Part of me thinks this is just incompetence. People put in charge to "change" things without knowing what the thing is or does and just randomly mashing buttons.
Musk is neither competent nor efficient. He looks at line items and makes stuff up. He destroys a hundred useful things to destroy a bad one. Details don't matter to him. Its the same con man mentality that feeds off the works of his workforce. People who think he is a genius are gullible.
- Calling payments to non-profit organizations fraudulent on a whim.
- The sweeping condemnation of what USAID was doing.
- His call for a blanket drop of regulations.
Either he knows better or he is totally lost in his sauce. Hard to say what's worse for where he is right now.
I believe, he does not care. He only cares about his conception of the world and how AI and Mars are more important than those tiny tiny human problems. Society has to serve him and his god complex. He was told to find his subsidies and tax cuts by himself. That's what he is doing.
You really need to take a hard look at who is gullible here.
Govt money going to NYTimes, AP, Reuters, Politico: https://x.com/stillgray/status/1887191056074350690 https://x.com/Austen/status/1887179699874304210 https://x.com/kylenabecker/status/1887179349440290883 https://x.com/stillgray/status/1887184877197410455 https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1887147866688213254
This guy has been providing evidence for a decade: https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber
Long list of questionable funding by USAID: https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1887151291895267553
...
EDIT to make my current position clear, I do think there is probably waste in various government agencies. My objection with the current approach is mainly 2 folds:
1. The lack of transparency and accountability
2. Some of the statements from the administration that are false or misleading. e.g. the 50 million on condoms.
The 2 combined makes it difficult to have trust on what's happening.
Don't get me wrong. There is certainly fraud and overpayment happening in government operations. But just looking at receipts is not the smoking gun. If anyone suspects fraud, there are a processes. Inspectors Generals are (were) one way to have those payments investigated, DOJ and FBI would be another step. The IGs were fired last week. I wonder why...
Also, this "Ian Miles Cheong" guy is literally a Kremlin operative - really someone worth blocking. So that's important to know about his motivations to sow doubt in US Democracy.
NIH Official account is saying last year $9B of the $35B in grant money was for "administrative overhead". Not fraud. But does that sound reasonable to you??
That $9B is just a number. Whether it is reasonable or not can only be determined by looking into the details:
- What accounts as overhead?
- What were decisions that lead to that overhead?
- Were there alternatives that would have costs less?
- Why and how were those decisions made?
- Can we learn for future decisions?
- Was there actual fraud?
- When there was fraud, why wasn't it referred to DOJ to be investigated properly?
"Administrative overhead" is not bad by itself. Outside government, its simply called "Operating Expense" and "Cost of Revenue" (not a concern of government luckily). I am certain, if you look into SpaceX' or Tesla's expenses, you would find fraud too.
Because Musk and his brainwashed followers can claim stuff on Twitter doesn't make it true. And it certainly MUST NOT be basis to destroy Democracy and democratic processes.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/usaid-payments-to-politico...
> The above claim was false. Publicly available records showed that in 2023 and 2024, the USAID paid a total of $44,000 — not $8 million — to Politico, and the payments were earmarked for institutional subscriptions to E&E News, a Politico publication. No other transactions between USAID and Politico were listed for the entire previous decade.
Nice, how much are you getting to propagandize?
This is factual though.
The previous NIH director Dr. Hugh Auchincloss and current deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak agree that the definition of "gain of function" as was listed on the NIH website applies to engineering a biological agent to infect something it normally wouldnt be able to.
That coupled with the fact that Dr.Daszak submitted the Year 5 Annual Progress Report Nearly Two Years Late. Said report had the experiment with infected transgenic mice with four different coronaviruses, three of which were chimera or recombinant viruses with different spike proteins.
When confronted in the deposition Daszak said that the reporting system was inaccessible. So they deposed the IT stack of the reporting system, and they showed logs that it was accessible and actually logged into several times during the 2 year period that the report was late.
