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Comment by samrus | Hacker News Reader

I understand wanting to make the organization more efficient, but i don't think this is what's happening here. I think this is the classic republican strat of gutting federal agencies, pointing to the inefficiencies caused by the loss of institutional knowledge, and using that as an excuse to privatize to their friends.

The fact that Elon's DOGE suggested these cuts lines up

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It's not worth making this point anymore. Bannon et al have been explicit for decades now they want to destroy the federal government. It's ideological, that's it quite simply.

All these discussions about efficiency, even more so the debt given they just blew up the debt to never before seen levels just shows that sincerity is not deserved when talking to Rs.

It is worth making the point: a lot of people simply don’t see it (yet?) for what it is and still support the people doing it.

Well there's also just the "own the libs durrrrr!" crowd.

Politics has become a sports game. I lack confidence in a good chunk of the population to vote in their best interests, perhaps democracy isn't the right way. Or voting on something should require an exam on the subject.

> I lack confidence in a good chunk of the population to vote in their best interests

That's because for a long time the political system in the US insulated people from the consequences of their decisions. A dum-dum state government from Idaho could vote to slash education and healthcare spending, but the Federal government had always been there to provide a backstop. Whatever the local idiots decide, Social Security, SNAP, Medicare were always there to provide at least _some_ safety net. (and the easy migration within the US helped a lot to alleviate local issues, which is now also gone)

The political system in the US has also always been biased towards conservatism, making any changes difficult. For better or worse. That's how the extremely toxic meme that "both parties are the same" was born.

That's also how political orientation became a part of the identity for many people: "My family has always been voting for Republicans/Democrats".

Now it's all gone. Dum-dum Republicans are destroying the safety net at the Federal level, and they are doing it in a way that will start hurting people within years. Not decades down the line. For once, people will get to experience direct consequences of their vote. And this is the silver lining in this whole mess.

>For once, people will get to experience direct consequences of their vote. And this is the silver lining in this whole mess.

They may experience consequences, but they sure won't care about any consequences so long as they still believe that "demonrats" are systematically raping babies. They'll endure any consequence as long as they think their team is punishing the libs.

the second someone like Trump gets hold of a voter exam setting process, they're either going to abuse it to their advantage, or abolish it entirely, after having used it as a wedge issue to set the working classes against "elites"

also, in the US, taking exams in order to vote is a massively sensitive issue as it was one of the ways that blacks were restricted from voting even when they legally had the right

more technically, where do you draw the line? if it's too easy, you're going to insult people without even getting the desired effect. if it's too hard, then the demographic will skew towards people who work in the industries affected by the policy. for a second that sounds good, and when it comes to something like culture or maybe health, then sure, but there are many industries that would burn the world to the ground if it ensured them 20% annual growth. can you imagine if the only people able to vote on financial regulations were people who know a lot about finance? there'd be famines within the year

Because this is more like dialing it back to pre-covid:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001

Unfortunately the two choices are expansion and haphazard reduction

I don’t know why the number of employees is a problem when the reduction is offset by instead contracting out that work and just needing to also pay middlemen for that work. It’s the worst of both worlds.

As a proponent of a “smaller fed”, I wish it was not haphazard but that we some actual thought went into it rather than shooting from the hip

I think GP's point is that it's achingly difficult to believe anyone at this point still buys into the "efficiency" bullshit. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me 20 times...

> fool me 20 times...

... I'll vote for you again!

Seems to be how that saying goes these days; and here I thought Bush had the dumbest possible ending for it.

The "ecosystem" of polticial knowledge is balkanized in the U.S. (and elsewhere). "Making points" to those who are subscribed to a narrative fed from propaganda will not learn what they are told is not true. But noting causative "they say it's 'X', but it's actually 'Y'" feels more like simply properly labeling the information.

Every day the debt rises to never before seen levels. That’s not new or something exclusive to one party or the other.

It absolutely is worse for one party more than the other. Clinton was the last President to balance the budget. Bush II and Trump made it far worse than any Democrat

That’s just factually not true. Obama and Biden both added more than Bush II. Trump on the other hand is a big spender…

This is not hard to look up..

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030515/which-united...

Yes, thank you for providing a source that supports what I wrote. Big of you to highlight your prior mistake.

Are you really saying that Clinton didn’t balance the budget that Bush II undid and that Trump’s latest “Big Beautiful Bill” is projected to add 3 trillion to the budget on top of what he did in 2017?

I’m saying what I said originally: your statement was not factual. Your own source affirms that.

So which party’s presidents since Reagan have raised the deficit more?

It doesn't support what you wrote.

