I'm reminded of the story of the Air Force designing cockpits for the "average" pilot, only to find that
> out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions [0]
Surely, there are so many employees in general that probationary employees aren't needed. And surely, most government employees don't need to purchase things on a daily basis, so we can inhibit their credit card use. And most contracts about XYZ aren't crucial, so we can cancel them.
But, my goodness, there is so much nuance and breadth to the things a government does, let alone the government that is responsible for the largest military and that props up a big part of the world economy, that compounding these rash decisions will have far-reaching and serious blowback. I'm all about efficiency, but why be stupid about it?
The plane that we're all on is being dismantled midair, the engines have been turned off, and we're just gliding now. Gliding or falling, anyway
The people radicalized to these actions are trying to destroy the government. They haven't been especially subtle about it in their writing. The ideal outcome is not the same government outcomes but at 70% of the cost. The ideal outcome is the collapse of the federal bureaucracy so that the lords of capital can scoop things up and create their little kingdoms.
> The people radicalized to these actions are trying to destroy the government.
It's worse than that. They're also incompetent.
Look, I'm a radical anarcho-capitalist / libertarian / voluntaryist myself. I'm fine with the idea of "destroying the government" in general. BUT, even I would say that there's a right way to go about it, and that that involves dismantling things slowly and incrementally, identifying replacements (where available) for government services that are being wound down BEFORE winding them down, minimizing the harm done, taking "collateral damage" into consideration etc. These people are doing the equivalent of "destroying the government" by just randomly lobbing hand grenades all over the place, with no knowledge, consideration, or concern, for the outcomes.
Well, then get to resisting. Like it or not, people with your ideology aren't going to be distinguished from the people that burned the government to the ground, destroyed people's lives, and sold the ashes to the richest men on the planet.
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It is a fascinating comment. Surely, you recognize things are hardly black and white. Like it or not, the guy has an actual popular mandate to do just that. If you accept that premise, the undistinguishing is already happening on both sides of the US' political spectrum.
Less than 50% of voters voted for him and what was total voter turn out? 60%? So maybe a 1/3 of eligible voters voted for him. A plurality does not equate to a mandate.
By that logic, no president is ever allowed to do anything - because IIRC that turnout is slightly higher than the historical average.
The populace is always arguing about how I have to pay up for taxes for muh roads and schools whether I want them or not, or else go in a tiny cage.
Now they have to eat their crow of what it's like to legitimize the violence of a republic.
It may not be right, and I also disagree with our governance, but by god the schadenfreude is off the chart.
I hope the 2/3 learn something from this.
I hope the 1/3 learn something from this
They never do
Many things are not black and white.
But if the outcome is that the existing federal system collapses and we have a collection of fiefdoms run by CEO-kings, endless nuance won't be the appropriate response.
If Trump has a popular mandate to illegally dismantle the government, then what was Biden's popular mandate? Why were such comparatively small things like student loan forgiveness seen as tyrannical? Where was the endless supply of pundits saying "well that's the mandate" then?
You have to understand that arguing from "mandate" is a nice way of saying, "Please stop talking." Its purpose is to end the conversation, not to engage in further discussion.
Trump didn't even get half the popular vote. That's not a mandate.
@cthalupa
> Trump didn't even get half the popular vote. That's not a mandate.
I think you confuse USA with some other country. Read about electoral votes.
I didn't say he wasn't elected. I said he didn't have a mandate.
If he did not secure even half of the popular vote then it is obvious that the median voter does not align with his views.
"Not even half" is being intentionally misleading: He did get more than his main opponent, by over 2 million voters.
No.
We are explicitly talking about a mandate - the will of the median voter. Someone who did not receive even half of the popular vote is not representative of the median voter.
Just winning is not enough to receive a mandate.
Mandates would come from popularity, not from weighted numbers.
I just had to check since I am admittedly sick. Even wikipedia has mandate[1] as
"mandate is a perceived legitimacy to rule through popular support. Mandates are conveyed through elections, in which voters choose political parties and candidates based on their own policy preferences."
Even if we play around with concepts here, in a very, very practical sense, if the mandate is conveyed through elections, at least at the very beginning of the administration, that administration has a mandate to govern. Now.. this perception may change, but you can't honestly tell me this administration has no mandate for one simple reason:
If it does not have a mandate, neither of the previous administrations did.
> If it does not have a mandate, neither of the previous administrations did.
I would agree with this. I think the last time an administration had a clear mandate was Obama's first term.
Every election since then the margin has been to small too clearly say that their policies reflect the will of the median voter.
Except that when democrats are in power, we don't hear "they have mandate" for them. We see obstruction at every level and a lot of vitriol. It is only when conservatives are destroying it becomes mandate for anything.
So, no. This is just another asymetric rule designed to enable.
Also, on cultural level, we are supposed to not consider all Republicans assholes, but if they mandated this, they are. Or when Canadiens boo American anthem, it is all "American people are not responsible for their leadership".
<< Except that when democrats are in power, we don't hear "they have mandate"
We don't hear it from democrats now either. What is your point? That each side uses the best argument that supports their position and they decide on the argument after they decide what their expected result is? We all know this and it has been unfortunate part of the discourse for decades at the very least.
<< We see obstruction at every level and a lot of vitriol. It is only when conservatives are destroying it becomes mandate for anything.
Could you elaborate on this point a little? I had a longer initial reaction to it, but I realized that the phrasing can be interpreted in several ways.
I will say this just to give you an idea of my initial read: the vitriol( from republican electorate ) was the cause of the mandate ( to clamp down on bureaucracy ). Now, said clamping generates its own vitriol ( and seemingly some vitriol as well ). Which vitriol you want to focus on?
<< Also, on cultural level, we are supposed to not consider all Republicans assholes, but if they mandated this, they are.
Why.. do I care about it at all?
Asshole designation is largely meaningless to me. I will push that point further, because I worry that I might be misunderstood on this point.
You may find that almost the entirety of the situation we find ourselves is a result of people 'just being nice' and trying not ruffle feathers. There was rather ample time to do some of the incremental changes some recommended here, but no one wanted to be an asshole. We are way past the point, where that label would even register ( not even have and impact; register ). Edit: I will separately note that on this forum, I noted years ago that if those issues are not addressed, we will find ourselves having to make rather unhappy choices.
I am pointing it out for one reason some may be misunderstanding some very basic reality. I will offer one more example of this weird blindness to zeitgeist.
Did you notice how Trump was able to simply shrug off the felon label? Have you considered the why behind it?
<< Or when Canadiens boo American anthem, it is all "American people are not responsible for their leadership".
Again.. why does it matter to me? They can boo all they want.
Being okay or ignoring such a label indicates a certain level of understanding it and accepting it. Trump is totally fine with being against the law because he is in a position of privilege - he can afford it. He doesn't care about those laws either, so basically is totally fine with being an antisocial - because a society codifies its principles in the laws it created. Now if another person is okay with being called an asshole, again it's because they are okay with being mean to others, to disrespect norms and generally other persons, out of a feeling of personal or group superiority and expected impunity - an impunity they see again and again in their role models. So while you cannot make the asshole care about it, the way you truthfully explained, it's important for the less-assholes to point this out to each other. Because the "others" are a group as well, even though nowadays it looks chaotic and actually just less visible in general. Just to be clear, I don't think anybody expects assholes fixing stuff for the rest, it's for the moment nothing more than flag waving. And also I agree that the system is seemingly built to be abused by assholes, something not even the founding fathers have considered. But what happened, happened, and the question is, what now?
<< Being okay or ignoring such a label indicates a certain level of understanding it and accepting it.
I am ok if people choose to believe that.
<< because a society codifies its principles in the laws it created.
In broad strokes, sure; no real disagreement here.
<< Now if another person is okay with being called an asshole, again it's because they are okay with being mean to others, to disrespect norms and generally other persons, out of a feeling of personal or group superiority and expected impunity - an impunity they see again and again in their role models.
No. Laws are laws. Norms are norms. Both are subject to change, but I worry that people confuse the two for whatever reason. Even the issue with Trump getting felon tag is resolved within the existing system since he is the president. You may disagree and despair that the norm "president shouldn't be a felon" is not upheld, but them is the breaks ( I was gonna write "that's democracy for you", but I don't think you would have found it as funny as I did ).
<< So while you cannot make the asshole care about it, the way you truthfully explained, it's important for the less-assholes to point this out to each other.
No. I am done with tacit acceptance of social coercion. It only allows current system to get more unstable as it basically rewards people who yell the loudest. If I really need to point out an example you may get behind, look at former Twitter. Musk bought recognizing that simple fact and used it to his advantage.
No. Pass on branding assholes with a giant A to point out to others.
<< it's for the moment nothing more than flag waving
Yes, thankfully thus far only minor incidents have taken place, but they are there and social media is not exactly helping.
<< But what happened, happened, and the question is, what now?
Honestly, I don't know, but my personal rule of thumb is to not make things worse.
>I'm fine with the idea of "destroying the government" in general. BUT, even I would say that there's a right way to go about it...
Earnest question: Does the second sentence here cause you to reflect on the first, because:
>minimizing the harm done, taking "collateral damage" into consideration...
acknowledges that the government is performing important functions on which people rely.
I know there's an argument that the private sector could instead provide some of these, but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?
> but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?
I believe the idea is that you can have multiple companies for a given purpose and switch between them (or form your own) depending on what you think works best for you and your community. You cannot have multiple governments - if the one elected on an piece of land you happen to live on does not act in your interests, you're pretty much SOL at least until the next election cycle (if it's a democracy) or the next coup (if it's not).
The obligatory caveat is that - of course - this does not work in practice. At the very least, it requires a perfect free and fair market which means it needs us all to be well-informed rational actors. And there are probably more requirements than just this.
The problem with this line of thinking is in people frequently ignore their own interests or just shrug their shoulders and "I got mine" in some way: The absolute easiest example that comes to mind is roads. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people complain about tax on gasoline and how they don't even use the majors roads and highways that much. Mention that nearly every single thing that keeps them alive will in some way require roads to exist and they'll move the goal posts to "I ready pay other taxes" or "I've already paid plenty" or less reasonably "fine let all this go away then because we got along fine 200 years ago without it".
With other things, it's just about impossible to convey to someone with this sort of mindset anything much less direct like the costs of having beauracracies creating and enforcing regulating building codes or workplace standards, and even those are easier to grasp than many other services
Exactly - no disagreement here. But if you understand it and I understand it, can we dream of a day everyone will? :-)
In the meanwhile, I support bureaucracies. Even if the long-term goal is to get rid of them, I currently believe that we desperately need those training wheels for the time being, and trying to dismantle them until we know how to do well without is irresponsible and dangerous.
It doesn’t work in practice. So needs regulators or you end up with cartels. And for regulators you need a government.
We got where we got because this already failed.
That's what I've said, yes. It does not.
Companies tend to deceive customers, as the incentives are frequently aren't aligned, so "voting with a wallet" is not functioning as well as it should. And profit-seeking leads to market consolidation, which, at least past some threshold is a net negative on society and turns into oligopoly.
A vision of a society without a government is utopic. It requires drastically different mindset and understanding of the side effects and unintended outcomes from every living person. Yet, I cannot help but naively like the idea of such society (which is entirely subjective thing), and so I wish we all could be smarter and knowledgeable, stop fighting for resources, and that some distant day whatever becomes of us may live in a world where cartels won't form because everyone understands how that's not really in anyone's interest (paradoxically, I believe that's not even good for the cartel itself in the long term - power and wealth are also a deadly curse).
The history of private fire departments is a solid lesson in the pitfalls of this perspective.
I did not expect that conclusion in the last paragraph.
It occurred to me that making a point of the type, "here's what I believe is best or here's what I prefer, but I understand that the current reality doesn't accommodate it" represents a level of non-binary nuance and maturity that is exceedingly rare these days. We'd all do well to emulate it.
You can think that someone doesn't deserve the benefit they get from the government but also think it's unfair to impose additional hardship by cutting it off suddenly.
> You cannot have multiple governments
I have 4. City, county, state, and federal.
For most states, there's only two governments--the city and county governments of most states are organs of the state governments and only have such authority as the state unilaterally deigns to let them have.
