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Comment by DamnYuppie | Hacker News Reader

It takes time to turn a big ship. Why would I be excited to see more spending into government agencies until I am sure of how they are operating and what they are spending money on. Once things are cleaned up then you can start spending money as needed to get the results you want. It feels everyone is near jerk like, you actions didn't improve everything immediately so they were wrong. The reality of all of this will play out over the next few years.

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But cleaning can't be done Musk's way. The whole system is kinda stable because everything is linked together. To start from scratch without anything in the meantime is just suicide. It's like if a scientist what not giving food to an animal for a month to test if really food is needed. Well, he will conclude that food was needed, but now the animal is dead.

If this was really about cleaning up government, or balancing the budget then it wouldn't have started with small potatoes. You would immediately cut the low hanging fruit. Say, oil industry subsidies. That would get you something like 13 billion a year in savings.

All the destruction sown by DOGE (outside of USAID) represents (favorably) 0.2% of the US budget. Including USAID it's closer to 1.3% of the US budget.

At the same time Republicans are proposing reducing revenue by 4500 billion dollars.

Again these things take time. I can see how people don't like the method but I will wait to judge it by the results. Please bear in mind that Clinton fired 377,000 federal workers in the 90's. Things didn't come crashing down.

We need more oversight and less people imho. I am actually hopeful that they will have the ability to push through better software systems to track initiatives and spending. It isn't the number of employees it is where was all the money going, it was/is the lack of insight/transparency which has eroded my confidence in the federal government.

My true wish is they have the guts to pass legislation outlawing campaign contributions. It isn't just parts of the house that need a thorough purging to be honest.

Pol Pot tried that with Year Zero. It turned out poorly.

Counter point Bill Clinton fired 377,000 Federal workers in the 90's and it turned out ok. Well aside from the Glass–Steagall legislation but that was legislation, still hurts though.

Multiple groups agree that Clinton efforts were well planned, reviewed and bipartisan

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/21/clint...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-trump-federal-work...

Dismantling everything in the hope of finding alleged problems is witch-hunt level of political action.

That was done carefully with planning over six years through hiring freezes, retirement offers, and announced layoffs:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/21/clin...

Not random shotgun immediate firings. Your weather forecasts are about to become less accurate because of some of these firings and planned improvements in them are not going to happen:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/01/weather/noaa-weather-forecast...

Go ask a farmer or pilot how much they depend on weather forecasts.

This is chesterson’s fence playing out in real life with the major superpower of the world and it has real consequences for people. It should not be the insane fiasco that’s happening right now with an unelected foreign citizen admitting in a cabinet meeting that they accidentally stopped Ebola vaccine financing. If you seriously think this is going to turn out well after we saw trump’s first term I just don’t have anything to help you.the funniest shit is that all of this upheaval is literally < 1% of the actual budget and it’s going to be touted as billions in savings by musk the grifter in chief. I don’t need time to see that this is a dumpster fire.

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