"The U.S. budget deficit exploded in fiscal year 2009, ultimately reaching $1.4 trillion under President George W. Bush...The deficit would remain above $1 trillion throughout the 2012 fiscal year, but it was slashed to as low as $440 billion in the later years of Obama's presidency."

Comparing Biden to GWB doesn't make any sense. Their presidencies were 12 years apart and in very different circumstances.

None of this is efficiency. Our local NOAA office has lost their sparse janitorial staff. That doesn't make the agency more efficient. That just means an overworked person making 6 figures now has to figure out how to procure toilet paper and get the bathrooms fixed. It's obstructing people eager to do important work while marginally reducing cost, that's all it is.

I don’t think it actually reduces costs if someone better paid is now doing it instead.

No, payroll is still down, it's just that labor is now being used less efficiently and thus less useful work gets done.

It's not about reducing costs, it's about funding the tax breaks for the rich.

No, that particular act of stupidity is about fucking up NOAA so it can be privatized by Trump cronies, while simultaneously burying "inconvenient truths" that inconvenience the same people.

Defunding NASA is about the tax cuts. NOAA is different.

Side note: Inconvenient Truth documentary might have actually been more widely accepted if it wasn’t a political ad for Al Gore

There’s the problem. It wasn’t a political ad for Al Gore, it was published 8 years before he ran. It just so happened he was actually interested in improving things and leaning on smarter people for policy, but that made half the country go “Eeeewww… facts! Elitism!! we want someone dumber we can have a beer with for president!” That was literally an argument in the 2000 election: who would you rather drink with. Then GWB put on his yokel hat and yokel accent and dumbed it down so that people wouldn’t be scared. Instead of voting for someone with a plan, they voted for some rich cokehead fail-son from the Bush dynasty because he seemed more “of the people”. But Al Gore takes the flak for trying to raise awareness. Unbelievable how dumb this country is as a whole. And 10x dumber now that the current POTUS is unwriting history at rocket’s pace.

Something something Florida recount and now those people are in trumps cabinet and even in the supreme court. The federalist society has been subverting democracy for a long time.

How was it a political ad?

Plus now we're paying everyone full salary to not work for many months. Complete waste.

This makes sense. A GS doesn't earn that much, but if they resign and go work for SpaceX and get paid as a contractor, doesn't this just cost the taxpayer more?

The normal formula we use is a range from 1.8x to 2.4x for fully loaded contractor labor rates based on contractor salary.

I presume we’ll be paying up to $576,000 for a senior engineer (GS15) equivalent from SpaceX

It's all part of the plan, which is referred to as the butterfly revolution, by Curtis Yarvin. Leaders that have literally invested in this platform are buying into this nonsense. Peter Theil, JD Vance, Marc Andreesen, Garry Tan, Srinivasan, and many others, wanting to overthrow democracy and dissolve nation states. This effort is to establish Network States with those that worship them, sycophants and cults. They want to transform the US into an Autocracy. The polarization of the media and political parties is on purpose. They want America to fall. It's not a secret, not a conspiracy theory. It's definitely being rolled out by billionaires. It would be wise for others here to really do your research and understand why we are being polarized to hate each other. Enter butterfly revolution:

1. Reboot (“full-power start”) Suspend or bypass existing constitutional limits; concentrate absolute sovereignty in one new organization—analogous to Allied occupation powers in post-1945 Japan/Germany. Eliminate checks and balances that block rapid change.

2. CEO-Monarch model A single executive (chosen like a corporate CEO) rules; the former president becomes a figurehead “chairman of the board.” Treat the state as a firm run for efficiency, not democratic representation.

3. RAGE strategy “Retire All Government Employees” by mass-firing the civil service and replacing it with loyal appointees. Remove institutional resistance (“the Cathedral”) and ensure obedience.

4. Parallel regime Build a fully staffed shadow government in exile before inauguration; unveil it on Day 1 to take over agencies at once. Prevent the bureaucratic slow-rolling that stymied Trump’s first term.

5. Media & academia clampdown Defund or shutter universities and independent press seen as hostile. Break what Yarvin calls the Cathedral’s cultural dominance.

Resources:

"The Straussian Moment", https://www.hoover.org/research/peter-thiel-straussian-momen...

Freedom Cities in Trumps presser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJA_GBhCGgE

Billionaire example: https://www.praxisnation.com

Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tec, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqHueZNEzig

A.I., Mars and Immortality: Are We Dreaming Big Enough? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV7YgnPUxcU&t=404s

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-in...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/11/patchwork-p...

All this revolution in the objectively best of times.

At least in past when people wanted to burn everything down they had a good reason. This is truly the dumbest period in human history.

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