As for the distinction between state and federal, that's essentially the exception that proves the rule. The reason you cannot have multiple governments is because you end up with a situation of contested authority, and a brief look at US history (and I suspect every other federal system in the world, though I don't have particular knowledge for others) shows a litany of debates over whether state or federal government has primacy in a given jurisdiction. It's only barely tolerable by the fact that, even if the grant of authority to the different governments is unclear, at least the authority to decide who has authority is unquestioned.
>acknowledges that the government is performing important functions on which people rely.
>I know there's an argument that the private sector could instead provide some of these, but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?
I think decentralizing and delegating some of those services to be closer to the people (to state governments) has merit. I agree with the OP that to shift to in that direction there's a right way and a wrong way to do that transition. In today's immediate self gratification culture though you'll get what we're getting. Patience is a virtue we were all born without. It takes displince and strong values to stick with it.
Oh but they can be just fine, you only need to look outside the States to see it working. They're not perfect either, don't start me on it, but I can see exactly that idea working in Switzerland: the state making the rules for the private providers _and_enforcing_ them. It might be against "muh freedom to rip everybody off" but I personally refuse to call that "freedom".
OTOH, some important things in Switzerland are still state-owned, like the railways or the post.
Some people treat Switzerland like some libertarian paradise, but in reality, while Switzerland does tend to be more economically liberal than many of its neighbours, it's usually pretty pragmatic and not committed to some ideology.
True, I was thinking rather about the health insurance system as a working example of private companies being controlled by state-defined rules.
So, like terrorists.
More like National Socialists.
They believed in government. It's more like Italy.
At least it's an ethos.
> that involves dismantling things slowly and incrementally
Yeah? been waiting, consciously, for over 35 years and all we managed to do is give billions to industries for no return for citizens, tenfold our debt, potentially bankrupt Medicare, and so on.
Democrats have been in power about equally (20 vs 14 years but just president isn't enough to be "in power"); so neither side is interested in fixing this country for the people instead of themselves.
This. In fact, since the system is built for gridlock, both parties happily pretend to care about given's electorate red meat, while blaming the other party for failing to do X. It is a perfect scenario for an elected official: do nothing -- the hardest thing to do in politics.
The lock is VERY one sided. Democrats were willing to work across the aisle and even adopted republican ideas.
The moment they do, Republicans reject their own ides. Republicans refused to cooperate.
It is assymetric and the knee jerk tendency to both side everything just enable it.
<< The lock is VERY one sided.
Hmm. Is it though? You are making rather broad statement here. Would you be willing to offer an example supporting that statement?
<< Democrats were willing to work across the aisle and even adopted republican ideas.
'Were'? It is a real question, but the spirit is the same as above. Can you offer an example you have in your mind. I suspect I know where you are going with this, but I don't want to assume too much.
<< The moment they do, Republicans reject their own ides. Republicans refused to cooperate.
Same as above.
<< It is assymetric and the knee jerk tendency to both side everything just enable it.
No. This is pure silliness and I am frankly tired of hearing this point so I will just call it out.
I like to see things as they are. If things happen to work in a way that I happen to not like, then I do not like those things, but it does not mean said those things are invalid, simply because it was a 'kneejerk' reaction to it.
And even trying to cast it as kneejerk is amazingly inaccurate. This resentment has been building for a long time now ( does anyone even remember Vance's CNN commentary that basically said 'can you hear us now?' ), which kinda sucks for the political class as they will need to figure out a different model ( and it seems they may have already ) to bamboozle the population.
I am happy to discuss further, but you need to give me a little more.
While I do think gp should give you an example, I also invite you to provide a counter example, otherwise both of you are just stating your vibes.
If you are _actually_ willing to discuss, you can't just demand the other side to give, you can also set the standard by giving.
Fair point. I will respond to parent's comment below.
Obama was literally that. And republicans refused to do any cooperation at all and punished own republicans for any compromises. Obama eventually understood it well into his period.
Trying to both sides here is just lie. And yes, knee jerk complain is about people saying 'both sides' because they feel like they have to, not because both sides would be the same.
<< Obama was literally that.
I will admit it is a good response, because McConnell is effectively on the record[2] for actively torpedoing any opposing party moves. Still, affordable ACA passed with -- I might add -- 'bipartisan' support ( quotation, because phrase is thrown out the moment even one opposing party joins the vote ).
On the other hand, we may need to go over some definitions, because it is possible we are somehow not talking about the same thing, but use the same words further confusing this conversation.
<< and punished own republicans for any compromises.
<< ( previous comment ) The moment they do, Republicans reject their own ides.
Practical question. Sides or ideas in the above as it will affect my interpretation.
>> In fact, since the system is built for gridlock, both parties happily pretend to care about given's electorate red meat, while blaming the other party for failing to do X. It is a perfect scenario for an elected official: do nothing
<< The lock is VERY one sided.
Let us assume for a moment that I buy into your premise.
The current system is built around gridlock. I am not joking. The whole separation of powers is basically saying 'if you can't work something out, each side has opportunities to grind the system to a halt'. Which side uses the feature more is irrelevant to equation given that the system effectively incentivizes its use. We can talk all day about how things should be, but you don't exactly win golf tournaments by performing synchronized swimming routine.
Anyway, my very subtle point that both sides are the same stands. Do you know why? Because the 'sides' that do not understand the system and the rules it operates under do not last in congress very long ( and are ousted as you pointed out in your example ).
The problem is that it wouldn't get done. To do it that way you would need the cooperation of the bureaucracy and they are just not going to cooperate here. And who can blame them? I wouldn't do a good job if my bosses asked me to do an analysis of how to cut my job. The conclusion would be "the collateral damage would be catastrophic." I think that's why large corporate layoffs are always a shitshow too.
What about early retirement for unnecessary bureaucrats? You give them their most recent salary and benefits until they're 65 or would've been eligible for retirement, then handle their retirement plans as though they'd been working all that time. So that's fewer bureaucrats, less resistance to the change, more people moving to the "more productive" private sector, and the money still flows to communities via federal wages.
This kind of plan would be crazy for a private company that needs to fight to survive each quarter, but it works for governments who should be planning decades ahead.
Then it's worth asking: surely no matter what your perspective is, it's possible to come up with intelligent and capable malefactors who'll further your power and that of your side?
No matter who you consider to be malefactors. Let's say we call ancaps malefactors, and we're talking about the reformation of society. Surely it's possible to find capable people who will set that in motion and lock it in so it can't be avoided? There must be so many people able to plan this out. You might be one of those people!
And yet, how come we're looking at a pile of nonsense people, hurling grenades and being catastrophically useless in their own rights, across the board?
Do you consider them incompetent, when the claim is they'll make everything great and you hope they'll serve your interests?
Or do you consider that they're doing exactly what they are meant to do, but they're meant to be saboteurs and the damage IS not only the point but the only real plan?
In that case, they might not even be in control of what they think they're intending, but they've been selected to do exactly what they're doing. Some of the bigger ones seem to be carrying on like Bond villains, presumably because they enjoy that, but even they are poised to do catastrophic damage to what they're supposed to 'rule'.
So do they even expect to rule anything, or are they simply trying to break everything before fleeing the ruins? They're not acting like they're trying to build power, it's something else. Even Trump's bluster is not really building power in any way, it's only undermining American hegemony at a staggering rate.
That might be the only purpose.
<< They're not acting like they're trying to build power, it's something else. Even Trump's bluster is not really building power in any way, it's only undermining American hegemony at a staggering rate.
That is arguable, but let us assume it is true for the sake of the argument. If that is true, would you agree that US hegemony seriously waned over the course of at least 4 administrations before Trump?
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I notice you very actively defending Musk in threads but typically leave the conversation when someone ask you to defend the indefensible.
I can assure you that a great number of the people who disagree with you don't just "hate Musk" or have Trump derangement syndrome or something. This assumption that people only disagree with you for bad faith reasons or aren't "remaining curious" is weird, and you should reflect on it.
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"Just hire them back" is not actually a cost efficient option.
Take TB medication delivery, one of the many programs halted by the USAID cuts. If you stop a TB treatment midway through you make the development of drug-resistant TB more likely and you make it more likely that this strain spreads to others. Even if Musk decides that actually it really is unconscionable to not tackle the deadliest disease on the planet (which happens to be treatable), the delays cause deaths. This isn't like turning some web server back on.
Rehiring people is also a fucking joke when they've been fired in this manner. People have been forced to rapidly leave the countries that they are deployed in with minimal support from leadership. Those relationships are burned.
> Those relationships are burned.
That's the bigger point. This is the destruction of the United States as a viable partner, today and for the future. It's the most anti-American thing you could do, which makes you think how much of this is incompetence and ideology and how much of it is compromise.
> Those relationships are burned.
Also, everyone knows that they're more likely to get messed around as a government employee now, so the market rate has gone up. It is now more expensive to hire people for the same roles.
Government jobs don't work like that, do they? There's a pay schedule for the job title and that's what you get paid. The codes start with G and go from 1-16 and beyond. Idk look it up. You don't really get to negotiate wages as a federal employee. The only thing you can get paid more on hire is if the schedule for the title is like GS4-GS5 DOE
The flip is they get paid time off, a lot, retirement, health coverage, and maybe early retirement.
They do once no one applies at those rates. The deal just changed, dramatically.
I guess we'll see. I don't have a rebuttal or anything fancy to say other than i disagree with your assessment.
> You don't really get to negotiate wages as a federal employee.
Not on an individual basis, no. But the rates get set according to the market just like everything else, to the lowest that results in sufficient supply. The market is always moving. Recent changes will result in positive price pressure. Rates will inevitably lag, but they do not exist in a vacuum relative to the market.
Benefits of government employment exist, but other changing factors still move the market.
>It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back. Performance metrics are unreliable, but firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t. It shows you who is really critical.
I might believe this if there was actually any time between the firing and rehiring. This isn't the administration firing people, observing the result, and then restaffing the programs that did actually become less efficient. There have been multiple times in recent weeks in which this administration fired people and then immediately moved to rehire them because they didn't have any idea of who they actually fired in the first place.
I just don't understand how anyone could think all the confusion and uncertainty we have seen over the last month is part of a well constructed and good faith plan for a more efficient government.
Its picking up rocks to see what makes threats or scatters.
A large portion of the effect you seem to be experiencing is trump and elon troll, and the media just mangles the trolls until I do not believe any story, comment, etc about Trump, doge, musk, Zelensky, Putin, whatever unless I literally see their words or hear their words.
Ex: the executive branch policy executive order today or yesterday. MSM and people on the internet "he's bypassing the checks and balances!"
OK no that's not what the EO says; but just for fun check what EO Biden signed about this many days into his presidency.
Hint: Reformation of the US Supreme Court.
It's just what they do. Presidents.
Also for the record Trump has signed 68 and in the same timespan Biden signed 34. Most of both were rescinding the others EO.
The example I gave was people being fired and immediately rehired[1][2] and you're blaming that on the fake news not understanding Trump's "trolling"? That is your defense that this is all "part of a well constructed and good faith plan for a more efficient government"? The President of the United States is trolling federal workers by firing and then immediately rehiring them?
as my wife pointed out earlier today, they weren't fired. she said the best term she could come up with at that exact moment was something like furloughed. They're getting paid for months without having to show up and clock in.
that is not fired.
thank you for proving my point though. Probationary employees won't have their employment renewed, and everyone else you're calling "fired" was furloughed. Since she's a government employee, i tend to listen to her, rather than some other government mouthpiece over in Britain.
Your wife seems to be confused and is probably lumping together the previous round of voluntary deferred resignations with the more recent round of firings and layoffs.
The exact word used by both the USDA spokesperson and NNSA email was "termination" with the latter specifically saying "effective today"[1]. These are the words directly from the people whose job it is to communicate on behalf of this administration.
This matches the pattern of what has been happening to other federal workers who have generally had their termination letters cite "performance", regardless of their past reviews, as the reason for the termination[2], presumably so they can be let go without any notice or severance pay.
the first article you linked uses the phrases "terminated, fired, laid off, mass firings, termination notifications, ending contracts"
Do you see how you're not actually getting any information from that?
the second article isn't any better "fired", "laid off", "sent letters that were lying", “The U.S. Department of Transportation finds, that based on your performance you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Department of Transportation would be in the public interest,” the letter to fired staffers read. “For this reason, the Department of Transportation is removing you from your position with the Department of Transportation and the federal civil service effective today.”
