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I think impartial observers have not spent time in actual government bureaucracy. Basically everything will seem like “they’re cutting something important!” Or “they’re stopping critical research!” because every government contract needs justification; so naturally they will all sound good. The data and accounting itself is such bad quality in all cases that it is impossible to be perfect at this; there are entire industries dedicated to simply analyzing and tracking contracts and spending. None of them are above ~90% accurate. Many “analysts” born over the last couple weeks are talking about things they know nothing about; for example measuring savings off calls on BPAs or IDIQs is silly because a call = spent money. You cannot save money you have already spent, but you can stop the vehicle.

I’m not saying DOGE is definitively good or even that they are going to actually accomplish their mission (probably their cuts will become a piggy bank that gets raided by OTA’s at the end of the fiscal year). But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.

What is on paper for government contracts is totally different from reality. Most of these programs accomplish nothing, are totally un-utilized, filled with employees who literally do not show up to work.

I could write a novel with examples but here are some notable anecdotes:

- Once, I built an intelligence solution for a large-ish intelligence program within a civil agency. After 6 months it was not used once but cost the government a cool ~12M$. Only after a full year did the program leadership finally take a look and discover, wait a second, none of these people have worked more than a week total in the past year. Only half got laid off, the rest are still gainfully employed elsewhere in the government. Many such cases!

- I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!

- Dozens of cases of the government spending on “XYZ tool” that sounds super critical. In reality they are paying $12M for a postgres database and an extremely basic data entry UI on top. Also, I can’t believe I am about to defend Sharepoint, but realistically something like tracking 10 SIM cards can go in an excel spreadsheet and doesn’t need a $12M “inventory tool.”

- Many cases of projects investigating bird flu in depth and tracking its spread as early as 2022. You would think this is critical with bird flu being a thing right now; however none of these $20M+ contracts have accomplished much at all.

You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same. The only way to go from GS-12 to GS-13 to GS-14 to GS-15 is just to spend recklessly. They are experts at justifying their budget and navigating internal hierarchies. However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.

(Disclaimer: “government” above refers to civil, exclusive of DoD)

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> But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.

It's also absolutely true that private companies are endlessly wasteful. I've worked for four large companies now, and the waste is mind boggling. I think what upsets people about government is that tax dollars are used to fund it, but I would claim from my own observation that beyond a certain size any kind of organization is filled with waste.

I'll point out, though, that there are areas of government that have been studied and found to be very efficient, and have high levels of satisfaction. It's been quite a while now, but I recall around ~2006-2007 an academic study came out which was originally intended to look only at private insurers. As they designed the study they realized that given the size of Medicare they should also include Medicare as part of the study.

What they found:

- A much much higher percentage of the money going into Medicare goes toward patient care than in any of the private insurers. Like low single digit percentages of overhead vs. 10-25% overhead in the case of the private insurers.

- Customer satisfaction from dealing with the bureaucracy (claim processing) of Medicare was much higher than customer satisfaction with the private insurers.

- Patient satisfaction with the care they were receiving from Medicare was as high or higher than the private insurers.

It’s still worth looking and finding that stuff out (carefully and transparently). There’s only been token attempts at a meta analysis of gov efficiency in the past. GWB created a small version of DOGE with almost the same mandate that never really did anything notable because it was small and never ambitious (it also still exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_Inspectors_Gene...).

Most large wasteful private organizations are often the ones who get comfortable in their existing market, employees get hardened in their ways, and eventually are threatened by changes in the market and competition and die off. There is no competitive pressure on gov agencies. It’s almost always a one way street after an agency gets formed that it continues as is indefinitely with only occasional changes in leadership. The number of agencies (>400 federally in US) only increases. Congress rarely looks backwards with spending, they only challenge demands for new spending plans to expand agencies. Otherwise budgets only go up with new line items as US tax revenue forever increases each year.

> There’s only been token attempts at a meta analysis of gov efficiency in the past.

Citation needed. The OMB has been around for a while.

It’s partly true OBM saved $25 billion once a decade ago in 2014 when they proposed 215 cuts https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/Building_a_21st_Cen...

But those big wins were rare. It’s mostly small stuff like during Biden admin they banned single use plastic and reducing food waste. No one has ever really done large scale data analysis on spending and made it a major priority across the federal government in recent history.

>> But those big wins were rare.

Citations needed. I found this with almost zero effort and it seems like the program saved $60 billion over four years: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/briefing-room/2024/...

I feel like your confidence is just ignorance

I didn’t say they never did anything I’m saying the big wins were rare. Your own link says the $100B number was aggregate since it started in the Obama admin. That’s over a decade ago.

The US federal gov spends almost $ 7 trillion a year. I’m sure they can find a whole lot more than a few billion here and there each year.

I also don’t know why it’s so controversial to want the gov to spend money wisely and make efficiency a core value. It’s funny what people will defend because the current people doing it are controversial and unprofessional so the whole idea gets dismissed. I’m not a political extremist like that, I just think it could and should be done better and done right.

> I also don’t know why it’s so controversial to want the gov to spend money wisely and make efficiency a core value.

It’s not. Consider that people who do believe in efficiency might be upset about political purges which increase inefficiency being conducted under the guise of efficiency – for example, illegally breaking contracts or firing people will cost more and cutting things which are useful (the vast majority of what DOGE has done) is not only failing to deliver savings but also throwing out the past investment. Research funding and cuts to researchers are a great example: an NIH, NASA, EPA, etc. scientist represents millions of dollars in training even if they’re “just” a probationary hire. Firing them to save 0.00000002% of the federal budget means giving up the money which was already invested in them and the programs they support.

Similarly, people who actually study government efficiency often highlight the high cost of reducing unnecessary spending. For example, we could try to drive down the number of Social Security payments sent to people who are dead but decades of auditors have found that would be a massive _increase_ of inefficiency because the vast majority of payments are legitimate and it would require a huge number of people to validate each one, not to mention the mission failure and costs of falsely denying payments when that process fails (old people are allowed to live in remote areas or not pick up the phone, and you’ll hear from their congressional representatives if you decide that means they’re not a real person or dead).

There are ways to improve efficiency considerably but none of them are easy and most will require legal changes by Congress.

getting close to two days without a response, dmix. Are you sure you aren't a coward? Even worse, an internet coward who can't even account for their nonsense?

Maybe you wanna make some trash claims about 150 year olds collecting social security checks? Just looking for efficiency....

Why don't you care about nuclear safety, dmix?

> I also don’t know why it’s so controversial to want the gov to spend money wisely and make efficiency a core value

This is a rank and disgusting assumption, and should show anyone else reading this how dmix isn't an honest participant in this discussion.

It's not controversial that an administration is trying to spend money wisely, but that isn't what is going on here. Firing NNSB staff because you don't know what the NNSB does isn't trying for efficiency, it's pure and utter stupidity.

Now time for my assumptions: I don't know why it's so controversial to want the government to act with care, diligence, and common fucking sense when nuclear energy or weapons are involved. Why don't you care about nuclear safety, dmix?

And yet still no citations supporting your position. Tell me, how little did the PART program and its successor save?

Trump has also attacked parts of the goverment doing anaylsis/oversight of the budget as well as hobbling prosecution of corrupt politicans

Yes DOGE would be much better as an independent agency created by Congress with all the controls that comes with it. It’s inherently a bit toothless as an executive advisory council without further increasing executive power which is dangerous.

toothless? they have arbitrarily axed entire departments and fires tens of thousands without cause. they apparently have far too many teeth.

So far firings were mostly just from the subset of executive agencies they directly control, for ex USAID is legal because it wasn't create by legislative branch like the hundreds of other agencies. They can only fire probationary employees in those, with the exception of 'with cause' firing - a newer executive power as of 2020 supreme court ruling.

But I don't think employment is the primary waste issue. Federal employment has grown relatively slowly compared to local and state administration.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c4/Go...

Which is why my point was about doing macro spending analysis. Most of the waste is in gov cost-plus contracts/procurement (feds outsource everything which is why employment hasn't grown much), how agencies operate (large duplication, old systems, etc), and more generally the unwieldy 1000 page congressional budgets no one reads.

