpower to operate. It's not just about eliminating busywork, but also having the manpower to manage the queue.

Bet you a dollar the bureaucracy has already thought of this and has multiple internal committees that have been working on those exact words for years. Any issues aren't going to be lack of good people or ideas, government is swimming in those. The issue is incentives at the systemic level and the patchworks of powerful interest groups. Adding, effectively, a new interest group doesn't look like progress to me. Especially since the incentives don't seem to be well aligned - why would Musk care about how efficient individual workers are? It might be, but it is far too early to say if it is.

“Fast and efficient bureaucracy”: can that even exist?

Yes, and the fact that you cannot even conceive of it tells you that you might be a victim of propaganda.

what example can you give?

It's a group with no real authority. Their only option is to create reports. In some cases the Administration may act directly on them. In the majority of cases it will be a report delivered to the legislature that they will then completely ignore.

The largest budget programs are entitlements which the Trump team seems powerless to change and thus has no stated desire to engage with them at all or the Pentagon which is _the_ pork barrel machine as far as congress is concerned.

DOGE mostly looks to be a PR distraction.

> DOGE is a lobby group with no plan

That Elon hasn't published a plan doesn't mean he doesn't have one.

He's done the "impossible" many times before, so I expect a very serious effort. Can it fail, sure. But betting agains Elon is historically a terrible strategy.

I have yet to see a department of innovation to actually do anything. The only innovation I have seen in any organization has always been from the inside, never imposed. Not giving Musk e.g. Treasury to bully everyone with budgets clearly indicates this is only to flatter his ego, but effectively protect everyone else from him wielding actual power. I am happy US administration remains sane even in these trying times.

> wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo

I have yet to meet a veteran civil servant with whom I cannot establish rapport and prepare the groundwork for a project.

The key is to actually increase their agency without needlessly exposing them to risks they cannot mitigate.

Yeah, sometimes you run into egos and people who are used to huge bribes, but that just means marking them for dismissal when possible and adding their favorite sponsor to the delivery team temporarily.

And if all fails, they refuse to budge and insist on protecting the old, unusable, siloed system to protect their bribes? That's where you report to their boss with final word said by the cabinet member. And find another project for 4 years until the situation resolves itself. These people usually don't last long.

But when things go well, public servants can really rip through the red tape and make the project reality. It's just that they need to see the benefit.

>"What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built"

In theory billionaires should be treated just as your average Joe. What worries me more is that they seem to be able to buy government they want. Not completely there yet but moving in the direction. And while I do not put much trust to government having people's interest at heart I think the government subjugated by billionaires will be a nightmare in the end.

Elon Musk moved from South Africa to New Jersey to California to Texas because he wasn't getting the government that he wants.

From the article:

> It's really hard to have an accurate model for why change is so hard in large bureaucratic institutions, and specifically for public sector ones, where the differences in governance really do matter.

From the discussion of organization types by Mintzberg, it seems a natural consequence. Bureaucracies are the efficient, right answer to stable circumstances - you make a stable organization, figure out the right answers and make everyone follow these answers. Non-compliance is a problem - the culture you aim for is "what's our accepted answer to this". When you think about it, what is change but non-compliance with the previously accepted rules?

(Software development is in the opposite category. The bread and butter is change and chaos.)

The fundamental problem is that there is no „wall“ but a labyrinth with many walls. Some of real value, some outdated, misunderstood and some a real problem. We can all agree on that.

Now how does Elon decide which ones to smash?

By overshooting, obviously. He's demonstrably comfortable with breaking good things in the service of eliminating bad ones.

There's no reason to take Trump or Musk at face value. DoGE is an excuse to weaken or abolish government departments that Republicans dislike.

People like Peter Thiel are not so interested in government reform and efficiency so much as toppling "the ancien [sic] liberal order" and replacing it with techno-fuedalism.

Thiel isn't a techno-feudalist, he's a libertarian.

He explicitly opposes liberalism and pluralist democracy. He's not a libertarian.

In 1947, the US congress attempted exactly the same thing with the National Security Act of 1947. There were inter-service rivalries during WW2 that needed to be addressed. The Air Force was separated from the Army, but the Army quickly re-established their own air operations with the helicopter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_1947

The Army got really screwed with this and the succeeding Key West Agreement. Doing everything with helicopters ("airplanes want to fly, helicopters want to crash") is ridiculous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West_Agreement

"POSIWID". The purpose of the system is what it does.