This is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that they were attempting to hide or delay the experiments from being discovered by the grant review process at the end of the year. The report is pretty damning.
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/12.04...
It’s just that government isn’t that.
Or are his companies successful despite that? The impression I get is that his direct reports are exceptionally good managers and shield the companies from his dumbest moves. Except at Twitter--that's lost, what, 75% of its value? (still works as a political platform for him though)
I don’t condone manage by trolling; it’s not how I want to manage or be managed. But it seems to have worked out for his industrial complex.
He's good at identifying ideas whose time has come, I'll give him that much credit. Ransacking the US Treasury wasn't on the radar, though, as far as I could see.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/03/scaling-waymo-one-safely-acro...
Note the date. Tesla still doesn't have a taxi.
Self-driving taxis will be a "market" someday, but not yet, and when they are, there is no reason to think Musk will be a force to be reckoned with. (Well, no reason other than the regulatory capture that he's no doubt putting into place now, that is.)
from their blog that GP linked to, which says they gave 4 million rides in 2024, which seems like more than a "science faire side project", whatever that's supposed to mean.
If he does manage to outcompete Waymo, my guess is that it will be because he hosed them via regulatory capture somehow, thanks to his buddy in the White House. Or because Larry and Sergey got bored and folded their tent.
Regardless of what you think of his intellectual capacity, he has a proven track record of organizing people to produce exceptional outcomes !
An inevitable characteristic of his algorithm is chaos: delete as many constraints and parts as possible. When things break, re-add those necessary parts.
This might work sometimes for companies (surprisingly, often it doesn't) - it has far more significant and wide-reaching consequences when you're doing it to an entire country and its institutions, particularly one as influential as America.
And? Getting people whipped up into a frenzy through fear, us vs them mentality, narcissism, to do good work is toxic. Musk is toxic.
We should stop elevating leaders as extra-ordinarily capable. Especially leaders who employ a negative leadership style instead of one founded on empathy, trust, respect, and importance of the group over leader.
the media + bureaucratic class + democrat leaders who all have a vested interest in these un-audited institutions remaining in the shadows,
or
the people doing exactly what half the country asked them to do: clean up the government in an unprecedented way
For better or worse, there is no media, only social media mobs.
I would think both sides of the political spectrum agree that the government spends money frivolously; so I am confused on why people are so upset. Maybe they aren't actually upset and all we are hearing in any form of media are government leeches crying about the end to their gravy train.
And yes, everyone agrees that there is waste on government, however, what is being labeled as waste is medicare and SNAP and foreign aid.
Why are people upset? there's 200,000 people getting laid off and its only february, of course people are upset, I very much doubt 200k employees are DEI hires.
> The layoffs include between 1,200 and 2,000 employees at the Department of Energy (DOE), including staff from the nuclear security administration and the loans office, two sources familiar with the decision told Reuters.
https://www.newsweek.com/federal-layoffs-live-thousands-prob...
Let's not forget about FAA, which immediately had 2 crashes after it was gutted.
> The aviation security committee, which was mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, will technically continue to exist but it won’t have any members to carry out the work of examining safety issues at airlines and airports. Before Tuesday, the group included representatives of all the key groups in the industry — including the airlines and major unions — as well as members of a group associated with the victims of the PanAm 103 bombing. The vast majority of the group’s recommendations were adopted over the years.
https://apnews.com/article/coast-guard-homeland-security-pri...
Its not our Job to aid the world. Foreign aid is a huge money laundering scam by and large. We have major problems here on our own shores.
> The layoffs include between 1,200 and 2,000 employees at the Department of Energy (DOE), including staff from the nuclear security administration and the loans office
Good. Maybe we can actually build some more nuclear plants instead of having to fight green energy bureaucracy.
>Let's not forget about FAA, which immediately had 2 crashes after it was gutted.