That letter was to probationary employees. maybe. I've never seen a nat-pop in a news article like that before. It is in reference to something near the top, maybe?
What you're reading and linking to me is fuel. It isn't useful information.
people who get fired for being poor at their jobs - do they usually own up to it? or do they squawk about how unfair everything is. "i'm not poor at my job and my supervisor said so" yeah does your supervisor still work there or? There's poor management; just like employees, C levels, and politicians.
>Do you see how you're not actually getting any information from that?
I don't know what to tell you. There is information in these articles and you don't even need to trust the journalists who are reporting them. All these articles have included quotes directly from the relevant government officials and emails.
Here is another article[1] with a direct quote from the following:
-White House deputy press secretary saying "Any key positions that were eliminated are being identified and reinstated rapidly"
-Trump's Secretary of Energy saying "When we made mistakes on layoffs at NNSA, we reversed them immediately, less than 24 hours."
- Even Elon Musk saying "We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we'll also fix the mistakes very quickly."
And yet you are still refusing to admit what the people directly involved are telling you is true? You still think I'm just being misled by bad journalism?
so the secretary called them "layoffs"? Alright, so they weren't fired? Thanks again. I said they weren't fired. The comment you replied to originally was about the threat of auditing agencies is kicking up a lot of ruckus.
It is fine if you think these layoffs, firings, or whatever are not necessary, even if the only reason you think that is msm reporting and a dislike of elon and donald. I don't really care.
The journalists you assure me are doing just fine used 5 different words that have different meanings to convey that the people were no longer "employed".
If you can get real information from that, great. I'd argue that you don't, since i've spent 3 comments arguing that.
> It’s the same with ...
This is the problem with your argument and all others like it.
Like the parent comment states in this thread, there is a truly mind boggling level of nuance and complexity that goes on in almost every single discrete field. The nuances that make you succeed in one field may not (are probably not!) the same as another field.
We can even see this within a field: Being a good engineering manager does not make you a good engineer, or vice versa. So why should we think either of these disciplines can be extended into geopolitics, finance, or anything else?
I don’t think it’s a good strategy in this case.
Some of the people you fire will not come back, even if you try to rehire them immediately. Some of the firings will not result in problems in the near term, but will cause problems later on. Some of the firings will cause problems that only occur under certain conditions, like catastrophic events and natural disasters.
Furthermore, you cause real harm to people who depend on these services in the interim period where you’re figuring things out. In some cases that harm cannot be undone.
The stated policy objectives to reduce waste could be achieved with much less disruption and cruelty simply by doing them more slowly and thoughtfully. There is no need to rush everything through in six weeks.
<< The stated policy objectives to reduce waste could be achieved with much less disruption and cruelty simply by doing them more slowly and thoughtfully. There is no need to rush everything through in six weeks.
If there is one thing that Trump has clearly learned from his first term, it is your window to effect actual change is surprisingly small and for that reason alone, historically speaking, presidents tended to open with their priorities ( whatever they were ).
I am mildly on the fence, but it has been my affliction most of my life. FWIW, I do hear you, but I do see a need for a drastic reduction. I recognize it is a gordian knot and it will be painful across the board. Doing it slowly may be just taking a bandaid off one hair at a time.
If the only thing on the planet you care about is efficiency, sure. How about the human lives impacted by all of it?
"Efficiency" is such a dumb thing to optimize for singlemindedly. Overly efficient systems are brittle and can't adapt to shocks. Look what happened to the efficient global supply chain when that ship blocked the Suez Canal.
Imagine if we demanded "efficiency" from fire departments; they'd only hire as many firefighters as they need to respond to the average number of emergencies per day, then totally flop when there's a mass casualty event.
Having a fast moving and inefficient government is what attracts people to the US! To live and invest there. Fast moving governments can destroy things, make them unpredictable and unstable based on the whims of a few. In this case an unelected billionaire with conflicts of interest and a pardon for all his crimes waiting for him in Dec of 2028.
People hate that.
Slow moving*
"move fast and break things" means iterating on a product but that's on a whole different scale when you are talking about space rockets and the USA government
You give a compelling argument. If the same strategy was being executed by someone else, I'd even consider giving it a thought. Heck, if the president was executing this independently, I'd still give him the benefit of doubt. But I don't trust Elon with what you're suggesting. He has nefarious motives.
>It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back.
Except that we're talking about human beings.
>Progressives will hate all of this simply out of a hatred of Musk
Consider that truly believing this instead of considering that some people have well-reasoned concerns, might make you closed to divergent ideas. And that is, of course, what you're accusing progressives of being here.
Which other leaders? Any who aren't about to be impeached for rugpulling memecoins?
> a brilliant strategy to quickly and comprehensively remove waste
A better strategy would have been to :
- spend 2016-2020 while Trump was in power auditing the NSAID / federal spending.
- spend 2020-2024 while they were hand-vetting thousands of loyalists and having Musk donate $240,000,000 towards their funds, plus other donations from other mi/billionaires, planning spending cuts.
- spend the pre-election time telling people what cuts they were planning and why.
- move to make those planned cuts quickly and comprehensively.
- release a tidy report of fraud and corruption found after 2, 3, 6 months.
This keeps confidence in the government high for national and international investors and governments, it would win over some Dems and undecided voters, it would reduce worry and stress from Republicans. They didn't do that, and you can't say it isn't a priority or they didn't have money or time or access to do it, so the possible remaining reasons don't look good:
1. they are just winging it. They don't know what the agencies do, what can be cut or what they want to spend.
1. The plans are so objectionable that if they told everyone their plans in advance, people would not have voted for them. (They don't care what the agencies do).
1. the chaos and hurt is part of the plan.
1. They want to be able to make stuff up, and have nobody able to call them on it. (see also: DOGE's actions are sealed by Executive Order, Musk has said some untruths about what they've found, Musk told interviewers that the things he says will be incorrect).
1. any other reasons? Any compelling reasons?
If you move slowly, agencies will circle the wagons and organise resistance.
I don't endorse it, but it seems like the "strategy" is mainly speed and surprise.
I'd say it's probably option 1.
Spoken like a true sociopath. These are people’s lives.
"lOoK HoW gReAt TwItTeR iS DoInG"
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It's been overrun by Nazis and is worth a fraction of it's purchase price. Having a website be technically online is not the measure of if it's "doing well".
>Operationally, Twitter is doing well, even with 80% of the workforce gone.
>It’s pretty clearly a success story on any objective measure.
Your comment actually underscores the problem. That is, even if Twitter really is more efficient operationally, the overall business is greatly diminished.
You point to the advertiser feud as the reason for revenue drop-off, as if it's a tangential thing. But, in fact, part of the reason for that is the chaos, as well as other, let's say..."human dynamics". And, now we're seeing a mass exodus from Twitter, the impact of which remains to be seen. It's all related. Having humans in the mix makes things far messier.
So, business success is not merely about operational efficiency and, when it comes to government, it's orders of magnitude more complex.
The advertisers couldn't care less about operational chaos at Twitter. They care about bad press. If Twitter was a lesser known company or Elon Musk wasn't a political enemy of liberal journalists, there would have been minimal revenue loss. This had nothing to do with the layoffs. Twitter would have the exact same problem even if they kept all the employees.
>The advertisers couldn't care less about operational chaos at Twitter
I wasn't referring to operational chaos or layoffs. I was referring to social chaos—you know, all of the controversial "free speech" stuff.
You could certainly characterize it all as merely political. But many would say (do say) that the kind of speech, disinformation, etc. that now occurs regularly there is much more than that.
Obviously, you're free to disagree, but then that leads to a somewhat tedious and unresolvable discussion wherein we debate what other people actually think or how much hate speech occurs; or we disagree over semantics of the "who decides what's hate speech?" variety.
Overall, I think most would agree that things changed under Musk. Some call it free speech. Some call it hate speech. But, whatever side you choose, it's controversial by definition. Advertisers, especially those serving a "general audience", tend to not like controversy.
Everyone has the right to choose and, among those with that right, are advertisers.
Advertisers don't care about "hate speech" being allowed or any of this controversy. If they did, they wouldn't advertise with Google of Meta.
Well, that's certainly an interesting take that I didn't anticipate.
Thanks for the chat. Take care.
Yeah, things are looking for for Twitter all of a sudden...
objectively, the ad business used to bring in around $5 billion. It now brings in closer to 1. Sure, costs got cut, and now it's cashflow positive, but if the goal was really to reform the business from a strictly monetary point of view, it's impossible not to bring up the fact that there could have been an extra $4 billion in profit, if someone had just been less polarizing of a character.
so objectively, looking strictly at the numbers, it's not a winner. if I were a PE firm and my hired CEO's personality caused revenue to drop that hard, I'd find another CEO who could just as easily have cut costs without all the insanity. insanity brings risk and has cultural and political costs, and who wants that? Just make me money and don't get me in the newspapers.
so the only reasonable conclusion is that it's not about money or the stated goals but about power. Ever get annoyed with a waitress at a restaurant over something small? A normal person would just brush it off, but if you're a billionaire, you can buy the restaurant, cut her wages (because firing her is less humiliating), and have her boss treat her like shit, because it's fun for a billionaire to flex on the peasants like that.
It stopped being about the money a couple hundred million dollars ago.
You're probably part of the problem; folks like yourself are nearly universally ignorant of many Chesterton's fences.
Unless they radically edited what they said after you replied, I’d say the approach they favor necessarily includes understanding the fence. It’s a bit rude to just lump them in with “folks like themselves” as an ad hom.
Even as a left lib who thinks the primary purpose of a government should be to pool money into public good, I doubt all the fences that are up are there for good reasons anymore. Questioning them in a careful and rational manner is healthy, and I wish it were done more. Wanton destruction like we’re seeing now isn’t.
I think that’s in line with what your parent comment was saying too. They might be more surprised than I would be as to how many fences are justified, but it sounds like they believe it’s important to check.
I've worked in government and large institutions, and frequently deal with people who think like this.
Let's just say I'm perfectly comfortable with the ad hominem.
Literally 100% of the people I've encountered with this attitude either soften it once they're actually in, or they come in and break things.
Any time someone comes in with a "clean house" attitude," I know I have to get ready because they nearly universally have no clue of what they're talking about.
Pardon my French. - You need to be sharing a fuck ton of examples.
People make sense of things in many ways. One of the most fundamental are stories.
Share every example or story you can, or your friends can. This is one of the things conspicuously absent on HN, which is surprising since there should be many people with personal experience dealing with governments or complex systems.
It may seem simple, but they matter.
I respect your experience, but your message added literally nothing to the conversation besides “you probably suck because people like you generally do.” It was nothing but a personal attack.
That’s considerably harder to respect, and it put me in the position of feeling like I needed to defend the parent of your comment.
Being more direct, since you seem to value that: consider keeping that sort of thing to yourself unless it has an actual constructive point beyond insulting the person to whom you’re responding. However true it might be per your subjective experience, posting it here only makes you look bad.
If nothing else, choosing a straw man of not understanding Chesterton’s Fence, when that was already directly contradicted by the parent comment, comes off as you being the ignorant one.
You may be comfortable with the ad hom, but maybe you shouldn’t be so comfortable with that.
Identifying what the collateral damage would be, planning to minimize harm done, and identifying replacements for the functionality prior to replacement reads to me like an exact application of the principles recommended by Chesterton's fence rather than apparent ignorance of the concepts https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/:
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
If you still see it so differently I'd like to better understand some more of the reasoning why.
All of your theory sounds good.
I've NEVER ever ever seen anyone who comes in with this attitude do it effectively in practice. They always either soften greatly or screw things up.
I can't take any credit for theory as the above is just what Chesterton's Fence story is advising with nothing added.
I'm not particularly a DOGE fan myself but I've seen many folks like the above able to do great amounts of "cleanup" in organizations of 100k+ employees without much broken glass. Plenty who don't as well and create a mess of course... but those are not usually the ones who introduce themselves by way of being concerned about the effects and rate of change. People absolutely certain they know how something will go without doubt before even getting involved are usually the biggest problems, though they aren't wrong 100% of the time either.
