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Comment by x86hacker1010 | Hacker News Reader

Ill informed on the inefficiency that seems to be Doge, but isn’t all this moot if we spend like 50 billion dollars on missles and shit? Like.. $3 mil here and there is like .01% of the actual waste

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The big-ticket items in the Federal budget are the military, old-age pensions, and medical spending; everything else is pretty much a rounding error. All three of those categories are rife with multi-billion dollar waste and fraud, but have powerful bipartisan political armor. I am looking forward to seeing what happens when Doge grasps one of these third rails.

The new GOP budget envisions a "$4 trillion increase in the debt limit", so yeah, $3 mil here and there do not really compare to the amount being "spent" (income lost in future budget compared with existing) on tax cuts.

Wasn't the GOP just recently hell bent on stopping an increase to the debt limit because it was so utterly awful already that the country was on the verge of collapse?

You're wasting your time if you are trying to find any consistent logic to their stated positions other than "we will say and do whatever we want to reduce taxes on he rich".

Isn’t the US GDP relative to debt all that matters? The USA is nowhere near broke or collapse (from a fiscal perspective). The GOP seems to create a boogeyman, repeat it, then use it to advance their agenda.

Only if you think the purpose is to reduce waste! But this is an ideological purge, as the list makes clear.

> Ill informed on the inefficiency that seems to be Doge, but isn’t all this moot if we spend like 50 billion dollars on missles and shit?

One doesn't have to look as far as the DOD. See "Why Trump’s Military Deportation Flights Are So Expensive":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNObnSDwWnI

For whatever reason, the Trump administration is using military aircraft to deport people… which costs 2x to 3x the amount of simply chartering civilian aircraft… a practice that ICE already uses.

Two flights start at the same place, and fly to the same destination country: civilian charter cost $55k; military transport cost $166k. One-way.

The military flight to India used two sets of mid-air refuelling tankers was estimated to cost $3M:

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/05/military-fli...

> For whatever reason

Optics. It’s just optics. It makes the admin look “tough”.

try 850 billion. that was the defense budget for 2024. and yes. this is picking up pennies from the couch cushions.

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