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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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