> However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.

Reading your comment I saw so many similarities to any large organisation which I worked for that I can't help but think it's simply on the same level.

Hell, my first internship was 100% budget filler and, in line with my role, I was useless.

Regarding inefficiency: I'm a contractor for a large organisation and have been for over three years now.

My contract is up in a few months and by that time I will have a total of four years of cancelled projects under my belt. At least one of them started out as an Excel sheet and in truth could have remained so.

Makes you think that waste is a universally emergent issue which gets worse with the size of an entity. Not making any distinction between governmental or corporate structures.

Everybody cries when the government raises taxes. Yet, when corporations increase prices despite not having higher cost, we just accept it as "business as usual".

As corporations rival the power of nations more and more, some people should rethink their attitude to public and private enterprise.

In theory, competing firms keep each other honest. In reality, the managers care more about their petty kingdoms than the health of the corporate empire. If theirs goes bankrupt, they use their skills to build a new fiefdom elsewhere.

> As corporations rival the power of nations more and more

See: British East India Company. I don't really have a relevant point to make here but corporations being more powerful than countries actually seems to be the default state that has already been dealt with somewhat, rather than a novel growing problem.

True that. There are plenty of historical companies which have absolutely dominated politics. "Standard Oil" being another example.

What's different in our time, is that it is not just one company, but a whole range of mega-companies (Particularly in technology). It has changed from a few powerful and malicious actors to a systematic problem, fueled by the dynamics of the financial markets and passive investment.

I say govt politics is so much worse because it is not like, a handful of people trying to get ahead by spending a lot, it is almost all of them.

They're also vicious, many times I have been cussed out by bureaucrats over stupid things like css padding on a table. There are lines that don't get crossed in corporate politics, none of those lines exist in government.

There are NO LINES that aren't crossed on corporate politics. Verbal abuse, illogical decisions based on vibes, favoritism or just plain stupidity are common in companies not listed and not rare on those that are.

The majority of things illegal in governments are business as usual in the private sector. Want to take a kickback of a supplier? Perfectly fine and normal on non large corporations. Still happens on those.

Because you had luck with your career is not representative of overall corporate behaviour. I worked as a third party seeing lots of large companies as clients. The amount of BS is outstanding and awe inspiring.

I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work” like that. They had teams and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a normal startup. I’ve never seen such bureaucratic waste anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them about it, and they shrugged it off by noting, “We are way more efficient than our competitors.”

I’m not defending DOGE’s specifics or competence here, but do we need to clean house? Absolutely, yes.

did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison. So when I see USAID or whatever with some bleeding heart mission statement, all i can think of is how many vendors are siphoning off that money while paying lip service to the culture war theme of the year, like a drug lord making sure to be seen at church every every Sunday. It’s not a question of, like, is it one third fraud or half fraud. There is absolutely no accountability and there is not a single competitive aspect about these projects. At no point whatsoever is there a credible attempt to deliver on promises made. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does and what that program I saw does is let about 150 people bill about $100 per hour to the government. All you have to do, to collect your $800 per day, is report that your jira ticket is taking more story points than expected due to technical debt, and make sure your MS Teams stays green from 8 to 6 (buy a mouse wiggler)!

Stuff like this is why the Skunk Works at Lockheed was such a big deal.

Just a whole department of people who innovated without any of the red tape, in a government setting.

You might find this Washington Monthly article interesting as it echoes your point: "Fire the Contractors" https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/05/fire-the-contractor... "Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it. ... That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine ... have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."

100%

And it's like 10 to 1 of contractors vs civilians that work for the gov. You'll find a hell of a lot of casual corruption there too -- companies bribing the civilians who select contracts to pick them. It cuts across public & defense spending.

Or collaborating with government decision makers to word the contract to ensure that they are the only company that can meet all of the criteria. TYL

Contractors are hired by civil servants, these are not independent things.

I don’t think DOGE will fix this because the solution is easy but very counterintuitive — we would need around 30% raises to all federal employees at GS-12 and higher, to match market rates.

Right now they cannot hire civil servants that are skilled due to being unable to compete on comp; instead they have to reach to private sector, which will charge them 600 a head, while paying each contractor 200. Because GS only affords 120-130 for those positions, it becomes necessary to reach for contractors.

PWS contracts are the biggest suck on budget; eg there are more PWS contractors manning what would normally be FTE positions at Dept of State than total FTEs.

Unfortunately, it is so backwards to actually spend more and raise payscales to save money that I don’t think DOGE will land there as a strategy.

i honestly could not find any root cause analysis in that article that i agree with. it is not a problem of “too few bureaucrats”, it is that the contract procurement process is not competitive, nor is literally any other process on the government side, including meta processes like the bureaucrat hiring and selection process. the entire govt side system top to bottom has evolved in a world where money does not matter and the contractors have simply evolved to the constraints of that interface to get at the money the way a plant grows towards the sun.

... i actually considered becoming a "civil servant" after this experience to try to help (on either the govt side or private side), but I could not see a viable way to actually make a difference, even a small one. Everything is so jammed up and deadlocked with outrageous anti-competitive regulation —go learn what is "IDIQ" "SPARC" "8(a) STARS II" "GSA IT Schedule 70"—that it's not actually possible for a startup to bid these contracts without partnering with the 800 lb gorillas and therefore becoming a part of the thing that you are trying to destroy. "Disruption does not come from within"

Because of the existence of [1] FedRAMP and other compliance initiatives that are blanket applied to everything even though 90% of SaaS contracts do NOT need it, and [2] past performance being predominantly the #1 factor for evaluation, contracting itself is an enforced oligopoly.

You need to be a big-ish company to enter, and will have to kiss the feet of existing oligarchs.

I love the narrative that some how “startups are efficient”.

I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired.

I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more successful prior to acquisition.

So yeah , sorry, startups can be extremely inefficient too.

I’ve also worked for some of the biggest tech companies or have friends that work there now, including Meta, they are extremely wasteful in nearly all cases. They just make a lot of money. Probably like the collective United States.

The moral of my story is that efficiency isn’t necessarily profitable, desired or even required.

In my opinion DOGE is telling stories to distract and achieve other ends. Last I hear most of Musks companies actively received government welfare :)

More people need to internalize that moral. Efficiency is an optimization after you are achieving a goal. It is not the goal. Unless you are not looking to do new things, maybe?

This can be seen in every resource consumption ever. We get far more out of any single input now than was ever achievable in the past.

I don’t mind startups wasting money unless I’m a seed investor with a vested interest. We all have a vested interest in the way government allocates or misallocates funds. That’s one difference.

The other, as someone else pointed out, is a matter of scale.

Most of the startups fail, I hope we don't want that in government things

They wont because they're propped up by tax payer money :) the very thing they whine about.

in evolutionary biology, almost all cells die, but some of those that survived evolved to become humans

Strictly, no? No cell has been alive through that whole process. Rather, many laid the foundations that lead that direction.

Yes, this is very much a Ship of Theseus argument. But, I think that is very apropos?

I'm not a biologist but I thought there are no new cells, just old cells splitting.

The next logical steps to this is eugenetics, I'll pretend I didn't see this comment

BTW, we already tried that and it didn't work

absolutely startups can be inefficient but government projects are at a wholly different order of magnitude. Some startups will crush $20M and then die, and yet the best ones, such as facebook, return 100,000x ROI on that same $20 mil. Govt projects will crush $200M, deliver nothing and then go to recompete so another vendor can have a turn.

Those sound like contractors, so a private company that's failing here? Or am I misreading?

The problem is not the government being inefficient and wasteful but the contractors -- aka private companies -- being inefficient and wasteful.

Meta spent how many billions on Metaverse and has what to show for it? Some argue it was wasteful.

sell your stock then if you are a shareholder, it's up 225% on 5yr chart, 1525% since IPO, and has risen to a $1.7T mkt cap since the $13M Series A at $100M Post in 2005. That's a 100,000x ROI on the A if I did the math right, forgive me there are a lot of zeros to keep track of

> I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts.