Just as not every person who is hesitant to remove things is just a curmudgeon, freeloader, fake worker, lazy, or whatever else people like to characterize them as it's also true not every person who wants to remove cruft is ignorant, clueless, wreckless, royally screws things up, and so on. In both cases success is more tied with those focusing on the details, review, and planning of the execution rather than feelings on first thought.
Because this isn't about efficiency.
Last weekend the Washington Post published some internal DOGE memos showing this is absolutely true. What's happening has nothing to do with efficiency. It's all about ideology.
The original claim was "these actions are trying to destroy the government", but the article only seemingly says they're trying to destroy DEI?
But DEI is what made JD Vance who he is today. To quote an article:
"The truth is, if it was not for the Yellow Ribbon Program I would not be going to law school."
Why are they trying to destroy it?
Are they saying that they do not want more DEI, JD Vance-type people, that one is enough?
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> To quote an article: "The truth is, if it was not for the Yellow Ribbon Program I would not be going to law school."
That's not DEI. This program is about helping ex-military to find new employment.
DEI is about "we do not have enough racial / gender diversity at this company / office / organisation / employment level".
It absolutely is. I’m a disabled (technically, but not in any meaningful way) veteran, and you’d best believe that the first time I decided to mark those two boxes on job applications, my callback rate skyrocketed.
Please see my answer to someone else - "My message was specifically about the Yellow Ribbon Program, not if DEI includes people with disabilities.".
I assume that you're USA-based. Is there any chance that there're any state-sponsored programs for employers hiring people with disabilities?
I do still see a large difference between:
- giving companies some benefits to cover the additional costs of having a disabled person working for them
Again, my original statement was about what the JD Vance program is and what is not.
Veterans are included in DEI hiring practices. As are disabilities.
If you've applied for a job in the past 10 years surely you've had to declare your gender, ethnic background, veteran status, and disability status.
> Veterans are included in DEI hiring practices. As are disabilities.
My message was specifically about the Yellow Ribbon Program, not if DEI includes people with disabilities.
> If you've applied for a job in the past 10 years surely you've had to declare your gender, ethnic background, veteran status, and disability status.
I did not. I believe that here, in Switzerland, it'd be illegal to ask for your gender or ethnicity. Age is legal, although not often practiced in IT. Veteran status - not a thing.
Phase 2 consists of placing on leave employees in non-DEI roles — who DOGE determines are somehow tied to DEI — as well as other employees working at offices whose existence is mandated by law.
>>What's happening has nothing to do with efficiency.
In my experience, efficient is rarely, if ever cheap.
The ideal outcome is that government fails, then they can point at the failing government and ask, why do we want to pay for something that is failing.
This - it's basically meme of the guy shooting the person behind him in the chair and then being incredulous.
If you want people to get onboard with spending cuts, you should raise taxes high enough to actually pay for all the spending so taxpayers feel the consequences of it.
Reducing revenues and letting people run up the credit card for decades instead, as an intentional strategy, was beyond irresponsible.
They've known for a long time that they can't cut spending. It will be terribly unpopular. So they cut taxes (especially on the rich) which keeps tax pressure on everyone else, but gets them wealthy donors.
Then the opposition has three choices: play chicken with the national debt, cut spending, or raise taxes. Usually raising the national debt is the easiest option.
What's their plan after that though? Privatization, I guess?
Ever read Snowcrash?
Yeah, their vision is us living in burbclaves of New South Africa, Mr Lee's Hong Kong and Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates and the bankrupt US Government with trillion dollar notes not to be used as toilet paper because it is illegal and clogs the plumbing.
I haven't, not yet anyway. I did read
Termination Shock by the same author, though. I loved it, and promptly added Snowcrash to my TBR list.
so glad someone else sees this.
When you are Elon, or Trump, or even a moderately succesful business… all the government does (or at least what you perceive) is tell you no. You can't dump that here, you can't build that there, you can't fire that person for that reason, you can't do that without a permit, etc.. They just want to clear all the roadblocks out of the way for their PERSONAL gains.
Get rid of the government and you can do whatever you want. That is what they want. These are people who feel they have "won" the game of capitalism, and were still told, "No." That greatly upset them. How can a winner be told they can't do something?
There's thousands of homeless and underhoused people all over the US for the same exact reasons so you don't have to be rich to feel the effects of government telling you no. Didn't used to be that way at all. My grandfather built his own house ~70 years ago with his brother from trees they cut down on the property and set it on blocks. He lived in for 60+ years and it's still standing. It's a house I could buy and live in right now. But I can't just build a much better house with modern materials and live in it without an egregious amount of site work.
It's so dumb it's gotten to the point that there is intense competition for the most rundown house that's already utility connected so you can tear it down and replace it piece by piece to avoid all the ridiculous new rules. It's only feasible to build either million dollar+ homes or jank-station multi-families where you hear your neighbors toilets flush.
All the body does is limit cell growth for cells with potential! What has the body ever done for thee?
There's thousands of homeless and underhoused people all over the US for the same exact reasons so you don't have to be rich to feel the effects of government telling you no.
Somehow countries with bigger governmental social systems have less homelessness.
You know, goverment said no to the robosigning of fraudulent evictions, no to the predatory loans ...
Network states per Yarvin. Each ruled by a corporation with CEO. With a caste system for cheap labor vs "citizens"
There was a new EO recently that required all new hires to be approved by DOGE. So the goal would be to bring back something like the CSC had (which was essentially IQ filters for a job). Then the per employee productivity would increase in the government.
Government employees are unbelievably unimpressive, and it started in 1978 with the abolition of the CSC.
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That's partly because they like Hitler quite a lot though.
They don't care, they'll be fine.
Is the US going the way the aftermath of which is described in Neuromancer, or is it going to be Snow Crash, complete with visas to every city state, and the "US" part that's left deluded that they are in control?
It's snow crash, they're calling it network states. Tech billionaires want to be CEO kings of their own mini states, their goal is to destroy the federal government. Project 2025 is based on ideas (in particula, RAGE, retire all government employees) from Curtis Yarvin, good friend of Peter Theil and JD Vance.
So great the worst people alive are now in complete control of everything.
> This wasn't just theoretical—there were actual attempts to implement these ideas, like the Peter Thiel-backed “network state" project called Praxis in Greenland.
Huh.
Guess where Trump wanting Greenland comes from.
Accurately observed, but I think they're foolish and are only being used by a particular nation-state with a grudge against the US. Their alliances are pretty obvious, but an empire trying to reclaim its empire does not keep its promises to tech barons.
The Project 2025 people are probably sincere, but wildly impractical. Their impracticality has been indulged by a global adversary which simply intends to destroy the United States on every possible level. There's no reason the tech barons will be given mini states. Why would that happen?
They have money, there might be enough corruption in some states to allow them to accomplish this, or since they're in power they could sell federal land?
Not sure if anything but their own incompetence can stop them now, if not that a military coup might happen when trump cracks down on protests with soldiers, like he wanted last time he was president.
Yeah, they all are (immensely rich (for now)) useful idiots.
Their greed is being leveraged to have them dismantle their own nation -- no need for military action.
What happens afterward might surprise these rich plutocrats, but I personally won't be surprised by it.
It feels like they really want to make use of those expensive bunkers.
That's actually the problem. These tech shitlords KNOW there's a chance everything is destroyed in a way that doesn't leave them gods. But they place that chance at like 30%. They're degenerate gamblers basically, betting it all on red.
That's my take too. The tech barons are all remarkably stupid and think that if they destroy the federal government they'll be able to swoop in and take everything, but the end result is 50 individual governments that stop paying dues to the feds, many of which are going to be far more hostile to said tech barons.
They're not even smart enough to properly pay off and maintain the military so they could try and enforce the oligarchy.
The best part is this is trivially obvious to anyone who knows their US history. The articles of confederation were torn up and replaced with a strong federal government that could adapt over time in part because the "federated states" system resulted in a bunch of petty tyrant Governors who completely ignored and neglected their federal obligations, ran their states like fiefdoms, and consistently made things shitty for everyone out of their pettiness.
Lots of people insist that the US should be a loose federation of states that are mostly left to themselves, basically like a less bureaucratic Europe, but that's stupid, because if that model worked, the constitution would not exist
This is the most sensible take I have seen online in months.
Lately, I feel like I'm living in the William Gibson "Bridge" trilogy meets Douglas Adam's Zaphod Beeblebrox timeline.
> Douglas Adam's Zaphod Beeblebrox timeline
At least the galactic government had the good sense to make the President of the Galaxy a figurehead. (Or, uh, figureheads?)
I spent a long time trying to figure out who he could have been comparing himself to every time he was in the media for decades, until I was watching the Simpsons and realized Krusty had always been there but was no longer the worlds most beloved clown.
Removing political guardrails and community due-process is what is happening.
A king and his fool is unsustainable, thus... people with brains and money will simply start to vote with their feet and leave while they are able. Have a great day =3
> people with brains and money will simply start to vote with their feet and leave while they are able
That worked in 1935. It doesn't work in 2025, in a world with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. We're all stuck on this planet together now; there's no escaping from a US with a mad king at the helm.
"nuclear-tipped ICBMs"
Not unless someone is suicidal, the ultimate glass-cannon is practically only an economic-weapon designed to bankrupt anyone foolish enough to compete in such programs.
Besides, there are rumors of far worse things now like geriatric Fox media. lol =3
>Not unless someone is suicidal
There are plenty of examples of rulers suddenly becoming suicidal once the walls start closing in on them.
Narcissists love themselves more than anyone else, and would never deny the world of their joy in collateral misery. lol =3
The government was on life support because of the same people killing it now. If you want to shrink the government, you first break it, then say it’s broken and must be reduced as a result.
The alternative was followed from the 30s during FDR until arguably the 80s…make the government effective, and it was immensely successful.
That was dependent upon an interpretation of the 10th amendment achieved via intimidation to pack the courts. Before that most the regulatory apparatus would not be constitutional.
What many of us are welcoming is an end to most regulation of most intrastate commerce except as authorized by the constitution. It is time to undo the damage of Wickard v Filburn.
What damage? You think the American economy was better during the robber baron era before the federal government had the ability to regulate interstate commerce and redistributive taxation, strong unions, and things like the GI bill created a large middle class capable of buying goods and services?
We’re backsliding into serfdom forgetting what Henry ford said when asked why he was raising wages far above competition: “I’ll sell more cars if my employees can afford to buy them”
If it’s austerity why are they raising the debt limit by 4 trillion and awarding massive contracts to their cronies (or themselves)? They are not trying to cut costs, they are trying to reallocate wealth away from the working class and into billionaire pockets.
That's the endgame I see.
Oligarchy. Kleptocracy. Morons cheering because they're deluded enough to believe that the definition of "pork" is when the government transfers money directly to lower and middle class via paychecks.
Congress will authorize contractors to do these jobs instead. We get back privatized versions of the old government services at a higher price, and the money goes into the bank accounts of the rich.
I'd like to read the CBO report on what this shit will actually cost over ten years.
> awarding massive contracts to their cronies (or themselves)?
Source(s) that this is actually happening?
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"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work"
Yarvin's writing as Moldbug is very clear on the subject. Both Thiel and Vance are public admirers and have reflected Yarvin's RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) in public. Thiel acolytes and admirers are staffing DOGE, drawn from tech communities and web forums.
They do not believe in functioning democracy but instead in a Randian "utopia" where the lords of capital run regions of the country as kings and the poor are turned into "biofuel."
It's from the admin of r/keep_track. It is far from complete (missing lots) and the summaries they write aren't always accurate.
The Federal Reserve section is one that's clearly incomplete, for instance, including just two goals when the document has several (e.g. curbing last-resort lending is missing).
That said, the site's a good portal if you're aware of those limitations. I really like that each item has a link to the PDF.
Yeah, the plans have been laid out in the public for a while.
We're seeing it happen in real time.
There are also various public talks and other published pieces by members of the admin, laying out exactly what they're planning to do (and now are doing) and why.
