New DOGE site update breaks down government jobs by salary/age/headcount | Hacker News Reader

headcount

doge.gov

47 pointsmlindner75 comments

So 211B in salaries? That's incredibly small on a ~7T budget, like 2-3%. Also it averages less than $100k per person. Seems like to me we're getting a great value out of the federal workforce.

When will we see all the contracts that flow into Musk's companies that we can cut?

To know the value we'd have to know the benefit from this work. Maybe it's a great deal but we can't know from the average pay alone. It could be a massive net negative if these workers are, in aggregate, making everybody's lives harder with bad decisions.

I'd argue that's precisely the point of electoral politics, checks and balances and the federal rulemaking process: a bad-decision making agency to Elon (say, FAA oversight of SpaceX) is a good-decision making bureau to others. None of the three are involved at this point, and by the time these cuts are litigated in the court of public opinion (and not, say, Twitter), it'll likely be too late to reverse them if desired.

Decisions are still going to be made, it's just that now they're going to be made by people loyal to Trump and Musk. That doesn't inspire confidence that they're going to make decisions that benefit the average American any better than the career civil servants who have been in these positions for decades.

In his first term, Trump focused on: huge tax cut for the rich and gutting EPA regulations, cutting back on Climate Change action, tried to cut ACA which would have brought back "pre-existing conditions" (don't know if you remember that, but it was pretty bad, and as someone with a child with a disability that would have been devastating), uh, what else?

We're seeing a repeat of that same stuff here, only worse (as in, now you can bribe foreign officials).

I haven't seen anything announced so far that benefits me as an average American citizen, just a bunch of culture-war stuff (like cutting DEI, or making sure transgender athletes can't compete in sports -- what do I care about any of that?)

The price of eggs hasn't gone down since Trump took office. I thought that's what people were concerned about.

Do you think people should be paid more or less if they are making everybody's lives harder with bad decisions?

My dad was a civil servant retired as a GS13. A GS13 would report directly to a division head. Think vice president at a fair sized company.

You can see the pay scale for the San Francisco Bay Area here.

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

Ideological nutters are completely ignorant or delusional about how much government workers get paid.

Perversely if you wanted to save tax money you'd hire more government workers and issue fewer contracts to glorious free market private enterprise. They're cheaper and upper level managers are vastly cheaper.

> Ideological nutters are completely ignorant or delusional about how much government workers get paid.

How much did the government pay your dad after he retired? Guaranteed lifetime income is a big reason govt pay is lower, and should be included in the calculation.

The Feds pay about 23% of an employees salary into the Federal retirement system And the employee contributes a couple more. Which is part of the reason Federal employees are paid less.

If one is wise in the ways of economics one understands that employees pay for their retirement no matter how it's set up.

What I'm saying is that in order to do a fair comparision, you should include the total amount of (inflation adjusted) income your father got from the govt for his job, not just the yearly income recieved during working years.

To illustrate, it would cost about a million dollars today to buy 20 years worth of $60k/year income (inflation adjusted). And that's using TIPS which have favorable rates right now. 5 years ago it probably would have cost more than double that.

Sure, someone could fund that themselves, but then they'd need to make more while they're working to stash that away on their own. Which is why you need to look at total income.

> Seems like to me we're getting a great value out of the federal workforce.

Especially since, even with a growing population and arguable more complex world, the number of employees has stayed the same for decades:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001

A reasonable argument can been made that governments actually need more bureaucracy is actually needed:

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...

> When will we see all the contracts that flow into Musk's companies that we can cut?

Not just that, but all the gov investigations into Musk companies which have now been terminated (directly or indirectly because there's no one to pursue them anymore)

> averages less than $100k per person

tsk tsk tsk, using averages in tech forum...

100k for a good developer is US is kinda low, but IMO too damn high for most bureaucrats. On flip side you wanna keep salaries high so they aren't too tempted by fraud.

Goverment insight is always a good thing, and once this is actually anonymous then fine. There seems to be a slant of "Look at this bloat etc" when in reality I don't think many people realize what it takes to run the largest most impactful government in the world.

$211.3B Total Wages with a GDP of 27.36 trillion USD ..

That's not a bad deal.

