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Comment by SubiculumCode | Hacker News Reader

DOGE fired a whole bunch of NIH staff that processed high scoring grants to get them ready for Notices of Awards (the official document that starts moving funds, etc). Meanwhile, the administration now requires final approval of any grant by non NIH political staff.

Consequently, Science is slowing down (and that is outside of other shenanigans). What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.

For the many medical research Institutions where the dominant system for professors is soft money (no or partial tenure, salary is provided by research grants), there is a real crisis.

To try to make up the shortfall,we are submitting any more grants, doing less actual sciencee are submitting even more grants, and exacerbating the staffing issue at NIH.

DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government, doing what was lawfully passed legislation asked, and destroyed it anyway (instead of passing legislation to remove programs, the lawful way).

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"DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government…"

Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.

>Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.

Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).

Also about destroying the government's investigative/enforcement capacity. USAID's destruction was ideological, but protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential.

> protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential

Don't you miss the simpler times when people could just frantically applaud Musk's genius and not be inconvenienced by the truth of how big of a role deception, grifting, and outright fraud played in his success?

Anyone who thought this guy was a genius is probably still frantically applauding.

They saw Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but didn't really get it.

And racism.

> What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.

Yep. You used to apply for a few relevant grants ahead of time, wait for your talented grad student to wait a few months whilst they continue their summer project, and you'd have an answer on whether or not you can take them on right as they finish.

Now? You apply continuously for a whole host of different grants, some of which are tentatively related to your field, at least a year in advance and hope that at least one of them pans out so that you can hire a potential grad student who might just wait around enough for the funding to come through.

The competition for funding is fierce, and I'm seeing a depressing pattern of profs taking on post docs who secured their own funding and needed a complimentary signature, to then take it from them and kick them out as soon as the money comes through

DOGE was run like a startup and many startups are run like Sh!t shows with them following the mantra of break things fast ask questions later.

Case in point i know someone at the NIH who in March 2025 wasn't fired with his hordes of colleagues who were. Yet, fast forward a year later he gets a notice saying something like we are sorry but you should've been fired last year so be prepared to be let go at the end of June (2026).

Thankfully i just saw my friend last week as the end of June has passed and now he says they might keep him. Talk about batsh!t insanity for him and his life.

Of all the things a 250 year-old federal government serving hundreds of millions of people across the entire spectrum of services should be run like, "a start-up" is pretty close to the bottom of the list.

I'm impressed we managed to arrive on an idea more detached from the fundamentals of public governance and less worthy of trust than running government "as a business." It takes real, concerted effort to be that thoughtless and shallow.

> as a business

This is doubly-bad when the guy at the top's "business" has a nearly 1:1 mapping to the governance of North Korea: An unaccountable dictatorship where the head directly owns everything and cannot be fired for incompetence, he executes/fires people on a whim, and meanwhile relatives and courtiers spend most the time sucking-up and backstabbing to end up with the power when he dies.

Why would any American patriot want to adopt that style? Even the people who sincerely advocate for "government like a business" draw upon a completely different type, one where the CEO is answerable to a board, the board answerable to a shareholders, and most of the shares are publicly circulating.

P.S. We're not even touching whether the business-person sucked at business, which in this case is also quite damning.

This is a tangent, but people who advocate for "government like a business" are mental. Businesses want to profit and grow. The government should never be looking to profit off of taxpayers who are already funding the government. It's always a scheme from the wealthy guy to become more wealthy, and they do a good job of getting people to repeat their nonsense.

A business has one boss who decides everything and is personally responsible if things go to shit. The employees pack up and leave to get another job.

None of this is applicable to a government- unless any American wants to find out what it means to be a refugee at the Canadian border.

If you seriously make a go at it you Americans be accepted for asylum in Mexico. There is a guy (Gavin I think? Real lanky nerdy guy) from Washington who was constantly criticizing government officials (and even Mexican ones) that was granted asylum.

I also of a guy who showed in in Paraguay, renounced his citizenship to become stateless, and then they just offered him citizenship because they didn't know what to do with him.

Perhaps at current rates, but receptivity to asylum-seekers and refugees tends to be very amount-dependent, even for relatively friendly destinations.

Historical examples in Europe circa 1933-1940 are not encouraging.

There's an additional case that can be made: Businesses want to disrupt, but they can only do so against a stable current. The governments main job in regards to the economy is stability, so that business can plan, innovate, disrupt and grow.

This important point -- business practices/goals are antithetical to governance -- is unfortunately not understood by the majority of Americans

Everyone I know who says they want government ran more like a business are actually saying "if a business was that inefficient, it would cease to exist." They are quoting $500 hammers and tossing around tax money like, well, tossing around someone else's money. They want better stewardship.

However, many who claim to want this better stewardship have no idea how wasteful businesses are. And the idea that government should profit off its services sounds good to the (capitalist trained) mind, at least on the surface. Dig an inch deep however, and it should be obvious that the government is managing cost centers by definition, and expecting a profit is asinine. The goal of being business-like quickly degrades under scrutiny. Digging an inch deeper is seemingly impossible for many.

Yeah, the idea of running it like a business should die. But I think most who say it acknowledge there are differences and what they are really wanting is stewardship.

>DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government

For anyone that has worked on either side of government procurement it is obvious that this is not true.