I dunno when they figured out they can just conduct conspiracies in public and nobody will call them on it, so there's little reason to bother with secrecy, but that's how they work now, and it's been weird to watch. I first noticed it with Bush II when prominent members of his administration published multiple pieces (before he was elected) calling for war with Iraq, and stating that the US should take essentially any half-decent excuse to go to war with Iraq even if that excuse itself is bad, then... did exactly that! And got away with it! Inexplicably, the media would interview them on the topic of going to war with Iraq and didn't make all the questions about that. It was barely a footnote to media coverage of the run-up to the war, which was so damn weird when anyone could just go read the text of these pieces themselves, with familiar names on them, telling us exactly how they were planning to fuck us. Didn't matter, they could just straight-up publish "here's how we're going to screw the public" and then screw the public exactly that way, and laugh all the way to the goddamn bank (literally, in many cases—they made so friggin' much money off the post-9/11 security apparatus and the wars)
It is really frustrating how news organizations don’t remember previous news cycles and connect the threads. That’s why the trump strategy of flooding the system with outrage constantly is so effective. People can’t maintain the narrative over time and so things get buried.
The public WANTS to be lied to.
They were basically asking for it.
People in positions of power gave the public exactly what they want.
If what happened to USAID isn’t evidence enough for you, I suggest you go and read up on Project 2025. Below is a link to the chapter on the commerce department where they call for the dismantling of NOAA. As the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought is one of the most powerful men in the executive branch and was one of the main architects of Project 2025.
Thanks, that's very interesting! I don't follow US politics closely, so it gives me a starting point.
The "starve the beast" strategy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast) has been around for a long time and is something that some right wing conservative people want to do. E.g. Norquist's quote that "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.".
As someone else mentioned, this isn't only about improving efficiency of the government but also about it doing less. So things that currently you would be getting from the government you would no longer be getting. You might agree or disagree with this idea.
Predicting what Trump is going to do is not easy. I don't think he really knows himself each day what he will get up to. Mostly draw a lot of attention to himself, seems the main goal. He's doing fantastic on that front. Regarding policy, he is a lot more purposeful vs his previous term and he is pretty closely following the Project 2025 playbook:
Enacting government policy primarily through executive orders is an "interesting" approach. I would say that's not how you want a government to work. Maybe Trump's extreme use of EOs will prompt some reform or maybe it will become the new norm. The other branches of the US government don't seem very interested in actually performing their job.
The congress in 2021 seemed very interested in doing their job but the minority in the Senate did a really good job of obstructing anything and everything using the pocket filibuster.
meta: it's interesting because this kind of disingenuous "Just asking questions. I'd love to know more!" had been pretty effective at shutting down conversation when the topics were abstract. People were inevitably tired of explaining the same things over and over to a contingent that didn't want to understand.
But now that our country is being imminently destroyed by these treacherous looters, there are enough people ready to immediately jump in with straightforward answers that the FUD is a mere speed bump, making the technique pretty useless for shutting down discussion and consensus.
I'm not from your country and don't follow its politics closely. The GP had said that the intent had been clearly written but provided no breadcrumbs for me to research further.
Your country makes up 5% of the worlds population, the other 95% of us are not all following that closely and certainly not trying to commit some form of sabotage by asking for more information.
You're voluntarily in a thread about US politics. If this is your first such thread, reading it would have gotten you the background.
Also, the "I haven't seen" construction is quite dodgy on its own, as it has become common pattern of the neofascists to feign ignorance rather than acknowledge details.
If it was really an innocent one time question, you're certainly not the only one to have been harmed by this destruction.
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>Because this isn't about efficiency.
Being alive and happy is not effcient.
> The people radicalized to these actions are trying to destroy the government.
The federal government, right? They are in favor of state and local government, but object to federal, which they assert reduces the ability for states to have different rules and regulations that can drive competition amongst different legal frameworks.
This seems unclear. For example, the Department of Transportation just told NY they have to shut down the new (and apparently relatively successful) congestion pricing [1] in NYC. (As with some other things being torn down by the administration, apparently the rules say the government cannot do this.)
So it appears, at least, that the administration doesn't actually respect states' rights and is looking to take over everything.
I'd be interested in understanding the property rights of the roads they were taxing. Were they taxing highways that had some covenants or contract ensuring toll free passage? I'm unfamiliar with the contract made for federally matched roads but it wouldn't surprise me if there's an agreement you can't just turn it into a toll road by calling it a new tax.
“ In a letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the federal government has jurisdiction over highways leading to Manhattan and that the additional tolls posed an unfair burden for motorists outside the city.”
However that seems like a dubious claim (Google results report the highways around Manhattan are operated by the state of NY, however New Jersey is adjacent).
I wonder if they could get around that by making the prices balance to zero? Like charge fees to people during congestion times and pay those fees outdistributed equally amongst those who enter during non congestion.
Then there would be no net revenue/toll. The optics would also be far better than green washing a net toll on people driving in from outside the city/state.
Charging people from outside the area so that they are less likely to come in a personal vehicle is one of the direct goals of congestion pricing. It isn't an environmental program, it's a traffic management program and isn't greenwashing anything.
You can call it whatever you like. I didn't say it was an environmental program, it is first and foremost a revenue generation program under a clever guise to dupe towards political leaning of new yorkers.
You can read their own description, they green wash advertising cleaner air, less emissions, etc.
They didn’t need to dupe anyone; the program is indisputably not popular and they implemented it anyway. The two goals of congestion pricing have always been to generate revenue for the MTA and reduce congestion/pollution in Manhattan. They never hid that. Most transit advocates support both of those goals, and the beauty of congestion pricing (as opposed to a revenue-only option like an extra tax on businesses in the congestion zone) is that it can accomplish both at once.
I’d also note that popularity has been going up as everyone sees the benefits immediately and the predictions of a business meltdown turned out not to be true. It feels very similar to the bans on indoor smoking where smokers predicted restaurants and bars would close and the opposite happened.
It's not greenwashing if it actually does those things?
The horrors of less traffic and uh, less actual pollution.
Ye probably the wrong thing to accuse of green washing.
I think he tries to brown wash the tolls to hide that they are environmentally friendly to prying eyes by accusing the NYC road dep. of green washing.
edit: (Brown as in dirt, not anything else)
They seem to be in favor of state and local governments only so far as those governments agree with them.
Yes, and they have threatened action against those they disagree with. We’ll see if they can get away with it, but something to resist very strongly.
What is harder to fight against, however, is when they make deals with corrupt officials (looking at you democratic NYC Mayor, Mr Adams) to get what they want: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80yrglnn79o
The world's first volunteer slave.
Let's not call a Black mayor of a major city a slave.
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> They are in favor of state and local government, but object to federal, which they assert reduces the ability for states to have different rules and regulations that can drive competition amongst different legal frameworks.
As demonstrated by efforts to prevent state and local governments from acting independently...
> As demonstrated by efforts to prevent state and local governments from acting independently...
Ironically tempering states is an important function of the federal government (eg civil rights, environmental protections, etc).
If the federal government is used to force states to make things worse, that is something to resist very strongly.
> Ironically tempering states is an important function of the federal government (eg civil rights, environmental protections, etc).
Right, like shutting down congestion pricing plans. ;-)
State government? You mean states in the bible belt, right? Because they aren’t in favor of liberal coastal state government.
You want to distinguish between favoring federalism VS favoring the policies/culture/etc. of specific states.
So yeah; they are in favor of more state government in lieu of federal, even though they hate certain states’ policies. I think that’s obvious. Now, the question is whether or not they will succeed in handicapping states’ autonomy when they disagree with things. My take is they will try (and have tried), but it isn’t a foregone conclusion that they will succeed. There’s soft power and there’s violence, and I’m optimistic that it will be more the former.
> So yeah; they are in favor of more state government in lieu of federal, even though they hate certain states’ policies.
They just nixed NYC’s congestion fee. They are gonna do plenty of meddling.
More feudalism less federalism.
I thought this was already settled during the American Civil War, yet we're back at it again.
Apparently not!
An opposite question is interesting: why not abolish state governments and only have the federal government? I haven’t thought about it deeply so don’t have a strong sense that it would be better than the status quo, though I suspect it might.
Centralization and size comes with inefficiency and slow decision making. It also comes with economies of scale. For something like the Medicare, the economy of scale dominates and it makes much more sense to be federal. When it comes to running schools, there really isn't much economy of scale so it makes much more sense to run it locally.
Economies (and diseconomies) of scale exist, of course, but aren't central to what is the responsibility of the federal government and what is the responsibility of the state governments. That, of course, is laid out rather plainly in the founding legal document of the country.
The Civil War settled that the feds could rule over the explicitly authorized powers of the federal government. In the 30s the feds reneged and decided blatantly unconstitutional stuff like the (later passed) Civil rights act could hold if they just call everything interstate commerce.
When the US falls apart this will be a likely central focus .
how was the civil rights act not constitutional?
CRA under the 1875 version was found unconstitutional per the Civil Rights Cases of the Supreme court [0].
In the 1930s the executive threatened to pack the supreme court and many analogous private/intrastate commerce regulations were allowed federally by this bastardization of 'interstate commerce' by the court. Then they repassed the CRA with yet again stuff found unconstitutional, using their new version of 'interstate commerce' (everything).
The CRA objectively has been found unconstitutional by the Supreme court, and I believe it may be again under the latest generation of the court.
so, probably restating what you said, if someone wanted to pass something like that, a constitutional amendment is the better way since relying on interstate commerce clause is shaky ground... is that right interpretation?
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Yesterday, Trump announced he was killing congestion pricing in New York City. A program set up by the state of New York, to help fund infrastructure in New York.
Seems like an issue that should be left to the state, and yet here they are asserting federal authority over it.
I’m not that familiar with US politics but I read that this was more a symbolic move and he actually can’t influence this law since as you pointed out it’s a matter of the New York state. He can announce things all day, which is exactly the strategy - do at least 5 ridiculous things every day and the media/people can’t react fast enough — bury them in shit
If it was purely symbolic then it may be even worse because the Truth Social post he wrote to announce it ended with "LONG LIVE THE KING!"
He loves a good troll and the media + commentariat eats it up like candy and gives him all the free airtime he wants.
He means those things. And does those things.
He is just a tell is how enablers made all these people sound innocent and their detractors crazy. At this point I believe it was often deliberate strategy. Plus crazy paranoid were actually 100% correct over years.
Like many things in US politics, “it’s complicated.” The program had to get approval from the federal government (which was granted by the Biden administration), it’s now up to the courts if Trump can rescind that approval.
The point is that saying power should go back to the states is really just a talking point conservatives use when it’s convenient for them, not actually a strongheld belief that guides their actions in any way.
Louisiana wants to punish a New York doctor for prescribing medicine. Project 2025 in general wants to ban and criminalize medication abortion nationwide.
If I kept a running list of all the ways conservatives preach states right but don't really practice it, I wouldn't have much time to do anything else.
And "states rights" has been coded language anyway. Refer to Lee Atwater 1981 interview. Now the coded language has focused attention on "DEI", "trans", among other things.
Indeed, you're a sucker if you ever did believe it really ever was about state rights.
The thing you always need to ask when you hear about "state rights" is "state rights to do what?"
The answer is usually something Federal law or the Constitution would otherwise forbid, or that most people would consider morally reprehensible.
That states' rights were claimed to keep slavery, or any other morally reprehensible thing, does not mean that the concept of states' rights is wrong. It means slavery and other morally reprehensible things are wrong.
Of course, at any given time, there exist a number of issues facing the public over which there is no clear consensus on whether they constitute something morally reprehensible.
You're making the argument that what the federal government decides is right is always or usually the right thing compared to what states are claiming. I challenge you to claim that this is the case for, say, federal law forbidding marijuana versus states allowing it, or as was the case until very recently, enthusiastic support for pediatric gender reassignment from the federal government versus states outlawing it.
They are making the point that "states rights" is empty hypocritical talking point. It is meant to win argument by pretending you care about something you don't.
Everybody knows "state rights" imply conservative policies, but don't apply to anyone else.
> Everybody knows "state rights" imply conservative policies, but don't apply to anyone else.
Is that right? Has there been a widespread backlash on the states' rights grounds against, say, Colorado or Massachusetts legalizing marijuana despite it being classified as a Schedule I drug federally with no acceptable use?