It's going to be hard to find much bloat in the federal workforce. The GSA pay scales are public, and they aren't exactly making anyone rich. The federal workforce has also remained in fairly steady range over the years while also becoming a smaller % of all US jobs over time.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...

When Musk starts cutting big money contractors including himself let me know. Otherwise this just performative grandstanding at the kids table.

An interesting thing I read -- which unfortunately I can't find the link to now, will try to add it -- is that back in the '60s the US government had 2.5 M employees with a budget of ~$600B in today's dollars. Today's budget is 10x that, with about the same number of employees.

The gov spending problem is not in how many people it employs, which is actually quite efficient all things considered (though certainly there is room to streamline and increase efficiency, and I'm all for that), but how many contracts it farms out to _private entities_ (95% of its expenses).

The fact that the person wanting to purge gov expenses by cutting employees while receiving Billions in gov contracts is ... well, something you might expect to see in Russia, or Nigeria.

Easy and obvious cases of inefficiency and lack of care will be easy to spot and remove but I fear these many examples will be made an example of and justify the tearing down of Chesterton fences and irreplaceable Good Things.

It's also possible the US is entering it's own "Austerity".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity

There's literally lots of people excited to suffer to make number go down.

> There's literally lots of people excited to suffer to make number go down.

People are excited for other people to suffer:

> A federal prison here in Florida’s rural Panhandle lost much of its roof and fence during Hurricane Michael in October, forcing hundreds of inmates to relocate to a facility in Yazoo City, Miss., more than 400 miles away.

> Since then, corrections officers have had to commute there to work, a seven-hour drive, for two-week stints. As of this week, thanks to the partial federal government shutdown, they will be doing it without pay — no paychecks and no reimbursement for gas, meals and laundry, expenses that can run hundreds of dollars per trip.

[…]

> The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/flo...

Getting poor people to fight amongst themselves and ignore the huge and growing wealth inequality is a common strategy.

> It's possible the US is entering it's own "Austerity".

Which has generally been a bad idea:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...

Austerity is horrible for those that don't produce goods and services that are desired.

For those that do, it's fine.

> Austerity is horrible for those that don't produce goods and services that are desired.

Even the IMF, who pushed for austerity

* https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2009/07/art-564828/

admitted that it can kill growth:

> This paper investigates the relation between growth forecast errors and planned fiscal consolidation during the crisis. We find that, in advanced economies, stronger planned fiscal consolidation has been associated with lower growth than expected, with the relation being particularly strong, both statistically and economically, early in the crisis. A natural interpretation is that fiscal multipliers were substantially higher than implicitly assumed by forecasters. The weaker relation in more recent years may reflect in part learning by forecasters and in part smaller multipliers than in the early years of the crisis.

* https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/31/Gro...

* https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.103.3.117

You'd think they'd learn their lesson, but nope: post-COVID they were pushing austerity again.

What's wrong with "unelected bureaucrats"?

Edit: also these numbers don't mean anything without context.

It's a populist trope, as if you could elect the hundreds of thousands of people that are required so that the government can even exist.

Nothing, really.

The big problem is that now Trump has politicized the entire government, including a bunch of boring paper-shuffling agencies that have been largely nonpartisan with career civil servants who persist for decades regardless of the president.

A bit of an aside, but Trump making himself the chair of the Kennedy Center has got to be one of the biggest shows of ego that I can think of.

They split data into three branches ( executive, judicative, legislative), only to show that they have data for the executive and not the other branches?

So that is at best a incomplete picture, and at worst a specific framing of a particular view.

I am neither endorsing nor rejecting what is happening (i am not American), just want to point this out here.

The vast majority of it is in the executive branch. The judiciary's budget is around $10B; the legislative is about $7.

These branches don't do much with the country directly; they just work in their own office buildings. All of the actual managing of the country is done in the executive branch, so that's where all the money is.

The vast majority of that work is actually managing the rest of the money. That's why salaries are a mere $220B out of a $7,000B budget.

Wanting to give the DOGE folks the benefit of the doubt, I decided to look for military spending. Per Wikipedia, there should be ~400k active duty folks in the US Army (not counting other military branches). These are definitely under the Executive branch, but seem to be absent from the data???