It's quite common for contracts to no longer make sense yet neither side wants to cancel them due to the paperwork involved. "Just put the money towards something else similar"

Plus the many high profile examples like high-speed rail, rent subsidies.

And yet well known grift like corn-derived ethanol continue. Looking forward to cutting some welfare queens loose next go around!

And repossessing the fruits of successful Obama era industrial policy (Tesla & SpaceX) for the American people who paid for them too, of course.

You responded to a detailed/narrow example flagged as an example, with a reiteration of the rule.

Worse still, the lack of significant savings DOGE, indicate that the government was generally efficient.

This means that while specific cases may exist, the vigilance of the public and the set up of the US system had kept average performance in bounds.

Could there be any other reasons that DOGE did succeed?

And who does this ultimately benefit?...

The billionaires who don't like regulations and like the idea of a semi-starving population that are forced to work in inhumane conditions for the lowest possible wages. Also, destroying democracy seems to be desired by them as they wish to concentrate all the power into their own hands.

Making their wealth in a democratic society is a temporary embarrassment to a Ellison/Thiel/Musk would-be technocrat.

> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government

Really? From what I've heard, DOGE was completely incompetent. Are you claiming they were actually extremely competent and simply couldn't find the waste?

They're saying that the federal government that DOGE "investigated" was already highly efficient.

Elon's goons are mostly a pack of bumbling morons sent on a mission to steal data for private purposes.

But if Elons goons are a pack of bumbling morons, it’s possible they simply didn’t find the waste that exists, or they had different goals (I.e. dismantling and looting). That they didn’t really find much isn’t evidence that waste doesn’t exist.

Elon AND Russell Vought's / Project 2025

Let's not fall for the transparent narrative of post-hoc branding DOGE "Elon's thing" so that when there are inevitably Congressional hearing the real architects go uncalled.

Sounds to me like the claim is—with the perspective of somebody who has lived an entire professional life within the federal research award system—that it actually was highly efficient.

So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place.

What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?

I don’t have any reason to believe the grantmaking system is particularly inefficient. If I was in charge with saving money I would look at consolidating welfare and slashing the bureaucratic apparatus. Research grants wouldn’t even be in my top 10.

But this is what I mean, people are claiming that the government as a whole is efficient. I think that’s trivially false, and saying “doge didn’t find waste in research grants therefore the government is efficient, also doge is incompetent” is completely faulty logic.

> If I was in charge with saving money I would look at consolidating welfare and slashing the bureaucratic apparatus. Research grants wouldn’t even be in my top 10.

It's almost like a bunch of kids with no experience in government (and little in life) were sent to every department with a mandate to make a certain amount of cuts by their boss, and then delivered on what they were told to do without feeling like they'd be held accountable for the effectiveness of their work...

> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government

Wish we could see the evidence for that.

Well, they sure seemed to fail at finding much meaningful savings to be had. The government seems to be throwing money in the furnace at rates never seen before while actual outcomes seem anywhere from mixed to bad depending on your viewpoints.

A weird question to ask in a thread about the destruction of evidence.

DOGE's record.

> What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.

There's no need to do work for the jackbooted thugs at this point.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-gover...

"One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired."

sahil also said:

> "The public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible," he continued. "In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions."

He also only very briefly worked with a single agency (VA), and his positives comments were about how the VA already had some open source Github repos and had a previous project to 'reduce claim times from "133 days to under a week"'. He was also critical of how they don't fire people with seniority, regardless of performance (which is enshrined in a reduction-in-force law from 1944) which explains why new and probationary employees were the ones let go when Trump's people took over. https://sahillavingia.com/doge

I mean, they're hardly blameless.

They never had a proper mandate or real power to do anything, so it was mostly bullshit (see canceling software contracts) and the administration/Elon deserves criticism for pretending otherwise merely for PR.

It should have been something that they pushed congress to establish as a new agency or heavily expand the OMB with a wider purpose/budget. That way it would have included careful public monitoring under existing rules and been able to take on DoD/education/healthcare spending which is where 90% of it goes.

But everyone knows Congress doesn't want any more people questioning where the money is going. Half their job is gaming the system to push federal money into their states. So DOGE was left with fake data collection jobs while feds fired probationary workers to pretend it saves money.

> What's the evidence for that?

If your mandate is to identify fraud or optimize a system, wouldn’t your success or failure be determined by the number of fraudulent cases you successfully prosecuted and won, as well as the amount of money you were able to recover?

Their god "genius" and leader promised[1] $2 trillion in cuts, if they haven't been achieve their stated goal, does that not mean that majority of the $2 trillion was being put to good use?

Running a government is nothing like running a company, because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating (example the military, food stamps, farmer subsidies) but are key to the successful operation of the government.

This is why it is often a terrible idea to have former CEOs ( who only care about revenue and profits) run governments or government arms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_X6VmsMWiI

>because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating

True, very true. I don't want my government turning a profit, but I do want my government being accountable and efficient on how it spends my taxes and what it gives me back for them. If I keep paying more and more but get less and less quality, I want some audits and changes to be done to fix this. "Government not being revenue generating" is not the answer here.

What do you think the GAO was setup to do? When was the last time you read a GAO report, if you claim to care about how the government spends your taxes and if they spend it efficiently?

DOGE was a total non-starter for anyone who knows how the US government works. They tried to replace something that already existed(GAO) and made things even worse.

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