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Comment by cupcakecommons | Hacker News Reader

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Why did they kill 18F, then? A department that was net-zero in costs.

For the millionth time, we don’t pay the government. The US federal government is not funded by taxes. The US government spends money into existence. It taxes money out of existence to help control the supply of money, inflation, etc. Stop using the deficit as a smokescreen for redistribution of wealth away from the 99% to the 1%.

> when it obviously can't allocate what it already has

No large government in the history of the world has ever perfectly spent its money.

We can at best aspire to good government spending, not perfect.

Therefore the current dog and pony show of 'look at these excesses and get mad' is just a distraction to functional cuts that would be less popular.

Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Donald Trump are lying. They know exactly what they're trying to do: impair the operation of the US government.

Any claims about fiscal justification are ridiculous from a financial standpoint -- if they cared about US debt, they'd be making these spending cuts, and not passing tax cuts.

We aren't even in the same dimension as perfection here. It's a historically obvious phenomenon. Basically all human organizations tend toward inefficiency and waste eventually. The US government is the largest employer in the world. The reasoning would be no different if it was a corporation.

This is true. So now let’s look at the substance of what DOGE has actually done:

- indiscriminately fire people who have been in long term positions but recently got promoted and so were considered “probationary”

- dismantle the CPFB which was a net gain for revenue

- dismantle 18F which has a track record of improving government efficiency

- fire people who were involved in managing nuclear weapons and bird flu and then try to bring them back

- share spreadsheets on Twitter about really old people in the social security system making people think there’s tons of fraud without learning about the 2023 OIG report that already existed that explained this data

- make a bunch of noise about cutting a bunch of contracts including a third of which were already fully spent and will save nothing

Does this give you confidence that they are genuinely focused on reducing inefficiency and waste? It seems to me like they are rushing in, not bothering to learn what has already been done, arrogantly making assumptions, randomly breaking things and causing chaos, and all for what… a few billion in real savings which is not even a fraction of the proposed increase in spending by the current budget resolutions being worked on by the Republicans in the house?

Why should we have ever thought that an operation literally named after a dog meme was serious about anything?

I’d also add that doing all of this by breaking laws/contracts makes it likely that the net cost will be greater than the advertised savings. Every one of the contractors they stiffed has pretty straight forward grounds for a breach of contract suit and every government employee they said was fired for poor performance has grounds and a strong incentive to sue to clear their name.

All of this makes everything more expensive in the future: new contracts are going to have higher overhead to account for new legal and accounting costs, and unless the government will never hire anyone again they’re going to struggle to get skilled employees at all, much less at the same salary, when it’s clear that they’d be signing up to be treated like this. The direct cost is bad but the productivity cost will be even greater and last for decades.

The government has a fair bit of flexibility to cancel contracts without penalty. They usually don't, and of course nobody has ever seen it as this scale.

You're probably correct about the employment law. That will take more legal finesse to keep them from having to pay a ton of money. Fortunately for them they also own the judiciary. It's not 100% reliable, but they've for 4 out of 5 needed votes locked in at the top level

Most contract or employment disputes aren't going to the Supreme Court.

And expecting lower federal courts packed with conservative judges to vote in favor of ignoring contracts?

We'll see, but I wouldn't take that bet...

They aren't packed with conservatives. They are packed with Republicans.

They also deleted the largest "fraud findings" from their site after a day or so after posting them because they were lies, and enough people called them out

The next step after identifying some waste isn't to cut well-performing functional parts of the government.

> The reasoning would be no different if it was a corporation.

The difference being the overflow after wastes gets spend on society instead of shareholders.

I don't think the US government is the largest employer in the world unless we aren't counting other countries governments. China seems to have around 50M government employees, 10 million civil servants and 30-40 million in other government jobs.

> It's a historically obvious phenomenon. Basically all human organizations tend toward inefficiency and waste eventually

It's not that obvious to me, and is such a broad assertion that I'd require more than an "Everyone knows it. Just look at history" explanation to accept it as fact.

It also implies 2 things that I would disagree with

1) That the inefficiency and waste increases over time. It's likelier to me the ratio of those things stays the same, but it's more apparent as it scales - a company "wasting" 2% of its budget is vastly different than the US government "wasting" 2% of its budget.

2) That it's inherent to "human organizations" themselves - this doesn't seem to explore any other possible explanations. Given the nature of the discussion, I would think it's worth discussing whether other factors (like capitalism) might have an effect

(We'll ignore the vagueness of terms like "inefficiency" and "waste" with regards to government spending; not everyone agrees on what things are efficient or not. There are also many ways of measuring efficiency for both long- and short-term outlooks.)

When ever anyone talks about government inefficiency, ask what perfect efficiency would look like.

Nail them down to specifics. Not just improvements, but perfect efficiency.

Guaranteed they will soon start to flounder, because "inefficient government" is a propaganda talking point, not a fact that can be established with any workable economic definition.

And "the deficit" is the difference between what government chooses to spend and chooses not to tax.

A huge proportion of government spending is either/both an investment and/or a direct driver of beneficial economic activity. That includes "unworthy" spending like welfare.

Dilbert is about a corporation, not government. Everyone seems to know that every large organization has some inefficiency. They seem to think the government has it worse, because that's what Republicans have been telling them.

It's no worse for government than any other large organization. Better than expected, given it's size.

A oft-missed point is what's required for redress of waste at scale: more spending.

It costs money to save wasted money.

Sometimes, that equation is net positive and other times net negative. But it's never financially efficient to reduce waste to zero.

> Why do you want to pay a government more money when it obviously can't allocate what it already has?

I don't think they're reflexive responses by stupid republicans, I think billionaires don't like paying taxes (to pay back into the society that made them fantastically rich in the first place) so they purchase Republican politicians to both obstruct government and vote for tax cuts. They obstruct the government to make it inefficient and then they use the resulting inefficiency as evidence that the government needs to be "starved".

And that's just politics-as-usual stuff before the literal cabal of billionaires in the Trump admin began working expressly to create an oligarchy.

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