Yes, this exactly. Reflexive "ugh govt" is a result of decades of Reagan-ite propaganda. Govt is just people, and people are flawed and have competing incentives. I've worked in massive companies that have incredibly dumb inefficiencies.
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.
If you want to use the "private sector lense" (which I do not think is valid for a govenenent bureaucracy), there's a reason why when I've participated in M&A events, we would spend a year doing due diligence and understanding the organizational and financial structure before initiating an event.
By haphazardly doing these kinds of initiatives without even understanding regulations and laws means any potential savings will be burnt in litigation and cleaning up messes.
If you want to actually improve governance (and we really should because it is in fact often quite dysfunctional), you don't come in with the notion that it is intrinsically rotten to the core and the very idea of governance is flawed by nature.
You start by motivating people to improve. Which you don't do by accusing them of graft, corruption and incompetence.
It's all very disingenuous.
If all you have is insinuations and hearsay... Well, can't help you.
But one does not run a decent poultry farm by putting foxes in charge of the hen house.
There are really two type if inefficiencies being conflated here. That of the workers, and that of the organizations.
For the organization, firing does nothing. You have to start by reducing the scope and simplifying the legislation of those organizations. E.g fix the tax code, eliminate the department of education, streamline EPA objectives.
For the worker incentive, this is really a classic public sector union debate, and should be treated as such.
So if there were policy and organizational changes they wanted to make, they now have the power to do it, through passing laws.
But they're not doing that. Which really draws attention to the fact that it's not the manner in which government is being run that is a problem to them. It's government itself.
I'm not sure what you mean by the following statement:
>manner in which government is being run that is a problem to them. It's government itself.
Where are you drawing the distinction? I imagine someone could disagree with both what government does and what it is.
Having an government organization underfunded and understaffed to fulfill its mission leads to more waste, both on the public and private side.
For example, the solution isnt to fire employees, it is to simplify the tax code.
Exactly!
That doesn't follow at all. Plenty of cost and waste arises while carrying out things that are solidly within the scope of a federal government in the eyes of belief system but anarchism and other forms of extreme heterodoxy. To "provide for the common defense" is literally in the Constitution, yet the DoD is a black hole of funding, while soldiers eat powdered eggs on base.
Government is what we make it. A snapshot in time of your own experience does not define government and its capabilities.
Sure, maybe there is broad support for making government more efficient, but that is not in any way what Elon Musk is trying to do. So if there is broad support for DOGE those people are entirely wrong to believe they are aligned with Elon, and entirely wrong about supporting DOGE as the means to achieve their goals.
That being the case, these same people cannot be trusted to understand our government and how it functions and where the inefficiencies are. If you support the DOGE mission you do not actually support making the government more efficient, so alluding to that support is a red herring. Worse than a red herring, it shows that their anti-government views are not based in reality and facts.
What a wild take!
Only some of sooo many reports all over the media 5-6 days ago that you somehow missed:
"Key US agencies tell staff not to answer Musk email on what they did last week"
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0qrj20g5vo
"Elon Musk’s Federal Worker Emails: Agency Leaders Can Decide If Employees Must Reply, White House Says"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/02/25/elon-mu...
And the latest from today:
"Some government employees are instructed — again — to not respond to 5 things email as Musk doubles down"
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/5-things-email-nati...
They answer directly to the President. The email was sent by someone at OPM who also answers directly to the President.
The President has issued no formal orders regarding these emails. He did issue an executive order telling employees to comply with DOGE requests but this email came from OPM not DOGE.
There whole thing is an unclear clusterfuck.
Once again, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/27/opm-firing-probatio...
> A judge ruled Thursday that the Office of Personnel Management — the central human resources office for the federal government — broke the law when it ordered other federal agencies to terminate thousands of “probationary” employees.
> “OPM does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees within another agency,” the judge said.
This is entirely false. This is so incredibly false that I am actually shocked you were willing to post it. It is hard for me to imagine anything more absurd and untrue someone could have said about this topic. I tremble with fear thinking about what your media diet must look like in order for you to believe this absolute nonsense.
(Edit: I accidentally pulled this from a different article not about 18F, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/02/24/musk-doge-fe... . I believe my broader point still true, but I'll elaborate more below.)
This email came AFTER thousands of layoffs!
You have implied every laid-off employee was given a chance to reply to the email and didn’t, which is contrary to TFA.
2nd “what did you do” email came Friday, 28, Feb.
1st “what did you do” email came Saturday 22 Feb.
Some other points:
* The second email came "late Friday" and the layoffs happened hours later at 1 am on Saturday, so it's not reasonable to count the second email as a warning or genuine attempt to find the "good" employees. I'm guessing it was just blasted out and happened to land in their inboxes before the firing notice did.
* Based on https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/general-services-ad... it appears the entire 18F unit was cut, so this doesn't seem targeted or predicated on email responses. Also, I'm not a leader, but if 100% of my organization didn't comply with an order, cutting them all is probably a much less effective decision than trying to meet them half-way. I guess if they've truly been doing nothing for years, there would be no loss, but that seems unlikely to be true in most cases including 18F's.
