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Comment by almosthere | Hacker News Reader

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I'd love to have those answers too but it seems like DOGE doesn't care about transparency as much as they claim to want that. Elon keeps touting open source and transparency but the transparency is only in the form of poorly researched, cherry picked tweets from him which are often false. I could actually get behind DOGE if they were properly publishing all the financials of the agencies that they're auditing and programs that they're cutting. Without that, it's completely unaccountable.

Did you know there's a website where they're documenting everything? https://doge.gov/

The receipts still aren't there, even though they had said they'd be up there before Valentine's Day (now they just say "coming over the weekend", I wonder if they'll make that deadline or have to update the text again...).

Transparency would have been most important before they started randomly cancelling contracts, but it seems they didn't bother.

Who is the "they" you're talking about? Assuming you mean "the establishment executive branch agencies", it's not like you're getting that answer from Trump and Musk either.

We have no idea what they're actually cutting, whether that $100M would have gone to something genuinely useful, or if it was going to some wasteful project.

Well, we do sorta find out, when we hear about a single mother being unable to provide food for her children because she's capriciously and arbitrarily lost her SNAP benefits.

DOGE is a train wreck, and like in any train wreck, a lot of innocent people get hurt, and no one knows what's going on in the midst of the chaos.

I agree with you, but I feel like this argument is kind of lost in a place like HN where even if the $100 million was going to ensure that orphans got warm beds and enough vitamins, someone would come along and say "yeah but why is that the government's job?" and ignore the point that, well, if you want to debate what is and isn't the government's job, you should probably do that in such a way that doesn't disrupt the lives of people who were accepting legally distributed aid.

They could've done the advisory role investigating and proposing improvements with a normal review process as promised instead of just going in there and being a bull in every china shop smashing things up regardless of whether or not it's useful.

Instead, you're getting to debate whether or not something was a good idea after it was already destroyed.

If you believe the system is fundamentally broken, and has become an instrument graft to funnel taxpayer dollars to DC bureaucrats, NGOs, special interests, political allies, propagandistic media, etc., that would be a much less effective way to fix it.

I realize many people don’t believe this, and believe instead that government corruption and waste in the US is non-existent or acceptably low, and we shouldn’t rock the boat.

But if they don’t believe that, their actions make sense.

Oh, have Doge actually provided anything of substance of where the money is going?

The government does: https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/CFO/documents/2024-Budget-i...

I guess he got flagged as I was replying, but there's his transparency. The government isn't a private corporation.

As you mentioned DOGE is looping some holes to not disclose their budget nor staff. That's not how the government works.

I don't think this counts. The most detailed it gets is this:

Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS for $505 Million. What exactly is that? People with AIDS already have housing options. They have the same options as other people. There is literally nothing in that line item that explains why half a billion is needed for that. Where's the report, wheres the description of number of employees to administer, and an explanation of why thats needed.

Another thing: In the period between 2012 and 2019, the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) employees at HUD declined from 8,576 to 6,837, a reduction of 20 percent. This loss of staff presented serious risks to HUD’s ability to meet the needs of its customers, protect against cybersecurity threats, and deliver on the mission.

Where is the backup of that statement - "HUD’s ability to meet the needs of its customers, protect against cybersecurity threats, and deliver on the mission. "

Protecting against cybersecurity should literally be handled by a different org within fedgov!

Also why 2000 more employees? Are they also taking an elevator down the limestone mountain and riding around on bikes to file a loan?

The stories coming out of DOGE are like this, how do you expect me to read this PDF without a ton of cynicism?

It is totally inappropriate for a tax base to fund something over $1M that has nothing backing up what it is for. Let's get rid of FRAUD and ABUSE!

Orig comment: These are the things they don't want to answer. As a Tax Payer I want to know what that money was for.

There is literally nothing in that worth flagging. HN users are becoming less tolerant of opposing ideas.

I should note that I try to avoid flagging unless the entire comment is an outright attack and there is nothing of substance whatsoever in it. The "these are things they don't want to answer" is partially fitting that criteria, but I simply focused on the implicit question.

I figured a comment like that is better (and a bit funnier) to to simply disprove than hide. And I didn't need much work to disprove it. Any little nudges to help peope realize that "yes, a good 95%+ of government budgets is publicly viewable" is a good step forward.

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