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Comment by fourside | Hacker News Reader

I’m sure you can find some evidence of that. You also need to find evidence that every department that is getting slashed has those kind of inefficiencies. The government is large and complex. Even inside large companies, which are comparatively smaller you’ll find different departments have different level of inefficiencies.

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Which is why a discussion on this topic at such a high level isn't really productive. You need to look at each line item and ask whether it’s fraud/waste/abuse and then make a call. That is exactly what DOGE is doing. If you don’t trust them then you’ll never get to a discussion on meaningful details.

Its not. they are just firing everyone they can. if they were being careful and looking at every line item they would not have accidentally fired the engineers that maintain our nuclear weapon initiating a mad scramble to rehire them. you cant have small team doing that level of audit in the time frames they have been in operation.

You can—you’re watching it happen. Sounds like the problem was swiftly remedied.

They wouldn't have fired them in the first place if they had been doing a line by line audit.

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?

Nothing concerns me less than a quickly remedied mistake.

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.

> 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.

Many of the mistakes they are making are not being remedied, nor will the consequences be obvious in the short term.

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)

But that's _not_ what DOGE is doing.

What are they doing, then?

> What are they doing, then?

Un-reforming the civil service:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

“The government is large and complex” EXATLY the issue.

The country is almost 340 million people.

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.

> 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...

Is there any way to provide care, education, and prosperity for hundreds of millions of people that is not complex?

We're software engineers. If anyone should understand the difference between domain complexity and added complexity, it should be us.

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