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Comment by searke | Hacker News Reader

You can't claim to have "saved" money by destroying programs funded by congress that you have no authority to destroy.

Especially when the long term costs of destroying those programs are going to be enormous.

If DOGE will document their claimed savings publicly, those claims can be tracked and challenged publicly. According to their claimed schedule, this will continue for the next 2 years. There can be case-by-case reviews by journalists, lawyers and courts.

You are the one who is claiming that they've saved $1.82 Billion dolars by posting some random website that thinks illegally destroying a federal agency is fiscally responsible.

Just embrace it. If they’re making claims, it would actually be prudent to document those claims and ask them about their methodology. Ask them if they consider any costs from second-order effects as subtracting from the total. If not, why not?

Calculate the totals yourself. Report the data to as many as possible. If you think it will look as bad as I do, there’s every reason to.

The president has authority to run these programs, every president has.

DOGE is advising the president and the president is choosing what to do.

There are a lot of people on this site claiming this is not legal for some reason but not really citing any law.

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

There's nothing on this page explaining how Trump changing how USAID works is unconstitutional.

USAID is an entity created by Congress, a separate branch of government, via legislation, not via executive order. It lives in a separate universe, in legal terms, than entities created by executive order. This is called separation of powers. The executive branch cannot make substantive changes to an entity created by Congress due to separation of powers. It also cannot prevent moneys allocated by Congress to USAID from being spent, due to impoundment. These are tenets for you to learn, not argue about. The world was not invented with your birth, when you fell out of the coconut tree. You live in an inheritance, a world in which all of this- laws, independent branches, etc etc was already worked out, over many distinct countries and legal regimes over thousands of years.

We're the DEI initiatives programs directly funded by legislation?

Trump's executive order only stopped funding that wasn't required by legislation.

If those programs are going to have long-term benefit, then they really should be directed by Congress and not by an autocratic president.

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