Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

HOWEVER Congress has NOT reduced the budget so everything I just said is bullshit and hypothetical until some of that money starts coming back into our pockets.

But I am trying to remain optimistic. These are challenging times.

I reckon approximately 100% of those people would prefer 18F stay how it is

It's not Musk's ideal scenario I'm sure, but he'd be an awful lot more happy with it as the new status quo than what was there before.

Oh, you mean about 18F? I’d just keep trying to draw public attention to what appear to be hasty decisions made by this administration that aren’t actually beneficial to the country.

My issue comes from the fact that Cuban is then directly aiding and abetting the process that Musk is putting in place with DOGE, thus my concern.

With that in mind, asking "Well what would you do?" to justify the actions of putting a generally well regarded and good service into the hands of the private sector is a fundamental lack of scope on what's continuing to happen.

My point is just that Cuban is supporting the problem that Musk is creating, albeit without putting himself entirely in a position where he could receive the ire of the public.

And just to reiterate, 18f has done great work, and if this is the only way for them to continue for the time being I guess so be it. I just don't agree with the chain of events that led here.

It was so, so bad.

Purchases of companies owned the CEO / brother. Mother hiring their children to high internal positions.

What do you make of all the people arguing that governments and corporations are not the same, and that what works in one won’t work in the other? This feels like the opposite of that argument.

Some government entities are great, really efficient, some seem nearly like startups.

Some are nearly all deadweight. A majority of the senior older folks working for in one of the state governments, would eat breakfast, read the newspaper, have lunch, and then try to do something for a couple of hours before going home. I was rather shocked.

I was less so when I encountered it in other places.

The government is an enormous group of entities. Some work well, most I think work ok, and some are horrors. (from a taxpayer perspective, not from the people who work there s perspective)

There is a lot of dead weight in the private sector. The worst examples I have encountered are places where nepotism is king. Older companies seem to accrue dead weight over time. Especially with strong unions¹,

But at some point some new CEO or some such makes attempts to clean house, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I am a huge supporter of unions and I think they are one of the only ways to try to get the US back on track again if enough people are unionized. BUt that is not a silver bullet either.

They were paying $300/hr for a fresh out of college grad working on their first project. The money was allocated, so they didn’t care how much it cost. Anyone with any motivation left employment by the state and became a contractor for 5-10x what their salary was when working for the state. It was disgusting.

Meanwhile in the private sector, companies or deoartments that don’t make money cease to exist after a while. The government can bankroll a failed department with negative outcomes to their purpose indefinitely (and then get more money for to fix their own broken outcomes).

I’m not proposing solutions, and I have recently worked with entrenched utility monopolies with the same segment capture behave the same way. There are, however, significantly more efficient private companies operating at larger scale than some governments.

These are defensible positions based on various world views, but they should not be accepted automatically. But I see here and other places people speaking as if this is just "obvious fact."

This was not the case in the past. Civic duty, the need for a functioning civil service, the notion of a commonwealth and/or social contract, etc are all foundational notions coming out of the enlightenment and were at least formerly mainstream.

The Ayn Rand types have always been around. And they're welcome to their positions. I'm concerned about how we get here now that this is a default position for people to take in North American society. I certainly don't agree with it. And I suspect if you force the majority of "mainstream" people to go through the arguments piece by piece, they wouldn't either.

I'd also argue that decades of corroding the public service's effectiveness through economic and ideological warfare has in fact made the public service look like exactly the thing its enemies claim it is. If you make the civil sector into a partisan battle, and play games with its funding, and spread cynicism about its motives... surprise you're going to get a partisan, inefficient, and cynical public service.

I (and many others) have worked for, contracted for, interacted with, and/or closely observed government for decades. The only “reflexive” thing here is your argument that people who disagree with the you are the victims of propaganda.

You can certainly quibble with the details on how to deliver government efficiency (and I highly encourage people to sincerely scrutinize any efforts to do so - it should produce better results), but there are good and valid reality-based reasons that the “DOGE” mission has broad support.

Which is the original definition of the "Deep state" until it was hijacked by conspiracy theorists and Republicans who do bad shit.

Looking at federal spending as a percentage of GDP [1] it seems we've been hovering around 20% for most of post-WW2. There was a huge spike for COVID and a smaller spike for the GFC. (It was pretty surprising this chart doesn't also show a huge spike for the response to 9/11.)