* Your initial comment appeared to be speaking generally on DOGE cuts, so it is fair for us to be responding accordingly. 18F seems to have been pretty small, but part of the reason this story is interesting is everything else DOGE is doing. As we've said, plenty of cuts happened before and independent of any email. Personally I'm doubtful that responding does much, but I'd be interested in any reporting on employee's experiences or what DOGE is saying about responses and how it affects their decisions.
Like I said above, I don't think TFA mentioned 18F's responses and there's not really a good reason to assume that the layoffs were due to no response.
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…
"To the board: if you have this level of distrust for my management, you should fire me immediately. This request is out of line, and shows great disrespect for our employees as well as myself. If you are dissatisfied with the information you receive about the company's operations and performance, you can talk to me and my staff about that. I will not allow you to display such callous disregard for the people under my leadership."
You would write "Ask HN: my company has thousands of employees, a board member showed up in Slack and told everyone to write him a weekly summary, or we'll be fired, what to do?" and everybody would be like "WTF that's beyond stupid, name the company, also it's time to polish your resume!" yada yada.
Don't be obtuse.
And it’s not the board that send the emails, it’s a committee created by the board.
It’s unclear whether OPM has the authority to order employees to do anything.
The real way to do this. If it was what they actually wanted to happen was for the president to issue an executive order requiring everyone to logon to a secure site and fill out a form. Then give some kind of reasonable deadline that makes allowances for people on PTO or leave.
If a board wants something done, they can urge the CEO to implement it, but they do not hold unilateral power to dictate internal operations. They can vote to remove the CEO if they feel that they aren’t producing the desired result, but again, this is an indirect action.
DOGE are not the boss of most (any?) government departments. Its entire purpose, legally, is to improve software: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...
So once again, who are they to ask this, legally? Who are they to fire employees from other departments who rightfully deny this request?
And yet you act like he is.
Who is he to order DoD or DoJ employees to write this email?
It doesn’t matter either way. The President has the authority to order employees to perform certain tasks but he has to do it through proper channels.
OPM doesn’t have the authority to order non-OPM employees to perform specific duties. They never have in the past. And the President has issued no executive orders stating that OPM has this authority now.
If the real purpose, as Musk later stated, was to see who would respond and who would not, with no consideration of content, why deceive? Be direct: "This is a test of government employee email deliverability and responsiveness. Please reply to this email when you receive it. An empty reply is fine, you do not need to put anything in the email."
If you want to know what people are working on, you work with the management chains because those are the people whose job it is to know what their people are working on. You take your time to dig into the data, talk to people at all levels, understand the structure and the work. This request, in the way and fashion it was made, shows an incredible lack of disrespect, distrust, and disregard for federal employees across the board. If I were a government employee and received that mail, I would be unable to avoid expressing my own disrespect and distrust in my reply.
These emails sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy where government fails to serve the people. Some people leave public service. Others stay but are disillusioned and checked out because they know their actual job performance no longer matters, the whims of a billionaire who voted with his wallet to make himself co-president can destroy their livelihood at any moment. Over time, you have people who are unable to leave and thus will do what they're told out of fear, and unqualified loyalists who just do what they're told.
I can never know what I’d do when faced with a position where I believed some of my budget was going to pay dead and inactive employees, and where members of the management chain were insubordinate and unwilling to help identify the issue and even complicit. I’d guess I’d just fire them all. Is that more humane?
At the team level, that is of course quite reasonable.
Doing this from a top-down approach in an organization at any real scale is fucking insane.
Reductions in force due to mission/budget/etc. changes, etc., which are based on seniority, not firings, which are (where civil service protections apply) exclusively for documented misconduct or incompetence and have due process protections.
It’s true that private industry (at least outside of unionized workplaces) leverage at-will employment to blur the line between mission/budget-based staffing reductions and for-cause firings, but the civil service isn’t at will and the line is a sharp legal distinction.
Is bureaucrary inevitable? A side effect of organizational psychology?
I have no clue.
But until someone divines a better way to coordinate humans, we just have to suck it up.
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.
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.
"Gotcha" hypocrisy arguments about personal behaviour I don't think are great taken from either left nor right.
Which, perhaps ironically, shows that welfare works as intended, even for morons that want to see it dismantled.
Nobody refuses free government help even if they hate the government, just as no one pays extra taxes even if they love the government. The point is always to distribute their belief more widely so that everyone has to live with it.
I remember when this was considered essential to being an American Citizen. We had classes on this in K-12.
Sometime in the last decade or so, it's become synonymous with "communist."
Which is pretty rich, considering what's going on, these days.
Both Abe Lincoln and Joe McCarthy are doing 3200 RPM, right now. That's pretty crazy.
So, no, it's not "communist" to advocate a functioning civil sector.
I was raised in the Cold War "Red Menace" days, and Civic Duty was considered "Red-Blooded American." My father[0] was in the CIA. He was a Harvard LLB, and could have been quite wealthy, but chose what he considered his Civic Duty, as a career (which wasn't really rewarded well).
I've never been particularly extreme, myself (very centrist -a vanishing species), but Civic Duty has always been important to me, and to my family, for generations.
That no longer seems to be the case.
And yet every single time Communists (Lenin included) have gotten into power...
(I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater though. There are theoreticians who have added a lot more nuance here, especially Poulantzas)
Which is the original definition of the "Deep state" until it was hijacked by conspiracy theorists and Republicans who do bad shit.