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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

There are ways to cut wasteful spending without, y'know, creating a panic.

How sure are you that there is in fact a ton of waste? All the sources for that position have a clear bias, and offer essentially no real evidence (at best a few anecdotes).

There's bound to be some.

Is it as much as the right pretends it is? Is it the cause of the ballooning federal debt? No on both. But it does exist.

And honestly, the worst thing you can do is have someone try to run the organization allocating those funds as if he's the CEO of his own personal organization.

Is it much more proportionate to over all budget then Google, Microsoft, Walmart, UPS, bank of America, etc?

Those companies can't produce money to "pay off debts", increasing the defecit. So I'd say there's a fighting chance there.

I'm no economist nor businessman though, so I won't pretend I can answer that with confidence.

Just don’t see why I should take it on faith that the US department whatever has 10X the “waste” of a big multi-national bank. Or that DOGE can improve anything.

DOGE will improve everything... For billionaires. The working class is screwed.

But hey, they might lobby to finally get rid of penny production. So that's a micro-win.

I definitely wouldn't claim that the government is on a scale of 10x the waste of corporate. But the structure of government budgeting does make it easier to create more efficiency

There's inefficiency in any system. Engines, motors, fusion power, and transistors. We can calculate their efficiency, and the numbers aren't impressive if that's all you care about. Maybe it's better to ask how they compare to other methods of doing work. This is the cost of the system, and it's either worth it or it isn't.

The US medical system is a public-private partnership, and it's likely the most expensive system in the world for what the benefits it provides (see "List of countries by total health expenditure per capita" on Wikipedia). The government can only optimize here if it's willing to rein in the for-profit middlemen.

To paraphrase a quote, I'd be tempted to call an obsession with efficiency a hobgoblin of little minds. Or maybe it's just an excuse to cut programs.

There is also the question of whether the actions required to cut the waste are themselves expensive. If you spend a huge amount of time and effort to cut waste, there's a point at which it would have been cheaper to just accept that some waste is inevitable and to not worry about it.

Literally every organisation I've been in has had "waste", but most of them have been smart enough to realise that you don't want to spend thousands of person-hours measuring every tiny little thing and doing wildly complex RoI analyses (especially on stuff where it's almost impossible to figure out anyway because there are too many variables), and instead focus on having metrics around the outcomes that they do care about.

Fear and stress is actually the desired outcome.

> "When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains"

Trump's nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/27/trump-federal-eorkers-inspe...

Treat people like villains, and they'll start to act like it.

This pithy, stupid comment is completely missing the forest for the trees. Most of these people have long histories of being the villain. Treating them as villains because of their history of being villains isn't what caused them to be villains.

Most workers at federal agencies don't have long histories of being the villain.

I've been far more screwed by the private sector than by people in government.

I'm not talking about those people. I'm talking about villains, like Trump and Musk, Kash Patel, Mitch McConnel, the people we treat as villains because they have shown us repeatedly that's what they are.

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