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Comment by jpcom | Hacker News Reader

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Have you considered that DOGE is an opaque, unaccountable bureaucracy that is motivated to optimize for ragebait? Who don't seem to know the consequences of their actions, or have any skin in the game if they make mistakes? Who have been given alarmingly high level of control over some of the most sensitive pieces of information and governance of our government, and never made any effort to assure the public that they aren't acting carelessly? And for some of these services they have basically left broken, there is an obvious conflict of interest when Musk suggests that the government buys replacement services from him?

You're asking the people to act in good faith but it doesn't seem like DOGE either understands or cares that there are a lot of people who have basically had their contributions and service to the country basically shattered overnight, because Elon wants to get x amount of likes from a certain culture war faction.

Nobody cried for the Keystone pipeline workers that lost their jobs. There wasn’t much of a whimper when Bill Clinton cut 400,000 government jobs. The duplicity is obnoxious. Even Jon Favreau, former Obama speechwriter lamented that Obama’s team should have done some of what DOGE is doing.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-bros-doge-stuff-ve-14192594...

> There wasn’t much of a whimper when Bill Clinton cut 400,000 government jobs.

People are not concerned with cutting, they are concerned with how it's being done which is causing disruption:

  The cuts that Clinton made to the federal workforce followed a six-month period called the National Performance Review, launched in March 1993, soon after he took office. The review process ended in September of that year with a report that found nearly 400 recommendations, which Clinton then implemented gradually so that essential services were not interrupted even as the workforce shrank considerably.

  "Nothing could be more different in that approach than the approach that Musk and his team have taken, which is to assume the federal government's employees are the enemy, and the less of them we have, the better," he said.

https://www.newsweek.com/how-bill-clinton-shrunk-federal-gov...

You don't seem to get that the money is spent when Congress allocates it, not when a public servant puts it on a credit card. You want accountability talk to your representative.

This will just make government less efficient as it goes through extra steps to request invoices and post payment, or perhaps even spending petty cash.

It will exclude government from buying certain products where this isn't possible.

Of course this is all quite irrelevant, since it's a publicity stunt for the people who are not interested in saving taxpayer money but hating and destroying.

If they need more they can get an increase, what's the issue

Again, wrong end of the pipeline. It's just more busywork to do. The staff is already responsible for what is spent on the card and to match it to approved spending and their budget.

Just building in more red tape and expense to a system.

Saying we shouldn't improve spending oversight because the real problem is at the budgeting level is like saying we shouldn't put security cameras in a store because the owner should have hired more trustworthy employees. Sure, hiring matters, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also keep an eye on the cash register. If Congress allocates funds irresponsibly, that’s a separate issue—but ensuring that spending is properly tracked and justified helps prevent waste and misuse at the point where it actually happens.

Obtaining that increase implies further bureaucratic overhead. That's time (and thus money) that they didn't used to have to spend in order to get a job done.

You're also positing that the people in a position to grant the increase will do so in good faith. That's the opposite of Musk and Trump and their M.O.

> Taxpayers, however, require accountability for the taxes they pay in a functioning democratic republic.

Accountability to taxpayers is a really weird excuse for bypassing Congress on changes in whether and how money Congress has directed with law is actually spent.

And by “weird” I mean really “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”-level abuse of language.

They're just angry because sometimes people in Congress spend money on things they don't like in places they've never been to to serve constituencies they're not part of. And they look at the $4/month or whatever that that costs and they would rather have the extra cup of coffee than see bags of food go to Africa or Gaza.

IF they wanted to spend $4 for food to Africa, they can voluntarily do that. The unique feature of government is that you can compel someone else to do it that doesn't agree.

This is just adding to the bureaucracy, instead of approving all purchases on the card at once now they have to get approval for each and every purchase.

Bureaucrats revel and rejoice in paperwork

So DOGE is in fact pro-beauracracy?

First is reduce cost, if it takes more paperwork to reduce costs then so be it.

I really hope you understand what cache coherency is if you work in tech. It's the exact same context here on why this is less efficient in time and money here.

>First is reduce cost

So, what do you think we are reducing costs for? You said you own a business, so I suppose you would benefit more than average from tax cuts.

so musk is a bureaucrat now?

as a taxpayer, id like the costs of each of these broad actions to be analyzed add shared for public review before doing them.

>Taxpayers, however, require accountability

What do you think is unaccounted for? Especially on an electronic credit card?

Does your credit card statement report exactly what you bought or just where you bought it?

The receipts you provide to support your claim for taxpayer reimbursement for the payment you have to make on the card report exactly what you bought, and come with a justification for buying it, or you aren't getting reimbursed.

How the fuck does kneecapping the ability of government employees to purchase things on a credit card increase accountability? Either they’re monitoring purchases or they aren’t, it isn’t any more difficult to do so with a credit card.

Like, you do understand that all purchases on a CC are inherently digital and thus logged by default?

huh? what idea are you trying to convey?

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