You can drill down by clicking on an agency grouping at the bottom of the page. There's also a breakdown (without the ability to drill down) of regulations vs laws by year. https://doge.gov/regulations

How do we know it’s accurate when it includes obviously partisan statements like this one

> This is the number of agency rules created by unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by Congress in 2024

Elon’s an unelected bureaucrat too!

He certainly is, but AFAIK he hasn't been creating any regulations.

No need to do anything silly like regulations when he can just turn off the funding.

No he can’t.

So all the stories about funding freezes are make believe? Got it.

Elon didn't give the order to do that, but it's likely convenient to Trump if people think he did (but that only works for so long). The criticism doesn't affect Elon, who isn't planning on staying in that role for long anyway. And it takes some heat off of Trump. He looks to have figured out to stay a step or two ahead of the opposition during this term and is probably going to see less resistance than what he has adapted to over the last 8 years.

The funding freezes happened before they restricted his access, so I'm sticking with my original comment.

Regardless, Elon's approval rating is climbing quickly, so we'll see how it plays out.

Personally, I'm not a fanboy of either of them, especially after Elon was proven to be a fake gamer. But then I remembered that was a petty thing to complain about now, as there's little hope of anyone else reversing inflation and national debt. Which over the last few years hit us so badly, I'd have to say it was one of the most painful national tragedies in the way it personally affected me during my lifetime, ranking up there with the Iraq War.

Wonder if my opinion had been different about this if I was personally doing OK the whole time. Likely yes, as I wasn't that bothered when it was only happening to the working class, before the money problems had hit me.

I even tried working harder than I ever had, at my last job, and minimizing my cost of living, and it wasn't enough. Some people find it hard to stay composed because of the sustained political drama, wars, and various failures being too much to bear. Not everyone feels these problems the same way. Not everyone connects the dots.

The incumbents had plenty of opportunities to slow the national debt growth, but did not. Much of the public have similar stories to mine, are likewise not MAGA by any stretch of imagination, but have long grown tired of the petty complaining and the defenders of obvious failed policies. There's going to be little sympathy for the people who think that losing some of these foreign aid programs is what keeps them up at night, when most of us have endured a lot of personal hardships because of these poor policies.

It's time to remember that we're supposed to be on the same side. It's time to accept that there are going to be policies that you disagree with, especially when they don't affect you personally to nearly the degree that these hardships have affected us. Of course, none of these points will make much sense if you're not American to begin with.

If things had not been allowed to reach this point by both parties, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

And this is why it's not revenge, but justice.

Yes he can, but indirectly: in the federal workforce there are more contractors than actual government employees [1], and they share similar roles and responsibilities. Those contracts can be terminated at the pleasure at the government. Rip up the contracts, and you have essentially witheld funds for programs that no longer have adequate staffing.

https://blog.simpletechnology.io/why-would-you-want-to-work-...

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/contractors-and-true-size-of-g...

Elon wasn't given that authority. If he asserted it early on it was later taken away. It's been said over and over that his access is read-only and any findings are to be made fully transparent to the public.

> he hasn't been creating any regulations.

But it's experts in their fields who are supposed to propose regulations, this is the way it should be. Why would I trust a politician to know about the nuances of electrical power stations for example to know how to regulate their installations ?

No, but he doesn't need to – the only person he needs to (and wants to) empower and enable is himself.

Give him time.

Yes, he will create restrictions over time, this is practically guaranteed.

Look at Twitter, which he claims is a bastion of free speech, but people who disagree with him or use words he doesn't like such as "cis" do seem to catch a lot of suspensions and bans.

At the end of the day he will allow what he likes and disallow what he does not.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Oh but he has… he’s been deciding who get’s paid and who doesn’t, who get’s to keep a job and who doesn’t

How is “unelected bureaucrat” a partisan statement? Sounds like objective fact to me.

Sounds like something an anarchist or syndicalist would write as just a objective matter of fact. In this case I guess "anarcho-capitalist".

As an epithet it is meant as some sort of insult. Most beurocrats are not elected. Like, judges, headmasters, DAs? In practice the head is elected or the elected body elect heads. Etc.

