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Comment by rzz3 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like people lose sight of exactly how ridiculously much money a trillion dollars is. You’re mentioning a bunch of desirable things you’d like the federal government to do, while ignoring the millions wasted on everything from a $90,000 bag of bushings to $1,300 coffee cups to $150,000 soap dispensers to billons on empty government buildings. You can simultaneously want the government to reduce waste and provide these services. Lately it feels like folks are getting too carried away and becoming “pro government waste” as some type of political flex. Really, the problem is _who_ is doing the reduction and _how_, not _that_ we’re doing it.

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> ignoring the millions wasted on everything from a $90,000 bag of bushings to $1,300 coffee cups to $150,000 soap dispensers to billons on empty government buildings

Who's ignoring it? Once the problem is identified by someone, you fix it and move on. This already happens.

$1,300 coffee cups: https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/22... Audit of C-17 Spare Parts: https://www.dodig.mil/In-the-Spotlight/Article/3948604/press...

See also, the myth of the $600 hammer: https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...

Trashing whole departments/agencies first and then trying to find all of the 'waste' amongst the wreckage creates more work in the long run when you have to rebuild all of the processes and try to reclaim some portion of the institutional knowledge that got flushed down the toilet for no reason.

In the case of one of my examples, it took someone dragging a bag of bushings to congress. And though these specific examples may have been addressed, the point is there are likely many more in every corner of the government. It needs to be systematically reviewed and prevented; waste like this should never have happened and should never happen again. I’m not at all saying I support DOGE’s methods here, but I do want to eliminate government waste, and I don’t think the existing methods have worked. The national debt is out of control, and I think the reality is 25% of government spending could be eliminated without anyone even noticing a reduction in service.

I guess the question that should be asked if the examples of waste presented thus far are exceptions or if there's just rampant waste everywhere that nobody has been able to find. We have (well, had) a Government Accountability Office that's supposed to be empowered to audit the federal government's spending, and should be able to catch fraud and waste on the scale of billions of dollars. If they're not able to find it, then I can only think of three reasons why that might be: fraud and waste on that scale doesn't exist despite certain outlets constantly insisting that it must be there, it does exist but they're either understaffed or otherwise not empowered to adequately remediate what they do find, or it exists and they're complicit in hiding it.

I'm sure I'm missing something, I'm no expert by a long shot, but government spending isn't a secret. Budgets get approved by congress and spent by the executive out in the open. Maybe someone interested in curtailing waste could start by auditing budgets? Making sure that the money allocated got spent where it should have and that the budgets weren't padded with unnecessary spending? But that takes a lot of time, effort, and energy, is kind of boring, and wouldn't generate dozens of headlines every day.

Musk doesn't give a shit about any of that waste. People aren't pro government waste, they're anti political grandstanding about meaningless crumbs as a distraction while a literal nazi-saluting fascist eats the rest of the pie.

That’s really the reason for my comment—there’s a fine line, and the person I responded to said something (IIRC) along the lines of “take my money, I don’t care, I just want good government services”, and that can’t be the message. Everyone should be in favor of reducing waste and increasing accountability, and where and how our tax dollars are spent _does_ matter. This just isn’t the way we should be doing it, and the way we were doing it before wasn’t the best answer either. I’m scared that people are going to start being anti-waste-reduction simply because we hate Trump and he’s (claiming to be) pro-waste-reduction.

I assume you're talking about me. I said that I want the government to keep the money I paid them to provide services that I and 340-odd million other people rely on. You seem to think that means that I want the government to spend as much money as possible. I've never heard anyone argue in good faith that they want the government to spent limitless amounts of money to do those things, but it needs to spend some amount of money to provide services. Providing services for every American is expensive.

It's not an either/or situation. You can have responsible spending and also services to benefit everyone. Cutting me a check to give me back some of the money I've paid into the system doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you only got the money by destroying the CDC or whatever.

It would be kind of like the gas company tearing my house down because my windows aren't insulated and then giving me a couple hundred bucks because they technically eliminated the source of the wasted energy

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