As an aside, you're actually making the argument that we need more federal employees. The push to privatize everything has led to higher costs and more abuse. So DOGE is currently doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

There's no question this exists.

But firing a bunch of government employees doesn't fix this problem. Where there is waste, it mostly comes in the form of contractors bilking the government, not the government employees themselves.

Is DOGE going after the private sector and their bilking of the government?

Who do you think hires contractors and puts out contracts?

The only way to get promoted at and above gs-12 is to amass reports and budget authority. The wasteful spending is not handed down mandatory by congress, it is conducted using budget authority afforded to federal employees.

If you lay off 70% of federal employees especially those in gs-12 to 15 range, you could probably easily cut 70% of discretionary spending with literally no negative impact.

You will never see them reduce their budgets because it reduces their political power; look up “Washington Monument Syndrome” for how they have evaded cuts for the last two decades.

Congress wants to _increase_ the defense budget by $150B instead of decreasing it. You could gut as many employees as you want, and that money is still going to be spent somehow.

The only way to reduce 70% of the discretionary spending is for Congress to reduce the discretionary budget by 70%.

Perhaps the private sector and their bilking of the government is what we are witnessing.

That's why I like where I am. We usually work in really lean teams. One person in each role. And usually we're making a physical product so that's one mechanical, one electrical, one sideways, etc. Has its downsides but I don't feel like we're wasteful.

Are you in the private sector or government?

I've done both (though only once each) and it's been like that both times. Maybe I'm just drawn to it.

Yeah, if you're actually interested in government efficiency, Ro Khanna has been advocating for significant cuts to the federal budget in a way that actually improves efficiency.

Good. We need a lot more representatives genuinely interested in eliminating government waste. Because the graft is real regardless of political party.

Yes, I maintain anyone who has spent any measure of time in govcon will come to the same conclusion. Our government is endlessly wasteful -- this was a universal, bipartisan take 3 months ago but now people are getting successfully gaslit into believing every dollar the government spends is efficient and critical.

Are they going to clean the entire house, or will they ignore the parts that benefit their cronies?

You spent a few weeks somewhere and knew all that? Seems doubtful to me.

"You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same."

This x100. For all those lambasting the public sector, understand that its flaws are not because of the 'public' part, but because of the size of the organization.

Private sector organization's inefficiency, fraud and waste also scales directly with their size.

I worked with the government as a contractor for a while and saw a lot of waste and inefficiency. My brother in law works for a bank and what he describes sounds a lot like what I saw at the government: crazy amounts spent on contractors to do stupid or trivial things, massive hardware and software purchases never used, LOTS of consultants consultants consultants, lots of unnecessary travel, people hired to do no work, failed IT projects, wasteful disposal of working equipment, etc. It all sounds exactly the same.

I've talked to a lot of people who have worked for other huge companies and the stories are similar. When I worked for the Fed there were people there who had worked for GM, Boeing, etc. and a few said the Fed was actually more efficient than some of those.

Has anyone ever worked for a very large (several billion annual spend or more) entity that was anywhere near as efficient as a startup or SMB?

This is why small startups can beat enormous companies. From what I've seen, comparatively, startups can at times be thousands of times as cost-efficient. But as startups grow they become less efficient. I've seen this too. It's incredibly hard to maintain efficiency as things scale for a very long list of reasons.

Bringing up Palantir is funny to me. I don’t know enough gossip on Musk and Thiel’s relationship, but if I did I would bet it would solely determine the outcome of a hypothetical DOGE investigation into Palantir contracts. It seems from a sibling comment I’m not alone. If we’re right, DOGE isn’t going to eliminate government waste and corruption, just move it around.

We’re not gaslit into thinking everything was fine with government spending, we’re angry that this is how they’re going to “fix” it.

I think for many people, this is the first exposure to audits and spending reduction in govt. So judging on an absolute scale, yeah DOGE is not doing a great job.

Judging on a relative scale to past attempts and the existing 5(!) agencies with the sole purpose of auditing and reducing spending, DOGE looks amazing and has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.

It is an immensely difficult undertaking and the bureaucracy will struggle, writhe, and set fire to everything around it before it can be put down. We should hope that DOGE is just getting started and picking up momentum rather than having settled.

So what you're saying is that "waste reduction" is such a holy goal that the means justify the ends? Not matter the consequences, no matter the outcomes, no matter the harm.

I think that's where we fundemtally disagree, not to mention your blindness to their stated ideological ulterior motives. Thr Project 2025 document explicitly states it's goal of ultimately replacing federal workers with its cadres that work towards to it's political project.

I'd like to be proven wrong but I have a feeling all of this will never provide any cost benefits to those that aren't the rich. Even if they somehow manage to reduce the taxes on the avg joe, a big if, the Joe will pay for it in other tangible ways. I.e. I don't think it's waste being eliminated but projects the administration disagrees or wants to privatize. Can you address these concerns?

> the bureaucracy will struggle, writhe, and set fire to everything around it before it can be put down

Convenient way to blame "the bureaucracy" for every problem that DOGE creates. Are you open to the possibility that DOGE will cause more problems than it fixes?

> DOGE looks amazing and has gotten farther in 1 month

Burning down your house because of a leaky faucet I guess is a strategy, but not one I think we should be undertaking.

This assumes that DOGE has actually found something in their "audit", which seems dubious given TFA

USGS seemed like it was mostly worthwhile stuff when I was there, just operating on outdated technologies and under budget cycles and patterns that incentivized goofy behaviors because saving money in even the simplest of ways could only lead to budgets being cut in unconstructive ways.

For example, imagine there's a budget of $5k and it's assuming that you'll replace a computer with part of it.

But you don't actually need to replace your computer until after the fiscal year.

But if you wait, the next budget will just think whatever you didn't spend can be cut, not that you deferred a cost for slightly longer.

Similarly, even if you have budget for something you need at the start of a fiscal year, everyone is afraid of blowing budget before the end of the fiscal year... So many expenses get deferred until things are close enough to the fiscal boundary that everyone starts worrying about not spending instead...

Yes, well documented phenomenon — the government spends more between July-September than the rest of the year combined. Conversely spends very little in December and January.

Not me but another contractor got a phone call the last day of the fiscal year and was told essentially “hey we have an extra 5M$ in the budget we need to spend, can you make something up and we will just give you the money for a random pilot.”

I don't think the complaint is that all government spending is good or that cutting waste would be bad. The objection is that they're not cutting the kinds of things you're talking about and their approach seems fundamentally unlikely to do so.

Finding things like solutions nobody is using or systems that are far more complicated than they need to be is worthwhile if you're goal is removing waste and increasing efficiency. But it also takes in-depth analysis by people who understand the context. You're definitely not finding it with just raw budget access and first principles from people with little relevant experience. Same goes for employees. There are definitely poor performers or people doing unnecessary things, but you're not dealing with those cases if your approach is just to fire all the new employees.

It's not that this approach is an imperfect solution to a legitimate problem, it's not a solution to the problem at all. Instead, it's basically about redefining a hard problem (identifying and addressing waste and inefficiency) into an easy problem (have less stuff) and then trying to solve that one. Which is great if your goal is to declare victory, but it doesn't actually address the original problem of efficiency.

I find it frustrating because I agree with you that the government is absolutely not perfectly efficient and it would be great if there was a concerted effort to improve the situation. But not only is that not what's happening, this approach seems likely to make things worse given that random chaos and disruption are generally the enemies of efficiency and it seems likely all this will make it harder for the government to attract or retain the best, most efficient employees.

Is perfect efficiency really desirable, when increase in efficiency often results in increase in brittleness?

Look, beyond unobjectionable facts that the government wastes money, that money isn't completely wasted: some percentage eventually becomes salaries for Americans (the rest in some rich person's pockets). For example, all the USAID jobs that are now gone.

There are now billions-USD-worth fewer jobs in the American economy.

There are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers.

