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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I don't fault this guy for wanting to join DOGE and make a difference. The fact that he was able to make a few phone calls and actually get hired into an influential position despite having zero background in government, civics, economics, finance etc. should, however, tell you everything you need to know about the department and its brain trust.

I wonder what will happen to all these Signal conversations when the inevitable scandals/lawsuits/inquiries happen. Surely the public will be able to scrutinize them right?

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Yeah I find that anecdote incredibly revealing as to the way wealthy people move through political spaces. No offence to the author of the blog post, but he was the CTO of a company that sold video conferencing software—what on Earth would he know about public governance? Pick a random student with a BA in public policy & administration off the graduating class of 2024's honour roll, and I bet they'd do a better job at doing whatever "DOGE" is supposed to do than this guy would.

We've tried that for decades, and look where it's gotten us.

Policy wonks and lawyers have run America into the ground with reckless spending and forever wars.

I would venture that introducing fresh ideas and technologists with first principles thinking will yield better results.

Fully agree. The academia gatekeeping in certain fields hasn’t served us well over the last decade or so.

Fresh ideas from individuals with experience from all walks of life should be entertained. Doesn’t mean they’ll be followed.

Furthermore, DOGE has no actual power administratively, really all they can do is advise. Congress would need to grant them power first. Saagar Enjeti gas a good take on this, he’s pretty well versed in Washington-Speak

I enjoyed his recent conversation with Lex, but I lost quite a bit of respect for his opinion on politics when he called the Cambridge Analytica scandal nonsense.

The DOGE guys + Executive branch will try to get the Supreme Court to rule that the phrase "take care" in the Constitution means that the President has the power to fire any government employee at any time.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S3-3-1/...

> forever wars

And yet they're allying with Trump and his Republicans? Republicans are responsible for the most recent US "forever wars", and Trump has threatened to invade various countries Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, publicly proposed annexing Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland, has fired missiles into numerous countries like Syria, assassinated an Iranian general, etc.

And Trump loudly opposes various orgs that are responsible for holding aggressive powers at bay, like how NATO represents a check on Russia's apparent violent expansionism.

Trump's approach to geopolitics seems just as violent as his predecessors but more mercurial and erratic.

America has tried giving robber-barrons free reign before. How did that turn out?

Several things:

For one, who said anything about "first principles thinking"? Elon Musk has a pronounced ideological bias. Anyway, first principles thinking is practically useless when it comes to highly complex systems, because such systems do not behave in self-evident ways. Empirical knowledge is the only thing that gets you anywhere.

Moreover, "DOGE" is not a break from the status quo in any way. Corporate interests have informed governance since long before either of us were born. That, rather than "policy wonks," is the rot at the heart of the government. Forever wars happen because they are extremely profitable for weapons manufacturers, not because warfare is a wonkish policy.

The only novelty "DOGE" brings to the table is the aesthetics of an SF tech startup, which won't help the government any more than it helped WeWork. It'll actually do less: WeWork was taken seriously, at least for a while. "DOGE" is impossible to take seriously.

I would venture that introducing fresh ideas and technologists with first principles thinking will yield better results.

It could, maybe. Provided the people you appoint have some measure of credibility and integrity. Or at least seem to have some kind understanding of the basic mechanics by which governments (even when reduced to a bare minimum) need to operate.

Elon and Vivek plainly do not fit this description, and that should be screamingly obvious by now.

So weird. You cut the taxes of the most wealthy in this country, slash the corporate tax rate and our debt mounts. What is going on?

You don't have to be convinced, but to present an argument -- He knows how to lead a team with disparate skills and motivations towards a complex, poorly defined end-goal. That might sound like corporate B.S., but I truly believe that's a useful skill that not everyone has. Of course I expect he is relatively weak in his understanding of law, the dynamics of different government organizations, etc, but I expect (hope?) they're hiring others to fill in these gaps.

Championship-winning 12th grade soccer captains probably have decent leadership skills, but that doesn't mean they can automatically succeed as M&A advisors at a multinational. We don't need a blitz version of the Peter principle where people skip n-levels at a time.

Lets hope that DOGE is not just bunch of rich assholes who all think they are really smart.

So far all the arrows I've seen point in one direction ...

Whiz Kids 2.0 ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen...

That didn't work out too well but I guess I just see the cons in hindsight, not the pros.

For those not familiar with the 1960s "Whiz Kids" attempts of "smart people" to use data and statistics to "fix" business and then government/war, there is a nice brief overview of pros/cons/lessons at:

   https://www.amnesta.net/other/whizKids/

too late.

Leading tech for a 250 person startup is surely different than wrangling the vast bureaucracy of the US Government, especially when the author says they didn't want to join Atlassian because they would have to deal with "politics" and "NPC coworkers". TBF DOGE as a non-governmental entity is just going to make bullshit recommendations to Trump and not have to actually deal with the consequences of things they recommend, so maybe it would have been perfect for this guy.

Maybe we'll get some funny "Elon Musk: please set the self destruction timer to 30 seconds" in court documents just like Google.

Scottish Government bans use of WhatsApp for official business (2024)

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scottish-government-b...

> The decision follows a fierce backlash over the mass deletion of messages by ministers and officials during the Covid pandemic.

You mean, what will happen when we get to Episode 5: The Deep State Strikes Back?

> The fact that he was able to make a few phone calls and actually get hired into an influential position despite having zero background in government, civics, economics, finance etc. should, however, tell you everything you need to know about the department and its brain trust

I have no interest in defending Elon, but this assessment is unfair. Recall how during the Obama transition, a bunch of Silicon Valley'ers got hired in to help modernize government tech (and doubly so after the disastrous obamacare website rollout). Very few of those people had experience in govt, civics, etc.

There's a difference between "building tech for the government" and whatever governmental cosplaying DOGE is doing.

Slight difference between asking techies to modernize government tech and asking them to retool the entire federal government.

You can listen to their own description of their strategy and tactics. It was every different from the contemporary counterpoint. They reformed one system one subsystem at a time by working with the current owners and tech staff and teaching them their approach.

https://changelog.com/gotime/154

I knew contractors in their wake working at companies that grew out of their work in CMS, such as Ad Hoc (a name of the original team to not be called WHITE HOUSE HOT SHOTS or DOGE or something similarly jarring to thereby take agency away from the people who had to you know do the work once they knew they'd roll off) and Nava as they expanded beyond that one system 5 years later.

Let's see how the braggadocios we'll solve all the problems at once flavor of the moment goes, then judge the healthcare.gov teams.

Yeah and it was probably equally craven and opportunistic to bring them in as well.

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