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3 reasons come to mind -
1. There's a vast and profound difference between trimming inefficiencies ("cutting waste") and eliminating a valuable function. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
2. This entire administration and its main actors have given zero reason to assume what they are doing is in good faith. In fact, quite the opposite they have incited worry that their motivations are not honest.
3. They are doing this with a shocking lack of oversight, on their own terms.
2. What type of actions/behaviors would lead you to believe this is being done in good faith? That seems somewhat hard to demonstrate when the other side almost universally assumes you never do anything in good faith.
3. This is the fault of our government structure since always and specifically our Congress over the last many decades, which has ceded more and more of the actual running of government to unelected civil servants who technically fall under the umbrella of the Executive branch. If we wanted to prevent things like this from being done, we should've had an actual civil service ala the UK, which although it falls under their Executive branch, it is not unilaterally controlled by it (e.g. the Civil Service Commission prevents the PM from just doing whatever he wants).
As a secondary note, oversight in this case seems somewhat hard to achieve, given the usual problem of "who watches the watchers?" If you think some part of the government is performing poorly and that this is systemic, who do you trust to provide oversight that might not themselves have ulterior motives to preserve the status quo?
This is perhaps the single biggest disconnect I see between Democrats and Republicans right now. To Democrats, Trump is "the man who attempted a self-coup", and everything he does is viewed in that light. Whereas Republicans seem to think that it just wasn't a big deal that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election.
There were all sorts of bad intentions on the part of the rioters/coupers/whatever on January 6th, but AFAIK there is very little evidence to indicate these people were directed by Trump in any meaningful way.
Do you recognize that Trump tried to overturn American democracy? If not: which part of the above paragraph do you disagree with?
In your comment, you seem to be referring to the fact that Trump didn't specifically call for violence on Jan 6. Depending on how exactly you define "coup", you could argue that Trump didn't personally attempt a coup, but rather Trump's supporters attempted a coup on his behalf while he cheered them on (and subsequently pardoned them). I think this is an irrelevant technicality; if Trump's supporters' attempted coup had succeeded, then American democracy would be just as dead as if Trump personally committed the coup.
Returning to the original topic: If you consider Trump's entire conduct around the 2020 election (as well as his extensive history of other dishonesty and lawbreaking) do you genuinely believe that the Democrats still owe Trump a presumption of good faith?
There also happens to be lots of historical precedent to this kind of aggressive purges that aim to install loyalists in government, not least Germany in 1933.
(Nazis also made a big deal out of stopping “sexual deviants.” Studies of trans people and their history were the first books they burned. And now the CDC in USA is removing that information everywhere they can. A strange coincidence.)
It’s not a get-out-of-jail card if you’re just crunching some numbers while following illegal orders.
In short: Framing this as "cutting waste, fraud, and abuse" is assuming good faith, but given Trump's history, he doesn't deserve a presumption of good faith.
(Secondary to that: There's a difference between "cutting waste, fraud, and abuse" versus "shutting down entire functions of government without a replacement". Look at Musk trying to shut down USAID, for example. If Musk wanted to "cut waste, fraud, and abuse", that would mean "reforming USAID to achieve the same outcomes while spending less money". Instead, Musk is proposing to eliminate USAID entirely. Even if not for the self-coup angle, that's clearly not just "cutting waste, fraud, and abuse". Foreign aid is established by Congress, and only Congress has the constitutional authority to eliminate that aid.)
If we were really concerned about waste, the first and only place to look is the $1T+ we spend every year on the military.
Also, please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN.
But I wasn't aware that ideological battle is off-limits. It seems like every thread is full of it, so it's hard to walk away with that impression.
The reason for a separate account is because proposing ideas that don't fit the HN mainstream can result in people trying to track you down and "punish" you for having opposing views. Unfortunate, but that's where the world is.
That's far from the case, and keeping things that way is critical to HN's future. Even now, when we're at a high-water mark because of the political externalities, it's far from the case.
It may be the case that people inclined to do ideological battle on the internet are more likely to overestimate its presence, simply because that's where their attention goes.