Administrative spending is also not that high, the majority of savings are in contracts. This is related to jobs because every employee you lay off, is one less person who can spend millions of dollars.

So in practice, there are now billions-USD-worth fewer dollars being taken from struggling American workers and being sent abroad. And only some millions-USD-worth fewer jobs.

This is not true, unless a tax cut is actually passed which lowers taxes for the poor. (And the poorest already aren’t paying that much in tax. And FICA wouldn’t get cut, since that money doesn’t fund what doge covers.)

Why are we setting the bar at the poor? 65% of americans live paycheck to paycheck yet pay 20-30% in income tax alone.

John Doe working in sales with three kids will lose his home if he misses a few paychecks. He drives a 2009 Toyota Camry and only buys things on clearance. Why should 20 cents of every dollar he makes go towards a bureaucratic machine that accomplishes very little? Why should 1 cent on every dollar he makes go towards funding mandatory charity and foreign aid, why should 5 cents of every dollar go towards a federal jobs program? It is easy to talk about things in isolation when we look at individual impact on budget or only look at the poor, but empathy based arguments fall flat when that same empathy is not extended towards the american workers funding this. Keep in mind we had an Industrial Revolution and fought two world wars without income tax on 90% of Americans!

FICA and payroll tax is the ultimate evil and should at the bare minimum be rolled into graduated income tax, but I digress.

> I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!

Just to back up this point: This is 100% my experience when I was an employee for them (disclaimer: 3-4 year tenure, some number of years ago). Everything we built was marketed as this brilliant, cutting edge, leading AI ML tech, and what we were actually building was React CRUD apps with 0 users, with a heavy focus on "making the UI feel like Minority Report / feel futuristic", etc.

It's not Skynet, it's a contracting company with a great design and marketing team.

I think people would react viscerally if they knew Shyam blasphemed himself as Jesus, literally appointed 12 apostles, and held a last supper-like meeting with a long ass conference table.

Many such stories

Could you help clarify something for me? When I looked into the federal workforce, just looking at raw numbers without much insight about the "inside", it doesn't seem particularly bloated or wasteful to me: it runs at ~5% of the federal budget and at 2mil people it is about 0.5% of the population.

It looks like you and some other commenters, however, are discussing government contracts, which are projects and programs paid for the government but implemented by third-party contractors. Is that correct?

Yes, they are correlated ; contracts are created with budget authority afforded to federal employees. Essentially the only way to get promoted is to amass reports and budget, and use it in some way.

So it’s basically like this: yes, the federal government creates jobs and the cost of those jobs directly is only 5% of the budget. However the real cost of those jobs is in spending, in terms of opportunities they champion, which essentially amounts to all discretionary spending conducted by the federal government — ~30% of the budget.

> it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.

It's equally insane to me that people think the private sector is somehow efficient. The amount of resources used to feed profit alone are a huge waste.

Private is not 100% efficient but it is much more efficient because if you don't make a profit you no longer exist. A government program can't go broke. Government programs simply get money with zero effect on their budget or revenue if they execute poorly or well. That's why removing an 'optional' HR role like DEI that does not actual produce anything measurable is slow hanging fruit. You are reducing cost and the result will not actually effect the outcome. It's an unnecessary ideological add-on, not a function. It's like removing the training on how to use a coffee machine in an office that doesn't drink coffee.

Hmmm, A few corporations come to mind that are considered too big to fail (banks a decade and half ago, intel atm,...). Seems like they have aquired government-like powers :D

Second point. Nuclear safety inspectors don't produce anything, they just cost us. Lets call them red tape. Simply fire all of them, energy costs will go down and nothing will happen in short term. But somewhere down the line a president will be asked how the hell they thought that running nuclear reactors without safety inspectors was a good idea.

Now, I honestly don't know if DEI is useful in the long run or not, but because you see it as ideological add-on makes me think that you know even less. People can make anything seem like its ideological (vaccines, wearing masks, climate change,...), but usually that just mean they don't know what they are talking about.

Too big to fail was a joke, they should have made them sell their assets or ownership to other companies and shareholders who would cover the losses. Not one person who owned the company before should have been allowed to remain owning anything, without additional paid in capital. Anything related to safety, social security and veterans benefits, was/is mentioned specifically as exempt to the cuts/payment pauses from what I've seen.

Wild red herring fallacy, I’ll bite.

The private sector is indeed filled with lots of inefficiencies, but due to the profit motive and presence of competition, there’s massive incentives to correct those inefficiencies slowly over time. You'll make more profit doing so!

Hence, the private sector is constantly self correcting itself and becoming more efficient via creative destruction. You can just look at the numbers, even the Chinese Communist Party understand this. Turns out the profit motive combined with competitive instincts of humans results in a consistently greater good.

Not sure you’re aware, but the government doesn’t do that. Hence why the US is massively indebted. Unfortunately the US debtors aren’t doing so great these days so it can’t continue even at current rates. Instead of DOGE they should have named it “The department of not finding the level of US debt that leads to currency debasement and collapse.”

I never thought I’d need to explain the elementary school 101 of why communism is bad and why debt is not endless on HN but apparently this place is turning into Reddit.

This is simple. Look at Medicare Advantage plans versus traditional Medicare. The same amount of care costs 23% _extra_ using Medicare Advantage. How is this more efficient? It's not.

>>The private sector is indeed filled with lots of inefficiencies, but due to the profit motive and presence of competition, there’s massive incentives to correct those inefficiencies slowly over time. You'll make more profit doing so!

Instead of correcting inefficiencies it's more profitable for private sector to: 1. merge/acquire competition, create monopoly, 2. lobby government for monopoly status (ISPs)/protection from competition with tarrifs (automakers)/... 3. sue competition out of business 4. aggressively use patents,...

Also found it funny that someone starts post with 'red herring' and ends with 'educating' parent post about communism :D

When stating "all profit is waste" you've officially changed the topic of discussion to communism.

Basic logic would dictate a response addressing that head-on is not a red herring.

I did not understand his post as 'all profit is waste', this is what he said: >>The amount of resources used to feed profit alone are a huge waste.

I believe that this can sometimes be true. For example, lets say that CEO want to raise profits by 20% by end of fiscal year and uses 50% more resources for that compared to current resource/profit use. This might be good idea for CEO, if his bonus is tied to profit, but for company it might be better to develop business that is going to bring more profit / resource spent a few years down the line.

I think both government and private sector have waste. It's just that reason for waste is different, and it doesn't make sense to compere them directly. Also, combating waste should be done differently in private vs public sector.

Very nice examples, but why then doesn't DOGE go through every project? Why did Trump end all DEI contracts, why cause the disruption by freezing all outgoing money, why fire the Inspector Generals that are inspecting their agencies for waste, why fire all probationary workers, and why the fuck do they want to mess with the IRS, the one agency that brings money in at a very successful rate?

Clearly no one at Musk's DOGE has spent time in actual government bureaucracy.

These are good questions that are easy to answer once you’ve spent time in gov:

- it is very hard to go thru every project and generally not worth it, it seems like they are sorting by contract vehicle size. there are 120k+ contracts spit out by the government every fiscal year alone so this is a monumental effort

- the DEI programs are probably a PR thing, generally speaking though they accomplish essentially nothing; I would probably go further though and roll up any program staffed by less than 10 people, then furlough 20% of the workforce under the larger program

- not all outgoing money has been frozen, idk how this rumor got started, it’s very specific and generally just foreign aid. this is part of trump’s campaign promise so while I don’t agree with it and it is probably going to shatter US hegemony, it is also what people voted for. the government is still spending tons of money, we are still doing more in depth tracking but it seems like only a 3-4% decrease overall

- the OIGs deserve to be fired they have not been able to stem any underlying issues for years, the outrage here is all manufactured. let me ask you this, if you hired an accountant and for the last 10 years they can neither tell you how much money you are spending nor find savings, are you going to keep that accountant?