Circumstantial timing. The FAA has been having close calls before it was gutted. The government can do more with less. The plane crashes will stop when we return to meritocracy.
Not that huge, not a scam either given America is so deeply hated on most of the world, America decided to fight and kill everyone who even thought about "communism" whatever that meant, USAID is its foreign marketing team. Seems like it doesn't want to market itself. that's fine, You also quoted medicare and snap there, I hope you're not one of those that think having well fed people and farmers is not part of a governments job.
> Good. Maybe we can actually build some more nuclear plants instead of having to fight green energy bureaucracy.
If you can't build a nuclear power plant safely, maybe you shouldn't build it at all. Also some firings were people who handle the nuclear weapons.
> Circumstantial timing. The FAA has been having close calls before it was gutted. The government can do more with less. The plane crashes will stop when we return to meritocracy.
It's so great that you mention doing more with less and a meritocracy in this instance given that, the washout rate for being an air traffic controller is incredibly high and there is a deficit of air traffic controllers.
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/one-thing/episodes/8b310a...
> The government can do more with less.
Can it though?
https://www.gq.com/story/no-irs-audits-for-the-rich
> The cuts are depleting the staff members who help ensure that taxpayers pay what they owe. As of [2017], the IRS had 9,510 auditors. That’s down a third from 2010. The last time the IRS had fewer than 10,000 revenue agents was 1953, when the economy was a seventh of its current size. And the IRS is still shrinking. Almost a third of its remaining employees will be eligible to retire in the next year, and with morale plummeting, many of them will.
> The plane crashes will stop when we return to meritocracy.
Return to when? When was this true?
Doesnt matter how huge, its a waste of money doing DEI programs in Burma.
>If you can't build a nuclear power plant safely
plenty of safe nuke plants running and they are building more for datacenters
>washout rate for being an air traffic controller is incredibly high
not really a problem of government spending unless you are saying they should pay more? not sure what youre getting at
>Can it though?
Yes it can I mean afterall we had no income tax during the industrial revolution
>Return to when? When was this true?
this was true when we hired people based on merit and not immutable characteristics.
That's opinion.
> plenty of safe nuke plants running and they are building more for datacenters
Yeah, and they were doing it safely.
> not really a problem of government spending unless you are saying they should pay more? not sure what youre getting at
You do, you're just ignoring it on purpose.
> Yes it can I mean afterall we had no income tax during the industrial revolution
And now you do, because it was necessary, back when it was implemented... this is just ignoring economic history.
Also, Industrial revolution!? the 1800s!? huh!?
Of course there was small government back then, the government only worked for landowners, not blacks or even women. Just white land owners. There wasn't even plumbing back then on most of america, barely any public utility, hell there wasn't even electricity, there was literally nothing to do apart from not dying of cholera.
plus the slaves/women did everything for free and if they died you just replaced them.
> this was true when we hired people based on merit and not immutable characteristics.
Pretty sure you're still hiring doctors and people with degrees, just now you have to hire a black one sometimes. what's so bad about a 1% in diversity hires?
(also trans people have mutable charactistics, ha)
That's opinion
>Yeah, and they were doing it safely.
That's opinion.
>And now you do, because it was necessary, back when it was implemented... this is just ignoring economic history.
You mean the centuries of history with public works projects that didnt require taxes?
>Also, Industrial revolution!? the 1800s!? huh!?
I obviously mean at the turn of the 20th century with the huge leaps in applied sciences and engineering giving us planes trains and automobiles. All done without taxes before 1913. You know, the greatest period of advancement in modern history?
>what's so bad about a 1% in diversity hires?
What's so good about it exactly? It does a disservice to everyone including the diversity hire.
>(also trans people have mutable charactistics, ha)
body dysmorphia is mental illness as evidenced by the ~40% suicide rate. Hows that for an opinion (Fact)?
- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
There is no accountability or efficiency in unelected technocrats blowing up what was working without a plan or subject matter expertise.