How about sanctuary city or state laws? Those in support of such policies base it on the concept of shared sovereignty between federal vs. state and local governments, i.e. states' rights. So there's clearly liberal or progressive uses of states' rights, in addition to conservative uses.
>You're making the argument that what the federal government decides is right is always or usually the right thing compared to what states are claiming.
Nope. The word I used is "usually." Go back and read it. You're the one who decided to replace that "usually" with "always" and I'm not obligated to play the strawman role for you.
When states make a special case out of states' rights it's usually not for a good reason, otherwise they could just pass state laws. States' rights arguments imply things the Federal government would be opposed to, that states would need to weaken the power of the Federal government to accomplish, usually where regulations or anti-discrimination laws are concerned.
If it's usually not for a good reason, then it follows that sometimes it is for a good reason.
Weak, divided governance, so that they can ignore it.
They to have just enough government for them to extract as much wealth as possible. States rights is about them doing whatever they want without interference.
The US had a civil war that its defenders describe as being about "states' rights", with the most important right of all being the ability to literally own other people as property.
Make America Great Again is a about returning to those glory days.
> the ability to literally own other people as property.
Make America Great Again is a about returning to those glory days.
Are you suggesting they want to allow states to reinstate slavery? That sounds very conspiratorial.
Slavery was never actually banned. The 13th Amendment leaves a Death Star sized loophole.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
I do not find it strange or otherwise see it as a loophole that duly convicted prisoners pay some of their debt to society by being forced to do labor.
It at least hinges on what people are convicted of being things that "deserve" slavery. Not all agree that possession of drugs for personal use meets that. Or performing or having an abortion. What if the government turns full Russia and makes political dissent illegal? Or championing/practicing "non traditional family values" like LGBT?
There is also a moral hazard in being able to earn money on prison labor, as it incentives putting people in prison.
I agree that the moral hazard is there, and it's fraught with potential for abuse[0]. But prison labor also has the potential to teach convicts skills and discipline that would be useful after their sentence.
> Not all agree that possession of drugs for personal use meets that. [...]
I'm not sure if you're saying that there is disagreement in society about what things constitute crimes, or that there should be a difference in how we treat convicted prisoners on what they were convicted on?
On its face, I'm not sure why, say, someone convicted of manslaughter is "deserving" of being made to do labor and someone convicted of, say, felony reckless driving is not, or vice versa. But I'm sure there are arguments to be made in either case.
[0]: Like the "Kids for cash" scandal in Pennsylvania, though I'm not sure if there was a labor component involved there and not just a per-prisoner payment (which is just as bad).
Sure, until you get “duly convicted” of a minor crime like speeding or having a joint and sent to the labor camps.
There's this idea that America's prisons are full of people like you describe, which really isn't borne out by reality at all.
There are quite a few less nonviolent drug offenders in jail than, say, the 1990s, but that doesn't mean it can't swing back.
It's a deeply perverse incentive, even if it's not currently being abused. I don't love having it in the hands of politicians as an option.
If they were in favor of state and local government, why is the federal government threatening to sue California for admissions in the UC system and demanding that NYC's congestion pricing be ended or else lose federal funding? Why are faculty members at state universities being forced to change their research because it is on a verboten topic?
The idea that Trump, Musk, or anybody involved in leadership of Trump's administration care about state and local government authority is, frankly, fucking ludicrous.
There's a certain sort of anti-intellectualism that revels in the idea that if there doesn't exist a simple solution, then there must not exist any solution. It is either an inability to grasp the notion of complexity, or a childish refusal to. Therefore, any system that is too complex for them to understand must be demonized and destroyed.
Reminds me of H.L. Mencken's "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."
I’ve never heard of any “solution” to cancer, well known or not, that was neat and plausible.
I think you're about to understand the quote.
I think I already understood the quote at the time of writing the previous comment…
Hence why I quoted the exact words.
Do you understand it?
Not sure why you're being confrontational? I'm not the OP but it's clear there's some misunderstanding
The quote is:
- neat
- plausible
- wrong
"Just get rid of the cancer" is
- neat because it sounds obvious and tidy
- plausible because we can and do cut out cancer
- wrong because it ignores the nuance that cutting into a patient's body can have massive impacts on long term health. It can also be wrong because certain cancers have no tumor sites.
No, I don’t think there’s a misunderstanding, unless the parent has literally never seen anyone on HN quote exact words before.
They’re likely being dumb and/or intentionally misleading.
The quote is meant as a type of sarcasm/humor. Meaning if a presented solution is neat and plausible it's likely going to be wrong.
I know… that’s why I wrote I’ve never seen such a solution for cancer presented as if it where both neat and plausible simultaneously.
If anyone offers an example that could have plausibly fooled the median HN reader at the time of reading, then I will change my mind.
It’s emotional immaturity, like you said very childish.
Narcissists are deeply emotionally immature, in a way that is incredibly resistant to healing. Their entire life narrative and every action is based on a fundamental delusion. Most of us struggle with change and admitting when we are wrong… To heal, a narcissist must change their entire world view and admit they have been living a harmful lie their entire life.
It’s quite bad when such a person gains significant power and has goals that conflict with well-being of others.
It's very sad that the Nazis made eugenics into a taboo for the next century. The conclusion of WW2 should've been the opposite - narcissism and lack of empathy (also known as psychopathy) endanger the entire world and need to be minimized in the gene pool. It is, of course, too late now.
Lack of empathy is not just inborn trait, it is ideological expectation. Nazi praised lack of empathy (especially in men) and ended up raising people to be like that
And currently, quite a lot of what conservatives see as traditional masculinity is that - you look at what they teach young men and lack of empathy is seen as asset. Compassion is seen as weakness.
But it has zero to do with genetics, it is values.
I think related to this is the notion that if people are unhappy with the status quo, and a clearly defective solution is offered, they still go for it.
"Something needs to be done. This is something. Let's do it".
The fact that this something might make it worse is ignored.
A variant of this is watching someone demonstrate years of practice and assume you could as well(without practice). The underlying assumption is if something works that easily it must also be simple.
Beautifully said
> that probationary employees aren't needed
Remember that "probationary" doesn't mean new. I just learned this, but apparently when getting a promotion it puts you back into the "probationary" period at your new role. So people with 10+ years of service are being let go because they had recently been promoted.
Saw posts of national park rangers with 10+ years of experience who were fired for being "probationary" employees because they were recently promoted.
It's really, really hard to believe I have anything in common with people cheering on this cruel incompetence.
Firing any probationary employees withou a real cause is cruel, has zero dignity and looks totally stupid. But this makes it even worse!
Like what is the great thing that needs to be done right now that justifies trampling over peoples lives like this ?
That's what's fascinating. Given the capture of all three branches of government, they could presumably get all their wishes "above the board." Congress would willingly rubber-stamp shrinking the government to three nuclear missiles and the guy who polishes the exhibits at the Smithsonian, but actually enumerating what they want and waiting for it to wend through procedure was too slow.
Part of that might be that they know it's a smash-and-grab operation: the moment they started the cuts, the alarm was already ringing and it's only a matter of time before (Congress | the courts | Luigi Mangione | Several million annoyed pensioners) man up and interrupt the process. (exactly the nature of the interruption is clearly TBD).
When the dust clears, the fascinating thing to study will be the real priorities. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the collateral damage is a smoke screen around very specific grudges against specific people and agencies-- the financial equivalent of burning down the entirety of San Diego because your ex-wife lives there. There was the whole USAID/Starlink angle already, but surely other people got theirs.
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Could be a round of promotions and pay raises coming so that they can fire more people and claim to save extra money.
I mean, that would imply some form of intelligence to all this. And, well, this first month has shown there is no intelligence.
Yeah, probationary in most civil service systems is attached to a particular class, so if you move up promotionally, or (in many cases) into a new career path, you retain seniority but are in probationary status again for some period of time. Usually, failing probation at the new level without additional problems means that you have reinstatement rights at your last non-probationary class.
Yes, and this example right here tells you how much research DOGE does (with anything they are doing). Highly inept people if measured by what their stated goal is...although we all know what the real goal is.
Hmm... interesting. Different departments might have different meanings then? I was in DIA nit ages ago and probationary only meant < 2 years.
We're going to get a great lesson on why 'command economy' style top down management doesn't work, from the guys who hate command economies.
Aren't they taking away the 'command' part of the government? No government, no command.
This is committing the classic mistake of forgetting that a government is just a corporation with an army behind it. "The government" isn't going away; just the one where you had any semblance of say in its operation.
This is exactly the insight that shifted me from being libertarian to progressive. Humans create organizations to coordinate behavior. Corporations are good for risk taking ventures, governments are good for social cooperation and coordination. Different purposes, time scales and objectives. Both are important and necessary. We should make them the best they can be.
Government ultimately is power over the citizenry -- it will always exist in one form or another whether it's the Church, the Mob, Warlords, etc. I believe our existing government is the least-worst option.
The goal is literally the end of democracy and a king reigning over techno-feudalist "states". They make no secret of this.
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I would like to see the IRS take my income when it's disbanded.
> a government is just a corporation with an army behind it
This is a bad analogy. A corporation, and a corporation that can use force, have completely different properties. Walmart cannot hold a gun to my head and force me to pay for illegal alien's hotels. They can only get by if they sell products worth buying, and in a free and fair market, they can flourish only based on merit. They must cut the fat and make better deals and better products if they want to grow. The government does not have the pressures of a free and fair market. If the government needs more money, they print it, or they take it from me. Both are a form of tax. They don't cut their own fat. They have no incentive. They only grow. I may get downvoted for this, but I think Elon is doing good work. He managed to get twitter running on about 20% of the employees and I think he can do the same with government. From my perspective, the only people who complain about this are those that want to see a perpetually growing central government who don't see the danger of having a centralized power encroaching and taxing every aspect of our lives, and those who are in on it themselves.
Would you say the East India Company had no command when its armies conquered India?
they will simply migrate the responsibility into the hands of a few billionaires who will act in their own best interest.
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A big part of what the government does is provide stability. It's supposed to be slow an inefficient. It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.
If we aim for 100% efficiency we end up with massive unemployment, because a lot of jobs and businesses are just not necessary. We all just got to experience that first hand, as when COVID hit something like 1/3rd of people either stop worked or worked massive reduced hours and the truth of the matter is the world kept spinning JUST FINE, save for a some inconveniences.
The more efficient things becomes, the more another mechanism is needed to control people, so you are going to eventually have to bring back some kind of formal class system or slavery.
"It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.", what a ridiculous and condescending statement. If that was true, the number of federal employees would be much higher but in fact the number has stayed relatively flat for over 50 years at 2.8 million federal employees.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
I'm sure there are bright and talented government workers, but it's not a stretch of the imagination to say that a lot of factors make government employment cushier for some people than they might otherwise find in private employment. Or do you think the 60k employees of the TSA actually stop terrorist threats to commercial aviation?
And I'm not sure how your logic follows; there's no link between GP's claim that some government jobs effectively function as a form of welfare and your claim that the number of people eligible for this welfare must increase over time.
> It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.
You seem to be implying that this is a desirable property of government. I don't think that's true, and I think that the Broken Window Fallacy applies to your argument.
Perhaps inefficiency is not desirable, but it should be deliberative. These rash, uninformed actions will have consequences.
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> It's supposed to be slow an inefficient.
For creating new legislature. Because the relationship between the government and individuals is fundamentally that of force.
> It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.
I disagree. The purpose of the government is to secure individual liberties and provide national stability. ALL its programs must serve that strategic objective. Its purpose is not to provide handouts or employment; that is incidental. You don't want incompetent buffoons running the government anyway, or you'll get a bureaucratic inefficient mess.
> a lot of jobs and businesses are just not necessary
So what? There's nothing wrong with having people learn skills in the private sector. At least their relationship to the people around them isn't based on force like it is with the government. Who are you to proclaim what businesses and jobs are necessary anyway? If a business is successful, it must be serving someone, somewhere well enough for them to be paid anyway.
> when COVID hit something like 1/3rd of people either stop worked or worked massive reduced hours and the truth of the matter is the world kept spinning JUST FINE
A lot of people lost their jobs and livelihoods unnecessarily, because they were forced out by the new government regulations. Sure, they may have still lived, but I can promise you their quality of life has reduced. There was more unemployment. More people depended on government benefits provided by productive people still working, rather than depending on themselves and their own businesses. It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to make rhetoric that twists that into a good thing. It's only good if you want more and bigger government with more control, all at the taxpayers' expense.
