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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

There's no denying that there's bloat, but going in with a chainsaw is not a conducive or efficient way to reduce bloat in an organization.

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.

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Indeed. The chainsaw approach will only produce an even less effective civil service, and one in constant crisis.

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.

Every accusation is a confession. Elon and his band of criminals know that if they were in government they would try to get a make work job and grift, direct money to their own businesses and friends, etc, so they assume that all civil servants are like that

They are also performing for a constituency who like believing that the government is their enemy. It's straight from the authoritarian playbook : claim the government is broken, get into power and break the government, replace it all with your own organization and declare victory.

How do you "start by motivating people to improve"? Cause all the inefficiency at best, corruption at worst and all in between is there not randomly because it serves the motivation of the people working there.

If you actually have evidence of corruption, charges should be laid.

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.

>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.

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.

For the first time in a long time the GOP has control over all branches of gov't.

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 agree that the GOP has legislative control. It'll be interesting to see what they do with it in the coming years, if anything. Destroying and undermining departments through the executive is easier than redesigning it through the legislative, and I suspect this is why we are seeing the current actions.

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.

Reduction of scope is required to decrease cost and waste. Unfortunately, reducing scope and regulation is a legislative problem, not an executive one.

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.

> Unfortunately, reducing scope and regulation is a legislative problem, not an executive one.

Exactly!

> Reduction of scope is required to decrease cost and waste

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.

Fair. I agree that scope is not the only source of waste.

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