The "unelected" bit is inflammatory.

It implies that the bureaucratic apparatus of the state could have been a bunch of elected people, and some dastardly force has pushed these unelected jerks into positions of power over the people.

But the vast majority of federal government positions are not elected positions. Of course the people in those positions were not elected to them.

These "unelected bureaucrats" work for agencies established through the rule of law. They operate under regulations established through the rule of law. They implement the processes, policies, and procedures they have been directed to do through the rule of law.

And get this - the people who made those laws - they were elected!

I'm the strange context of MAGA I think it's important to note that he's a South African immigrant too.

And was at one point an illegal alien: he clearly has no respect for US immigration law.

Good point without paper citation hard to trust in current day and age

Whether you hate him or love him, Transparency is always good. I think every country should have a watchdog like DOGE which can sniff out waste and take suggestions from general public. I don't expect generalist bureaucrats to be right about technial aspects. Our society has gotten complex but the representative government hasn't to reflect that fact.

It existed before DOGE: it's called the Government Accountability Office, accountable to Congress and not the President, and you can report "waste, fraud, and abuse" here:

https://www.gao.gov/about/contact-us

You care more for processes rather than outcomes. I have seen outcomes only when DOGE was constituted..

Transparency is indeed always good! Which is why this completely intransparent and obviously partisan "audit", which flaunts all rules of actual auditing, is bad.

> Whether you hate him or love him, Transparency is always good.

"The public won't get to see Elon Musk's financial disclosures. Here's why that matters."

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-public-wont-see-elon-musk-f...

"Elon Musk’s Financial Disclosure Will Not Be Made Public":

* http://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/poli...

> I think every country should have a watchdog like DOGE which can sniff out waste and take suggestions from general public.

If Musk-Trump actually cared about wrong doing they wouldn't have fired people:

"US inspectors general fired by Trump sue to win jobs back":

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/12/inspector-ge...

And this wasn't the first time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_dismissals_of_inspectors_...

There’s as much transparency in this process as there is free speech on Twitter - none.

So much transparency happening...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/trump-musk-do...

You act like this information wasn't publicly available before.

There is very little transparency about what DOGE is _actually_ doing. Not even the DSA -- which DOGE is supposed to be a part of -- knows.

I'm not sure number of words is a valid metric.

Feels like “lines of code”. It means something, but…

Pay someone by the line of code and he'll write himself a Ferrari by the end of the month.

Isn't this already public information? I agree the transparency is a great thing, and any data that is publicly available. Should be easy for citizens to research and see. I'm just wondering if this is taking data that is already available, or is it releasing data that is not generally publicly available?

I don't think it's been aggregated into one place, but government pay scales are public information (and it's easy enough to do the math).

I notice the front page has links to twitter to read more. So Musk is already using this as means to enrich himself.

I’m so happy to see the regulation UI laid out. Congress was the original legislative body, I.e. makes laws. This is great as it makes them accountable to what they do. A law I don’t like is passed? Well then I check to see how many senators and rep voted and take action accordingly. But then some big agency makes a regulation I don’t like? How do I find accountability in that?

While I recognize that Congress has granted said agencies the authority to do this in many cases, I can’t help but feel it’s a massive way for Congress to completely skirt accountability.

I do wonder how many are aware of how law making has shifted from Congress to agencies over time and what the political ramifications of that are.

I don't mind folks with expertise in narrower subjects to determine and pass rules that keep us safer. Congress folks can't each individually read and understand all the knowledge and data to write all of them.

Think the site uses SQL?

Can you run a search for my friend, Bobby Drop Tables?

While it has CSV download, the schema is quite unusable. Someone have a cleaner dataset?

If you snoop around the network requests you'll see API calls made for fetching data. Could pull from those endpoints instead.

Is there some sort of bot that auto-flags any DOGE article? Enough with that.

It's users. Between the die hard Trump supporters and the users who flag any political content on HN it's more or less impossible for anything DOGE related to stay up without the mods active protection. There's a contact link you can use at the bottom of the page if you think something is flagged that deserves said protection.

Right. The title is exactly what is being pointed to, and the site is just that, data on the government tax dollars pay for.

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