Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

What a weird thing to say. They are slashing and burning government and routing the permanent bureaucracy of democrats that run the country no matter who wins the election. That’s simply what the GOP has been promising to do for decades, but has been too feckless to do until now.

View on HN

So undermining national security by leaking oddly specific and contemporary critical infrastructure data is just "draining the swamp"?

Interesting how "routing the permanent bureaucracy" conveniently includes actions that benefit foreign adversaries.

Funny how Conservative principles now include strategic incompetence at the exact points that serve Russian interests.

What was leaked? It was all publicly available datasets?

I guess the leakers didn’t know that! :D

What can you do? Those DOGE staffers are young and inexperienced.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sounds like you didn't know that either.

What I do know, is that Russia seems to be remarkably fond of other people’s undersea links:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Baltic_Sea_submarine_ca...

Guess what:

A US Senate Committee has just directly asked,

“is Trump a Russian asset”?

https://youtu.be/ibfVfAETlmA?t=16s

[via Forbes]

> the permanent bureaucracy of democrats

That’s ridiculous on the face of it, unless you think GOP appointed heads of agencies have been in on it, and that there has been a massive conspiracy for years with no real evidence leaking.

The GOP appointed heads had no power. The are reports in the prior administration of political appointees having to follow legal cases on PACER because career bureaucrats weren’t accurately keeping them abreast of developments. Likewise they slow rolled rulemakings and other proceedings.

But the democrat appointed heads had all the power?

The problem with a persistent bureaucracy is that it selects for bureaucrats in favor of perpetuating and expanding the bureaucracy.

So a political appointee who wants to expand government finds willing allies.

An appointee who wants to reduce government finds opposition.

The association of individual political parties with those positions is more variable.

The American federal government has more or less the same number of employees as it did in the 1970s.

Yes, if you only count "federal government employees" https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001

But this neglects the millions of contractors and other positions that are also funded by government spending, which is harder to measure, and does change more over time.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-true-size-of-governme... (2020, but the article doesn't clarify if the 5m includes short-term census workers)

It’s a lot harder to argue that those contractors form the bulk of the “democrat installed permanent bureaucracy that ACTUALLY run the government.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com