Pre-2020 spending was ~20% of GDP, pre-2018 was more like ~18% - 19%.

There's definitely more government spending than there used to be.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

It certainly can’t hurt. Alas for the current moment, but it seems the eye we’re turning inward is as far from “critical” as can be.

Organizational culture in one might be different than the other.

I certainly wouldn't trust corporations with government functions.

It's also not true that the organization never disappears. The government functions across all sorts of areas, and departments change or are eliminated all the time.

Spend a few mil on something of marginal utility, politicaly controversial, or funding a study for something that seems obvious? Congratulations! Fox News found it on USASpending.gov (maybe not now that 18F is dead), and is drumming up outrage. Now your fielding phone calls from senators who are looking to grandstand by reducing your budget.

Waste a few million on a Salesforce implementation that never works, never does what it promised and never gains adoption and is finally quietly abandoned? Doesn't even make the Shareholder meeting and the exec in question gets even more influence for his ability to lead large projects.

Even if that is true, in some areas companies' interests strongly misalign with that of citizens. An insurance company earns more by rejecting customer declarations. An ISP earns more by giving customers less bandwidth for a higher price. A toll road company earns more by doing as little maintenance they can get away with, while keeping prices high.

Yes, in a perfect market, customers will flock to competitors that are better for them. However, in many cases a perfect market is not attainable for various reasons. E.g. because the cost of entry is too high (e.g. making a competing ISP would require you to put your own fiber in the ground) or because there are network effects that are nearly impossible to break.

This is why certain markets need strong regulation or government monopolies -- to protect people from pure profit seeking. Health care is a good example. Health care in Western Europe is much better, while less money is spent on health care. This is because health care is strongly regulated and insurance companies cannot f*ck over customers. The objective function of maximizing profits becomes a constrained optimization problem, which generally leads to other ways to increase profits, like pressuring pharmaceutical companies to lower prices of medicines.

Are either of those endeavors necessary? Are they profitable? Should they be profitable?

The US healthcare system is evidence that this is an overly simplistic view.

In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, and we work to decrease it.

In a for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered shareholder value, and we work to increase it.

Only—and this is a critical detail—if the market is competitive.

Otherwise, a government entity answerable to elected officials at some level is more efficient.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough competition for this to be true. In many markets the largest incumbents are able to build a moat to stop smaller, smarter companies from competing. Sometimes this is regulatory capture, but it can also be that the market is a natural winner-take-all market, and in that case well-thought-out regulation can be necessary to enforce competition.

Venture capitalists shy away from funding companies that want to compete in a well established market. They view it as a race to the bottom with no huge payout.

Once a company is large and well established, it can be as bloated and inefficient as any government, and it will extract rent with it's IP, real-estate, and means-of-production for decades before it has to worry about failure.

Google search is nothing but ads but the majority still use it.

A clue to why this dysfunctional market exists is all the tech CEOs pay homage to the Oval Office and shove monies into untraceable PACs thanks to Citizens United.

Have we really already forgotten "Too big to fail"? It wasn't that long ago that those words were uttered and the US gov't bailed out failing private companies with taxpayer money.

And on the topic of profitability that pops up in these discussions, what about public transport? Healhcare? Power plants? Nuclear weapons maintenance? Should these be "profitable"? Is profit supposed to be the be-all-end-all state for everything? Because from where I'm standing, profit incentives make the world an actively worse place when it's free from oversight and regulation. If it were up to Nestle, the entire planet would be a giant reservoir only they could draw water from in order to produce soda. If it were up to Chiquita, all of South America would be a giant banana plantation to the point where they funded actual paramilitary organizations to achieve that goal.

The most profitable route for most companies is the route that is objectively worse for everyone involved minus the shareholders that reap the profits from their antisocial, short-term-minded destructive behaviors.

Like health care and higher education?

Canada and Mexico will be happy to buy some of your failed states.

I would argue that replacing a private company that performs a critical government function poorly is actually more difficult than eliminating and reforming an agency like USAID or ICE.

However, if you are implying that only companies, and not nations, can fail and be replaced, I'd disagree. This has happened many times in the past.

I really liked this history video on the topic, which is rooted in how the founders of the USA were very familiar with a theory about how that happens called anacyclosis and they had originally designed the constitution to avoid that, where the theory proposes that democracies tend to dissolve when a populist demagogue takes over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton both very much feared that allowing the public to vote for more than members of the House of Representatives would eventually lead to the "uninformed, overly emotional public" to elect a demagogue.

