It's absolutely possible for a government to value investing in health care or education or foreign aid in a way that a corporation could never monetize, but still value doing it in a more effective way.
Is there evidence that this is what’s actually happening?
More Perfect Union has good video covering it on youtube
Anyway, the topic of this tread, DOGE, is reading the books and asking questions and then recommending areas where fraud/waste/abuse can be cut. They are not directly cutting entire gov’t programs for fun and profit. This whole sub-tread feels like it’s on a different set of tracks headed a loosely similar direction. DOGE isn't cutting medicare.
Firing and then trying to rehire nuclear safety employees: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o.amp
Firing employees at the CDC and other health agencies: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/17/nx...
(But not the “disease detectives” as originally reported: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/cdc-disease-detectives-doge...)
Laying off IRS employees: https://www.axios.com/2025/02/20/irs-layoffs-trump-doge
A list of cuts and firings: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2025/02/a-co...
Additionally, many of the claims by Musk and others being made about the agencies being cut are false: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/19/here-are...
>DOGE isn't cutting medicare.
Let’s follow up in two months to see where this statement stands.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-aides-search-medicare-...
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.
- Martin NiemöllerI mean, that's exactly what they're doing, isn't it? First thing they did was boast about shutting down entire departments at the weekend. Then they started mass layoffs of anyone on probation, with grudging acknowledgement they might have been a bit hasty in firing nuclear safety operatives without asking the question of whether they'd been promoted or recently hired because they were useful. And the subject of this entire thread is them publicly demonstrating lack of basic understanding of the books
This is absolutely outrageous.
What "is happening" is that Republicans in the mid-2000s ensured that Medicare and Medicaid would be unable to negotiate drug prices by baking that into the law. Insurance companies can negotiate drug prices.
I cringe when I hear about my town getting $20k-200k grants for stuff that would have cost perhaps half as much were my town simply catering to its own needs rather than trying to optimize for getting the feds to pick up the tab. My town's library, several school programs and several intersection renovations fall into this category. The library in particular is pretty stupid for reasons outside the scope of this comment.
This is the equivalent of flipping every breaker in the box turn off one light in an apartment building. Sure the light turned off but you also turned off everyone's refrigerators, and the oxygen machine the old lady in apartment 3b needs to live. But you turned it back on the breakers of anyone who came down and complained... unfortunately the old lady died but she didn't make it down to complain. the question is who are Doge going to kill with their actions that wont get their complaints heard?
PS: at many time’s I’ve been successful using the “flip every breaker” strategy. A well designed oxygen machine has a battery and a fridge can tolerate a brief power outage.
Sure, but you would at least do the due diligence to confirm that the case for Mrs Shelby before you YOLO it and wish for the best with her life on the line.
There really isn't any upside for anyone in this whole thing except for Trump, Elon and their buddies. And they are breaking the law.
The farce of this whole thing is that none of the destructive cuts they've made will amount to a hill of beans compared to federal spending. They're jumping over hundred dollar bills to chase pennies.
(That's b/c none of this is actually about making government more efficient)
Un-reforming the civil service:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...
That’s 340,000,000 individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and geographies.
They wake up every morning and go about their lives. Things like planes need to stay in the air, water needs to be clean, trains need to not derail in the middle of towns, dams need to stay not only structurally sounds but in some cases keep producing electricity.
The USA is the fourth largest country by area in the entire world.
To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say.
I can stipulate there must be essential complexity. I think we have to dispute any suggestion that this hypothetically-essential complexity has grown at the same rate as the spending[1].
It's not obvious that fairness, charity, national defense, public health, postage stamps, corn ethanol... [or air traffic control (cough), clean water (cough), non-derailing trains (cough), levees (cough)]..., ad infinitum should require a static percentage of the economy. Essential or not, those costs fundamentally cannot continue to outpace real GDP growth.
Rather, it seems obvious to me that the political class has scope-creeped "governance" into spending as an end in itself.
Practically, and morally, the government is too big and complex, and it should be drastically smaller and simpler.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#H...
We're software engineers. If anyone should understand the difference between domain complexity and added complexity, it should be us.
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/31/elon-musks-x-fidelity-valua...
"Fidelity has again marked down the value of its shares in X Holdings, which the mutual fund giant helped Elon Musk buy for $44 billion when the company was known as Twitter.
By the numbers: Fidelity believes that X is worth 71.5% less than at the time of purchase, according to a new disclosure that runs through the end of November 2023 (Fidelity revalues private shares on a one-month lag).
* This includes a 10.7% cut during November, during which time Musk told boycotting X advertisers to "go f*k yourself" during an on-stage interview with the New York Times.
* In terms of publicly traded comps, Meta stock rose 4.9% in November while Snap shares climbed 38.2%."
I personally think X is worth at least 10x that evaluation as it is now state-sponsored disinformation network which is worth much more than $44bn. it is best investment Elon has ever made
could you say a few words on how you think dodge making it harder for anything to happen without going through them is going to make it cost less to spend on the useful things?
A single payer healthcare system is, by every measure, more efficient than private healthcare. There's 1 system. You don't need hundreds of billing analysts. You don't need administrators on top of administrators. You don't need constant tug of war.
Part of the reason Medicaid is so inefficient is because there's other things that are not Medicaid.