The story of DOGE, as told by federal workers
wired.com
wired.com
Contractor teams end up staffed largely with builders who are held accountable for what they build not shipping, but it usually isn't shipping because it's held up by approval processes outside of the sphere of influence in which the contractor operates. Outside that sphere, feds tasked with releasing on a timeline end up frequently confused by perceived reticence on the part of the contractor--"why aren't they getting this bugfix out the door ASAP?" (answer: they are only often staffed for/limited in authority to building the thing and throwing it over the wall, not making sure it goes live).
What you get as a result is a situation where a cross-context group like the Digital Service is often the only way to speed up those bottlenecked processes. In other words, the problem was the failure at "getting us in contact with other gov folks to speed up releasing the fix", not the coding of the fix itself.
The larger solution to that failure mode is to fix the accountability matrix (I'll never stop linking to this article, which sums it up so well: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/understanding-the-cascade-of-...). That can mean a lot of things. It might mean that contractors are staffed/expected to work with fed shareholders running the release/approval processes to get their changes actually shipped. It might mean that federal departments bring more "build" or "technically own product delivery" expertise in-house. It might mean fixing/streamlining approval processes (this is lot harder than it sounds).
The first few months of DOGE were complete chaos. The senior executive service received conflicting information from one week to the next. Our operations were severely impacted without any benefit. We couldn't even go to test ranges for field testing.In addition to that, the five bullet points were a major security issue due to classification by aggregation.
Although DOGE is gone, we're still experiencing the fallout. There's more red tape than ever before. Everything requires multiple levels of approval - even ordering a replacement capacitor has to go up three levels of management. We're forced to bring defense contractors to our field tests because it's a fight to bring more than one federal employee, almost doubling the cost of any trip. It took half a year for us to even be allowed to mail equipment to various depots. Now, we're effectively forced to pay contractors for tasks we could do organically.
More privatization will drive up cost in the defense industry up significantly. I.E, an unnamed military contractor wants more than 5 million dollars for a line item breakdown for a quote they gave us.
DOGE villainized the average federal employee rather than addressing the true waste - overpaying Defense Contractors.
It's unfortunate that the reporting around such things doesn't actually dig into all this, but just gives quick sound bites without any real analysis.
I was referring to the inflated cost the DoD pays for everyday items. I.E, having to pay double or triple the market rate for things like office chairs, computer headsets, and WIFI dongles. There's no sustainment cost. Just an inflated price.
It's not the DoD, but this is happening out in the open at DHS where the secretary is requiring her personal sign-off on any purchase over $100k[0] when the previous limit was $25M.
Deployments of critical resources, such as tactical and specialized search and rescue teams, were delayed as a result of a budget restriction requiring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem to approve every purchase, contract and grant over $100,000[1]
All the incentives line up that this will only get worse.
This is EXACTLY what the PE firm did to my company after acquisition to "cut costs" and make numbers go up. I used to be able to sign off on my own purchase reqs up to $2000. That allowed me to easily acquire just about anything I needed and get my work done. Now I have to have EVERYTHING signed off on by upper management. As If I was an irresponsible spendthrift throwing money away on spare parts we actually needed. It's useless performative micromanagement by incompetent people. It's honestly insulting.
We received a quote containing two lines:
"Hardware Cost - xx million" "Software Cost - xx million"
There was no further information. No detail on how those numbers were derived, nor what we were paying for other than the "hardware and software needed for organic sustainment of the system in question. The defense contractor wanted over 5 million for any additional detail. We wouldn't know whether we receive documentation, schematics, etc without paying additional money. I don't mean that they wanted us to pay more for things like documentation or schematics. We wouldn't know what we are receiving until we pay.
We were providing engineering support for a DoD Program Office which normally deals in multi-billion dollar acquisitions. They treated ~5 million as pocket change. Over multiple system acquisitions, that adds up fast.
This will get you around the contractor requirement and the red tape.
I work in a DoD innovation org at the staff ;-) if you have questions let me know.
The deeper problem is that the richest man in the world bought his own department of the federal government of The United States and was allowed unchecked power within it. Nothing like this has ever occurred before in American history. The only thing that got him out was that Washington isn’t big enough for two egos as big as Musk and Trump, and one had to go. And since Musk’s people are still embedded in there, I would bet that he still has plenty of influence.
For those in the red tribe that support this, would you support George Soros or Bill Gates buying their own department and using it to rearrange the government to fit their will? Well, shit like that is now on the table. Good job.
It’s almost like they’re governing with the expectation of never losing an election
Democrat voters didn’t turn out this past election cycle. Even in the face of Trump. They’ve truly made their base apathetic. “Hold your nose” is a tough strategy to sell long term.
I will never forget what they did to Sanders. Maybe he would’ve lost anyways. It’s likely. But that whole take the high road thing is only messaging. Internally they function nothing like a democracy.
There are two ways: never loosing or ...
So when you say they "want smaller government" it's that they are literally agreeing with that statement verbatim rather then any plausible version of what that could be (and that's giving them credit: more cynically it's just "take away services from people who aren't me").
See Brexit for another national scale example of this: had anyone been forced to vote for a specific policy, it wouldn't have happened.
He and the rest of the pro EU side feared that any concrete plans would make it look more like a reasonable option.
It's like MS Word -- everyone agrees it's bloated, but everyone cannot agree on a subset of features that would be satisfactory.
facts not in evidence
tldr: no they do not
People with that mentality tend to believe most services provided by the government are waste by definition (especially any "social" services) and should be privatized. At the extreme end, they believe the only legitimate role of government is violence - war, policing and enforcing contract law. But somehow not taxes.
We live in reality, though.
Sir Humphrey summarises it fairly well, as usual: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks
"If, instead of Obamacare, the government was to offer some form of Affordable Care Act, would you be for or against that?"
Response was overwhelmingly ... for.
I also want to lose weight but I still want to eat lots of burgers with fries.
People want all sorts of things but they don't really want all the nasty details needed to make them happen and they definitely do not want the negative consequences of their hasty decisions.
George Soros or Bill Gates will never be able to buy their own department for reasons that the people with the tribalist lens can't seem to grasp: the democratic coalition is FAR more principled and fractured / diverse than the republican coalition. I can already hear people howl for evidence; for evidence, look no farther than the party platforms for the last few electoral cycles.
And my point wasn’t that the Democrats would. It’s that the Democrats could and may even be forced to, in order to win an election. If JD Vance is selling a department for $500M, from a game theoretical perspective, the Democrats may have no choice.
The whole problem is that all the norms that allowed the republic to function are being stripped away, and this is one of the biggest violations of our norms to date, yet no one has even mentioned this aspect.
Meanwhile, across the isle, a vague alignment in short term goals is basically all that keeps the left and the liberals together as a coalition. Whereas the right can say and do just about anything as long as it doesn't jeopardize their direct underlings' position in the overarching power structure, even small, strategic concessions can obliterate what little trust leaders have built up over the years.
It is tribal affiliation and tribal news channels at this point.
Thinking otherwise is the luxury of assuming you have different problems, and of not checking your assumptions.
_Currently_. On the other hand, realistically, it's impossible to imagine this happening under, say, Bush (either version of Bush), and yet now here we are. Things change.
Citation needed. Do elderly Americans selling their every worldly possession to pay for home healthcare after a medical crisis want reduced or increased government? Do single mothers unable to afford childcare want reduced or increased government? Do the people in Granbury, Texas suffering health effects from the noise of a Bitcoin mine want reduced or increased government? Do the Trump voters who want to round up and deport every last undocumented immigrant want reduced or increased government? Do the families stuck sending their chilren to failing urban schools want reduced or increased government? Do veterans struggling to access healthcare want reduced or increased government? Do consumers paying inflated prices to a proliferation of monopolies and private equity roll-ups want reduced or increased government?
Likewise, primary school funding and standards are largely state and local government issues. Cuts to federal staffing don't really impact that, either.
I'm not supportive of DOGE activities but if we're going to criticize then let's at least accurately connect cause and effect.
Everything is for sale, including government, if unregulated capitalism is the followed ideology.
This is the current state.
I have friends who work hard for the federal government to do things that people love. That curator who works at the museum of natural history to bring joy to a child who gets to learn something amazing about our world? That curator broke down sobbing at work multiple times this year. That's what they want.
We need to tell each other we are seen. We aren't alone. To keep our heads up. We will get through this together if we keep our heads up. Only when they can force us to cry alone do they win. They are weak and want unnatural things, which is why they are flooding the zone trying to break us all down separately and make us feel isolated/powerless. Every football team defense 'floods the zone' every field goal/extra point kick. It doesn't work. Don't let it work here.
We aren't brave and will just complain from the sidelines, but we can at least cheer on those not on the sidelines. It's never been easier to express support. Hit up peoples/institutions socials and tell them they are seen, tell them keep their heads up because we do support them.
The long game is going to be brutal, and the country bumpkins will suffer the most.
I reject the implied inevitability of your statement.
A nice read of your claim is you dont trust regular state employees at all - I could see that. But don't way overshoot by going 100 light-years beyond that.