- the IRS is not really efficient! first of all a majority of their audits are on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. yes of course the top 20% are still overrepresented correctly, but they are actually losing money for every audit they conduct on the bottom 80%. estimates are around 0.96$ per dollar with ~6k$ per audit, so they’d save $240 per audit they skip on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. it’s true they recover 6$ on average for every dollar spent on the top 20% which cost averages out to a little over 3$ recovered per dollar; however this is actually not much money, around $30B a year total. for such a massive agency and mission they do a pretty terrible job, and is very warranting of disruption

People are being gaslit into thinking the government is efficient; in reality it is endlessly bloated.

DEI is not just a PR thing, it forces employers to look at places for candidates they haven't looked before. Not surprising that white women are those who benefit the most from DEI. Even one JD Vance, as a military veteran, profited from a DEI program at Yale https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/feb/19/ask-politifac...

If outgoing money isn't frozen, why do farmers not receive money for the binding contracts why fullfill for the government. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/usda-freezes-farmer-funding...

The IGs have be fired in a very specific way that involves informing Congress. It was not done correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_... Cardell Richardson was in office since only May, don't know about you, but I'd give a new IG a year to get his ship running smoother. But looking at his picture I see why he was fired...

Regarding the IRS, well then we can expect that from now on only the rich people will get audited?

Government contract vehicles are not binding, call orders are but can also be cancelled and provisions are made for doing so. You’re pointing to one hyper specific example of cuts as frozen spending; it is easy to confirm billions have been spent in the last week alone. There is also a case to be made for malicious compliance in many cases with cuts. It sucks these farmers aren’t getting paid, but this is not an uncommon occurrence and if they truly are owed money they will eventually be receipted or they will be able to sue under FAR provisions.

Firing IGs without notice isn’t great but if Congress has an issue with it they are free to take it up. I’m not sure why that is relevant to whether or not IGs should be fired.

Cardell was an IG for literally two decades. This is like saying a SWE at Facebook for 20 years who now works in Meta’s VR division has only been a SWE for 1 year.

OIG at Department of State especially, among all OIGs, deserves mass layoffs. The track record of that office is the absolute worst.

It is also typical for SES to get rotated out and replaced during any new administration. 1-2 years in office is totally fair game as not many make it past 3.

Regarding the IRS, that’s a campaign promise Trump made and seems to be keen on with his ERS plans. However I doubt it will come to fruition or have meaningful impact, the IRS is hard to disrupt due to longstanding relationships with Congress.

> not all outgoing money has been frozen, idk how this rumor got started, it’s very specific and generally just foreign aid

No, that's absolutely not true. My partner is the accounting manager for a university. All their access to federal funding was turned off for a couple of days, and several grants (which they could draw from and get overnight) have not shown up in several weeks (specifically there are some that even remotely hint at DEI, that the university now expects will never be fulfilled).

It's not just "foreign aid".

I said `generally` not `exclusively` and you are selecting one very specific application of funding to generalize against all federal funding.

I literally analyze this stuff for work, there is barely a 3-5% contraction in spending.

This is such an insane rumor too because it takes 10 seconds to disprove it: https://www.usaspending.gov/search/?hash=8980ee6820c47f96a19...

Given that education funding dwarfs foreign aid and is affected, it would seem inaccurate to label it as "generally foreign aid".

The other point is just because a contract or award is on usaspending.gov doesn't mean the funds are flowing - that was my point, my partner's school has many awards that previously they could draw from at will, and receive money overnight. They've attempted to draw from many of them now, and the funds just ... aren't being transferred.

That was part of the furore, "we have agreements and obligations in place and you're just refusing to fund them", it's not about the existence of the awards in the first place.

You really think that reducing IRS funding will reduce audits on the bottom 80%, and not the top 20%? If you're going to go around telling people they've been gaslit (using a straw man, I might add), you might want to check your own biases first.

Yes! The IRS budget has nearly doubled in the last decade, primarily to increase their workforce and use manpower to focus on shotgunning low-yield audits.

High-income audits are difficult to conduct. To increase receipts, it is far easier to just conduct more easy, low-yield audits. This is the optimization they are making, and in service of their mission (maximizing revenue) it is technically correct.

Instead of picking your favorite logical fallacy to throw at me, you can go look this stuff up yourself to confirm.

Your claims seem to be directly contradicted by the data here: https://www.irs.gov/statistics/irs-budget-and-workforce

According to this, FTEs are down, and operating costs are only up ~30% compared to 2010. Average cost of collection is down.

And consider the decline in audit rate for millionaires from 2010-2019 described here: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-need-to-rebuil...

I guess the onus is now on you to provide support for your claims.

The IRS was in the middle of a hiring spree: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2023/04/irs-hire-30000-emp...

Those 15k they fired may just be forcing them back to how they were a year ago.

Absolutely delusional to believe any of this based on the history of these people.

It’s absurd to say anything is “what people voted for” in a system where only the votes of about 5 out of 50 states matter.

That isn't how elections work. You can't assume that all voters in non-swing states would never change their vote.

You could say the same thing about a popular vote where a candidate wins by 10 votes - "oh, our entire system is decided by 10 voters? how unfair"

For the US election, votes in other states resulted in a situation where only 5 were swing states. If those voters in non-swing states voted differently in enough numbers, then there wouldn't be just 5 swing states.

Look at any of the elections in the past 40-50 years and you can clearly see that which states are "swing states" and which aren't changes over time.

Something like 130,000 voters voting the other way would have changed the election.

However unlike in 2016, a strong plurality voted Trump - 2 million more than voted for Harris. Had Harris won the popular vote that argument might have meant something.

Not sure how true this is and I guess it is moot at this point (except as far as thinking how to ensure all legal votes are counted in the future): https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/ "Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes. And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million."

In either situation it didn’t change the numbers dramatically. About half of voters actually want what is happening to the country.

Which makes it insane that such massive disruption can happen as a result. When the result is balanced on a knife edge, the outcome ought to reflect that, instead of swinging dramatically one way or the other. I don’t know how you design a system like that, but this is nuts.

A similar number removed citizenship from all Brits in 2016.

A few hundred votes slipped the US election in 2000 and caused the invasion of Iraq.

You tackle this by having societal norms and strong institutions. The internet broke that. The concentration of wealth broke that. The unprecedented algorithmic manipulation broke that.

Some love it.

Brexit was especially wild. At least the US has the excuse that the law says we do it this way. To make such a drastic change based on a simple majority in a nonbinding referendum is really out there.

The US was the first modern democracy, since then we’ve learned how to make better ones (proportional representation parliamentary systems), but the US system is just stable enough to keep limping along.

Trimming down a bureaucracy is a good example of Gall's Law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."

The usual reason for this is simply dependencies. At some point in time, somebody took a working system, had some extra budget, and then invented a process that took the existing system as an input and produced some marginally useful work. But then next year, the new process was part of the working system, and they had more budget, and they added more roles and processes based on its output. Now you can't take it away: regardless of how marginally useful it was last year, everything built on top of it will fail. That $10M contract with one user might have just one user, but that one user might be the crucial communication link that determines the budget for a 1000-person department. You might even have a contract with zero users, but without auditing the inner workings of the whole department, how do you know it has zero users and won't just break everything when you terminate it?

It's only cuttable because DEI is not the actual budget line item. Think of it like this 'program gets a budget of $10M' and the people that run it decide the best way to implement that program includes $8M of DEI training. They can instead decide to spend $0 on DEI and the full budget on payroll. This is simply changing the priority of what was effectively an HR function to actual productivity functions.

Doing consultancy for the government, I agree with your assessment. Yet, it is fairly unrelated to what DOGE is doing.

1. Streamlining and simplification is good. Trimming can come with harsh cuts. But what we witness is arbitrary destruction. Otherwise Musk wouldn't try to reinstate nuclear inspectors they just fired.

2. Efficiency is not the goal. Neutralization of governmental power is. And with less governmental power, corporate power will fill the gaps.

3. Ideology is the driving engine. Talking points of "Anti Woke/DEI" or "no work from home" sounds appealing one half of the people, but carries no substance beyond it. In fact, these terms are misused and retooled as weapons (such as getting rid of "woke" generals).

