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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure which part pisses me off more: that tons of professionals lost their jobs and will likely not work in public service again because of it, or that through all that, they barely found any actual waste at all. A fucking farce.

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You're assuming their purpose was to find waste, it was not. Their purpose was to be the Chicago boys in DC.

I'm assuming nothing of the sort. I assume what I always assume in these situations; that unqualified ignorant fuckwits convinced a bunch of other unqualified ignorant fuckwits to vote for them, so they could make their lack of understanding everyone else's problem. And likely get away with a huge sack of money Hanna Barbera style in the process.

Seems like generally it ended up being a surveillance play, in practice if not original intent. For example, Dog coin has been reported to be passing data taken from other agencies directly to ICE^[1] for law enforcement applications, and there was that other matter of logins apparently from Russia using accounts the Dog coin personnel demanded agencies create on their internal systems with (auditable) logging disabled^[2]. And probably more that I'm forgetting.

One does wonder whether this was all part of Musk's vision, or more thanks to the scum he hired to staff Dog coin and/or other lawless opportunists in the Trump administration.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/04/16/medica...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/whistleblow...

The idea that Musk's intent was to gut all of the agencies that were in a position to regulate any of his companies does seem to suggest that DOGE was an outstanding success.

Good point!

I see your refusal to acquiesce to Musk's appropriation of an innocent meme, and raise you a, "Keep calling it 'doge', but pronounce it phonetically to piss him off."

I can respect that but I honestly have no concept of how it's "supposed" to be pronounced. At least with Dog coin I know where I stand.

The first obvious sign was that the people not holding office or having any access to government data were making unfounded claims about how the government was operating.

The move obvious sign is that people making that claim have a proven track record of being compulsive liars.

That anyone gives a word they say the time of day is actually crazy.

This is what happens when Chesterton's fence is ignored...

not just ignored but purposefully burnt down

Chesterton's fence, his dad's moat and his grandpa's bunker..

How about the fact that Elon and most of his cronies weren’t even born here and seem to feel that the people who were born here are stupid and/or lazy. Maybe only Vivek said that quiet part out loud, but they very much agreed on the solution.

I'll tell you what pisses me off: Having to be subjected to low security services because one political party wants to run a reality TV show instead of caring for people. The consequences are all for us to bear.

There is waste. A God awful amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. You don't rack up a 1.8 trillion deficit and a debt per capita that is 7x the income per capita without waste, fraud, and abuse.

The problem is that while common sense would dictate those nonsensical expenses as such, they were part of the official process, so it was all legalized, so they avoid the FWA labels because the rule writers have made it so.

The problem with your argument is that Social Security (old people income), Medicare (old people healthcare) and interest on the national debt account for fully one half of total federal spending. Add in national defense and you reach two thirds.

Interest is trivially accounted for. We know how much debt is outstanding.

Social Security and Medicare expenditures are well within 5% of what should be expected, given the total population of the US and its age distribution.

Your God Awful amount of waste, fraud and abuse reduces to a fraction of a fraction of the total budget. A tiny fraction of a big number may be a big number, but it simply doesn't matter structurally.

The only way out is to cancel the entire military, slash social security or raise taxes. The rest of the stuff (even if it is purely waste with no useful purpose) simply doesn't add up to enough dollars to fix the budget.

I know this isn't what anyone wants to hear, but numbers are numbers and you can't just wish away unpleasant realities.

A solid portion of the 1.8 trillion figure the GP quoted was also the insane spending that had to happen to keep the economy somewhat afloat during the pandemic.

Of course in proper propagandist fashion, we only ever hear about how much money the undeserving poors got, and nothing about the millions upon millions of dollars in loans given to private businesses and their owners that were definitely, 100% used for them to weather the pandemic, and later forgiven despite being explicitly loans.

There is of course waste. But the budget for everything apart from social security, medicare/caid, and defense is very small in comparison to those. The US could cut everything except for those three and it wouldn't delay the debt bomb's detonation by more than a year. Current projections are around 20 years of current trends. The US has to keep borrowing, or the world economy breaks down with no reserve currency. The trick is that the borrowing needs to keep increasing the gdp at the same rate as the debt. I.E. the loans have to be spent on assets. That is not currently the case.

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