I'll leave to others to argue say if musk is running tesla or X well.
There are two major drivers for talking about government inefficiency. One is the laws Congress passes, which agencies have to follow: requiring use of private contractors instead of hiring staff significantly increases costs and lowers efficiency, for example, and things like the Senate Launch System only make sense when viewed from the perspective of maximizing jobs in home states. The other is that a lot of the inefficiency is really differences in service: when people look at how much the post office, VA, SSA, etc. spend one of the things which is easy to forget is that they can’t reject people who are harder to serve so a comparison to companies who can stop serving unprofitable regions or demographics are going to be really misleading.
Side note, I think Al Gore was one of the most effective politicians of the last 50 years who wasn't president and he got tons of shit for it: 1. He never said he "invented the Internet", but he did give critical federal support to the Internet in its early days when he was a Senator, and technologists who actually know what they are talking about credit him with this, 2. He implemented the most successful reduction in the federal bureaucracy since WWII, 3. He conceded the 2000 election for the good of the country - he did not foment an uprising to try to fulfill his narcissistic supply, 4. He made many people aware of the dangers of climate change (though this may have admittedly backfired as some people interpret anything that comes from a Democratic voice as a "liberal hoax").
For a native English speaker, no it isn't.
Also fwiw, if you weren't working in the field at that time, experiencing the process of connecting to the then Internet, I don't think you can comment on this authoritatively.
For something on the scale of the internet, political alignment is absolutely critical for its creation, regardless of who invented it.
In particular, this sentence:
> Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
The citation for that links to this email from Vint Cerf, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/m.... The joint letter from Cerf and Kahn start with this:
> Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
> No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
And now people are pushing for AI coding where no one is going to write a code but only read it (with auto accept changes).
There’s a certain naivete coupler with arrogance required to believe one knows better, then push ahead to destroy older institutions and practices.
I read a lot of heavy stuff, but this collection of quotes makes me sick to my stomach.
And even more so: how this inhumane, perverted treatment of fellow human beings, regardless of whether you fantasize/reason that DOGE does net good for the planet, finds no mention yet in the comments here, at all. To add to that, these are people who have spent much of their life in public service, for the benefit of society.
To be honest, I don't even know what is worse; the quotes, or that.
“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
These people do not believe in America as it exists or the promise of what it could be. They hate us and they want to destroy what we have to create something fundamentally different.
Psychological violence is being committed and they're calling out physical violence.
It's a fantastic method of argument. But only a sociopath would use it.
From what I've read, this particular group of children naively thinks "AI" can and should do everything. As in, they think it's literally magic and have no clue how it or computing works. I remember reading about how one was asking on twitter how to use AI to convert word processor documents between formats, when that's a simple classic computing task. I'm afraid the next generation is going to think the only tool they need is a sledgehammer.
In fact it is not simple (e.g. convert PDF to MS Word or MS Word to Libreoffice without losses).
The problem isn't that we need another document showing how terrible these people are.
The problem is that we don't have people proposing effective, concrete steps to stop them.
You don't even need to bring morals into it or care about anyone else than your own peers. It just doesn't make any sense other than self-harm and a comprehensible yet pointless expression of own pain.
Republicans promised a bulldozer the size of a small city and they're delivering. Sometimes people prefer winning even if it means they lose.
They went big and the Democrats went home, offering "sensible policy" and "reasonable governance" and programs for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities.
None of that is bad on its face but it doesn't win elections. Especially when Elon is promising a Sandals resort on Mars.
Even if you disagreed with Bernie, the guy was willing to go big and bold and cared about what he was promising. It doesn't have to be universal healthcare. It can be UBI or building a solarpunk future or colonizing the bottom of the ocean. The Space Race. The Great Society. Morning in America. The New Deal. Something big and exciting and someone we believe really, really wants it.
The Republicans are promising front row seats to the end of the world and the Democrats are promising to check everyone's tire pressure. Understanding why the former can appeal more than the latter is the key to winning future elections.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker
Here's an effective, concrete step.
NATIONAL BOYCOTT OF ALL NON-ESSENTIALS.
It's far easier and less painful for the participants than a general strike (cause, you know, you won't get fired from your job for not spending money), but will bring MAGA's handlers to the bargaining table in a week. The only thing those ghouls love is money, and they only thing that scares the shit out of them is not making any.
It's also never going to happen (because there's no fucking way the dems want the hoi polloi to have that kind of power - and thus, they won't lift a finger to organize or assist it.)
Do your life perspective a favour and read the article.
If you're a US tax payer, do the future of your country a favour and read the article.
Everyone left and right instinctively knows this is, that it's a problem that they're both taxed directly for and (I hope) many people know they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime.
Don't worry – unless we stop giving out tax cuts as well, we'll still be running deficits until Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. For the average taxpayer, it's about fiscal sustainability - "smaller government" may as well be a feel-good abstraction compared to that.
I believe that is the reason why DOGE was supported by Trump, but I do think something like DOGE is needed but perhaps for better and less egotistical reasons.
Have you considered that maybe a segment of the population feels that way because of decades of propaganda targeted at dismantling the government?
It achieved neither of that.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
It's probably time to rethink where you are getting your news and analysis from.
https://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/s-9097
There are many more. But why not start with these?
The number of federal government employees has also remained mostly flat for the past 50 years (and IIRC most growth in overall public sector employment comes from schools).
Outgrowing government revenue is a different claim.
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
Reference: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...
It doesn't "raises questions" it "answers questions". Anybody who believes the republicans in America are "the party of fiscal responsibility" is a joke.
And SCOTUS. They have seized power of all three branches and "checks and balances" are but a memory.
Interesting way to say “they won a bunch of elections”.
If you actually believe in democracy and what it stands for you might have some concern, rather than just cheering on the team whose jersey you wear.
Whereas these days any Democrat supporting any Republican action is likely to get primaried at the next election, and vice versa.
Biden passed the bipartisan infrastructure act as well as USICA subsidies. The first step act was bipartisan. The deficit reduction in Obama's time was bipartisan. The american rescue plan wasn't bipartisan, but republicans claim credit for its effects. You don't really have much evidence here.
People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
In many cases, because they're slashing things that we are realizing that we do need, and we're going to pay even more to reconstruct the things they've destroyed.
The only way to effectively reducing spending and waste is by doing things slowly and carefully, evaluating the impact of the changes you are going to make carefully. This happened successfully in the 90s, but DOGE is not doing things that way.
From what I've seen the DOGE cuts have been incredibly efficient in isolating poorly spent (or corrupt) money. Lots of corrupt foreign programs or government donations into partisan political groups. Most of the time when someone says they shouldn't have cut money, they're talking about an NGO or some research that benefits their particular partisanship at the cost of fairness or scientific rigor; which is exactly what we shouldn't be funding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Clinton...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
Federal spending is up during this administration, the deficit is at modern-day averages, and the bills recently passed by this administration are going to increase it even further. The slash-and-burn style of cuts that DOGE is sloppy and ineffective. They are Chesterton's fencing themselves -- cutting things that they later find to be important. And on the other hand, not spending the time to actually seek out waste that is hard to find. A tech company works very differently than the government does, and they are slowly starting to discover that the hard way.
Which is incredibly ironic for people who claim to be "conservative."
The claim is that the government should act as a stabilizer: spending to drive aggregate demand during downswings (especially ones caused by external shocks) and regulating during up-swings.
In other words, "more" refers to different things and in different proportions in different phases of the business cycle; it's emphatically not a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" sort of thing.
Right. And those hundreds of millions went to tax cuts/benefits for the wealthiest (top 10%) among us, and less benefit to the bottom 10%, as well as trillions (3.8, in fact[0]) more in debt to actually pay for those cuts.
Yeah. We need more of that, right?
[0] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-05/61422-Reconciliatio...
On what timeline? The week of the first round of RIFs? The first month?
I assure you, as someone who works with in the space where DOGE has played, it will NOT be a reduction in costs in the long run. In fact, costs will go up because of the indiscriminate nature of "cost reduction". When the only people with knowledge of a system are removed, the remaining people cannot run it - no matter what AI they are given. At that point, you have to either hire back the people you fired, with a serious delay of important work, or you stumble for years until it can be figured out at the cost of delays, protests, lawsuits, whatever.
Considering firing everyone a reduction in costs is a shallow, short-term view.
That’s the first sign that a large group of people are going to something thoughtless and destructive.
Looking around at actual data from both gov and think tank sources, this quote from Pew is a good summary: “While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years.”
But that’s not the whole story. The postal service is shrinking, the vast majority of those federal employees work for the VA, the amount of funding being directed by the federal employees has grown (because of budget growth), federal regulations touch more private sector activity than in the past, and state and local governments employ significantly more people than they used to.
DOGE’s focus on headcount was wrongheaded because the number of federal employees is not the problem. The problem is Congress (budgets and laws) and states.
Conventional wisdom is that federal payroll growth is massive, and that is just wrong.