4. If you want more efficiency, you must make investments. No company or state entity has ever become more efficient just by cutting cost. Slashing budgets only cost you more money in the medium/long run.

5. Transparency is good. It holds people accountable and allows for better decisions. But one of the few purposes of these acts seem to bring are to bring chaos. In chaos, the stronger will win. It is the opposite of transparency.

All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people across the world in business class for a few meetings they could do remotely without problem. I'm pretty sure everyone could come with many anecdotes of waste in the private sector. I also worked in the public sector (not in the US) and frankly, I think it was pretty efficient. Most employees were competent and weren't paid very well.

The problem with reducing costs with a heavy hand is that you will cut things which are actually useful. And probably, the saving will be very little compared to the overall budget. I think DOGE is primarily a demagogical operation.

I see this take a lot in this thread, I think people do not comprehend the scale.

Your company sends people in business class needlessly, ok. The government sends people in private jets needlessly -- there are dozens of separate aviation programs just within Dept. of State each with their own planes and contracts to staff and supply those planes. We have hundreds of posts around the world, many people are getting to those mainly on charters, private legs, or in the contractor case, business class tickets billed at 2x rate under T&L.

This is just one specific example; it applies across the board, when the government spends it is on an exponentially different scale to commercial. A single database will easily cost them 5M$ -- that is ~10x the cash moved on the floor of a major casino during a busy night.

> I also worked in the public sector (not in the US)

Yes, key phrase not in the US. As a comparison, the largest spending item in our budget is Medicaid -- ineffective healthcare that applies to less than 20% of our population. We spend 4x more on Medicaid somehow than the UK spends on the entirety of the NHS.

Well do remember that you have 5x the population of the UK, and the NHS is effectively limited to about 20% of our population given that our "ambitious" target is to get the delay between referral and treatment down "only" 18 weeks in most cases. About 10% of the population is on an NHS waiting list as we speak, which should be pretty much everyone that needs it.

Medicaid applies blanket to less than 20% of the population while providing less coverage and having worse outcomes than the NHS.

I picked the NHS because it serves the same size population (70M) while having more coverage and better outcomes.

Having lived in the UK yeah the waiting times suck, I went to a doctor actively bleeding out with an infection and they gave me a dressing and said to wait 3 months for a surgeon. That’s insane but the same outcome people on Medicaid will get in the US.

In the above anecdote I just flew back to the US the next day and was treated and “cured” 4 hours after landing. But, I did that on private insurance, not Medicaid. When americans shit on the NHS they are comparing it to their private insurance, not to the state funded healthcare options (Medicaid/Medicare).

How does that compare to the scale of the federal government as a whole?

Federal revenue in one year is more than the market cap of the most valuable US company. It’s an enormous organization. If waste is as a similar level proportionally, it’ll be similarly enormous. Is it actually more than that?

Large private sector companies operate on a 30% profit margin and have exponentially lower capex and opex compared to the federal government.

The federal government with exponentially higher revenue that exceeds the entire market cap of these valuable companies actually runs a deficit while predominantly providing inferior services in competing categories; while having insanely high opex and capex.

This inefficiency passes everywhere, including to their contractors — because of all the random shit, compliance, regulations in government contracting, the average margin is somehow only 10-30%. They charge often 3-100x the price of a good or service when provided to the private sector yet make 3x >less< profit.

The scope of the inefficiency is unimaginable, something we must absolutely not accept under any circumstances if we want to have a future as a country that does not involve being a permanent debtor to other economies.

Contractors aren't allowed to have excessive margins or profits because that would be gouging... so they inflate the number of necessary staff so that their capped overhead costs deliver the amount of profit they want.

>>All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people across the world in business class for a few meetings they could do remotely without problem.

The difference is that businesses that are inefficient are wasting revenue, and eventually go bust. There is no self-correcting mechanism for government.

There technically is because the interest on the deficit alone is about to exceed total defense spending, over time we will eventually just become a debt slave society paying to other economies.

But practically the self correcting mechanism is democracy, our elected officials have been failing us. Like it or hate it, DOGE has gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else conbined incl 5 other agencies over the last 20 years. The reaction from the bureaucracy and political machine should tell you everything you need to know about our prospects in the absence of DOGE.

> over time we will eventually just become a debt slave society paying to other economies.

This is categorically false. 70% of our debt is held by US entities.

Great info thanks! Frustrating that we don't see anyone declaring victory by cutting off Palantir contracts.

It’s probably a lot of things causing that:

- new age defense tech companies band together pretty tightly

- you can cut 10 Palantir contracts and save $200M but then you’re stuck with the existing tools (Sharepoint+PowerBI or Salesforce+Accenture) that are usually super shitty and 1-2B$ contracts vehicles for SI

- Palantir actually has really low revenue, as recent as 4 years ago they would have often qualified as a Small Business

- if you cut down entire lines of effort, sweep out the legs from under an entire program, lay off bureaucrats, etc. you can stop more stab wounds and stem bleeding; this is an okay step 1

Ironically the easiest way to quickly fix the deficit is actually to spend money. Most government employees are contractors because a GS-15 can earn maybe 150k while a contractor translating to only a GS-13 can earn 200k while their agency charges the government 600k a head. So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed. Then you can cancel all the PWS contracts. By napkin math this would account for a cool ~$1T over 4 years.

> So if you raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you can attract better talent that is willing to actually work. Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately staffed.

Why on Earth would anyone go work for an organization that thinks it's ok to "layoff 90%" under the assumption that they're all under-performing? And you're making a huge assumption by saying there's zero risk. Laying off 90% of the original air traffic controllers presents zero risk? The intelligence services? Law enforcement? The military? Payroll accounts for around 3% of the Federal budget. Layoffs aren't going to fix our spending problem.

And this completely ignores the fact that's it's illegal to fire most of these people without cause. They're going to sue and they're going to win. And we'll end up paying them salaries to have not worked for however long those lawsuits take.

That didn’t happen. Palantir Has not currently lost any contracts. They lost stock value.

Imagine you know you are sick.

Doge is the one recommending bloodletting and brushing with burning straw.

The issue is rarely that neither side can name the problem but what is claimed to be the reason and therefore the solution.

I will raise you a more direct analogy, let's imagine you have a deep wound in your arm and are actively bleeding out.

There are 5 doctors who you have paid to treat you; they came, performed some tests, confirmed you are wounded, but don't know how to patch you up.

DOGE comes along and says well, what if we amputate the arm and cauterize it?

This will stop the bleeding, but you will lose an arm. That sucks, there is probably a method to treat you to stop the bleeding and prevent the loss of an arm, but nobody has figured it out and you are going to run out of blood.

Do you amputate or choose to bleed to death?

That analogy doesn't work because there is no "to death" for governments unless they go fully bankrupt. For the US government, that's practically unthinkable at this stage.

If we're going with the medical analogy, we've been rubbing all kinds of creams and taking all kinds of pills for a funky looking mold on our arm. There's some malignant growth, but operating may damage one's ability to use their hand, so treatments are used to keep the growth in check. Treatments aren't cheap, sometimes they don't work or cause side effects and need changing, and often you end up driving an hour for a five minute check-up.

There are risky solutions, such as operating and hoping you can still use your hand afterwards, that will cost time and effort and hopefully reduce the illness in your body afterwards, but the risks have as of yet been deemed higher than the reward.

DOGE is cutting off the arm, slicing it up in parts, and checking for every individual clump of cells if they're necessary or not, before trying to put them back. You're losing a lot of blood and you may need decades of surgery to get your functioning hand back, but all of the bad parts have been removed at least.

You have to add in that you've been told for 20 years that you are bleeding to death and you need to take drastic measures, and the guy who is telling you to cut off your arm now plans to sell you a replacement for a profit.

DOGE amputates your arms and your legs but you have internal bleedings.

At the end you can’t move but still bleed.

The main problem is that taxes are too low. But even Democrats are afraid to say it now.

