Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

Combating funding drains in other areas that aren't productive, are secretive or are potentially even fraudulent so that more money is available for the things that matter.

Essentially what DOGE has been trying to do.

View on HN

There is certainly a case to be made for efficiently managing resources but DOGE's chainsaw methodology was a disaster. It had no comprehension whatsoever of what it was cutting, as we saw with frequent firing of vital divisions and then having to hire them back, its keyword approach to grant cancelling which resulted in trans-panic resulting in genetic research that included the word "transgenic". Worst of all were its broad workplace policies of offering deferred retirement and firing probationary employees. These disproportionately effected the most talented employees who could find employment in the private sector.

No, they really haven't.

DOGE’s only consistent priority was ensuring that African children starve to death or die of preventable diseases. They didn’t do anything at all about, say, Kristi Noem buying two private jets, because they weren’t allowed to care about wasteful spending that benefits Trump and his goons.

That DOGE was so ineffective in the most DOGE-friendly political climate possible (Trump admin, republican control) kinda torpedoed the hypothesis that there's so much wasteful spending in the US government.

Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.

DOGE never had any strong legal mandate or financing by congress, it was rushed in and a small team operated on the edges of what OBM/federal heads were allowed to do... which wasn't much, so they did a lot of flashy mostly meaningless stuff.

It was an idea that was never earnestly pursued and highly constrained by not being a formal agency with real power (see: reforming DoD or untouchable golden eggs), and all the transparency that comes with being a real agency with an explicit mandate... So it burned public trust pretty quickly.

reducing wasteful government spending is an admirable goal but DOGE seems in mine and many others estimation to have focused less on reducing wasteful spending (overpaying for simple services, unnecessary doublings of effort, overly complex procedures etc) and was instead used to cut programs this administration has ideological disagreements with. Cutting programs it finds disagreeable is certainly this admin's right, but strange and dishonest to cloak it with talk of "efficiency" which is badly needed.

optimizing processes =/= removing goals

>Cutting programs it finds disagreeable is certainly this admin's right

Only if those programs aren’t legislatively established or mandated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com