The US government at the start of this administration was roughly the same as it was in 1970[1]. This, despite the addition of new departments (1970 is pre-EPA, for example), many new responsibilities, etc. And obviously the government has to perform all these services for 140 million more people than in 1970, a 70% increase.
Doing more with the same resources is a textbook definition of increasing efficiency.
1 - Seriously, you won't see the growth you describe in the data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
Like any complex bureaucratic process, there will be errors, and they know that, so there are checks to correct those errors. And you need a lot of people (with a lot of tribal, historic, or contextual knowledge) to deal with that complexity. But you don't hear that full story. You hear a sound bite of a partial truth selectively repeated by people who want to pass off a specific narrative.
Another way to think about it: think of the oldest legacy computer system at a company you're aware of. Now realize the US government has computers going back to 1965, and paper records from way, way before then.
Sadly, the competence and conviction of DOGE does not match the namesake of that quote. They do match the insanity, though.
The popular sayings are not an argument. They somt count as one.
Don't make an omelette with bad eggs.
It starts with these paragraphs, if you want to seek to it:
"This is the goal of the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. This is an advisory commission rather than an official government department. Musk has famously vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending—roughly 30% of last year’s federal budget.
Although this sounds good on paper, achieving such a target will be quite challenging, given the composition of government spending. Last year, the government spent $6.75 trillion, with $4.1 trillion (61%) classified as mandatory spending."
[0] https://www.lynalden.com/full-steam-ahead-all-aboard-fiscal-...
The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything? Paying for things that are ineffective or unnecessary? Would it be better to means test certain benefits so that the government isn't making big social assistance payouts to recipients with a net worth over a million dollars? Is there any Medicare fraud?
The next largest and almost as big is social security, so what happens if we means test that program, or even just get rid of the reverse means testing in the existing program which makes larger payouts to people who made more money?
These things would all reduce "mandatory" spending, potentially by a significant amount, and there is nothing preventing that from happening except for the false insistence that it can't be done.
e.g. if I ask you to submit receipts for literally everything that you bought in the last week, in order to give you a $20 stipend weekly, you will probably not bother, even if you could use the $20, and it will probably cost more than $20 to pay me for the time processing that.
I'm not saying there's no waste, but I am saying that the optimal amount of waste to reward is nonzero.
It’s also why “Medicare For All” runs into opposition. It’s hard to make the case that a healthy 22-year-old is entitled to a lifetime of free health care before paying a dime into the system.
Moreover, it doesn't have anything to do with whether you could modify those programs to cost less money if your primary goal was to lower spending.
We can just decide to make things public services. No one ever says "wait a minute, kids shouldn't be get to use roads for free before paying a dime into the system." It sounds ridiculous! But for some reason, people buy that logic when it comes to healthcare and college.
If you are by yourself, who is obligated to fulfill that right?
For example, since slavery was legal before the Civil War, does that mean the slaves had no right to be free?
The proposed right to health care does exactly that.
The economic future potential of a healthy 22-year-old is way higher than an aged 68-year-old. I don't think it's very hard at all to make the case we should be spending money on keeping the 22-year-old healthy, in fact I think it's very easy to tilt so far into claiming it's so that you'd be justifiably accused of cruelty ("what if everyone over 70 were tossed into the Soylent Green vats," etc.)
What is so hard about it?
I’m describing why it has not been enacted in America, not making an argument about how I think things should be.
The majority in the US (as of 2022, according to Gallup) believe healthcare should be universally provided.
The majority also believe it should not be a government responsibility.
Broadly speaking, the US position is "Our current system sucks and we should be providing people healthcare detached from presence or absence of individual insurance... But also the government cannot be trusted to successfully execute on complex national projects."
Then suddenly, some random guy in a mustang doing 150 in a 30 jumps the curb and runs over our optimistic 22-year-old, and continues speeding into the distance. A random onlooker witnesses the event and calls an ambulance, who rushes them to the hospital. Thanks to the hard work ICU doctors and surgeons spanning days, our 22-year-old miraculously lives, but is in bad shape. They're never gonna walk again, and they're gonna need weeks of physical therapy just to retrain the fine motor skills required to write and type.
All of this, for a variety of factors is gonna cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. On top of the massive hospital bill they're about to be saddled with.
I take it that our now not-so-healthy 22-year-old should just go fuck themselves then? They've never paid a dime into the system so why should they be entitled to health care?
No, no one is entitled to the labor of others, not in this scenario where they are 3rd party to the damages. That doesn't even remotely make sense no matter how bad of a sob story you attach to it.
Absolutely! We should just Brian Kilmeade[0] those folks too, since they're just a burden on society, right?
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/09/17/...
I'm just advocating putting the violent methods aside.
Mercy, mercy me!
Or are you just spouting ridiculous tropes? Charity? Work-Trade? Loans? Paid by whom in that scenario?
I'd expect you're more in line with Kilmeade than McCain. Why don't you just admit it? It's all out in the open now, no need to hide any more. You'll be broadly lauded for your economic smarts!
Please.
You're defeating your own argument.
It's not additional tax money, it's money that doesn't need to go to corporate jets and huge pay packages for the C-Suite and large dividends for the shareholders of insurance companies, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers.
And the tens to hundreds of billions we save on that can pay for that 22 year old.
But we can't have that, now can we? Better to Brian Kilmeade 'em, eh?
Are you really that ignorant of the issue, or are you just being deliberately obtuse?
We as a society already pay way more than we would with a rational single-payer system. That's not hyperbole either.
What's more, not having employers and employees pay insurance premiums would more than offset any additional taxes.
But you knew that already, because we've known this to be the case for most, if not all, of your life.
I'm done explaining the facts of life to you. Perhaps you should ask your dad.
A lot of people have a broken sense of fairness where they're only willing to help someone else if everyone else is required to do it too. It's one of the things causing the world to burn.
Some of this is even learned behavior. A lot of the dumbest econ 101 classes teach people that giving to charity is irrational. (It's not irrational. It's something you do because you want to do it, like eating cake or buying a fast car. Once your basic needs are met, the purpose of having money is to use it for the things you want to use it for. It's not irrational to want to do something good instead of something insalubrious.)
And armies and armies of middle-folk who are adjudicating from afar whether a given medical procedure is justified or not.
The way the US practices paying for medicine is, counter-intuitively, very expensive because we pay a lot of people to find reasons to justify not paying for it. If we took their salaries and put them into actual service provision, and cut down the vast web of categories and sub-categories to salami-slice the nickels and dimes, we'd spend far less on employment of arbiters and on paperwork and we'd have more money to pay for more services (and no a priori reason to believe the system would oversaturate).
Work-trade when it's someone's health is slavery, so we're going to go ahead and pull that off the table.
Loans are, more or less, how we've gotten into the awful state we are currently in in the US with unpayable medical debt.
I propose an alternate approach: medical care is a civil service that you can voluntarily provide, like fire prevention or undrafted military service. If you do, you are paid the rate the society agrees to for the work. We all pay for it with taxes. If we want more of it, we raise taxes and incentives. This removes several perverse market effects and sets up a minimum standard of care divorced from individual circumstance to level out the effect of bad luck a bit.
This is, more or less, a model that many countries are currently enjoying.
Because some people want to help others beyond what they're forced to do. There is a long history of charitable health services in the US and worldwide, you might rightly ascertain they can't possibly provide all of medical care, nonetheless it's non-zero enough to dispel the notion it can't be provided in the absence of an entitlement.
> medical care is a civil service that you can voluntarily provide,
Civil services are funded by people working to pay their taxes. Work-trade when it's someone health is slavery, so work-trade when it's to not have to go in a tiny cage dragged away by an IRS agent has to be slavery too, especially when you consider the health implications of that.
Therefore the public / civil service options are tossed out by your own criteria.
Loans, again, if those aren't allowed you can toss out any government option because that's a huge part of how the government is funding itself.
Using your own criteria only charity or cash payments would be allowed. Not sure I agree with that one, but that's what you're leaving us with.
Taxes aren't slavery; they're how we operate modern, functional, post-feudal societies (and whether they are actually "paying for" services or are "redistributing supply and demand more equitably by curtailing the spending power of the ones who have too much so that the ones who have too little can have access to resources at all" is an implementation detail for macroeconomists and operators of fiat currencies).
You do raise the interesting question of funding it by buying bonds though. I don't see an issue with that; the argument against loans is a practical one, not a theoretical one ("the private debt incurred upon patients is, in essence, an involuntary one-sided loan granted to them, and we've seen that lead to massively unfair outcomes"). Voluntarily loaning the government money seems to work great and is miles distant from involuntarily-accrued (or accrued under duress; "sure, that procedure is optional because you always have the option to die") medical debt.
False. You can be jailed for "tax evasion" which could be as simple as simply saying "yes I owe taxes, no I won't bother calculating and I have put all my money in bitcoins and I'll never give them to you." That needn't be fraud -- everything about that could be 100% accurate and true with no intend to defraud yet still criminal. (btw we still have debtor's prison -- you can be jailed for not paying child support debts and the absurd argument often used you're jailed for violating the court order to pay the debt rather than owing the debt is little more than a legal parlor trick).
