Doge Is Far Short of Its Goal, and Still Overstating Its Progress | Hacker News Reader

Doge Is Far Short of Its Goal, and Still Overstating Its Progress

nytimes.com

121 pointsrurp40 comments

You can't effect efficient change with zero knowledge.

But I don't think that's the point anyway, the point is to trash everything that operates interdependently in government, and enable the administration to become the one gateway to solve anything and then capture that income via corruption and etc.

You want cancer research? You want weather data? You gotta pay the toll... otherwise they don't care. Everything they trash is potential income.

"Disruption."

From the article...

“They’re just spinning their wheels, citing in many cases overstated or fake savings,” said Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute. “What’s most frustrating is that we agree with their goals. But we’re watching them flail at achieving them.”

To your point, people have taken musk/doge at face value, with 'efficiency' being the goal. That's not been the goal. But... pointing that out seems to make you some sort of conspiracy theorist.

"Just give them time! It takes time!"

We did have some meaningful government cutbacks in the 90s. It took months of bipartisan collaboration and dealmaking, and we ended up with a balanced budget and a bit of a surplus. The process was a lot more open, experts were consulted, hearings and studies were done, and we did make some short-lived progress there.

None of that process was even entertained. We had a charlatan foisted on us in the role of "chief slasher of anything woke", and a third of our country cheered it on, until they got cut. Those not cut/affected still seem to support this circus.

> "Just give them time! It takes time!"

Except it's exactly Doge and the admin at large who keeps saying how fast they're going to go and how easy it all is to fix, etc.

Back in the 1990s politics were much less polarized. Nowadays, perhaps due to the WWW, polarization is so strong that a bipartisan collaboration on this matter is highly unlikely. I don't even know if the Democrats are in principle interested in shrinking the government.

>Back in the 1990s politics were much less polarized.

The 90s were the era of Gingrich and the "Contract With America" and the rise of figures like Rush Limbaugh. If you weren't around it was pretty bad back then too. Witness the enduring "the Clintons are LITERALLY an evil crime family" meme from then that persists to this day.

I think about the quote that "Only Nixon could go to China" and maybe there's a corollary that "Only Clinton could balance the budget". Similar to how Nixon had the anti-commie credentials to be able visit Mao's China, Clinton had the liberal credentials to be able to cut social spending. I don't think that the budget surplus that Clinton left us was all due to social spending cuts, but he did make significant cuts.

Exactly.

I thought the same thing until I listened to this podcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQNe7nSgcrw

I can see how in some organizations/bureaucracies that you have to destroy it before you can have any hope of fixing it.

When there are a significant number of people in an organization trying to stop progress, it's impossible for change to happen.

Just like rewriting a code base is sometimes the best approach. However there is a significant risk off learning the hard way why things were done a certain way. There is a lot of experience embedded in old, running systems. If you don't understand it well enough to change it in place, you can do a lot of damage trying to replace it.

Congress is vested by the Constitution with the power to appropriate funds, or to not appropriate them.

There is currently a Republican Congress and Republican President.

Congress could & should enact these cuts immediately instead of having the Executive do whatever it is that DOGE is doing. The Constitutional mechanism still works, and would be much more effective.

> Congress could & should enact these cuts immediately instead of having the Executive do whatever it is that DOGE is doing

The whole point is there are no cuts. USAID was easy. DOE just moved jobs around. After that, there isn’t anything actually being cut. Just stupidity and chaos. (And possibly grift.)

Funds for medical research, which our elected Congresses and Presidents allocated for those purposes, are not being disbursed. This is a cut. Congress did not approve these cuts. We did not get a refund of the money.

We do not get a refund of the money... but the deficit should be a bit lower because the money was not spent.

Look, I am not a fan of DOGE. They are far more theater than effective. But on this one small point, your argument doesn't work.

> the deficit should be a bit lower because the money was not spent.

The durable problem with this logic is that it depends on the President overriding the written instructions laid out by Congress in appropriations. This power of the purse, of course, is one of the main checks in our system of checks and balances. Power is intentionally divided between the branches.

Is it even legal for the Executive to ignore the spending orders set forth by Congress?

So maybe the deficit is smaller (although we continue to pay the same tax rates), but the cost is we have eroded a foundational piece of our Constitutional republic.

We don't have to pretend like there is not a legitimate process to reduce the deficit if that is the expressed wish of the American people. And any time we veer from the proper legal mechanism, there will be unforeseeable ramifications in the future.

[Yes, in theory a smaller deficit can lead to a future reduction in tax rates. Congress can address both deficit and tax reduction to take place over several years this week if it wants. That's how the Constitution is designed.]

> the deficit should be a bit lower because the money was not spent

But...it's not. The deficit is ballooning.

All right, the deficit is a bit lower than it otherwise would have been, if they had spent the other money also.

You are correct. They have control of executive, legislative, and (more or less) judicial. They could make any of this permanent through law, but they don't want to.

They don't want to work. They don't want the visibility. They don't want the accountability/blowback.

We've already embarrassed ourselves by electing these clowns twice. We'll really have failed if every responsible person and accomplice isn't voted out at the first possible opportunity.

Agreed, constitutionally all these wide ranging cuts should come from congress if they happen at all.

Unfortunately the GOP is just a Trump fan club / hangers on party now and they control congress.

He told Time (POTY interview) that because Congress didn't fund his wall idea and he had to take it from the military, he was going to do everything through executive action.

> ... "because Congress didn't fund his wall idea" ...

I could swear he was absolutely insistent that Mexico would pay for the wall the last time around... (Of course this time around, he's also insisted the war in Ukraine would long-since be over, guided by his "stable genius" and his friendship with Putin.) The guy's a psychotic pathological liar, straight-up.

Say what you will about his funding methods but the wall solved immigration as promised. Never heard about illegal border crossings again after it was built.

https://archive.ph/lsSoU

Do we think doge keeps an internal dashboard for % US government destroyed?

This is a close enough proxy: https://www.project2025.observer

The purpose of a system is what it does.

It was never about saving money, ever. Stop sane washing this whole scam.

It was about punishing people, organizations, and regulators who annoyed Elon and Trump.

Once you understand that, the whole thing makes sense.

Finally the government is run like a business - a magical world outsourcing, capricious decisionmaking, and c-suite self-delusion.

I am so glad we slaughtered the Deep State that made us ... checks notes ... the global hegemon.

> Mr. Musk’s group has deleted some of its original errors, like entries that triple-counted the same savings, a claim that confused “billion” with “million,” and items that claimed credit for canceling contracts that ended when George W. Bush was president.

I thought the purported benefit of having skilled programmers/coders running DOGE would be that at least whatever they did would be done in a...programmatic way? But these sound like errors when doing manual data entry.

Or errors an LLM agent would make...

didnt take long for it to start operating like the rest of government.....

Even this article can't get it right.

https://www.inc.com/chris-morris/why-elon-musk-doge-savings-...

It was originally $2 trillion.

EDIT: Missed this earlier. Still think you should lead with the original claim to highlight the disparity!

> When he was Mr. Trump’s most prominent supporter on the campaign trail, he said he could cut $2 trillion from a federal budget of about $7 trillion. After Mr. Trump was elected and Mr. Musk’s group began its work, Mr. Musk lowered that goal to $1 trillion.

That is mentioned further down in the article.

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