You can say this is due to corporatism, which is often true as well, but gov't regulation is required for natural monopolies.

This is to avoid issues like the early railroad boom where they hugely overbuilt, a lot of them went under and/or eventually coalesced into a few monopolies, which needed regulation to prevent them squeezing their customers to death.

The best markets are sensibly regulated. It's a balance, not a binary.

Maybe they can, but they just as often don't. How much 'waste and useless things' do you think is at Microsoft or Google, yet is financially insulated due to their outrageous success elsewhere.

Not exactly. Ideally, you want to use market and persona segmentation to develop a partial oligopoly.

The nature of sales cycles and the fact that only a minority of organizations (F1000) represent the majority of spend, means that you essentially have 2-3 large players in an single segment, and maybe a couple smaller players that will eventually be acquired.

For example, the only way not to waste any food whatsoever, is not to eat. It is inevitable there will be some small portion of food wasted.

Chasing perfect efficiency is a fool's errand, since humans are not perfect.

Its not though, its the same layers of documentation, paperwork, upper management approvals, legal and HR approvals. The only exception being blatant policy violations like drug use, etc. where immediate dismissal can be done.

If you are talking about mass layoffs, for large corporations they still have to file paperwork for the WARN act, look at laws in various states around employment, get legal, HR, etc. involved.

I've seen both mass layoff and single individual layoff first hand and the only thing that might be different with Federal employees is a union. And in that case a union operates mostly the same if its serving a large corp or a government entity.

It is incredibly hard to understand what people are doing, and how that works out in a complex organization!

The effort and likelihood of reasonable success is a precondition for your argument.

I have been in a lot of companies, and I have seen soooo much useless busy work. Including my own well-paid IT consultant job, not infrequently.

Employees and managers on all levels try very hard to justify their existence. When they are under-employed they may also start looking for new projects themselves, which the next level of management is okay with because it appears that they are doing something useful, and they don't have to deal with that problem.

Overall, I will claim that your argument is far too simplistic and ignores the complexity of humans and their organizations.

If you have issues with certain programs or funding, then that is handled by congress NOT the executive.

This I believe will be a very bad outcome for bottom 90% of Americans and a very good outcome for top 10%

Secondly, private companies don't have to do a good job. They have to turn a profit, which could be exploitative and not necessarily legal.

Third, government agencies have budgets and audits like many public companies but not private companies. If a government agency exceeds its budget it is essential bankrupt.

Finally, if a government agency fails an audit people can be fined, fired, or even prosecuted. Government agencies are always audited, unlike many commercial companies that are only audited according to regulation and/or cause of investigation. Many of the people recently fired by DOGE are auditors that were preventing the very kind of behavior you suggest of government.

I mean this thread is on the federal government not state governments so your link isn't really relevant.

Federal government employees cannot make more than the VP ($235,100). So if you know a role that pays more than that it pays less in the federal government. (There is some hand wavey-ness around locale pay and stuff but we're not talking 2x).

Not sure what you think this shows?

government employment is a blight upon the economy

government employment is terrible for society as a whole

A more balanced review from the Congressional Budget Office. [0]

TLDR;

1. Wages tend to be lower for government employees, but benefits are better, making total compensation more competitive

2. Even with this effect, the higher you go in education, the more likely wages and total comp are lower for government employees

[0] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235

What you USED to get in exchange for less salary was stability as government jobs were viewed as less vulnerable to economic cycles and uncertainty. Now that value prop is gone

Yup. The following is a concrete example…

HN commenter [0][0]:

> If things keep going the way they are going, [a country with an authoritarian government that makes favored industries subsidized] could describe the US just as well in a few short years.

Me [1][1]:

> Why do you think so?

For asking this reasonable question, I received a bunch of downvotes but not a single response. Of course I can assume the reason is because I’m supposed to just accept the premise that Trump is bringing about an authoritarian government, but I really don’t, and a majority of American constituents (who voted for him) don’t either.

Before emigrating to the U.S., my parents and my family lived under real authoritarian regimes, under which family members were sanctioned, tortured (some still have the marks on their bodies to this day), and even killed for their political viewpoints, so I actually find so much of this hyperbolic rhetoric rather offensive when there are billions of folks all across the world who actually have to live under such regimes.