>Taxes aren't slavery
They are by your definition, where I need to trade work to pay for them to improve my health (get thrown into a prison, a den of disease and mental health problems). Of course, we could get into a semantic debate about slavery, but it's clear you've already defined slavery not to be literal chattel slavery, i.e. as black people in chains working the cotton fields, rather you appear to be referring to being forced to work under threat of violence which in this case you take the violence to be a threat to your health.
>You do raise the interesting question of funding it by buying bonds though. I don't see an issue with that; the argument against loans is a practical one, not a theoretical one ("the private debt incurred upon patients is, in essence, an involuntary one-sided loan granted to them, and we've seen that lead to massively unfair outcomes"). Voluntarily loaning the government money seems to work great and is miles distant from involuntarily-accrued (or accrued under duress; "sure, that procedure is optional because you always have the option to die") medical debt.
I also find this to be one of the most interesting solutions. Hypothetically if a 22 year old were to have some illness, it's totally conceivable that a bunch of lenders could bid for a race to the bottom so the 22 year old could get a loan low enough that it would easily be both a net positive for him and for the people who helped loan the money that saves him. Of course, if charity or some other option is available instead, all the better.
In any case, the biggest enemy for both of us is overregulation of the health system. Once medical licensing is eliminating and medical regulations eliminated, fights over how to pay become much lower stakes.
Not even remotely related. Yes, if you fail to bother to calculate your taxes you can be liable. If you do calculate them and you can't pay them, the government works out a payment plan. These trains of thought more or less died with Thoreau arguing why he shouldn't pay taxes (while living on borrowed property owned by his rich neighbor).
> Once medical licensing is eliminating and medical regulations eliminated
Independent issue to paying for medicine. If I understand correctly, your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could. Those regulations are paid for in blood (or in this case, snake-oil); agree to disagree that lowering the constraints wouldn't just return us to the bad practices that required the constraints in the first place.
>your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could
Really all the above. Probably even more so due to stuff like the intertwining of the insurance and pharmaceutical and medical industries with regulatory apparatus creating all the worst regulatory capture incentives to rent-seek patients with the free market destroyed.
The "agree to disagree" isn't necessary because it isn't relevant.
People can argue that quacks used to show up to rip people off and then skip town before people caught on that snake oil is snake oil, but they couldn't really do that anymore because now we have the internet which allows your past victims to notify your future victims even if they live in a different city.
But that argument is boring. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, because the laws that really make medicine expensive aren't the ones that require you to register as a doctor so they can more easily investigate quacks. They're the ones that e.g. the AMA has lobbied for to limit the supply of doctors. And we could get rid of those regardless of whether we also get rid of the other ones.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3890
The practical reality is that charity does not meaningfully solve these problems at scale.
Now if you offered me a deal, I could substitute all my taxes, or even everyone's taxes, for charity, yes I would take that in a heartbeat. In all likelihood I think I would probably donate about 10% of my income to charity if there were no taxes, but the government is so terribly ineffectual it might actually beat the 20-30% I pay now.
There is no savings I can identify there, nor in my tax records, which have only increased in % as I've made more money. And all well above the 10% of the income I would pledge to donate to charity if taxes are eliminated. But yes I have donated to charity on occasion (sometimes formally, sometimes directly in cash to people that needed it), despite the fact I keep getting taxed harder every year and despite the fact the government robs me of ~20-30% of my income under its own bloated forcible charity scheme.
[] https://www.concordcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/...
And while it may be an edge case, these are large, broad systems that directly impact the lives of millions of living, breathing people. Such systems must be robust and well-examined.
And I'd also like to ask what a society would look like, that invests so heavily in the education of it's young generation, and relies on them to bring innovations and new ideas to the table, only to cut them down the moment they need any sort of assistance. It certainly seems to me like a huge waste of resources.
What if healthcare was just an investment in our society? Our young 22-year-old gets healthcare covered not because he's entitled to it but because society is invested in his well-being in order to continue existing and improve itself. Because the ROI of the young being kept healthy and able to work and pay into the system is greater than the cost of the ICU doctors and surgeons and wheelchairs and physical therapy.
Based on your criteria it's the most textbook case for an individual loan imaginable, your argument is the 22 y/o needs a loan for some healthcare, that he can more than pay it back, and that both parties will benefit. In the absence of charity, some kind of trade, family or friend assistance, then in any rational market (US market is regulated to hell so no guarantee it works there unless you free that market) it's a no brainer and as sure as an apple will fall from a tree, someone would be happy to make that trade although the kinetics and packaging might be up for debate.
I don't see how you can possibly presuppose a requirement for public assistance, in that scenario, in order for the health care to happen. Public assistance is only economically necessary to complete the health care if there is negative ROI and all donation or voluntary options are exhausted.
Is it also hard to make the case for them to have police protection or being allowed to use a public park before paying a dime into the system?
But that's a very different question than whether it would lower the budget, and we're talking about programs that are paying out a lot more than $20. If doing means testing means you can stop paying $1000+/month to someone who is already a millionaire, that's still a savings even if it adds $20 in overhead. Meanwhile we're already paying the cost of doing the means testing, because we do it in reverse, and removing that would increase efficiency and lower spending.
Moreover, other taxes require keeping track of that stuff regardless. You already have to track the value of your assets for the purposes of capital gains tax and property tax. Doing that calculation to begin with isn't free, but the incremental cost of copying that line from the other tax forms onto the Medicare form would cost far less than it does to pay benefits to people who don't need the money. And it also has an efficiency benefit whenever it isn't a cash payment, since insurance is a moral hazard -- if the government is paying for something then you take it even if you value it at a third of what it costs, whereas if you're paying your own money you don't buy things that cost more than they're worth, so having less insurance coverage for people who could afford to pay out of pocket increases efficiency.
Only if these hypothetical millionaires you are stopping make up more than 1/50 of the people you are means-testing. You are not only paying for those who fail the means-test, but for all those who are passing it.
Then why don't we use the non-hypothetical numbers? More than 10% of retirees are millionaires and the $1000+ in payments is actually $2000+ on average and even more for the people who made enough money to be millionaires.
Also worth noting net worth "over a million dollars" is not extravagant for a Medicare-age person who did not have a pension, for example. This is basically a median home and $600k in savings. Not poor, but also not likely to be able to pay anything close to rack rate for health insurance for an older person.
While not attached to citizenship, there already is something built in. New immigrants to the US often have to have a financial sponsor (I did, on my K-1 fiance visa). That sponsor has to agree (and demonstrate ability) that in the event that the new immigrant claims public benefits in the first ten years of their residence in the US (Medicare, Social Security, etc.) that the government is entitled to recoup those benefit costs from the sponsor.
This is a political non-starter as it opens the possibility that younger people could also just buy into Medicare instead of paying more for private insurance, something which has been declared strictly off-limits. (Although it would help offset costs to have a lower-risk pool of insureds come into the program, in addition to the other societal benefits.)
> earning 5% APY would be getting more than that in interest
Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
> imputed rent on the $400,000 house
They live in the house, which lowers their monthly expenses to a level where they can pay them using Social Security and the interest from their savings.
Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years. And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
Whether something would have a particular policy outcome and whether you have the votes to pass it are two different things. Moreover, you could obviously require wealthy retirees to pay for Medicare without allowing younger people to do it. Stranger things have happened.
> Remember that we are largely talking about retirees. That $1400 + their Social Security is how they pay living expenses. If they have to pay it for healthcare, they have to find another way to pay living expenses.
They do have another way to pay living expenses. They have $600,000+ plus a house, and as soon a they only had $599,999 plus a house they would no longer have to pay the full rate for Medicare.
> Larger point here is that the suggestion to means test for seniors represents a clawback, a violation of promises made decades ago, around which people planned their elderly (perhaps non-working) years.
You can just as easily make the contrary argument. These programs were never funded -- social security started out making payments to people who never paid in and there isn't anywhere near enough in the "trust fund" to make existing payouts. The people paying the taxes to make up the shortfall were too young to be eligible to vote or not even born when those promises were made, so by what right does an older generation have to bind them to a promise it made to itself and then never actually funded?
> And we're talking about doing so before we ask the rich to pay (as Warren Buffet says) the same tax rates as their secretaries, and before we trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military.
How about we do this and trim the military budget back to the levels requested by the military so that we can lower the taxes on the secretary to the same rates paid by Warren Buffet?
They were funded. But administration after administration constantly "borrows" from it, and then (in one party's case) points to the shortfall as proof of a "failure".
No, they weren't. There was never a point in the history of social security where you could continue making the payments to existing retirees on the basis of the saved up money they paid in themselves so that a future generation could decide that they would prefer to both not pay into and not receive social security.
There have been years when working people paid more into the program than retirees withdrew, i.e. when less than all of the money paid by the current generation went immediately to the previous generation, but that money was never even close to enough to fund the promised future payouts.
