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Comment by carrja99 | Hacker News Reader

DOGE will be an interesting case study in the years to come to say the least. A friend was contacted by them in an attempt to recruit him to help rebuild the nations aviation systems from the ground up as a 1099 contractor reporting directly to Sean Duffy. The recruiter advertised it as a side hustle on evenings and weekends paying an abmysal hourly wage. When my friend pointed out that the comp was far below what he makes, the recruiter countered with the prestige that will come with having worked for DOGE.

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> prestige that will come with having worked for DOGE.

This seems like a highly fragile currency. If things continue to deteriorate a future administration may end up running its own reprisals trials against DOGE staff.

I mean I think it would be a fair assumption that there’s a very very real chance that havinng worked at DOGE will come with credible threats to your safety in the future. This is a team that is currently in the process of killing peoples grandparents by cutting them off from social security, building databases of immigrants and people with autism among a million other fuckups.

People aren’t going to just let that slide. I really don’t think they should expect to live in comfort and anonymity for the rest of their days if you look at how these kinds of things have played out historically with only a few counterexamples (I.e the East German Stasi come to mind as one)

> things have played out historically with only a few counterexamples

The first counter-example that comes to mind is the "Pact of Forgetting" that happened after Franco died, where basically people agreed to let spilled blood be spilled, without spilling more. Basically hard and difficult questions were avoided in order to facilitate "national reconciliation" when the transition to democracy began in 1970s.

Depending on the political aftermath when this (pointing everywhere) is done, it's not impossible something similar could happen, to try to let things cool down. Or, it goes the way of the Nuremberg Trials, also a possibility I suppose.

That's basically what Obama did with Bush, Iraq and the GFC. I remember him claiming that a bunch of investigations would bog down his agenda.

There was also this take from the "institutionalists" that a compact to not investigate your predecessor was an important part of our tradition of peaceful transition of power. Finally there was a feeling among Democrats that the Republican use of investigations against Clinton had been dirty politics.

I do think that generation of Democrats are being pushed out and I think we'll see a new generation with different ideas. In particular I think the base is finally repulsed by people like Chuck Schumer.

I can't speak for everyone, but as far as I'm concerned, I was willing to "forgive and forget" after the first Trump term.

But then January, 6 happened. And then Trump explicitly ran on the platform of rejecting the validity of the 2020 election and persecuting his political opposition, not to mention this whole DOGE thing and nuking the economy.

So, this time around, no. Anyone who stuck with him despite all that had their chance and they blew it. And this especially pertains to people who aren't just full-throated supporters, but actually facilitated this admin directly.

This is the kind of stuff we'll need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustration for.

For the half of the country that's always hated Trump to forget, Trumpism has to go EXTINCT. Like, discredited the way that fascism was after WWII or segregation after the Civil Rights movement.

God willing, when Trump finally officially plunges the US into recession, he and his supporters will become pariahs, but my faith in my fellow citizens is so low that I'm not even sure they'd notice.

I don't think that there is much room for forgiveness in a country where 48% of folks are STILL in support of Trump. The one thing I am certain of is that democracy will not die in the US without a fight.

> discredited the way that fascism was after WWII or segregation after the Civil Rights movement

Got some bad news for you there: a large part of Trumpism is explicitly segregationist revival. Those people never went away, they were just under the surface, and they got mad again when action was taken to remove celebrations of segregationists (statues, building names etc) from public life.

> very very real chance that havinng worked at DOGE will come with credible threats to your safety in the future.

That but also depositions. Lots and lots and lots of depositions in the future for DOGE employees.

Hiring a whole bunch of contractors is almost providing cover. "No, I didn't work on the gulag candidate selection tool, I was just a FAA navigation coder".

During the downfall of ISIS there was a funny quote from a commander in the Iraqi military along the lines of "if you listen to what the prisoners said, you'd think ISIS was entirely staffed by innocent drivers and cooks and never any jihadists"

The prestige of being unable to include it on your resume if you ever want to be able to work again.

Maybe they list it as "Consulting" and list vague achievements in government cybersecurity auditing?

A bunch of them seem young enough to just leave it off and say they were in school. Maybe DOGE counts as a student cybersecurity project?

Achievements and Hobbies: Destroyed US democracy, Kayaking and Bivouacking.

Oh, I'm sure some companies admire the "move fast, break things, don't care who you hurt, just follow orders" ethos.

Yeah, the less tongue in cheek (but even more tragic) version of this is just that they will be very employable by very ideological right wing organizations, and not very employable outside that bubble (unless they write or otherwise highlight a "learned lessons and turned things around" narrative of this period of time).

But most organizations don't, and won't, want to hire people who are willing to behave lawlessly.

It's a great case study of someone having no knowledge of something coming in and saying "we can save half the budget" then, oops - saying maybe they can do 5% of the original promise, lol.

I wonder how much DOGE is going to cost at the end of the day? I hope not literally billions of dollars, so maybe the $100b-200b they save will be net positive after the lawsuits, etc..

Rebuilding something as critical as the nations’ aviation system using underpaid 1099s working nights/weekends is certainly not the way to build a robust and fault-tolerant system. Idiots!

Ah yes, we should drop $20 billion dollars to some consultant instead. Who will hire incompetent people who'll do 30 minutes of actual work per day.

The false dichotomy! Nice. However you still make a good point. Farming out gov work to private industry is rarely a good answer. As you stated, they are normally even less efficient and cost more!

but you won’t have to pay pension and benefits :)

Would doing same work being contracted via big four consultant for 1/10th of the cost with 3x more meetings while moving 5x slower be more prestigious?

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