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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

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The government does plenty of things inefficiently, but DOGE is making such a colossal mess with their rushed, uninformed, and frequently illegal actions that they're causing more problems than they solve. Indiscriminately firing people because they were hired or promoted within the last 2 years is incredibly wasteful. It means getting rid of the people who were most successful. It also means getting rid of people who had very specialized skills or who just went through a very expensive training process.

Also consider how much disruption all of this is causing to the federal workforce and the contractors. People are being forced to upend their lives on very short notice to RTO. They were getting daily emails telling them to quit. It's hard to imagine anyone doing good work when they're scared that some indiscriminate process is going to fire them.

That’s a good example of penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking: they’ve been asking for funding to modernize for most of this century but Congress chooses not to allocate the money. A big contributing factor is that when money is allocated, it’s often directed towards contractors who cost twice as much and have a higher failure rate so congresspeople can say they “shrunk” the government.

Was this replaced by a better, more well funded and resourced system? Or was it made worse ?

that's why you fix it, not act like you can just destroy it and what it does. It is also why you think practically and tell us, the voter, how much extra it is costing us over your "new and improved" program. Just lying about it and exaggerating the concern is a sad, sad, disingenuous way of governing. I want fixes and unrelenting attempts at efficiency and not "hur-duh-hur I can make a meme out of this on X and not offer a single solution"

Physical backup of important documents seems like the opposite of waste.

It's not backup, the forms are processed by hand on paper.

Are you telling me that the US Government is storing its data in a data storage facility?

https://www.ironmountain.com/services/vital-records-storage

When will this woke madness stop?

Also why does it matter if it's in an underground ex-mining facility or a basement in Washington? It matters how much does this cost vs a modern computerized system. Instead the big brains over at X act like this is how the entire government works. They found maybe 1 or 2% of waste in USAID? "Shut it all down and lose all the experience and relations built over decades" they don't want efficiency. They want to slash and burn all government departments that aren't enriching billionaires.

Read the article. It's not just data storage. Hundreds of people actually work there, processing the applications there, by hand, on paper.

Hers a PDF detailing some of the audio and photographic professionals that work "down the mine" in the state of the art digitisation facilities that corporations have there:

https://edge.sitecorecloud.io/ironmountain-c8dd68e9/media/pr...

So why would it be by definition considered waste that a government has employees working on paper records stored in the same place?

There is absolutely no reason to think this is ridiculous. These types of sites exist all over the world. Yet Elon Musk claims it's ridiculous and people now have to defend that claim?

The article says they couldn't confirm Musk's claims about the number of employees.

Snopes hasn't confirmed it in 2025 but they did say that in 2014 the Washington Post reported that 600 people worked there.

The facility website says they have roughly 1100 workers there daily, but those aren't all government since other work goes on there too.

So 0.01% of the Federal workforce or so?

This is absolutely bizarre. It sounds like something out of Portal

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