> What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built?

Had this read "What if successful businessmen leading a unified government can't disrupt the system?" I'd raise an eye brow and see what they had to say.

Instead, without the flowery language of helping out, this argues directly that we ought to dismantle the distribution of power and give it to one man - ordained by wealth - in the name of efficiency.

It looks like, swims like, and quacks like fascist ideology.

What even is fascism anymore? Is populism fascist? The ancient Romans had a concept of temporary dictators for emergencies. Was that fascism? I recently read Starship Troopers, which many people say is a cautionary tale about fascism. It’s not cautionary, but it really leaves me wondering what the hell is the common theme amongst all these examples of fascism except maybe being a threat to the status quo. The book wasn’t even totalitarian, which is what most people mean when they say fascist.

https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...

It's a long article but includes a pretty good descriptive definition of fascist movements. (search "taxonomy" to skip to the definition)

He spends some time on the specific issue that no single instance of fascism, even the original italian model, explicitly manifests every single point of the definition. And some of them show up prominently in systems that it doesn't really make sense to call fascist. So every government has some of these elements to different degrees, the point where they have "enough" of them "strongly enough" to be considered fascism is kind of a judgement call.

But that doesn't mean the individual points aren't concrete or can't be evaluated straightforwardly into a working definition. Some of the things that differentiate contemporary fascism from "mere" dictatorship are:

  - attachment to an idealized syncretic national history
  - machismo and contempt for the weak
  - positioning in opposition to an "enemy" that is so powerful it justifies immediate pervasive violent action but is also somehow degenerate and weak

Thanks! I’ll have to read this later

Its the director of the movie that made it a cautionary tale about fascism. The commentary track is great as well.

Verhoven calls out specifically that fascist tickle your senses by making it fucking sexy.

Imagine our great future and all the good things we can make possible (if we don't have to listen and consider.)

we need startup mentality and efficiency in the governmental structures that are built for redistributing valuable resources in a system that exists in opposition to the outside world. Competition still does exists and we have internal and external dangerous forces that might make human life on the planet uncomfortable. To prevent this sudden wake up call to the broader society we must engineer incentives that will make the society slightly feeling the urge to do something productive that brings value. This force will be embedded into the economic model and will keep propagating further. Bringing a more just efficient and lean government that is working purely for the society's greater good.

Most startups burn runway and fail. Not a model for longstanding governance. Likewise what are your incentives? I think we have enough incentives already for people to be productive its just they face blockers to productivity. Investment is limited. Knowledge is gated and not evenly distributed or made accessible as means of stratifying the populace by trade. We seem more content to have a society of a few highly paid engineers vs a society where everyone is an engineer making a median wage. And a lack of social safety net means development optimizes for quick profitability in order to at least pay the owners bills vs developing novel technology that isn’t dependent on profitability in todays economic context (which severely limits human technological potential).

I don't always subscribe to someone's Substack, but when I do, it's Jennifer Pahlka.

What a weird eulogy. Why does she want to hide her infatuation with the incoming administration rooted in the explicitly far-right faction of the US one-party state?

Would it somehow hurt her economically or socially?

I would recomment Americans watch a bit of David Starkey who largely comments on the British horror show as it sort of gets in to some of what is wrong with the US (largely the move to put power in the hands of unelected bodies).

"Reform" is itself too ambiguous to be a target. I don't think anyone wants the government to more efficiently murder their own citizens, or oppress their minority population, yet if you simply settle for wanting "reform" that would have to count.

What we want is not simply "reform" not simply "efficiency". What we want is more good things. And therein lies the problem for DOGE. We don't believe that they are going to make good things efficient.

Beurocratic inefficiency is rooted in trust. The beurocratic network of controls and accountability departments are established when the existing system fail, and are slowly dismantled again (usually by the logic of "why are we doing this when we never catch anything") when it's no longer needed. The problem for the American beurocracy is that the American people neither trust each other, nor act in a way that would foster that trust.