Rather than doubling down on the hyperbolic rhetoric, it might be a good idea to, in good faith, try to understand why half of your fellow Americans see the state of our country so differently from you, which requires good-faith intellectually diverse discussions.

The ultimate irony in all of this is that a lot of folks seem to not understand that, when it comes to politics, simply alienating the other side, is one of the most counterproductive things to do, because while you won’t have to “suffer” hearing their viewpoints, they’ll simply resort to using the one tool they can still use: their vote. This is why Trump’s 2024 win was so shocking to so many when it was so obvious to anyone actually paying attention and listening. The same applies to AfD coming in second in Germany.

Months before the 2024 election, I told a friend of mine (who’s a big Democrat donor in Georgia) that I think the Democrats are wrong about the Hispanic vote, and he told me, “I love you bro but if you think Hispanics are voting for Trump the way he speaks about them I got a bridge to sell you. Trump is cooked!” After the election, he followed up, “I’m all ears now, what did I not understand?” It was too late though.

I knew I was right about the Hispanic vote, not because I have a crystal ball, but because my church is filled with Hispanics and I learned so much about how they think politically and so much of the nuanced perspectives within their community by listening to them, meanwhile the Democrats think almost entirely in terms of identity politics.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43159998

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43163139

BTW, I keep reading and hearing derogative terms like "script kiddies" and "20 year olds". What's happened to diversity and inclusion? So, they have to be of a certain age? What's the magical age? And, do they have to come from the same place that created the problems as well? This isn't sensible at all.

Here's a reality: The US has been on a self-destructive path for decades. You could argue the number is somewhere between 25 and 50 years. Staying on the same path isn't going to make things better. Changing paths is not fun. It's dirty, messy and painful. Welcome to reality.

I remember having discussions here on HN many years back, when the national debt was in the $20 trillion range and annual deficits below a trillion dollars. I remember asking a simple question: Where is the limit? $25 TN, $30 TN, $35 TN ... $50 TN? Where? Where is the limit on annual deficits? 2, 4, 8? Where?

Nobody ever answers this question. Nobody. And yet reality is that this is a nation destroying itself from the inside while others around the world are taking advantage of our fiscal incompetence.

We can't make anything here any more. Not one thing (unless gov/mil and corner cases). This has been a slow-rolling tragedy building up over 50 years. And we absolutely cannot turn that clock back, ever. Some of this is cooked and done and can never be recovered. We can't build a friggin high speed train in CA with over $100 billion while, in China, they built them at a rapid pace during the same period of time.

So, I ask you, and others: When? When are you going to say "enough"? Is there a threshold or limit?

The same issue applies to this stupid Ukraine thing. When? What's the limit? A trillion dollars and ten more years? Sending our armed forces there? What the hell does "security guarantee" mean? I am blown away that no journalist at any media outlet seems to care to ask this term means in practice. Does it mean we, the US, commit to engaging with the full force of our military to protect Ukraine? Nuclear? Building a base in Ukraine? What the hell does it mean? Where are the limits?

Do I, as a US citizen, have to accept having my children go fight this war in Ukraine?

Fuck no.

Do I, as a US citizen, have to accept gifting Ukraine a trillion dollars, with no limits on time and spending? Money we do not have, we have to borrow and will add to the deficit. Money that could and should be spent internally to fix our many problems.

Fuck no.

You see, it is easy to take a side until you have to live with the consequences. Not one person who pushes for the ridiculous continuation of the Ukraine war would be willing to go there and fight for them or send their kids there. Not one. And nobody who is critical of the very necessary process to get our national finances in order would be willing to, today, right now, this moment, send a check for 20% more money to the federal government (which you can do, you don't need a law to donate money to the government). Nobody.

So, what we are talking about is hypocrisy. Talk is cheap. Write a check right now for $50K to the federal government to keep the employees being fired. I won't do that, because I believe there's waste that has to be fixed. If you, anyone, believe this not to be the case, start a GoFundMe and donate money to keep people employed, pay their substantial benefits and do so every year forever. But you won't do that. You'll come here and go on social media to comment on how wrong this is, because that's free and it does not affect you.

They were asked first last last week. And then again on Friday.

——

> According to Politico, the emails — prompting employees to list their weekly accomplishments by Monday — were widely distributed across multiple agencies, including the State Department, the IRS, and the NIH.

I’m not making this shit up…