This does kind sound like the same kind of doomsaying people did of Twitter. Now it's functionally better than ever and the centerpoint of where conversations happen, possibly even more than before.
Maybe let the guy iterate. That's what he does. Remove things till there's actual pain and not just moaning. Moderate by that. Has worked actually wonders till now.
> Surely, there are so many employees in general that probationary employees aren't needed.
I did read somewhere - and I may be incorrect - but a lot of internal employees are put on 'probation' after internal promotions, and not all probationary staff are like new hires.
> I'm all about efficiency, but why be stupid about it?
USA is bankrupt and the elites have known this since 2008. Trump and co. are the front for the bankruptcy proceedings and the rest is stage management. So this is class warfare in a system that is about to lose its preeminent (power) position in the world. As for alliances, I can guarantee every power center in East Asia has taken note of how US just threw Europe under the bus under the pretext of "change of presidency" as if!
I wonder if the future holds a civil war or a revolution. One of the two is a given at this point.
Other administrations ( even Trump 1 ) had their chance.
Now somebody is finally addressing the debt/deficit.
If you think someone else can do better, have them explain their plan in detail.
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Except:
- Even in the best of cases, if this is your approach, you need a plan for how to add back the stuff that you learn is critical. DOGE haven't demonstrated that minimal level of competence. Firing National Nuclear Security Administration staff and cutting them off from their work emails meant that when those staff were quickly discovered to be critical, it wasn't possible to quickly bring them back. This is amateurish.
- But further, this principle works with designing rockets because you expect to build multiple rockets during the development process, and failing on one rocket doesn't destroy your ability to iterate. You don't do this with a rocket if you're in the rocket. If we crash the US economy or start a war, we impair our ability to just pick up the pieces and carry on as before.
- And this works with something like rockets b/c no one is actively trying to blow up your rocket, or take advantage of its weaknesses. The US has adversaries, and the current administration is destabilizing agencies in a pretty public way which those adversaries may take advantage of. A crappy way to discover that the NNSA is critical would be if, e.g. some reduction in global monitoring meant that we didn't notice some movement of fissile material to countries we aren't friends with, etc.
Maybe the tactics that work at Tesla and SpaceX aren't universally applicable and governing requires at least a somewhat different approach?
It's even worse than you point out. DOGE/Musk/whoever is really in charge didn't learn the NNSA staff was critical because the firings cause some immediate impact. Someone who actually knows what they're talking about likely told them about the problems it would cause and the firing squad actually listened. Had they relied on waiting for side effects to understand the impact, it would be far, far too late when you're talking about something like nuclear weapons.
In other words, not only is the strategy wildly likely to result in you learning things are critical years past the point of no return when talking about functions like nuclear weapons, it was completely pointless in this particular case. They didn't learn anything they couldn't have learned beforehand, but did manage to piss off a ton of people with critical skills who are likely looking for the exit now if they even came back at all.
So much this. Excellent points. Government is a unique organization with a unique purpose.
We are indeed in the rocket so maybe the minimum effectiveness for safety isn’t how we should evaluate the situation.
> firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t
Once you fire me, I'm not coming back.
Being hired into a known-unstable situation needs to involve a lot more cash than a stable-for-decades one. Is the assumption you're making that there will be no other market to absorb the employees? The ones who remain available will be the ones unable to find work elsewhere.
> Once you fire me, I'm not coming back.
I am, my salary is now higher. Much higher. And I no longer give a f' about the TPS report.
Nice and efficient. Get the same work for more money.
Actually maybe less work for more money because the employee now knows how vital they are but at the same time knows you don't give a shit about them so why should they care more than they have to about you.
Yep. They've made a decision to pay premium price for your service so you know you're worth more now.
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> It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back. Performance metrics are unreliable, but firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t. It shows you who is really critical.
No, it's not. They're not running a test to see who is missed, they are realizing they've made a huge mistake and fired the people who look after the nukes and the people looking into bird flu. Knowing whose job is important doesn't require leaving nukes unattended or bird flu to run rampant.
> but firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t. It shows you who is really critical.
Maybe for companies (although I'd argue it's extremely bad there as well), but for Governments this is a terrible idea!
From a profit maximization maybe.
But the government employs people. And in most of the civilized world, employing people comes with responsibilities over those people. For starters, the responsibility of not firing or changing terms that effects them on whim just for the sake of efficiency.
The functions of government are not like a start up or company. Getting these things wrong isn’t like a rocket crash or twitter going down. The government provides society scale services, and interruptions can trigger contagion. Doge stoping insurance payments to providers has already resulted in companies going out of business. There will be hospitals in rural communities that shut down, and the job losses will close gas stations and grocery stores and collapse housing prices. These things cascade.
They fired FAA staff (that was already understaffed) and plane crashes are increasing. I have several friends that have stopped flying due to distrust of the safety.
They fired the Department of Energy staff than monitors and prevents the international trade of nuclear materials and weapons. Do we really have the luxury of getting that wrong by running an experiment to see “what’s the minimum staff necessary”? Seems like a dumb cost benefit calculation.
Anyone with experience in a large org will hate this because it's a stupid, hamhanded way of forcing people to continually beg for the resources to do their jobs. Leaders think it's brilliant because it relieves them of the need to know what's actually going on in their organization, externalizing their responsibilities.
"Unplug it and see who screams" is not effective systems management.
People aren't rockets.
Especially once people stop caring about things actually working and go into CYA mode (stop begging).
"We wrote the memo that we don't have enough peope to check drinking water toxidity, guess leadership is okay with not testing for that anymore"
I agree and would add that people aren't machines either. The concept of 'fire everyone and rehire who is essential' seems to lack comprehension of human psychology. It seems analogous to 'cheat on everyone and marry the person who stays' in that you are settling for the people who have the least self-respect and/or the least amount of options outside of their current position.
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Are there some objective data for this ?
Rather I am seeing a lot of new companies and startups by ex-SpaceX people for example.
Your repeating this all over the thread doesn't make it so.
How do you square that "fact" with the CyberTruck?
How often do Tesla or SpaceX fire and rehire only the essential people?
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Organizational inertia can be cut through without causing a tremendous amount of pain and disruption. Stopping things by default is a very lazy way to do it. Doing it this way is a strongman fantasy that inflicts large costs: now your employees aren't doing their jobs, they're going through a round of "justify yourself" (when you should have had the organizational controls in place already).
And there's nothing new about this strategy, either. I read about these tactics decades ago in management self-help books. They were just as crappy and inhuman then as now.
It mainly allows you to quickly destroy your organization's ability to do anything, including repairing the damage you just did.
Which is, of course the goal: to destroy the United States. They already explicitly said that's the goal.
It's the exact opposite of "brilliant", it's extremely stupid and destructive. It shows they are absolutely incompetent at what they do and have zero understanding or even desire to understand how things work.
The issue is the goal with SpaceX is clear and something cool, whereas the Trump administration's goals are vile and DOGE's goals are at best unclear but probably just the same as Trump.
An aggressive anti-waste campaign would be more believable if it wasn't coming from an administration vowing to destroy the federal government and openly subverting the Constitution, led by a man who gets his political views from neo-Nazis that tweet at him.
> that compounding these rash decisions
You're only observing reporting about these actions. There's very little in the way of actual reporting on impacts. Are we actually objectively measuring government performance in any real way?
> will have far-reaching and serious blowback.
I doubt that it will be "far" or "serious." We did all of those things before credit cards even existed. It will be "minimal" and "altered on a case by case basis."
> The plane that we're all on is being dismantled midair,
I'm on the ground. Your government employees are in the plane. It's concerning to be sure, but not anything we can't fix if it goes poorly.
You (and other comments on this subject) reminded me of the old joke we had when working on the server farm and we found a server that wasn't registered to any specific owner.
We joked that we just had to unplug it and wait for something to fail or for someone to complain.
As a non citizen of USA, I'm genuinely curious of what will happen now that it seems that this joke is a normal way of doing this.
"Let's shut everything down and see what we're really missing! We'll fix it if needed be. "
55 years ago the Cuyahoga River caught fire (it wasn't the first time) and the fix was to kickstart the EPA.
> we just had to unplug it and wait for something to fail or for someone to complain.
You could also have kept better records in the first place so this sort of thing didn't happen.
> that this joke is a normal way of doing this.
You'll find that there are many differences between the operation of a profitable company and a government.
> and the fix was to kickstart the EPA.
The _natural human response_ once the media got involved was to start the environmentalist movement. Most of the work to cleanup the river was done by Cleveland and Ohio state. Which is just quibbling over details. What you should really explain is why the EPA needs credit cards to do what they do.
> You could have kept better records...
Each time I see or hear that kind of remark (because it's said everywhere in the world) , its paradoxical nature baffles me.
Many people want government agencies to be efficient, professional and productive... but they don't want to pay for it with their taxes.
The pure définition of wanting the cake and eat it too.
> Why the EPA needs credit cards...
As I said, I'm genuinely curious to see how all of this will pan out.
My opinion clearly don't matter on such weirdly hyperbolized subjects that I personally qualify as trivial.
> Many people want government agencies to be efficient, professional and productive
That's you moving the goalposts. I just want it to be efficient. This idea that government is going to be "professional and productive" is ridiculous.
> The pure définition of wanting the cake and eat it too.
Adding acute accents does not make your point any smarter.
> My opinion clearly don't matter
Yet you so readily share it. When the question of "does the EPA having credit cards prevent river fires" comes up then you are silent. Who's actually eating their cake and then wanting it too?
> That's you moving the goalposts. I just want it to be efficient. This idea that government is going to be "professional and productive" is ridiculous.
Efficiency refers to the ability for an agency to achieve its objectives using the least amount of resources while maintaining high-quality service, transparency, and accountability.
There is a paradox in expecting high efficiency from a government agency while offering low pay to its employees.
Don't expect motivated and talented employees when you have a low pay, because there's also a good chance that they're easy to corrupt.
Hence my words "paradoxical nature".
> does the EPA having credit cards prevent river fires
Does the EPA not having credit card prevent river fires ?
I'm still not sure about what's the best between a situation where someone has to fill 2 forms to asks for new pencils and that 2 directors have to approve it OR the same person has a budget of few hundreds dollars per year to buy pencils. (Back to the efficiency point)
Reducing those credit card to 1$ is just virtue signaling to poor people that thinks that those same employees pays their groceries with that credit card.
> Adding acute accents does not make your point any smarter.
-1 for me for having a multilingual keyboard that auto corrected "definitions" to "définitions" (in French) and not proofreading.
>> My opinion clearly don't matter
>Yet you so readily share it.
I'm not in the US, that why my opinion doesn't matter.
You clearly didn't understood my point, I'm not saying it's good nor bad to do what they're doing, I'm curious of what's gonna happen.
From my joke, nobody ever decided to unplug that server and wait for someone to scream.
The current administration is now unplugging everything, everywhere.
The results will be interesting.
If it goes poorly, it will take years to rebuild. And the same people who intentionally destroyed it will do everything in their power to prevent you from fixing it.
It was easy for X to get rid of advertisers. It was impossible to get income back. And while the old infrastructure and features work, their new ones are buggy and frequently reversed.
> it will take years to rebuild.
What evidence do you have for this?
> will do everything in their power to prevent you from fixing it.
They're the administration. This is their prerogative. Perhaps your ideas about "fixing it" aren't shared?
> It was easy for X to get rid of advertisers. It was impossible to get income back
Are we talking about for profit corporations or governments?
> And while the old infrastructure and features work, their new ones are buggy and frequently reversed.
Are we talking about a codebase or governments?
> What evidence do you have for this?
The history of building institutions in literally any country and time. You wont build it overnight.
> They're the administration. This is their prerogative.
You said "It's concerning to be sure, but not anything we can't fix if it goes poorly.", so do not be manipulative here. Now if it goes poorly, we cant fix it easily, because same people will lie and attempt to sabotage.
> Perhaps your ideas about "fixing it" aren't shared?
My whole point is that they want harm rather then fix. They do understand what "fixing" means like I do, but they want to break. They do not share my values.