The very existance of billionaires is a glowing example of why American beurocracy exists. Something has to stop their otherwise uncompromised power.

Meanwhile the DOD will continue vaccuuming up taxpayer money and doing god knows what with it for god knows what reasons

We pay more on debt interest than DoD. Pretty soon debt interest will be "vacuuming" the lion's share of all government income

True, but what options do we have to lower those payments?

Austerity measures (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity)

People will be unhappy though

Based on previous performance, not electing Trump would have helped.

But Elon's first act as efficiency co-czar was to get get Trump elected and he'll now need to trim Trillions just to come out even.

Eh I'm not too concerned about this given the last forty years of incompetence assuring that we obviously won't budget in any sort of rational manner.

When I was in the Navy, we had $X to spend at the end of a quarter, and by god did we fucking spend it! Anything under the sun with any shred of argument that it was needed would be purchased. I was personally responsible for a huge department and I recall we had to spend an insane amount one quarter. I'm talking almost Brewster's Millions levels of trying to spend money, but let's call it Brewster's Hundred Thousands instead.

Spare parts for the Whizz-Banger which we would probably never use because you only need to replace that part maybe one time in the ship's life? Yea, buy ten of those! Fancy pocket tools and knives for every human onboard the ship, even the guys who sit at a desk ordering supplies? Sure, get two of them each, so they have a spare!

I always wondered why they did that "reset the budget to the lowest quarter" type of thing, just set a budget and if there is a surplus then next year the taxpayers don't have to pay as much. I don't know who ran the budgeting system, but it was fucked how badly we wasted money during quarters where nothing broke on the ship.

I don't read the news anymore to save my mental state, but I hope that this DOGE is a positive influence instead of just more oligarchy in action, though I am not holding my breath.

It's called use it or lose it. If you don't spend 100% of the budget then it'll get permanently reduced in the next round and you'll have to fight extremely hard to get that budget back later if it turns out you need it. So you spend the excess on whatever will continue to justify line go up.

This is just 100% accepted as a universal law of bureaucracy. As long as individual managers own parts of a budget, it applies to large corporations, non profits, and perhaps most of all in government.

When I was at a Fortune 500 company, we had $X to spend at the end of a quarter we spent it and more - I am talking millions.

It's called use it or lose it - we would also overspend by as much as we could get away with so we had justification for asking for a higher budget next year.

there's approximately zero chance that the department of dodgy will go after this sort of thing.

why?

much easier to cut Medicaid, social security, education, and similar non-essential stuff. corporate handouts will increase, not decrease, when you have two billionaires in the white house.

How so? My expectation would be that budgeting process and can be reigned in by decree much more so than an official enshrined in law system like Medicare.

you're assuming good intentions. the two people just elected to the white house are two of the most selfish ever.

Yeah, any talk about “reigning in government spending/waste” that doesn’t start and end with the military is totally unserious. The DOD wastes more money every day than all the usual suspects in this kind of talk do in a year.

The major suspects this time around are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those agencies are very efficient by normal measures. But Elon/Vivek are coming at it from a perspective that considers their entire mission to be 100% waste. From that perspective, they waste many times more than the DoD spends. I don’t think they’ll get anywhere with it, but they’re very serious.

> From perspective, they waste many times more than the DoD spends. I don’t think they’ll get anywhere with it, but they’re very serious.

It's extremely difficult to take anyone who suggests introducing a profit margin to reduce waste as acting serious. (I realize you were probably indicating they weren't bluffing; just saying.) Plus, they can account for their spending and the DOD cannot.

The main point seems to be to cut spending on these programs. If one sees them as nothing but waste then that’s automatically a reduction.

It’s a pretty extreme view, but I think it’s serious. Destroying these programs has long been a dream of the more libertarian extremes of the Republican Party.

Fortunately for the people who depend on these programs, “DOGE” isn’t real and has no power to do anything.

It’s as real as Trump decides it’s real. All he has to do is instruct his administration to not disburse the money and the Supreme Court has already ruled that Presidents have presumptive immunity for official acts, i.e. you can’t even bring the administration to court over it as the act of questioning their action inhibits the presidency

These 4 years are not going to be normal just like most of 2016-2020 was not normal

No, not just like 2016-2020. It's going to be far more abnormal than that.

