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Comment by arunabha | Hacker News Reader

> we're seeing the death bellows of many large, entrenched bureaucracies right now with DOGE

That's one interpretation, sure. I hope you'll concede that another equally valid one is that we're hearing the deliberate shattering of the only institution in the country capable of standing up to the oligarchs.

So far the verifiable cuts made by DOGE are less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget. However, a lot of has been cut so far has been very favourable to the ultra rich. The most obvious ones being cutting the IRS enforcement budget and gutting the CFPB.

It's possible to argue that all of that is good policy, but the facts make it very to claim that all of the destruction being wrought is going to make a meaningful dent in the government's spending.

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> So far the verifiable cuts made by DOGE are less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget.

IIRC, less even than the govt's subsidies to Musk's enterprises.

Isn't a tenth huge? DOGE is brand new so I'm honestly surprised they have done so much.

Anyway at this point it's impossible to predict what will happen. There is no doubt a ton of inefficiency at these bureaucracies. You are making the point that cutting the budget will mean they will become less effective. But that doesn't follow if the departments are totally inefficient. Look at twitter. Musk fired like 80% of the software engineers. I'm not a heavy twitter user but I haven't noticed any difference in terms of reliability.

There is a massive difference though. It doesn't matter to anyone if Twitter works or not, while a lot of people depend on functioning government agencies.

And there are people who rely on it that aren't appropriately handled today. What I mean with that the current state is far from perfect too.

Your argument is essentially change is risk. Which is true. But what is also true is that never changing will yield a much worse system in the long run.

No, my argument is you can't compare the two.

Just because one is something people rely upon and the other isn't is not really a reason they are incomparable. Just because the end goal is different doesn't suddenly mean nothing applies.

I find it really weird when people just willy nilly repeat principles without any regard to their meaning or application.

> Isn't a tenth huge? DOGE is brand new so I'm honestly surprised they have done so much.

A tenth of one percent. So not 10%, but 0.1%.

Have you read the misc "why can't America build things any more" criticisms? Like why our mega projects are super expensive, late, and over budget.

The recurring punchline is: Lack of administrative capacity.

The trials and tribulations of California's ill fated high speed rail is such a case study. Decades of outsourcings and privatization eliminated CA's ability to manage the effort.

After getting rid of most third party app support, 99.9% of all API access, losing massive chunks of active userbase and virtually all advertising except penis pills and scams, site performance probably isn’t terrible for casual users, it would difficult for it to not be adequate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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