Zohran Mamdani's NYC Tech Team Is What DOGE Should Have Been | Hacker News Reader

Zohran Mamdani's NYC Tech Team Is What DOGE Should Have Been

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72 pointsgorbachev32 comments

You mean they are making useful software and not just eliminating people and groups that were investigating Elon in some way?

https://archive.is/PSE0i

That's not a trusted source anymore: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...

The college scorecard Lisa Gelobter lead is really useful:

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/search/

You mean the thing that was wrong with DOGE was execution, not the idea itself

Of course everybody wants the government to be efficient. People just have very different idea of what that means in practice (what is useful vs. wasteful spending is highly subjective (in many cases))

Ideas are a cover for the execution as it's the results that matter. Whoever is against government waste?

This is a disingenuous comment, possibly involuntarily so, but it assumes that the parties involve ever had any other goal than just killing what Elon deemed useless. One of the darkest pages in American history.

Which idea? The marketing, or the goal? Because nothing about DOGE was an idea about making the government "efficient". It was about weakening the government.

you can't beat the Zorhan!

so much politics on HN these days. edit: I mean politics related content

Two arguments that have so far, been talking completely past each other with no desire to understand each other:

1) efficiency means "use software to identify and cut federal programs that could reasonably be taken over by either the State dept, States themselves, or the market"

2) efficiency means "add new software and programs that streamline existing processes"

As usual, we should be doing both in a careful and considered way, and definitely should not be accusing the other side of either fascism or communism. "Efficiency" is not a decision on funding or not funding federal science research, and everyone using that word to mean that is being knowingly disingenuous.

There was a huge amount of bloat in USAID, and I'm sure there will be a huge amount of bloat in NYC, and I'm sure there was a lot of good in both. Unless you're willing to discuss specifics and tradeoffs with a calm head, you're not helping just by virtue of being upset.

I don't know how it works in your country, but in mine, each time a public monopoly is given to the market, corruption creeps in, costs increases, and suddenly you have to pay twice as much for your water and trash than the neighbouring municipality.

Ten years later some guy get arrested, other have to pay a small fine, a tenth of made profits, new red tape gets added to avoid the exact same situation. Stuff becomes so complex than muni employees avoid touching anything they don't understand (which is every contracts), corruption creeps in, and a new 10 year circle starts again.

The only way to do something about it is to really spend time understanding each item on your service list, take control of every contract on public monopoly where you can't understand everything, and cut deals with the company owners "we won't talk about your corruption, you accept our break of the contract without penalties" (one of my uncle used to do that, France's BPI took over more than 200 private contract in 4 years. He has stories, and threatening letters :D)

I heard they invented the GIF

I'm just glad I don't live in New York.

We want more efficiency, not bloated tech teams spending more and more taxpayer dollars.

DOGE was heavy handed, but the cuts still needed to be made. It should have been done in a more precise manner.

> the cuts still needed to be made.

Which ones? Because there are a lot of instances where genuinely good, productive and useful programs were cut.

DOGE wasn't even looking in the same world as where the majority of actual fraud and waste takes place.

given that DOGE took a chainsaw to legitimate medical research that was working on saving lives and conditions for people who have no other options ... no, they were beyond heavy handed. They were out for blood using DEI as a smokescreen. Stop. This crap isn't welcome in the industry.

Budget cuts that don't touch military spending aren't real budget cuts.

Entitlements and debt payments are ~60% of the budget and the entire defense expenditure is ~12%

Ok, did DOGE decrease those?

No, DOGE only recommended personnel and contract changes within various agencies. Trump promised not to touch entitlements and to increase military spending.

Note this was not the point of the original comment or my reply. You can in fact reduce spending without addressing defense spending: the majority of the federal budget is entitlements. No presidents (D or R) is even remotely hinting at doing this; it would be political suicide.

You can't cut entitlements without an equal tax cut. Which is potentially worth discussing but it's not going to help balance the budget.

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