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Comment by TomK32 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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