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Comment by SV_BubbleTime | Hacker News Reader

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Complaining about gross negligence, after all the competence has been gutted out, strikes me as misdirected frustration.

Oh, thats interesting ,. this is one of those things where two people can hear opposite things from the exact same information.

Without naming names, there's an old, old joke about a certain political party's philosophy: "Government is incompetent and ineffective! Elect us and we'll prove it!"

Gutting doesn't magically solve incompetence. It's a anti-solultion that people peddle because it requires literally zero thought or nuance.

If an organization has systemic incompetence and you gut them, then they're still incompetent but now they're also pressured and therefore more likely to make mistakes. So, you're just in a worse position.

On the contrary you can argue that gutting should lead to lower number of mistakes/incompetence.

There can't be any mistakes if no work is being done.

There's a big mistake in this logic: is work really not getting done?

Because a lot of work has to be done regardless of if you have the money or time to do it. Most government work is actually not optional, there are literal laws saying it has to be done.

And that's what we, very predictably, saw with DOGE.

Like, think about it. You fire say 50% of people. What happens to the other 50%? They twiddle their thumbs?

You've worked a job before, right? And you've had coworkers fired or laid off before, right? Okay, what happens to their work?

Does it disappear into the abyss or do you then take it on? Because in all my experience, I take it on. Come on now.

Gutting organizations _leads to_ these kinds of problems.

What if they purged all of the competent people and installed party loyalists? That seems to be a recurring theme with this administration. These are guys who unapologetically admire the efficiency of the Nazi party, not realizing that the pervasive incompetence and most levels of the government were one of the driving factors in their ultimate defeat.

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