Like the ebola program they "turned off and then back on again" ?

  "I disagree fully, completely, wholly, that they recognized the mistake and put it back," says Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University School of Public Health, who has worked on Ebola for more than a decade and responded to Ebola outbreaks in Africa. 

Musk says work to stop Ebola was accidentally cut but restored. Experts raise doubts

~ https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/27/g-s1-...

  Within USAID's Global Health Bureau there was a team of people that specialized in high risk outbreaks, like Ebola. "Virtually all of those people have been pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back. Only a very small handful — like low single digits — remain from what had been something like a 30 person team,

Many regulars at HN understand how poorly complex systems in the real world respond to hard outages and cold restarts.

These aren’t systems you just toggle off and then back on if you realize you miss it.

Once you do the layoffs and shrink the organizations, those people go get other jobs. You can’t just flip a switch and have everyone back like before.

You have to rebuild the organization. It’s expensive. It’s not efficient.

I think we’re in this mess because people who don’t understand how to operate organizations, departments, and government systems are treating these like servers in a closet that can be turned off and back on again.

Doesn’t work like that.

This cannot possibly be a good faith argument. Real world is full irreversible cause to effect. This isn't some tech company running an A/B experiment. Let's cut healthcare, oops more people dead, but can't bring them back. Let's skip saving the environment, oops low sea level cities are flooded

One of the programs they "turned off" was medical care provided to HIV-positive pregnant women in Africa to help ensure that HIV wasn't passed on to the child. There are now more children who have HIV, who didn't need to have HIV, but Musk thinks you can run a government like he runs Twitter, so here we are. I don't recall if that program got "turned on" again, but just the act of shutting it down for some period of time did significant harm.

Saying this is all "irresponsible" is vastly understating how messed up this all is.

Perhaps the fire department can start trying setting fire to homes — the ones that don't catch fire can become the new building code.

I work for a SaaS company and a frequent refrain is "the most important thing we sell is trust." I suspect our users would be extremely upset with us if one of our engineers decided to learn about our production systems by turning things off and seeing what breaks. If you insist on reducing the State Department or any other government function to a "complex system," then DOGE is doing exactly that - FAFO in prod on a service that's 239 years old and has nukes. It's beyond irresponsible.

I didn't say this is a great idea, only that this might be how DOGE operates.

I don't think DOGE has the time or resources to seriously evaluate small programs like these when they're trying to overhaul the biggest organization in the world in 18 months.

So they have to use crude simplified methods, or not do it at all.

In that context, arguing about the detailed merits of US embassy air quality data is not very relevant.

When the goal is efficiency, you generally don't want to pick the most expensive possible way of doing things.

Would you do this with a prod deployment?

This also isn't some eshop, it's the US government