Moreover, Congress "borrows" the money in the sense that the Social Security Administration holds it as government bonds rather than cash, but then the Social Security Administration gets the interest on the bonds.
The problem is, that was never even close to enough money either way, because the program was configured from the outset to transfer most of the money from current working people to current retirees instead of investing it at interest in order to make the future payments to the people paying into it. This could have been slightly better if the "trust fund" was invested in stocks rather than government bonds because they pay more interest, but it still wouldn't have been near enough. And if even that was the case then the government in those past years couldn't have spent as much money because it would have lost that huge sink for government debt, in which case all the people currently collecting social security would have had to have paid higher taxes for the level of government services they received.
Meanwhile using the money from existing workers for existing retirees not only doesn't actually fund the program, it only even fails to implode as long as you a) never intend to wind the program down and b) the ratio of working people to retirees never decreases. But the ratio of working people to retirees did decrease, because people started having fewer kids and living longer, so now the unfunded "trust fund" isn't just insufficient to make the payments to the people who are currently paying in, it's soon not even going to be able to make the payments to the people who are currently retired, because it's now shrinking rather than growing as a result of more people collecting for each one paying in.
Yes, there are issues with Social Security and Medicare. Not least of which is that, at least for the next thirty years or so (at least until the baby boomers are mostly all dead -- not because I wish them ill, but because later generations are smaller, constraining the pool of contributors to SS/Medicare).
A simple fix (that would give us ~50 years to figure out how to do this better) would be to remove the income cap on SS/Medicare contributions. Currently, that's $176,100[0]. Doing so would keep SS/Medicare solvent long enough to figure out how to structure the safety net appropriately, without jeopardizing the health/well being of those who paid in expecting it to work for them too.
On top of that, tax incidence is more complicated than "well the people paying it have higher incomes". Federal revenue has been a stable percentage of GDP since WWII, whereas that's an enormous increase in government collections exceeding all historical precedent, and the money had previously been going somewhere else, and the somewhere else (investment markets) would notice it going away. In other words, a tax hike that big would crash the stock market and the housing market etc.
There is no simple fix for this. People voted for a government willing to write them a check it couldn't cash and your only real choices are "don't give that much to wealthy retirees" or "take it from the economy at the expense of the kids".
No. Not even close. It's not increasing anyone's taxes. It's just making them fairer. Most folks have to pay those taxes on all their income. Why should it be any different for the folks with the highest incomes?
What's more, I can say from experience that not paying SS/Medicare taxes over the arbitrary limit makes exactly zero material difference in my quality of life.
Whereas keeping SS/Medicare solvent while we figure out a better way will have a significant positive impact on my life and the lives of millions of others.
Don't be disingenuous. If there isn't anyone paying more than they are now then there isn't any additional government revenue.
> Most folks have to pay those taxes on all their income. Why should it be any different for the folks with the highest incomes?
The way social security works is that you pay in proportion to your income and then you receive social security payments in proportion to what you paid. There is a cap on both of these. You're proposing to only remove the cap on one of them. That's the same "fairness" argument for not solving the problem by making social security payments according to need or in fixed amounts, so if you're not concerned about that fairness equation then you already have a way of solving the problem without raising taxes.
> What's more, I can say from experience that not paying SS/Medicare taxes over the arbitrary limit makes exactly zero material difference in my quality of life.
This is what I mean by tax incidence. It's not your life which is affected. You're just putting the extra money in your IRA or whatever. But at scale that has consequences for other people. What do you expect happens if you take literally trillions of dollars out of capital markets?
What a ridiculous trope.
Where do you think those fairer taxes will go? They don't just disappear from existence as you imply. Rather they get plowed right back into the economy. Into the hands of Social Security recipients (so people like your grandmother may not have to go without eating or eat cat food to survive) who will spend most of it almost immediately, and for medical/healthcare products and services.
In that scenario, will such moneys be a net positive for you personally? Probably, as millions of folks won't be starving in the streets and dying of preventable causes because their only means of sustaining themselves has been co-opted so you can have your "number go up."
More economic activity from fairly collecting existing taxes (that's what buying groceries and shoes and prescriptions is) will increase the velocity of money and grow the economy faster than the hoarding you're advocating. And "number go up" will continue.
Don't care about anyone else but you? Enjoy seeing people suffer and die for your marginal benefit? If so, come out and say it. It's at least a defensible, if evil and selfish, argument -- unlike the ridiculous one you made.
1) You start off saying the mandatory spending is a ruse.
2) You provide no evidence for it.
3) You ask some pretty basic (still good) questions that each department already undergoes.
4) You conclude the spending must not be mandatory after all, just by the mere existence of your questions. Almost assuming the worst case answer to each question you raised.
Do you understand this is Seagull budget planning? I am no government defender, but I am consistently flabbergasted by people who think government fraud detection started and ended with DOGE. Do you guys seriously write "Are we paying for unnecessary things" as though it's an insightful question nobody in government has looked into before? Even after we have confirmed DOGE did fuck all and likely made this whole process even worse?
It isn't a novel question, which is how we know so conclusively that the answer is "yes, the government is paying for many unnecessary things". The people receiving the money keep lobbying to prevent it from being eliminated, so the primary thing preventing it from being eliminated is government authority to actually change things. Whether or not that's what DOGE did, it's the thing a government efficiency operation could and ought to do.
Yeah, it's over paying for private equity vultures who overcharge to extra maximum profit from healthcare. But that's reform that sorely needs to happen by the government reigning in those private companies not to the government. By trying to "drown [the government] in the bathtub" like Norquist advocated, project 2025 asshats are damaging our country.
Some things are mandatory only if you love your neighbor.
So the government passes regulations that cause private equity asshats to jack up prices, e.g. by making it infeasible to start new companies to compete with them, and then the government overpays to buy things from them, but this is somehow not the government's doing?
Bad regulations passed at the behest of private asshats are still bad regulations and the solution is still to repeal them.
> Some things are mandatory only if you love your neighbor.
And some things aren't mandatory at all, like having the government overpay for stuff which is nevertheless classified as "mandatory" spending.
Nope. That's not what I said, but nice try.
It means we don't allow for-profit companies to run our healthcare. Public. Accountable. Non-Profit.
Accountability comes from the ability to reject something objectionable, i.e. it comes from having other alternatives that subject the provider to competitive pressure. That's not what you get from a government agency, nor is it what you get from a consolidated market where the incumbents have captured the government. It is what you get from a competitive market, which is the thing we currently lack.
Regardless, it was nice talking. Have a great week!
That's on top of the fact that it would require Congress to change the law to make that happen, no department of government efficiency can do it.
this assumes these people aren't actual complete dumbasses in this domain
(they are)
"Mandatory spending includes entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which are legally required to provide benefits to eligible recipients. Even if DOGE wanted to, this spending can’t be cut. To change these programs’ funding, eligibility, or benefits, Congress must vote to amend the laws, a daunting task in the current polarized political climate.
Compounding the issue, President-Elect Trump recently stated his unwillingness to touch Social Security or Medicare. In addition, the Republican Party included protecting these programs as one of twenty promises in its 2024 GOP Platform.
If the incoming administration follows along party lines, that leaves discretionary spending (26%) as the only realistic target to trim spending."
And yet with what he's done, federal spending has increased $400B this year.
I mean… what additional evidence would it take? Police, DBI, his discord messages, the texts to his trans boyfriend?
Wow, that’s amazing, can you please post a source for that completely made up nonsense?
You're also ignoring the candidates themselves
Smart people admit they are wrong and learn, then move on for the better. The stagnant macho person will never learn anything and just wants status quo in perpetuity, so long as it benefits them.
Usually I have a specific video in mind that is relevant, but this feels like a good time to link the whole series. It’s a good, informative, and (depressingly) humorous look at the alt-right - and while it doesn’t offer much in solid solutions, I think being able to understand how they operate and where they’re coming from allows us all to have a better chance in mitigating them and stopping the tide of fascism.
[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnz...
Man I love being right.
Edit: and who TF would have thought putting "big balls doge kid" in a position of power would be a good thing? That kid, along with whomever hired him, would be tossed out of any professional corp env swiftly.
It started and ended with malicious intent and demonstration of power. Classic Trump.
The correct spirit is how it was done under Clinton / Gore. Slowly, thoughtfully, carefully, properly planned and delicately executed.
(and this says nothing of party politics or the quality of president that Clinton was, this is only commentary of that particular action as comparison)
Congressional oversight in combination with incorporating CBO[0] work products to perform the oversight obviates the purported need for DOGE.
> ... Elon was absolutely the wrong guy to put in charge of it. Misplaced incentives, lack of interpersonal skills, lack of respect and empathy, lack of organizational skills ...
A more succinct way to describe this is; corruption.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Budget_Office
But people who have some level of fame who put their name behind it, and who had some influence in inspiring others down this wrong path most definitely need to address it. If you truly believe the intelligence of tech people over others in every field which led you down this path, follow the proper postmortem process.
It reminds me of Ancient Greece and the Sophists: they mastered persuasion as an art at the expense of reason, logic, and truth.
