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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

The thing you see as waste from outside might be the most efficient system possible given the consequences and tons of time it had for evolving.

These systems contain huge icebergs of knowledge gained, refined and organized over time. Rooting them like weeds which grow in three days flat is a huge mistake.

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Well, let’s find that with DOGE. DOGE had already revealed things that are so unnecessary for a government to do. Humans can do much better governance than what we do now.

> let’s find that with DOGE.

I think this whole logic of letting an unproven entity come in and destroy a working system to just “find out” if it works is negligent and malicious.

DOGE is working like a governing board which landed on top of a big corporation, and started reaping things down without understanding "why" part of the equation.

Ignoring Chesterton's Fences in the short term might look good on paper, but we have seen how companies enshittified themselves for profits (let's reduce the OPEX part).

Doing this to a government will have catastrophic results, and we will watch the slow downfall. It'll be dramatic and painful.

I cannot accept that sending 100B to an NGO where 90-95B ends up in politicians’ pockets and 10-5% ends up as actual aid or whatever is the most efficient system.

That's corruption and is universally bad. That's nothing to do with efficiency (remember the E in DOGE). Let's not move the goalposts, shall we?

I’m not moving goalposts, that’s what DOGE is attacking. It’s 100% part of efficiency. And it’s absolutely happening. DOGE is addressing “fraud, waste, and abuse”.

This thread discusses DOGE laying off a small agency that made useful online tools for people to access government functions at much lower costs than private contractors were previously charging the government. It is not obvious that this is an example of "fraud, waste and abuse". Other decisions they have made include laying off anyone unfortunate enough to be on a probationary period because they were recently deemed deserving of promotion or someone recently decided their role was necessary and they were the best candidate, and removing people responsible for nuclear safety before grudgingly admitting they might have been premature in firing people without finding out what they're doing first.

This is all stuff DOGE is actually attacking, not hypothetical 100B NGO donation of which 95% had gone to politicians which they pointedly haven't discovered. Although given the current track record for "savings" they have published, if they did "discover it" we'd probably find that it was just an error in the output of their GPT-authored PDF scraper...

None of the individuals working for this agency could provide a list of 5 things they did the prior week, either. The subthread here was talking about waste generally I wasn’t intending to move any goalposts. Ignore fraud. I still think it’s unacceptable for government workers to be insubordinate or absent to the point where they can't provide a weekly standup update when asked. That’s inefficient waste in my book.

> None of the individuals working for this agency could provide a list of 5 things they did the prior week, either.

Elsewhere you have claimed this is stated in the article, despite the fact it doesn't state it in the article[1]. It's also already pretty well established that Elon bragged on his platform about "deleting" 18F long before sending out these messages to them and the rest of the federal government. So now you're moving the goalposts again to pretend that Elon's long-established desire to "delete" 18F actually amounts to justified dismissal for "insubordination"

If the best arguments you can muster for DOGE's actions are all in bad faith, perhaps DOGE is not doing a good job.

[1]the article merely notes that they received a second demand for standup updates mere hours before they were advised their entire department had been shut down, which if anything suggests DOGE isn't very good at coordinating what it's doing and that replying to those emails is pointless because you'll get fired anyway It also links to an article which confirms that they were fired because 18F "as been identified as part of this phase of GSA’s Reduction in Force (RIF) as non-critical", not for "insubordination:

If someone entirely outside my chain of command demands I give them a status update, “no” is often an appropriate answer.

It doesn’t mean I can’t. It means I shouldn’t.

And now they’re facing the consequences (the existence of which clearly refutes your chain of command argument). Maybe they are virtuous. Maybe they got bad advice from leadership. Either way the chapter is finished and the outcome doesn't seem positive for the insubordinate individuals.

That’s not evidence the system is supposed to work this way. That’s evidence that the system is breaking.

What if that 10% of aid that gets to the actual people prevents something like a multi-trillion dollar ebola pandemic?

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