What's wrong with DOGE? How is eliminating bureaucracy/spending a bad thing? This has been done about 100 years ago, research on what happened after. It feels like people that scream the loudest are the ones leaching from the system.
- Much of the spending they're eliminating is good and important (E.g. USAID).
- The way they're cutting is reckless (They accidentally fired nuclear safety workers).
- Many of the workers are Musk sycophants, who were hired from Twitter/Tesla/SpaceX.
- There's a tremendous conflict of interest in this agency being run by a massive government contractor (NASA and the military are both avid SpaceX customers).
- The workers are not experienced with the data they're working with, and misinterpret it constantly in public before verifying it.
- Despite claims of "transparency", Musk asserted that it was illegal to publish the names of his employees.
- Their one product, their government spending portal, is a worse version of a spending portal which already exists, and they didn't even secure their database.
- They say they "use AI" for their decisions. Which AI? Where is confidential data going?
- Do the staff have security clearance?
The country prints its own money; and right now it's the world reserve currency, giving the US a huge advantage when it comes to borrowing whatever it wants — the biggest threat to continuing to be the world reserve currency right now, is that the scale of cuts being talked about can only be met by cutting at least one of interest payments on government loans or things the US government considers to be "mandatory" such as pensions, social security, etc.
The govt can debase the currency by printing money. That only impoverishes people , except for the wealthy, causing greater wealth gap.
Only if your economy doesn't grow.
> The govt can debase the currency by printing money. That only impoverishes people , except for the wealthy, causing greater wealth gap.
It impoverishes lenders and savers, but not borrowers. It's not as simple as wealthy or poor, as any can be any.
You can afford it, it's fairly close to a neutral thing, for a government to have debt.
Right now, the US gets to set the terms for those loans.
> How is cutting costs a bad thing?
Consider weight as an analogy: Most people can do with loosing weight, losing weight by getting enthusiastic amateurs to perform a quadruple amputation is not advisable.
Musk's target can only be met by deleting your entire armed forces.
And then you have to find another $1.2 trillion.
So the military and the entire CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, NASA, Federal Highway Administration, FAA, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, Department of Justice, the Treasury, …
… all that plus the military still doesn't add up to Musk's target.
Unless you want to cut stuff that's considered "mandatory" (like military pensions), or the interest repayments on the very loans you wish you didn't have.
Third point is opinion, at best.
Forth point; couldn't this be said about any politician?
Fifth point; So you're saying that no outside group is capable of auditing.
I'll stop there. You've drank the koolaid.
I mean, we could also do your plan and just hand off essentially dictatorial power over spending to the richest man in the country.
You do not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Everyone is impacted by the fact that money-printer-fueled government spending crowds out private spending / investment / growth.
It’s Congress’s role to allocate funds to certain purposes, and the President’s to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” including overseeing the bureaucracy that implements them.
The President already has dictatorial power over the bureaucracy, as per the Constitution.
Unless you extend it to that, in which case why have courts? Its not like they have enforcement power and the president can stretch discretion to the limit.
Again, DOGE operates from the premise that the federal government is bloated. Although this is a very popular message, I'd love to see some more objective data to support this and I doubt that CDC or USAID are the agencies where the bloat is. Like I said, their actions seem vindictive and careless. Also, likely to result in legal cases that will drag for years and end up costing taxpayer more than the supposed savings.
The main con is that once you fire the workers that you thought you didn't need (but that you did indeed need) hiring them back becomes more expensive and a lengthy process. Some of the firings are already causing chaos in vital teams among several agencies and have forced DOGE to try to reverse course (bird flu monitoring, nuclear response...).
And that's not to mention the dire situation you put the people you are firing in. Laying off people from their jobs is never "an experiment" unless you are willing to suspend every trace of empathy.
Note that DOGE fired, and is struggling to rehire, the team whose job was to mainain America's nuclear arsenal.
Also note that the stated goal of DOGE, $2T, exceeds the entire discretionary budget of the federal government, even though half the discretionary budget is your entire active military.
Even treating $2T as a stretch goal, eliminating literally everything but the military from the discretionary budget doesn't reach the lower $1T that Musk says he has a "good shot" at.
Cuts on this scale directly, all by themselves, even aside from all the other economic diasters that America expressly chose to vote for as a package deal with this, will shrink the US economy about 6%.
All the hysteria over this is just partisan politics as usual.
stop falling for branding and actually concentrate on the numbers: spending is going up, not down, and only touching entitlement programs, the military, or offsetting monetary loosening (via debt interest) will change that.
Only announce things your opponents do or even lie about it and spread the hate.
I'm 100% sure he won't direct the subsidies during COVID-19 for the hospitality sector, which Trump was quite happy about during his reign.
Or the expensive hotel stays for his security at trump hotels :)