Do you expect that contracts with Palantir will be under any scrutiny? Do you really think Peter Thiel would have supported this administration if that was at all a risk?

Lots of Americans think the government needs to be more efficient. Very few Americans think the way to do that is closing national parks, cutting veteran healthcare, and firing the nuclear security workforce. It is easy to be pro spending reform but still be unhappy with DOGE's body of work thus far.

You are falling for Washington Monument Syndrome!

I don’t know that Palantir will be under scrutiny but they are a really tiny government contractor. I would love to see the defense primes + big consulting firms like Accenture be on the chopping board.

On an absolute scale, DOGE is not performing well and it makes sense so many are upset with their performance. On a relative scale to past attempts and the 5 existing agencies that exist to audit and reduce spending, DOGE is like a unicorn and that’s why many with experience are silently cheering them on.

They have not gotten far but have gotten farther in 1 month than everyone else combined over 20 years.

"Your margin is my opportunity"

Even if you’re 100% correct, these aren’t the right people and these aren’t the right methods. Completely the opposite actually.

There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.

It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution? We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, and the last person to make headway here was Bill Clinton -- who proposed an even more callous approach to cuts.

Bill Clinton had the "line item veto" which allowed presidents to get rid of things in bills (spending) they didn't like. Ultimately this power was rejected by the courts as unconstitutional. Congress is supposed to allocate and deal with spending.

This line item veto was supposed to stop congress people from attaching things into bills that just benefited their constituents (to get their vote).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...

"Congress granted this power to the president by the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 to control "pork barrel spending", but in 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the act to be unconstitutional in 6–3 decision in Clinton v. City of New York.

The court found that exercise of the line-item veto is tantamount to a unilateral amendment or repeal by the executive of only parts of statutes authorizing federal spending, and therefore violated the Presentment Clause of the United States Constitution. Thus a federal line-item veto, at least in this particular formulation, would only be possible through a constitutional amendment. Prior to that ruling, President Clinton applied the line-item veto to the federal budget 82 times."

> None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.

Citation needed. They do their jobs, problem is politians also do theirs. Making sure military doesnt cut spending in their district even if military leaders think a base or tank factory is not needed.

Its easy to say this is wrong and these people are idiots because thats the case. Actually I wont even say theyre all idiots theyre just malicous and dont care about the damagr they cause. This isnt some sort of careful attempt to make goverment work better. Its axing random groups because they once said something positive about minorities or necause they prosecute political corruption or because they can install their own cronies or outsource it to their company

Wait, you’re alleging Bill Clinton downsized the government by measures more callous than randomly firing workers, forcing them to en masse justify their positions to an unelected billionaire? I was alive then and I don’t remember any of that. Citation needed.

And he actually did manage to balance the budget. Too bad that didn’t last long under Bush.

>It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution?

For starters, these people are in fact idiots. They randomly fired people at NNSA with virtually no warning. What the fuck? [0]

In response to your point: Why throw USDS in the trash? That was a great example of an effective, agile non-partisan tech workforce. [1]

Now federal workers are having to submit to political loyalty tests. [2]

Perhaps their true intentions here aren't really cost savings, if that isn't blatantly obvious already.

>We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, ...

That's like trying to cure cancer with cancer, but on the face of it and not in some clever cutting-edge way.

Actual solutions? Take highly effective organizations and copy them. USDS and JSOC come to mind.

I don't buy it. Shucks, we've exhausted every other method—therefore, the solution here is to hand over the reigns to immature, extremely low caliber people with conflicts of interest that are absolutely massive [3], and whose motivations are questionable at best?

Yeah, no thanks. I dislike government waste and inefficiency as much as the next person, but using the guise of cost cutting to rapidly install loyalists at critical power junctures isn't a good thing. Never mind the flagrant disregard for the law that's taking place as this is all unfolding.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298190/nuclear-agency-...

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/doge-engineering-director-resign...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/trump-loyalty-white-house-maga-ve...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/elon-musk-com...

Lets talk about Clinton's cuts to the federal workforce and compare them to what's happening now.

- 3/4 of those cut were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended

- large swaths of gov employees weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing (the long-term effects of which are yet to be felt)

- it was a more thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.

- there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned

- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut primarily benefiting the wealthy

There's really no comparison with what is happening now.

Didn’t he fire something like 200,000 people?

Yes, however:

- they weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing

- it was a measured, thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.

- most importantly, 3/4 of those were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended.

- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut to the rich

- lastly, there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned

So basically night and day compared to what is happening now.

Yes, DOGE is being raked over the coals but only 77k federal employees have taken their severance package. Clinton also famously proposed majority cuts to the federal workforce.

Trump is getting flack for breaking the law. Clinton’s layoffs were done with Congress which avoided all of the concerns about impoundment or other unapproved changes to their directed spending, they spent months planning first to avoid doing the cycle we’re seeing now where they ask people to come back after telling them they were fired, and they worked with the unions.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/feb/06/yes-bill-clin...

> There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.

Provide proof of this claim please.

GAO, OMB, CBO, GSA, OIGs (civil agency-specific, DoD OIG, Treasury OIG)

People are acting like I'm making outlandish claims, you can literally just google this! If you are going to go down a rabbit hole I recommend USASpending, which consumes ATOM from FPDS and so is very close to source-of-truth.

I’m confused. USASpending looks to be source-of-truth as you say, so how has the US federal government failed in tracking spending when said source-of-truth is supplied by them?

Skimming OiG audit reports, they appear comprehensive and detailed. How has the government failed in auditing if these audits exist?

Where is the 20 years of failure to audit and track spending you mentioned? I’m not sure what you expect me to google.

It isn't particularly correct to say that these agencies have the same purpose. They do similar things, but each has its own remit.

You could maybe instead say that they should be under the same roof, rather than being independent entities. But I don't think this is itself evidence that any of them have been ineffective. Having read some of their reports, OMB and CBO are not ineffective on face value.

(I also don't think any of this is really about curbing government spending.)

> None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.

That's nonsense.

GAO, civil OIG's, OMB, CBO, GSA, DoD OIG, Treasury OIG -- none have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years. This was a bipartisan, consensus take 3 months ago.

Thats not a consensus take. These groups put out incredibly useful reports. Which politicians often ignore.

The current administration doesnt care about waste or corruption. I can think of few things more wasteful or corrupt then "The Wall"

When we are all debt slaves to foreign economies I will be sure to reassure my fellow citizens with our treasure troves of useful reports!

This is a fundamental misunderstanding. At most our debt is mildly concerning its not some sort of catastrophe unless we do something stupid tp sabotage ourselves(see DODGE) and most of the debt is owned by americans not foreigners. Also China owns less US debt then Japan. UK owns nearly as much as China and Canada is fifth. UK Japan and Canada are close allies, or were they might not be after Trump is done.

If someone wanted to make an actual good faith effort to make goverment more effecient going over the reports would be the first thing you would do instead of attacking theae agencies.

If someone wanted to randomly cut departments that might object to illegal and corrupt actions the administration might take, or ones that once said nice things about minorites or just so you could stuff the fired positions with incompent cronies (or hire your freinds as contractors) then it would look a lot like DODGE

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/14/politics/corruption-justi... > Since Inauguration Day, the Justice Department has paused all investigations into corporate foreign bribery, curtailed enforcement of a foreign agent registration law and deemphasized the criminal prosecutions of Russian oligarchs. And senior administration officials have considered eliminating the Department’s Public Integrity Section, which investigates and prosecutes alleged misconduct by federal, state and local public officials.

Simply audit defense spending. It's the vast majority of government spending and hasn't been auditable in ages.

The problem with the military spending is on Congress, because they set the defense budget, not the White House (and certainly not DOGE).

But defense doesn't get cut because it props up a huge infrastructure across many states. No senator wants to be the ones to vote to cut that in their state.

The US economy is built, to some degree, on the military-industry complex, especially since we offshored all the other manufacturing.

Defense spending gets audited frequently, the audits just end in failure. This is primarily due to massive lines in their budget that are totally classified, but also they do lose track of resources. Until recently they did not even know how many warfighters they had!