Waste and inefficient spending in the DoD sphere is incredibly difficult to tackle. The article highlights two anecdotes/situations that are shared by the DoD and wider federal enterprise - that knowledge and power is generally actually incredibly diffuse across an organization, and therefore all changes require touching and gaining approval through a monstrous about of stakeholders, and that vendors can be giant dicks.

DoD challenges are compounded by being tasked to do relatively unique things for the American public. What is a reasonable price to pay for a training exercise where Marines actually get to deploy a anti ship missile battery onto a lonely Pacific Island? Is the incremental cost of 3 versus 2 of these exercises a year worth while? Valuing many of things the military does, both in terms of what their positive value is, as well as what their costs -should- be is difficult, since we have so little analogous scenarios to draw on.

Without confident and broadly consensus (or at least with sufficient top level cover and firepower) valuations on benefits and costs, any attempt to reduce spending just slams into resistance (both truly well meaning, as well as reflexive and self-serving).

Another major DoD challenge is that outside of the IT field, the DoD asks for industrial competency and competitiveness that frankly the overall US industrial base looks to barely be able to meet. And so not only is it inflicted by vendors acting like dicks, they're inflicted by incompetent vendors acting like dicks.

> Another major DoD challenge is that outside of the IT field, the DoD asks for industrial competency and competitiveness that frankly the overall US industrial base looks to barely be able to meet. And so not only is it inflicted by vendors acting like dicks, they're inflicted by incompetent vendors acting like dicks.

And inside the IT field it's even worse.

> Waste and inefficient spending in the DoD sphere is incredibly difficult to tackle

Not really—cut their budget and force them to compensate.

> and therefore all changes require touching and gaining approval through a monstrous about of stakeholders

Notably not the people footing the bill, though.

There is some waste that can be trimmed without sacrificing capabilities but those savings are limited and hard to identify. Overall the military is actually under funded for all the global missions it's tasked to perform and the strain is starting to show. Any real savings will require trimming down the mission set. Should we eliminate one leg of the nuclear triad? Back off from defending our treaty allies? Stop protecting the global sea lanes? Give up on being able to fight two major conflicts simultaneously? There doesn't seem to be much political consensus in Congress for any of those options.

And let's not have any uninformed claims that we can somehow achieve huge savings while maintaining capabilities just by swapping manned platforms for drones. That is simply science fiction, and even if the technology was ready the savings would be marginal.

> Should we eliminate one leg of the nuclear triad?

Yes, actually; two of them. Air-based nuclear bombs barely made sense in WWII; with modern IADS, the idea that you're going to get nuclear bombers through to target is laughable.

As for land-based assets, they're all in known locations built to withstand strikes that even conventional weaponry can take out these days. Sure, you can put them on mobile launchers and move them around like Russia, but then you have major security problems with hauling them around the country where people can potentially get near them.

The only part of the nuclear triad that actually matters for deterrence is the SLBMs.

I read suggestions at least 40 years ago that we should get rid of all land based nuclear assets because, in the case of an actual nuclear war, they will massively increase the amount of radioactive fallout and long term contamination the survivors will have to deal with.

I agree that you could cut the other two legs and still retain >90% of value with just the SLBMs.

What's nearly always disappointing with these types of cuts is what happens when you actually look at the numbers. CBO's 2021 estimate of 2021-2030 Nuclear Force costs are here: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-05/57130-Nuclear-Force...

The estimated total costs over that time frame (this includes spending on B-21+LRSO, Columbia Class SSBN and Sentinel ICBM development) is 634 billion dollars. ICBMs and strategic bombers are budgeted at ~130 billion, and SSBNs are 145 billion.

If you took the 634 billion, and cut out the ICBM and Bombers and tactical weapons, and cut the nuclear weapons lab/support facility cost by 2/3 (this is way optimistic), and cut the communications and C&C cost by 2/3 (this is also way optimistic), you end up with total savings over the 10 years of ~275 billion (44%).

This is not chump change. Unfortunately, the current (2024) DoD yearly budget (note that many of the costs above are split between DoD and DoE) is 825 billion. The same CBO estimate puts the nuclear budget at ~7% of the total defense budget over the same 10 year period. So these cuts get us a ~3% overall decrease to the DoD budget.