I feel more and more like a large portion of the American public exists at the weaponized intersection of the subbing Kruger effect and Chesterton fence. They hear so many vague platitudes about waste that it’s just taken as dicta without evidence. That somehow provides a global mandate to break anything.
If we survive this I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems to make fair processes and that they stop getting just blanket accused of incompetence for ideological gain.
Waste needs to be cut back - that is morally required to happen, because it's not waste of some private company's money, it's the waste of other peoples' money - the only problem is that you can't take the Office Space "What would you say you do here?" approach of randomly cutting people, but have to address the systemic issues that result in tens of billions of dollars lost yearly.
Some of these include:
- literal incentives to waste money in the form of "if you don't use your whole budget every year, we'll cut it next year" (which applies to large parts of the military and defense, which happen to be some of the biggest spenders)
- massive bureaucracy that takes processes that should take a day and turns them into multi-week-long nightmares
- terrible office cultures that encourage single-points-of-failure...and then gives those people lots of vacation time
- large policy sub-orgs that focus on evaluating requests against hundreds of thousands of pages of policy instead of trying to help the workers actually get things done
- terrible contracting processes that result in the government paying 2-10x more than private industry does for goods and services (which only a small increase in quality or reliability)
...and many, many more problems.
> I hope that the government workforce starts to get more respect of the hard work they do on complicated problems
You can simultaneously believe that the average government worker is competent and hard-working, and that the bureaucracy as a whole is extremely inefficient due to systemic issues.
Blanket defense of government (in)efficiency actively makes the problems worse. Focus your energy instead on adding nuance when discussing the problems and solutions.
The issue though is with the way it’s being done. Giving it the most charitable take, it’s at best reckless. No oversight, no transparency. We can only take him at his word that things are being improved. But given the various false and misleading statements that’s already come out, of the limited info being released, how can we trust him?
Yes, spot on, I think this is very accurate and truthful.
I'm just trying to differentiate between "the government is wasteful, and here's the careful and prudent way to make it better" and "the government isn't very wasteful and we should avoid even talking about the possibility".
Method aside, musk is trying to save a few million here and there on things that are “wasteful” but provide benefit to a lot of people, including Americans. Meanwhile, a multi trillion dollar tax cut that’s going mostly to the wealthy is fine and not wasteful for some reason. Jacked up prices from a handful of defense contractors is also fine.
But that is _not_ what is happening here.
- Audit spending (at USAID or wherever else)
- Come up with details of where there is waste, being transparent about it for the public to see and review
- Use that to recommend change to congress / the president, again in full public view
Then I'd have no issues. The problem is, what's actually happening is:
- Musk and team are in there with no accountability and no transparency. We don't know what he has access to, what was done
- Unilaterally making changes without public review or oversight. It's a "trust me bro" stance.
- From the few things that has been published, many seem to be outright lies (50m on condoms) or extremely biased conclusions (IRS direct filing)
> On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave.
Retaliation is very bad, especially when it comes to trying to protect national security information. As a semi-technical person running several large technical companies, even if he had zero experience with the DoD before, Musk should at the very least understand how important it is to guard your "IP".
Bullying, intimidation, arrogance. Traits that I would’ve hoped most would be against.
I dont need a line item list to know that USAID DEI Scholarships in Burma $45.00M is wasteful spending.
>Come up with details of where there is waste, being transparent about it for the public to see and review
The waste is right there in the name. Funding DEI Scholarships in Burma is not how the American people want their taxes spent.
>- Unilaterally making changes without public review or oversight. It's a "trust me bro" stance.
The public review was the presidential election. Making changes without oversight is what an executive order is.
Where do you see that? What accountability is present?
I never thought about it like this and it makes so much sense. I have financial (and maybe social) power therefore I should have intellectual power and if you show to people that you have more than I do, then I feel embarrassed and will use my financial (and social) power to make you feel embarrassed.