That being said, at the very least basically everything they do moves towards some outcome. Most folks in the military are incredibly mission-driven. Plus, all their big contracts (50M$+) get regular hearings from Congress.

The same cannot be said for civil at all, they have little to no oversight, everyone is buddy-buddy so internal audits often border on fraud, there are many billion dollar contracts that have never gone thru Congressional approval.

If you want to really lose your shit, you should look up how OTA contract vehicles function. Literally just "trust me bro" spending, and for some reason rampant in civil.

Defense isn't auditable and they spend the most by far.

I'm not concerned with government spending. The only reason we have a deficit is because GOP keeps cutting taxes for millionaires.

Defense is not only auditable but is regularly audited; publicly by GAO and CBO, and internally by their OIG: https://www.dodig.mil

> they spend the most by far

This is not true and for some reason a common myth that is easily disproven; defense spending is only 13% of the budget, the 54% number people keep throwing around is discretionary spending and not relevant as we should be looking at the entire budget.

DOGE is literally just sorting by percent of budget; Medicaid is 22%, SSA is 20%, interest on our deficit by itself is 11% and on track to exceed our entire defense budget.

> The only reason we have a deficit is because GOP keeps cutting taxes for millionaires.

I mean, the math does not check out at all. We can expect losses of revenue from cuts to be around the same as receipts from audits done by the IRS; we know this number to be only around ~50B$ a year. You are being gaslit into thinking the problem is your fellow citizens not paying more in taxes, when anyone going into government can tell you they are reckless with spending.

Just to put things in perspective, Medicaid is hardly an actual healthcare program as it applies to less than 20% of our population. However it somehow(?) costs more than 4x as much as the entire NHS.

>Just to put things in perspective, Medicaid is hardly an actual healthcare program as it applies to less than 20% of our population.

That's still a cool 70 million people.

>However it somehow(?) costs more than 4x as much as the entire NHS.

Sounds like a good argument for [properly-administered] single-payer, universal healthcare.

> That's still a cool 70 million people.

Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.

> Sounds like a good argument for [properly-administered] single-payer, universal healthcare.

The opposite right now! The US government is SO bad at managing healthcare, that they are somehow making the NHS look great.

We need to get our bureaucracy and spending under control. Then definitely yes, government funded healthcare, we can have a system closer to Australia in efficacy.

This is a tangent to this thread but I think in practice we will probably end up with something closer to the Swiss hybrid system.

> Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.

They might both cover ~70M, but the NHS population has a median age of ~41, for Medicare it's ~71. The US health system is expensive, but NHS vs Medicare cost is not really a valid comparison with such drastically different demographics.

The comparison was NHS vs Medicaid, not Medicare.

Doesn’t help the situation when you the very senators entrusted to run the legislative branch of government were the ones in charge of organizations that defrauded Medicaid and Medicare for billions of dollars. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott

Perhaps we should be barking up the tree of the private medical-insurance complex which is the real problem when it comes to healthcare costs.

Yes Congress cannot be trusted, that is why I am not complaining like many in this thread about the methods of achieving cuts or executive overreach — this is the best chance we have had in years to get anything done.

The only real way you can reform the government purely from the confines of the system is turning over around 70% of the legislative branch, I do not see that happening in any future.

I have to respectfully disagree - turning over basically unlimited power to reshape the entire bureaucracy to an unelected person isn’t the way to do it either. It’s not a binary choice.

Australia or Switzerland? Can't argue with that.

I wish I was optimistic as you. Only problem is, I highly doubt any savings realized from spending cuts will materialize in the form of better healthcare.

Regulatory capture is rampant, and then there's that whole pesky issue of growing unchecked authoritarianism that has a good chance of not aligning with the will of the people.

Yeah I can understand the sentiment. I’m being optimistic primarily because the alternative is to accept that our economy is going to eventually go bust and turn us into a debtor society to foreign economies.

The building is on fire, closing your eyes or clinging to a bottle of water are both valid reactions!

Recently medicaid overtook defense. You're right, but medicaid shouldn't exist and is a symptom of the larger forced government inefficiency that is the health insurance system.

People also claim that social security is a great portion of spending, but it's fully funded through income tax and even more solvent since covid killed so many of it's recipients.

Exactly. They exploit people like the one you’re responding to as mouthpieces for their broader campaign against the institutions that regulate their businesses. As long as they can claim they’ve stopped some money from being “wasted,” these people will look the other way and let them operate unchecked.

Trump and Musk are both petty, vindictive, greedy, and narcissistic billionaires, known for grifting, deception, abuse, and ruthless behavior. How can anyone trust them?

None of the existing cuts target deregulating SpaceX/Tesla, and the proposed regulatory cuts affect everything across the board and not just Musk's companies.

When it comes to deregulation, we can pretend like this is new, or we can have an honest discussion and acknowledge deregulation in various forms has been a key component of the Conservative, Libertarian, and Liberal platforms for decades. Recently even the Socialist platform has adopted deregulation for key industries like housing and infrastructure.

You can both hate Musk and Trump (as both are demonstrably all of the things you said above) and acknowledge that ultimately what they are doing is the best progress we have had on this front in 20+ years. Regardless of how many bureaucrats parade on media claiming otherwise, we must not forget that the government is and has historically been incredibly inefficient, reckless with spending, and filled with endless waste. This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!

We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_. It is not perfect, nor is it optimal, but it is far better than the last 5 attempts.

> This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!

No it wasn’t.

> We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_.

This is like an arsonist setting fire to your house and saying we finally have a chance to renovate.

The only thing that seems to bind you and Musk is your disgust for bureaucracy. How you can conclude the many conflicts of interests Musk has will not benefit him or his companies is beyond me. He did nothing to gain our trust. Most people wouldn’t even let him watch their kids, and you trust him with your whole country.

So who and which would be? Given SpaceX, Trump could have chosen worse.

SpaceX is a government contractor, immediately presenting a conflict of interest.

By the same logic the GAO, OIG's, OMB, and GSA are all government employees, presenting an even more immediate and direct conflict of interest.

BTW SpaceX is a fairly tiny government contractor -- big ones like Accenture and other consulting firms have previously audited spending including their own contracts.

I don’t know, maybe not the richest man on earth who also happens to have massive conflicts of interest, calls respected people he disagrees with “retards” and is clearly losing his grip on his sanity. I mean that’s just my dumb take, though. What do you think?

> clearly losing his grip on his sanity.

And sobriety if the CPAC video was anything to go by.

Almost all of it would be related to military contracts and spending

As large as social security is, I'm sure there's some efficiencies to be gained too, but the military industrial complex is THE defacto leader in greed and wastefulness

But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them. You can't tell me they're competent after that big of a screw up.

If you look seriously you will find military contracts and spending usually achieves something and is in many cases very difficult to decrease.

It has become somewhat of a pattern for politicians to yell about defense spending, get elected, look under the covers and do an immediate 180 in favor of defense spending.

On the other hand you can cut around 70% of the civil government immediately with no impact on our country. Social Security would not be my first choice though!

> But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them

They did not -- this is simple malicious compliance. This is a really well documented phenomenon and I am hoping this situation draws more public attention to it! Whenever faced with cuts, our govt bureaucracy reacts by cutting something visible to create a PR disaster and force back cuts -- the common saying is "firemen and teachers first" and this is often referred to as "Washington Monument Syndrome."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome

Blame the victims much?

Except in this case the victims happened to be essential to maintaining the security of the United States' nuclear weapons stockpile.

Surely their evil, bureaucratic bosses just did it for show to score political points though, right?

>Whenever faced with cuts, our govt bureaucracy reacts by cutting something visible to create a PR disaster and force back cuts

Cite one credible source saying this is in fact what happened recently with NNSA and I might believe you.

The preponderance of evidence recently does not support this, what with it being widely reported that ill-suited unqualified personnel have been presiding over these cuts across all agencies, at a scale and speed which is unprecedented.

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Analyzing this is my job and one of the main functions of the startup I founded!

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