This is certainly a major achievement, but unfortunately it's probably the single largest/easiest decision to make. Every single choice past this just gets harder and harder with smaller and smaller wins.

I see your point.

The challenge is that the US establishment firmly believes that American supremacy is both good for the world, and good for America and Americans.

No president (including Trump the first time) has yet been able to bring in enough true outsiders who were willing to gamble on this proposition to force through this type of change.

Consider if you really wanted to cut down on DoD spending, but you also believed that on a whole, American force projection was a good thing, but you just wished we could do so more cost effectively. If you're the big guy at the top pushing down these types of "30% budget cut, go figure it out", you're going to get push back from every corner saying that it's not possible without conceding on some critical capability.

As a single person, you could run down some of these claims and figure out which ones are bullshit, and ram your changes through. But you can't manage them all. So now you need more and more helpers to help you sort through the bullshit.

As long as you are hamstrung by the belief that maybe, just maybe, it's useful (or worse, vital) to have 11 carriers available (btw, that's a law, not just DoD policy) so that you can have 2-3 at sea at any point, you're going to run into problems trying to ram through straight budget cuts.

You can also just wind up increasing overall waste - i.e. the defense procurement classic is "we ordered 200, but we want to save money so we're cutting the order to 100". In practice of course, this does not halve the price of the contract, you'd be lucky if it's even 25% less because you weren't ordering "200 of already built thing" you were ordering "200 of thing with it's own production line, tooling, compliance costs and staff and workforce".

So ramming through a bunch of budget cuts might necessarily involve cutting a whole bunch of programs like that...but the effect is you've just ensured you pay proportionally more, to get less, despite the fact you had more then enough cash on hand for the original order.

Which is the problem with a year over year budget: the upfront price of the massive order of whatever it is might be that over time it's going to be far cheaper once delivered (or that it's delivery for the next 20 years of supply)...but the budget for it is only approved year by year.

I’m just going to watch and hold on to my opinions, as time and time again, Musk has championed his will.

Can you elaborate?

I think they’re saying they’re going to abdicate responsibility for thinking about what’s happening to their government because a strong man is in charge now.

(strong man, not strongman, but you can decide what the difference is)

I am cautiously optimistic about what Elon Musk is attempting with DOGE. But half my friends are convinced he will fail and that his legacy won't be Tesla or sending rockets to Mars but failing to reform the government. The other half think two trillion is too small a target.

I think two trillion is way too high a target but I am pretty certain they will achieve meaningful cuts that will make our government more nimble and faster. I just wished that Trump had not promised they wouldn't be allowed to touch social security or Medicare and Medicaid. I think there are hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicare and Medicaid fraud that could be rooted out in two and a half years. But I do plead guilty to being an optimist.

It’s funny to see people talking about DOGE as if it was actually a thing. Right now it’s just a collective term for Vivek and Elon saying stuff. It’s not actually a department and there’s no indication that will ever change. These two guys are going to say a bunch of stuff, they’ll be totally ignored by the politicians and bureaucrats alike, and that’s all that’s going to happen with DOGE.

I want to say it was the NYTimes, "the daily" podcast that did a pretty good job of being even handed when talking about this. If anyone is interested, it should be the Dec 4th one. They brought up the fact that we've tried to do things like this in the past, and that they have all mostly failed, for political reasons.

Cutting government spending is very hard to do. Everyone has special interests they look to protect, and no congress person wants to be the one that stopped funding for their district/state. I too am hopeful, but I have my doubts.

You have no one in your circle thinking he will succeed at making himself richer by crippling regulators?

If you paid attention to anything that Musk have said, it should be pretty clear that he is an idiot. Everything "engineering" Tesla or SpaceX related that came out of his mouth was communicated to him buy actual engineers. Once he went on his own to do Twitter without any advisers, the amount of cognitive dissonanse that he dispayed and still does to this day is astounding. There is no chance that someone like that can make any correct cuts.

Even if you dont believe any of that, the fact that he championed Trump should be a huge red flag on his mental state.

If you think Republicans can do anything effective, you clearly havent been paying attention in the last 8 years.

Spending will by increase by > 2 trillion

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