I'm not sure why you think any of them would believe they were wrong. I don't think any of them were hoping for some kind of transformation other than destruction.
sounds about right
In the federal space, we’ve seen purges of women and minorities, shutdowns of groups which work on things like civil rights or pollution in poor communities, widespread refusal to pay money as promised, and attempts to punish organizations for 1st amendment activities. There is zero expectation of good-faith from anyone who supports that.
You say that not all right wingers are bigoted, and then go on to proclaim the entire group doesn't recognize minorities as being human. Have you spoken honestly and in good faith with right wingers?
They don't "hate gay people". (They have gay friends!) But they don't think gay people should be able to marry or adopt children. Sometimes Leviticus comes up.
They don't "hate Black people" (They have black co-workers!). They just think the disparities in the justice, education and financial systems are all Black people's own fault.
They don't "hate immigrants" (They love Mexico!), they just think they're not assimilating, taking American jobs and draining tax payer resources.
Trans people seem to be the only group they'll outright admit to hating.
Oh, and Democrats. They really hate Democrats.
As I said, Texas is fun.
I have a number of family and a few remaining right-wing acquaintances (all of the libertarians I knew are voting straight-ticket for Democrats against MAGA) – not “kinda liked Reagan” but people who’ve had worked published in national media or been invited to dinner at Rupert Murdoch’s estate. Privately, people express concern or distaste for anti-liberty actions - but not in public, never to the point of standing up for a group being targeted. Like the Mexican woman who cleans their house, she’s great even if her husband was originally undocumented, so of course ICE shouldn’t go after them – but they won’t speak up on behalf of anyone they don’t know personally, even just to call for due process.
I left the Republican sphere during the Bush years when it became obvious that for all of the talk about ethics and the rule of law during the Clinton administration, there wasn’t a desire to hold their fellows to that same standard. Sadly, it’s only gotten worse since then – as we can see from the blatant lawlessness this year where even people who might share goals like reducing government spending or reconsidering industrial policy should feel safe saying there’s a better, legal way to do it.
Unfortunately your/US views have become simplistic (yes simplistic) along two hyper extremes. Both sides are wrong at this stage. Just wrong in different ways.
This opinion comes from having many conversations with (real, not online) people who literally state that they consider that the government is inherently evil and it's sole function is to rob people of their liberty and hard earned money. I've spent a considerable amount of time doing business travel and working in parts of the country where I've heard people, in an public office conversation, voice that support for public radio is literally fascism to nodding agreement among their peers. I once mentioned an experience I had in the beginning of the pandemic and the response was "oh yea, that's when people still thought it was serious right?"
I don't think these people are inherently evil, they believe the government is evil and that those who work for it are working to undermine everyday Americans. If you actually had a conversation with anyone deep in the MAGA community you would know that harming the federal government, for them, is seen as a victory and virtuous.
It's baffling to me that anyone can still not understand the foundation of the MAGA community and growing extreme right. For years they have increasingly felt that their way of life has been robbed from them (and to be fair, it has been, rural communities in the US are in trouble), and they sincerely believe that this is caused by sinister forces working in the federal government, immigrants, the global elite, and "radical" woke leftists that want to harm their children.
I didn't see the cultural reference. Never heard of Baudrillard before. I was just playing off the word "revenge".
That being said, your take did stop me in my tracks. Even though it's not the first time I see sentiments like this on HN.
You said:
> I don't think any of them were hoping for some kind of transformation other than destruction.
Maybe I read you wrong. But isn't that the opposite of "Don't attribute to malice ..."?
I mean, come on. How many people grow up really wanting to do harm?
Sure, there are some. For example, there are people who have no power to create anything. For them, being able to at least destroy someone else's creation can be a form of satisfaction. Like the kid in kindergarden that doesn't have the patience to build a brick tower, but takes joy in smashing down someone else's. It's a low-effort way on leaving some mark. "I destroyed, therefore I am." Such people exists.
But those aren't the people you're targeting here, are they? As I read it, you're targeting Trump, Musk, and perhaps all the proponents of "small government". Who are, by and large, people who build, create and have an impact on our time. I'd argue that the idea of "small government" appeals first and foremost to those who stand to gain from lower taxes and less regulation - i.e. those who already do affect the world around them.
There are many reasons why someone might disagree with these people's values. For example, one might argue that nobody deserves to be that rich, or that wealth should be distributed, etc.. You could argue that "small government" is really just the selfish interest of those who stand to gain from it, in just the same way as "big government" is just a selfish interest of those who stand to gain from that. That it isn't about right or wrong at all, but about what camp you are in.
But the idea that "small government" people want to destroy America? That's a circle I can't square. There are interviews of Trump from the 1980s where he spoke about America vs. China, etc.. You may disagree with his ideas about how to make and keep America great. But the idea that he's driven by a desire of destroying the country? Is that rhetoric, or do you really think that's what he secretly dreams about?
What about Reagan in the 80s? He talked about "small government", reducing regulation, agencies, etc.. Do you think he hated the country?
And Elon Musk? The man has been talking about making human life multiplanetary. Heck, he's launching one rocket after another in order to get there. Every single endeavour of his (maybe with the exclusion of PayPal and Zip2), at least from his perspective, is explicitly pro-human in motivation: Sustainable energy, human-friendly non-monopolistic AGI, self driving, multi-planetary humanity. Again - I can understand if someone disagrees with these efforts. But the idea that this man is looking in the mirror every morning thinking, "Let's see how I can destroy this country"? Like, everything he does and says 24/7 over decades is just a façade to hide the real secret wish? All that work is supposed to be just a disguise? He pretends to love humanity, because, deep down, he really hates it? That makes my head spin.
There was this debate in the 16th century between Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus said that a human is good if he strives to do good deeds. Being human, you don't see the whole picture, so you may err. But as long as you strive to do the best you can, to be courageous, to use what you've been blessed with for the good of all, you are good – and even if you err, you will be forgiven. Luther countered: No - an evil man can never be good. You're either one of the chosen ones that are good, or you're inherently bad. And if you're inherently bad, then whatever you touch is going to be tainted with evil. You're not a person, you're not a soul - you're a mere vessel for the devil, and it would be foolish to even argue with you.
I'm quite sure there are people who hate society. But where I'd look for them is among criminals and fraudsters. Every crypto scam, every Nikola or Theranos. That's where I see a hatred of humanity. Or, if not hatred, then at least a disregard of everyone outside of their own circle, or of those who came before and who will come after them.
Isn't it a much safer assumption that most people are trying to be good and helpful? They sure can develop a damn blindspot, or myopia. For example, in the internet space, I'd say Cloudflare is "destroying" a lot of the web's original openness. But that still doesn't make me believe they do what they do out of a desire to destroy. They just focus on one kind of stakeholder at the expense of some others. If I went out there on Hacker News and claimed the Cloudflare CEO was driven by a pure hatred of the internet, everyone would think that I must be a grumpy dude with anger issues. And rightfully so, as it would be just an over-emotionalized reaction to an adverserial situation.
If you say you think the DOGE efforts were misguided, that the execution was flawed, or that the goal of downsizing government expenses in itself was the wrong thing for the country - that's an argument I can follow.
Anyway. I'm off doing my homework - checking out Baudrillard!
For an example: Sergei Brin, Sebastian Thrun, and Elon Musk were all interested in self-driving cars. Musk has been making materially misleading statements promising to deliver L5 in the next year or so many times since 2013, and still doesn’t have more than L2. Waymo did not promise things they couldn’t deliver, treated safety as a top priority, and is expanding L4 taxi services around the country. They’re all interested, Waymo is serious, but Musk’s strategy has made him enormously rich and I think that’s always been his top priority.
I have no idea what kind of person thinks that was a good idea.
>money to people who hate you is insane
-Do all the people who receive the money hate us?
-Why does it matter if some people receiving help hate us? Why is this insane?
>And most of that money goes to warlords and dictators
How do you know?
Why?
>But government needs to live within its means.
Which is what? No deficit? That's not possible so if you will allow some debt then why not USaid but other programs are left?
I know many folks that don't have any animus to individual people. They just have been brainwashed since early childhood...
At the very best you'll get "the left forced them to do it" but blank denial of reality and invention of entirely fake parallel worlds is much more likely.
They've been doing that for climate, renewables, COVID, Trump etc. far longer than for DOGE with no sign of giving up.
He and his businesses have had several interactions with the federal government of varying antagonism but this is nothing like Trump firing Comey.
I think that it's pretty apparent that the pdf you linked is a pretty partisan document that makes a lot of tenuous links between Musk recommending firing the low level employees and his interactions with the heads of those agencies.
The fact is that DOGE made cuts to NHTSA. It is also a fact that DOGE made cuts to a bunch of agencies, not just ones related to something Elon was doing.
There isn’t even any evidence that DOGE was more aggressive about cutting things related to Elon vs other government waste.
Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government. The opinion is that the reason is to cut people specifically going after Elon.
And to be clear I gave no opinion on what Elon did or didn’t do. My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious.
