On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm expecting any savings to be funneled to Grok/xAI/Elon.
The irony is that they're cutting external solution providers to do more in-house.
... which means more work in-house.
... done by the same teams they just cut the size of.
Without looking at government pay bands for specialty talent, I think the Pentagon is going to have a hard time doing this work itself well.
Eventual costs, well that's not really a concern and neither is national defense.
You'd have to be a GS-14 [0] to be north of $150k base salary.
That's tech team manager / senior manager, with a post-graduate degree, and 7+ years of experience in the field.
[0] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
> and the working conditions are usually great
Really? Because private sector seems a lot more stable these days.
There’s a lot of things that are supposed to take an act of Congress to change.
If you don't count mass firings, sure.
Had. Not have.
But yes, the federal package is good, but not fantastic. It's on par with what a typical company provides. Salary is decent, too. Not FAANG, but not below industry average. More or less, just like a typical industry job.
State/city jobs tend to have much better benefit packages, but lower pay (often a lot lower). They also tend to be relatively chill workwise.
This feels like something that needed past tense.
Some rich asshole I don't know blasting out weekly check-in demands to the org-wide list doesn't sound very chill.
Context? The comment was about city/state jobs, not federal.
https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desan...
Govt gives benefits and job security, at least till the next opportunity rises.
I'd much rather have a "vibe" generated codebase as a deliverable over what these body shops churn out.
Speaking from experience with both.
Where are you getting that this is "actual" waste, because you read some mean things about consultants? Go easy on the kool aid.
And that's assuming the cuts don't have any fiscally counterproductive knock-on effects. Which they certainly will.
Their president also publicly stated water is not a human right, implying we should let people die if they can’t purchase water from capitalists.
Monsanto will sue you after their “patented” seeds float onto your field and germinate, basically leaving you no options besides using their seed after their local lobbying manipulated the courts to their side.
I’m sure there’s more and worse hidden away.
> $5.3 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts (the combination of $3.8 trillion of tax cuts assumed to be “costless” under a current policy baseline plus $1.5 trillion in additional deficits permitted), deficit increases of $521 billion on defense and immigration spending, a minimum of $4 billion in spending cuts, and an increase in the debt limit of up to $5 trillion.
So savings plus new borrowing will be funded to tax cuts, which will likely prioritize those already on higher incomes, and corporations.
Or you can keep living in a Disney reality where uncle Scrooges are the norm and not the exception.
I'd rather believe wanting power for power's sake than this cartoon idea of an old duck diving into a pool of well-polished coins.
Truth is that beyond a few truly neurotic exceptions, the obscenely rich do use their money. Just not all in supercars and yachts, but also to influence what they can.
When's the last time you heard a billionaire say, "I've got enough money I don't need to get any more" before they're very old and looking to burnish their image with charity work?! If they were the kind of person to be ok with more money than they could spend in 10 lifetimes they wouldn't be billionaires in the first place, at least not multibillionaires.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/03/13/elon-mu...
I don't know, I really don't know. To this day I can't imagine the day I become a president of a big country I tell my citizens "BUY MY COINS AND THOSE OF MY WIFE!". It's difficult to imagine on so many levels. But yet this guy is doing it. So no conspiracy theory is too weird to at this point.
https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-donal...
> Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
Further examples: https://decrypt.co/310771/elon-musks-grok-ai-is-turning-agai...
> For instance, if you ask Grok: “Who is the biggest spreader of misinformation on X?” it replies that “Based on available reports and analyses, Elon Musk is frequently identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X."
It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd from the US market to protect primarily Tesla.
In Tesla because of the brilliant behavior of its precious CEO, will likely be specifically targeted for exclusion from subsidies in the EU, and inevitably at home when this administration passes by
This is a bad take. Nobody can compete with BYD. This isn't a Tesla vs BYD issue, this is a Everyone vs Cheap labor and deregulation issue.
It would simply take a government capable of recognizing the multifold benefits of EV transition: environmental, geopolitical oil independence, energy efficiency, associated alt energy rollout and grid adaptation, lower total costs and associated economic benefits, reduced cancer and air pollution death rates, reduced logistics costs.
That's just off the top of my head and I'm not even that smart
If you ignore the 1/5 (not exactly sure, but somewhere in that ballpark) labor cost, sure. And that's one example.
This is such a debunked argument but I guess its undebunkable because its a branch you can hang onto about how the only reason SpaceX exists is the government. Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or Arianaspace in the EU.
Or any of hundreds of other national space programs and companies, in countries which would have been ecstatic to pay 10X the US Govt's "subsidies to SpaceX", to put themselves or their nation's company into SpaceX's current position of utter global dominance.
That's why every government contractor has to report what they are doing with their government money.
The more mundane problem is things like "drive that truck over there… drive another one back" often result in the exact location of an asset being unclear fairly frequently.