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Comment by JansjoFromIkea | Hacker News Reader

An opportunity to provide value to the government by replacing their own service with an inevitably more expensive one which can be recontracted out to whoever suits the interests of a specific administration with minimal pushback.

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.

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"Replacing" sounds like he's taking it away. It's already gone.

He's resurrecting it.

I meant in terms of what people expect this kind of service to be.

If his vision is a privately-ran for-profit contracted agency he's not resurrecting anything.

I’d propose a slightly different reading:

“The government just tried to screw you, but they need you so you should join together in a way that when they inevitably come calling, they no longer have the power to screw you again.”

How many people have said they wished to be in the same position over things like RTO? Or employees unionizing after managerial and corporate abuse?

Once somebody proves themselves untrustworthy, it’s not wrong to protect yourself from them in the future.

Cuban isn't in charge here, in fact he literally campaigned for Harris.

Trump and Musk destroyed USDS and 18F. At worst Cuban is trying to salvage something from the wreckage.

It's called a "shadow government" in European (?) parlance[0], though not to be confused with the term "deep state". That is, the opposition basically prepares a shadow government to signal to the public that, despite not being power, they have the qualified personnel ready to go on day 1 if they come back to power. The down side for MAGA when firing all these workers in all these agencies is that it gives the opposition the opportunity to organize a "department in waiting" for every agency that is gutted by gathering the most-qualified of the fired employees.

But just another billionaire doing this instead of an organized opposition is not ideal, to say the least. ex 18F workers should get someone they trust more in the mix.

[0] https://www.yourdictionary.com/shadow-government

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