What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
How doge isn't a plain dictionary definition of corruption? A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
It used to be that in such cases that private citizen then must give up their rights to their businesses (or some other way of avoiding conflict of interest).
Except he had no power to do this? In the end the executive branch had to authorize anything coming out of DOGE. Like it or not, elected officials (Trump) rubber stamped the cuts.
And this is not Facebook. There is no algorithm driving views and hot takes. This is ordinary, everyday people choosing to be irrational because self-righteousness is its own dopamine hit incentive, even in the absence of external incentives.
Like how a garbage can close to the door is more likely to be used than one on the other side of the room. The people who change their behaviour in those situations aren’t making a thoughtful, rational choice not to use a garbage can on the other side of the room. It is subtle, quick, and mostly unconscious.
“The medium is the message.” This is what that old quote was getting at.
I mean, they were scraping the signage off USAID offices on day one of DOGE, while Musk walked away with $0 of his own grants cut. There was no process at all for determining whether any of his billions were waste fraud or abuse. Surely all the money he's getting from the government is well-deserved and prudent.
"Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government"
Then
"My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious"
It doesn't matter if the person is bias or not, what matters is it they backed their opinion up with facts
NHTSA, CFPB, DoT (FAA), DoE
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/21/musk-doge...
https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-spacex-doge-faa...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/28/faa-clears-spacex-for-starsh...
We have fiscal issues, clearly, and they thought they were doing good work, but it was an absolute failure and many of the issues still remain, and were exacerbated by what DOGE did.
That’s what C- brains bring to a project.
Which when the EPA / etc are the only organizations large enough to stand up to you is uh very good for you.
Kakistocracy edition
I believe you're correct that he viewed the bureaucracy as a sort of foe, but that idea is somewhat paradoxical. You need employees to do anything. Fire everyone and Trump ends up nearly powerless.
He sort of figured out the basics of how the government worked as he went along, but a little late at that point: https://www.reddit.com/r/mmt_economics/comments/1jdkz81/elon...
The reason people lie it as a story is because it makes everything have a logical sense to it. It brings reason to the disorder, and people hate chaos so cling to this Machivaleian mirage of a plan. An evil plan is better than chaos. Even if it is not true.
However there _is_ an underlying reason to _some_ of the DOGE vandalism, and that is that Elon Musk's personal social media feed is a brain destroying fire hose of far right racism and conspiracy theories. One of the big boogey men of the far right racist conspiracy theories was USAID. So that is why USAID was shut down with the consequent loss of thousands upon thousands of lives. Because Musk believes bullshit he reads on the internet.
I see hollowing out of institutions but no one is building anything
Read some of the LeopardsAteMyFace stories on reddit, and there are tons of federal workers that voted for this, and still are on the Kool-Aid, even as they are financially struggling.
One federal worker that voted for Trump, had his wife die during the mess, crossed multiple layers of hell to be rejected aid, dropped into poverty levels ... he still thinks that it was not Trumps fault. Trump just need "guidance", "temperance"...
Side note: he is also heavily religious so the overlap was not hard to spot, between religion and zealot worshiping.
If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
And maybe (just maybe) raise your voice in _actionable_ support for dismantling the complexes these money ghouls use to wage war against you and regular society.
We've entered Civil War II and I fear it will have to get much worse before there's any chance of turning things around. Regardless we can never give up.
10 years ago that would sound crazy but today it's very real. I wish very much to be wrong in my prediction.
[1]:https://youtu.be/JEjU-X57Wrc?t=5815
It seems sometimes that they have mapped out how things are going to play out years in advance and are ready. After all what is the American government but just a group of fellow countrymen with all the data and resources?
Generally speaking, we don't deploy our military in peacetime. So unless there's a natural disaster in Chicago or D.C. right now, there aren't but so many conclusions to draw...
Or alternatively, they were in fact correct, and tens of millions on the other side subverted democracy, at least temporarily (and would surely do so again if not prevented).
Either way, it sounds like you've millions of people each convinced that millions of others are about to start a civil war. Which sounds like it makes that war practically unavoidable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/03/heritage-...
They call it a revolution. They keep using that word, I do not think it means what they think it means.
1. Trump declared a Venezuelan gang as a terrorist organization.
2. Since then, Trump has ordered the military to conduct extrajudicial killings of people suspected of being in that gang who were on boats. He is implicitly asserting that military action is allowed without Congressional approval if the target is a terrorist organization (it probably isn't legal, and he's put out no justification for it).
3. He just declared Antifa a terrorist organization. He has a history of blaming things on Antifa and has mused about declaring other leftist organizations as terrorists.
Now connect 2 and 3.
I've literally gotten language I drafted written into state and, twice now, federal law.
If you pick a hot-button issue, no, you probably won't move your elected. But on issues they didn't even consider to be on their plate? You can get attention. (Better yet if you can convince them you have other motivated voters beside you.)
It does. But every single case where I got to draft legislation occurred before I made money and before I’d given anyone any money. (I never gave either of the federal electeds I worked with money.)
I called about a bill that wasn’t getting attention. The elected thought it was interesting, but their staff were overworked. (They’re always overworked.) I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work. In a minority of cases, they introduced those into the working copy of the bill, and in a minority of those cases the bill actually passed.
Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
I'd argue that time to do free work, and especially the ability to do is legal drafting, is something that the upper classes have a lot more access to than others.
Your leverage is in surfacing primary challengers. Even if they win, it’s a drag on time, energy and capital.
Elected will pay attention to groups that can petition for and support a primary challenge. Even if they’re gerrymandered.
I have better things to do with my time than charge at windmills.
Yes. I’ve lived in these districts. They still don’t want a challenge.
> The party wants it this way and is actively hostile to any primary challenges
Of course. They’re hostile because they don’t like it. Not much of a threat if you’re going to do something they like.
> have better things to do with my time
Then say this. Of course civic engagement takes time and effort.
Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district. Most people aren’t.
And then we have the Supreme Court giving the President unlimited power.
Whether you are a Republican or Democrat in California it doesn’t matter who you as individual votes for for President. If you are in Los Angeles county, it also doesn’t matter who you vote for in the general election as your representative.
The primaries matter though. California sends the same number of Senators to DC as West Virginia and half as many as North and South Dakota combined even though they don’t have nearly the population.
How long and what strike of luck will it be based on timing that you think this country will see a liberal Supreme Court? Especially since justices nominated by Democrats refuse to leave when a Democratic President is in office? But then again, we are in this mess we are in today because the Democrats were too cowardly to pressure Biden not to run sooner.
I’ve knocked on doors for judicial elections in Manhattan where a single tenants’ association’s turnout out swung every election on the ballot. (In another case, the judge who went to Koreatown with us after a meet and greet swung our eight top to turn out, which was more than the margin for an off-cycle mid-week judicial primary.)
There are always elections on the ballot that matter. And civic engagement isn’t limited to voting.
The (Republican) governor of GA has been spending years and millions of dollars to get the Hyundai plant in GA that would bring 8500 direct jobs and no telling how many indirect jobs to GA. That was delayed an almost ruined by ICE.
It was such a bad fuckup that Trump tried to beg the Koreans to stay after being arrested by ICE. They refused.
The GA voters overwhelmingly voted for Kemp over a MAGA endorsed candidate during the primaries and even a Republican governor can’t block the federal government’s jack booted thugs
Never listen to anyone telling you that your voice doesn't matter.
Like... here's a story about me getting a kind of boring corporate law (related to limited liability companies) changed in Italy. Tons of people rolled their eyes at me and said it'd never happen, but I kept poking away at it, and it did happen:
https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt...
Also, local politics matter a bunch in the US. There is a ton of good you can do in your community with just a handful of people.
Right now, the governor of California is trying to meet Texas gerrymandering with its own. But liberals are clutching their pearls with “two wrongs don’t make a right” and arguing about things like this in their committees
The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/dnc-mee...
And with deregulations, "move fast and break things" startups can move even faster.
What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd. They enjoy social freedoms which the current gov. would rather see go away...so, talk about selling their soul to the devil.
SV workers, sure. But "socially liberal" is absolutely not my impression of SV venture capitalists.
Most of what DOGE cut was stuff no one wanted or needed in the first place. Just scroll their twitter feed, cutting this stuff shouldn't be termed as "smaller government".
Generally, the government doesn't do things that private industry could do on their own. There are specific times where this isn't true. For example, there were small commuter buses in San Francisco for a while that the existing MUNI service could not accomplish. But these are quite rare!
For example, private industry is never going to fund basic research that is the foundation of the US's wealth and strength, except through taxation. The idea is ludicrous.
We could have private highways, private roads, perhaps, but we would be handing off public decisions to a private company that is almost certainly a monopoly. There are only rare cases where roads and highways are not inherently monopolistic.
SV venture capital is not one type of person, there are both liberal and libertarians among them. The libertarian variety got suckered in by the Dark Enlightenment propaganda and thought they could be the puppetmasters controlling the world with propaganda. They should have looked to what happens to their ilk in places like Russia before backing someone who wants to turn the US into an autocracy like Russia:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/business/russian-oligarchs-de...
Silicon Valley has had a monarchist element for at least a decade now. I've been commenting on it for a while. It masked itself in the language of libertarianism. (Note: not all libertarians are monarchists.) But 2024 outed them (Andreessen, Musk, the All In crowd, et cetera) for the bastards that they are.
Sam Harris is the only intellectual in that space that I know of who was repulsed by their actual views and pulled back but maybe there are others.
The libertarian party itself got taken over by a less sophisticated group of these guys in a Mises Caucus mask from a coup orchestrated by the overstock.com ceo in 2022
I have been railing against these people for over a decade.
My experience with every friend or acquaintance denying their racism pretty much came down to “no one is actually that bad, you’re being ridiculous”
Between that and the people telling me Project 2025 was a caricature of a cartoon villain and would never happen last year, I am losing my mind at all the people confiding in me hat in hand that maybe, these people might actually want to bad things
It was really obvious what these people wanted. They advertised it. They wrote entire books about their plan. But all they had to do is say “no, that’s not true” in a single interview and everyone bought it because the alternative was mentally painful
You can have members of this group straight up admit to lying[1] and yet I have people who I can show the video of them admitting to lying who then still try to claim the lie is truthful.
If you are reading this comment and had seen these actions and events and had waved them off previously, then my opinion is that you were actively ignorant to save yourself the mental anguish
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jd-vance...
My company just spent $10M renovating an office but we’ve been in business for several decades and have been profitable every year for the past decade, I’m not sure about prior to that. It’s not always a bad idea to spend money on office space.
Tenant improvements (office remodels) are $75-$150/square foot these days depending on the level of finishes and FFE (furniture, fixtures, and equipment), and can go higher if you’re building out dozens of offices instead of open office space with perimeter private offices or want high end architectural lighting, aesthetic flourishes, etc. I know you can wire up a basic office with lights and receptacles for about $15/sqft if you use union labor and basic 2x4s/recessed cans for lighting.
My state allows 1 occupant per 150 gross sq ft of floor space (interior partitions, columns, and other items that occupy floor space are counted in gross square footage), so an office tower with a 22,500 sq ft floor plate allows for 150 occupants. At $100/sqft, you’re looking at $2.25M to build out a single floor of an office tower.
Depending on the market, the landlord might offer an allowance for tenant improvements or ‘pay’ for the improvements and they get paid back later over time through rent payments.
Support for DOGE before it was implemented is not a bad thing. Ro Khanna (Democrat from Silicon Valley) supported it too. https://khanna.house.gov/media/in-the-news/opinion-democrats...
It is the act of supporting DOGE after the dumb implementation (e.g. 1/28/2025 Fork in the Road letter) that would concern me (which I think a16z has continued to do).
In my opinion, Elon Musk approached DOGE all wrong because he is used to running companies where payroll is the #1 expense, and cutting workers is how he has always cut costs at his previous companies when they were strapped for cash (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla). He did’t realize that the US Government is mostly an insurance company, so cutting office staff is a drop in the bucket. A tragedy of his own juvenile ignorance.
Of course it is. It shows terrible judgment this was easily foreseeable.
A reminder that before it was implemented, it was called DOGE. It was never a serious thing, and supporting it may not have been bad, but it was hopelessly naive.
Our leadership is so inept it hurts.
The fallout of a few employees being screwed by Google or similar is a lot different than the fallout of everyone being screwed by government.
Your concern for an illusory fiat ledger is noted.
The answer is no.
> The government would likely end 2025 with about 300,000 fewer employees... The total figure amounted to one in eight workers... In recent weeks, hundreds of the employees DOGE pushed out have reportedly been offered reinstatement.
"Hundreds" coming back is portrayed as if it offsets the 300,000 gone. They continue:
> The true scope of DOGE’s attack on the federal government remains unknown. While there is no reason to think it achieved meaningful cost savings or operational efficiencies...
and then go on to complain about an immigrant database, which has nothing to do with the reduction in the federal workforce. Simple quick math would suggest $60 billion or so a year in savings from the workforce reduction. Of course the larger savings is in the whole programs that were eliminated, not just the salaries and benefits savings.
DOGE saving $2 trillion / year is indeed impossible. That kind of savings would require a national conversation about what federal roles we no longer need. But DOGE likely achieved hundreds of billions a year in savings. USAID alone had a $50 billion budget that was mostly eliminated, though a few billion just moved over to State.
A lot to unpack here ----
If you're an institutionalist: Does the executive now hold power of the purse?
If you're a humanitarian: was $50B for millions of lives and god knows how many more of massive quality of life improvement worth it?
If you care about evidence: "Likely hundreds of billions a year in savings" is insufficiently rigorous to throw around such large numbers. I've heard its as low as $2B and likely lower.
I don't think you actually wonder this because this information is easily and widely available with essentially zero effort.
Not only were there no real cost savings, but it was painfully and mathematically obvious that it was impossible for this approach to produce that kind of outcome.
They achieved something impossible: More federal spending even after reduction in work force.
People need to understand that the world doesn't revolve around themselves. Your employer doesn't have to bend to your every will and need. She also had the opportunity to get 8 months of severance if she was that short on money.
And it sounds like she actually did find a place to drop off her child: "Her explaining to her manager the way her child cried and begged Mommy to stay home broke me." Yeah, most employed adults have to leave their children somewhere when they go to work.
However, you're also wrong about "what's been done" -- this year the government will not only post a deficit but the highest deficit in US history. So to the extent that you support this administrations effort to cut the deficit, they have abjectly failed to do so. So perhaps it's more true that you cannot cut costs if you try to do it quickly, because doing it quickly has not worked. My prediction is in the next 4 years, the deficit will increase every year.
Moreover, you stated in your earlier reply that it is "obvious" the government was "inefficient it had to be trimmed and optimized". This is not obvious.
For starters, you (and also DOGE) neglected to define "efficiency", so we are left wondering what is being optimized. Efficiency is a weasel word -- it doesn't mean anything on its own -- so using it without measuring anything is immediately suspicious. How can you say you've made it more efficient by cutting spending if you don't have a metric for efficiency?
I'll give you a metric: in 2024 there were as many government employees as there were in 1970, despite the population growing by 140 million people, a 70% increase. Population explodes, yet government does not... that's efficiency. So no, it's not "obvious" the government as it existed in 2024 is inefficient.
Look at these two charts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_employees_in_the_Un...
First chart shows where the extra work is being handled, it's at the local level. That's what should be happening, so nothing to correct there.
Second chart shows what is actually growing: government dependents. So when you say "Have some empathy for the middle class that has to carry this terrible tax burden." I direct you to the following collection of lamentations of middle class people, his supporters, pleading for the President to stop the economic damage he's doing to the middle class: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace
Actually what you're suggesting is that we have to save the middle class by cutting lower class social support systems. But Trumponomics (all tariffs all the time, crony capitalism, mob-like strongarming of private companies) is driving a reduction of the middle class to the point where they need more social services.
Not trusting the government but happy they are performing some action at all seems reckless.
> only ones with the cajones to do the job.
Trump doesn't have the balls to cut defense spending or to stop government subsidizes to farmers. Firing people and cutting aid to poor people isn't brave.
1. The deficit has increased with Trump in office.
2. The rate at which the deficit is getting worse has increased with Trump in office.
3. That's in large part due to an increase in government expenditures more than enough to offset the claimed savings.
4. Even if that entire $206B were actually being distributed to taxpayers somehow, it's on par with the increase in grocery prices just since Trump took office, resulting in a net loss for taxpayers (you pay for groceries with post-tax income).
5. The things being cut first are those which help anyone with a middle-class or lower income. E.g., the CFPB more than paid for itself for years from the perspective of anyone other than a malicious bank just from one policy change limiting abusive fees banks are able to charge.
6. Even if you believe that all such departments need to be neutered and downsized (a bit weird that we need to reduce their power, impact, and effectiveness just to make them more "efficient", but whatever), it's objectively costing more in lawsuits and hiring critical personnel back than it would have to think for a moment before firing literally everyone.
7. Even at $206B with sane economic decisions elsewhere in the government, it's still not enough to move the needle on anything, and it's a far cry from the $2T in advertised cuts that were used to trick the American people into allowing this chicanery into our government.
And so on. Nothing about the current administration would qualify as increasing government efficiency even squinting at it in a modern art museum.
And that's if you take them at their word. At a bare minimum, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, DOGE themselves have admitted to many of those advertised cuts being mistakes, oftentimes by an order of magnitude or in totality, yet those mistakes are never corrected in their public leaderboard. If you look at their own sources and receipts there's a significant number of mistakes on top of the ones they've fessed up to.
I agree that the government is bloated, and I'm not particularly happy with many of the political maneuverings on either side of the spectrum the last decade or three, but when it comes to Musk and Trump I think it's reasonable to consider that when there's significant evidence of lying from individuals with a history of lying for personal gain, you're probably being lied to, even if you really want the thing they're claiming to give you.