> Are we talking about for profit corporations or governments? Are we talking about a codebase or governments?
We are talking about how much easier it is to break things then to fix them.
> You wont build it overnight.
There is literally tons of evidence littered throughout history that it can, in fact, be done overnight.
> because same people will lie and attempt to sabotage.
Show me the evidence.
> They do not share my values.
They won the election. Your values did not.
> We are talking about how much easier it is to break things then to fix them.
It's very easy. I've been spending my life doing it. Your imaginations are small.
Dumbest change ever. The employee charge cards are there to get rid of red tape. Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.
I worked for a company that at one point was worried about wasteful expenses.
Eventually to solve this resulted in a system where a $40 pizza lunch went to a committee of completely disconnected morons who debated it and would then forward it to a VP to make the final call. Probably a couple thousands in time costs with the paperwork and people time involved … for $40 of pizza. Oh and they had lunch while they debated.
I got an email from the committee once, I told them to forget it and I would buy my team pizza with my own money…. they actually tried to get me in trouble for that.
These kinda dumbass middle manager politics sound like they help (to people with no work experience…) but they’re more costly in the end.
Thankfully we were bought and the new CEO did away with it.
That is exactly why there are discretionary spending limits, if the overhead for sending the $40 pizza to a committee isn't priced in, then every cost will blown out.
Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock.
They don't care, destruction of the federal government is the point. Congress needs to do their job.
"Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock."
One day, deep in a build, I was so frustrated I got our CEO and COO and made them walk around the building with me as I fumed "Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" screen" - and our COO looks at me and said "are we really that bad?" and I said "THIS MEETING ABOUT MEETINGS COST US $5,000!!!!!!!!!!!" - sadly, we didn't get any screens, but a company wide email went out and meetings decreased.
>Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock.
This would actually be impossible to use in most companies I worked for, as half of the workforce is usually consultants or contractors from various companies and their hourly rates are trade secret.
Just use a blended rate, it doesn't have to be on the nose accurate, it's just a reminder.
At my company we even buy condoms during office parties on company card.
The majority in Congress have — rather obviously — been paid off with luxury trips and RVs and trips to Russia.
We are truly fucked, you know?
Hey man Thomas is totally proud of that RV he paid for …. well didn’t pay for… also didn’t pay to park it…
Yeah, I was telling my wife last night that if we live long enough we might get to read some really interesting books from (to be) former SVR/GRU types about the time they made assets from most of th oval office.
Isn't this job of CIA and the NSA to prevent this shit?
Ultimately voters gotta care too…
Aren’t they about to be fired?
Haha!
That sound exactly out of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual
Once when I was in consultancy, I was at a 10+ person meeting where they spent 45 minutes debating an hour's worth of charge for a PMs time on the project.
It didn't go down so well when I stated "I don't know how much each of you get paid, but I know the rough hourly rate my firm charges to have me here, and I can pretty confidently state we've just spent more money debating that hour's charge than the hour's charge is worth" -- it did move the meeting on to more important topics though.
"Penny wise but pound foolish" springs to mind.
>>These kinda dumbass middle manager politics sound like they help (to people with no work experience…) but they’re more costly in the end.
I knew a place which did the same for stationary. "Employees are using too many notebooks".
Eventually they would have a staff to stock, approve and disburse. Which Im sure costs darn more than anything the notebooks did.
Either way, its still unclear why you would ration notebooks of the things.
Eventually I guess people just want an illusion of control.
These are people who want to prove, regardless of anything, that government is less efficient than private enterprises... particularly their private enterprises, who would be happy to help you with your problem, dear citizen, for a nominal fee.
It blows my mind how many people like "that's so inefficient!" or "that will create so many problems!", giving even a shred of consideration to this fake org that its goal has literally anything to do with what it says publicly. It's a complete farce.
I've said this a dozen times here now, but the word "efficiency" doesn't really mean anything in isolation; "efficiency" only really makes sense if you define what you're optimizing for.
Since they don't really do that, they can then define the term to mean whatever they want and then declare it as "successful".
Well if it isn't clear, I can help out: they mean financial efficiency. That's why everything they mess with is about money.
It's absolutely not clear that that's true, and "financial efficiency" doesn't make sense either in isolation.
You could only make the argument that what they're doing is "more efficient" if we're getting the same output while spending less money, but since they're cutting entire programs then I don't think it's fair to assume at all that we are getting the same output. It is absolutely not implied that spending less money and reducing the federal workforce is going to be "more efficient" by literally any definition of the term that I can think of.
And it's really odd the DOGE hasn't found any "inefficiency" in the contracts that Tesla and SpaceX has with the federal government. I would personally think that spending $400 million on a bunch of famously unreliable cars pretending that they're tanks is a waste of money, but I'm not the richest person alive, so what do I know.
Even dumber than that. The cards are there to make sure that the federal government doesn't pay state taxes.
This is literally going to cost the government more money.
It's not going to cost the government anything, when they destroy the government. That is exactly their intent.
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." - Grover Norquist, an unelected person, who many Republicans in congress signed a pledge to.
We're at the "small enough" phase, and soon enough we'll be at the "drowning" phase. This is their dream come true, unfortunately it's going to be a nightmare for everyone but the most wealthy.
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No. Now workers will not spend the $50 on office supplies, either paying for them out of their own pocket, or doing without.
Either way, they're saving $50, either by stealing it from the employees who'd rather pay themselves to be able to do their job, or by causing hundreds of dollars worth of damage to the productivity because someone spends 2 hours hunting for an unused pen instead of just grabbing one from the supply box in the corner.
This is the equivalent level of pettiness as removing free coffee from offices.
Many government offices had no free coffee already. This was the case in the mid-teens at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which houses the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where the federal CTO and CIO sit, and the National Security Council, just to name a couple.
I've seen news articles like "here the government spent $5000 on a party" like it's some crazy story of wasted money. And then it was like their annual Christmas party, with 100+ people paying less than ~$50 per plate and they had to bring their own beer. Like, hardly affluent spending.
Or "government sent their workers to this hotel on tax payers' dime!!" with a picture of some suite, and turns out they just attended a conference about their area and they only saw the conference rooms.
I don't get why spending money on government workers is so frowned upon. They deserve conferences, a nice office and some social stuff just as much as anyone. My Christmas parties as a government consultant cost probably 5x as much, never heard anything, and also paid with tax payer money, just through a layer of privatization...
I spent the first 9.5 years of my career at a large defense contractor. We never had free coffee.
Just one person taking a coffee break to go get coffee obviates any savings. The free coffee isn't there for the staff, it is there to save the org money.
The federal government is so worried about the appearance of spending excess taxpayer money that employees set up water clubs and coffee clubs where the employees all chip in for a water cooler and a coffee machine every month.
If only they extended this frugality to not hiring 10 people to do a job that could be done by 2.
It does not matter how efficient they are, people like you will a use them of inefficiency.
So, this particular contractor was big into efficiency and cost savings, to the point that we were all required to do a project where we made something more efficient and documented how much money we saved in doing so. The whole thing was mostly bullshit, but one of the interesting things I learned by doing it was that saving engineering time was essentially $0, because from the company's perspective we were all salaried, and as long as the time we were saving was charged to the same contract we would be charging our other work to, it didn't matter.
From that perspective, which I do not agree with, the cost of coffee breaks was also $0, while the cost of providing it was not, so no coffee. On one program I was on we at least managed to get facilities to install a commercial Bunn machine for us, but we were still responsible for buying all the supplies.
Under that simplistic model there is no space for higher quality, higher reliability, etc. Then "efficiency" is one dimensional and you have basically no agency. The cost model should be agreed upon collectively.
-2000 lines
You're right, and there were definitely situations where we could have done things better, but didn't, because the impetus wasn't there. It was really frustrating, and I wish I'd been able to get out sooner.
> -2000 lines
Not sure what this is a reference to, but one of the fun things I tripped over while there was that code changes were valued on dollars per LOC. Changesets with net negative LOC were... problematic. I think I once had a change that was near -2000 LOC net.
And coffee itself is chiefly a productivity aid, to benefit the business.
"We need you in the office for CoLlAboRaTIon."
"OK, we'll have coffee after our morning standup."
"Absolutely not."
Worth noting that it is not at all dumb if your objective is to degrade the power and effectiveness of the US government. There are effective people in charge this time who know exactly what they're doing here.
This argument exists even if there is no bureocratic process for the purchase, assuming that the purchase is not done.
Suppose a 500$ monthly expense for taxi, where the employees need to use public transport in its absence. Or a software tool that saves 1 hour per week, and costs 20$/ month.
In both cases the employees need to spend more time and the costs are reduced.
But the salary cost is fixed (for the most part, whatever cuts where possible were already done), so the workload goes up in this phase. And I'm assuming they are just trying to crack the whip.
It's just a typical business management tactic of reducing costs, and maximizing workload per employee, (and increasing income usually, but in this case I think they'll translate it to reduced income as tax cuts, the increased income is for the private sector)
At least that's my take, pretty straightforward.
Placing back the red tape and requiring everyone to follow the rules is step one in a malicious takeover. It makes everything slow and inefficient, making every department fail their objectives and deadlines, providing an invented basis for reducing/upending/replacing/getting rid of whatever policy/program/department you want to get rid of.
The goal isn't to reduce spending. It's to create bad press to get rid of parts of the government that get in the way of the cronies in charge.
Exactly. This is all about power grab without going through a proper due process. The government is shitty and inefficient but DOGE is not the way to fix it.
Requiring people to "follow the rules" is malicious? Why did we even make the rules in the first place? What is this mythical idea that a government without red tape will automatically be operating in your interest?
This is a Capraesque idea of Washington D.C..
We had the first 4+ years to learn that "malice or incompetence" is not the right question. There's been more than enough pathological input to show it becomes a denial-of-service attack on observers.
The correct answer is both, until and unless the perpetrators wish to come forward and defend themselves as just malicious or just incompetent.
Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.
Sounds like my company.
It finally got rid of the travel agency contract, so for my meeting last week I ended up spending $600 in salary hours making my own arrangements so the company could save a $50 commission to a travel agent.
Penny wise and pound foolish.
I've always found it much easier and faster to make the travel arrangements myself than to do it with a travel agency, but my work travel has always been pretty simple.
I've had the same experience, especially with making changes - places I've worked where we could arrange the travel, changes would be easy since we'd book flexible, make changes through the airline's web site and not pay fees, but with the travel agent we'd often have to call, so we couldn't easily make changes out of business hours (when we often needed to) and then we'd have to pay the agent a fee for the service of doing something we could have just done on the airline's web site ourselves.
I've always found it much easier and faster to make the travel arrangements myself than to do it with a travel agency
But that's the point. With the travel agency contact, employees did ZERO work. One day you just got an email with your flight, car and hotel information. The travel agency handled everything.
There was no "working with" an agent. Employees focused on their work, not figuring out travel arrangements.
That you worked with someone tells me we're talking about different things.
> With the travel agency contact, employees did ZERO work.
I've never worked anywhere where they just sent me flight and hotel information with no input from me. I've always coordinated with the travel agent so I could at least pick a travel time that worked for me.
Conversely, I've never worked anywhere where the employees had input on this sort of thing. The company's paying for it, travel is on company time, so barring conflicts like doctors' appointments, the company tells the employees when and where to go.
there's a bit of legit thinking that it'll scare employees into not charging things, to avoid the paperwork...
Dumbest change so far*
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Yes I'm sure your business spends roughly $10 trillion a year so the federal government should use your system because it scales so well.
If anything, such an extensive system should have better controls than a small business. Given that, there are trillions of dollars flowing around of other people's money.
You're falling for the sleight of hand if you think this is where bulk of the waste is.
Have you worked for the federal government? Employees literally have to fill out forms and follow a strict process to buy anything when they don't have these charge cards.
If my experience in non-federal government is any guide, they have similar requirements when they use the card, the difference is that it is after the fact and if the application gets rejected, the payment is the employee’s responsibility. The amount of red tape is the same either way, but with the caed the red tape happens after the purchase.
With the card, the urgent next-day-delivery order is already on its way while the red tape waits for approval. And the worker enters the order into the supplier's website directly.
With a standard order, the urgent order is entered into Oracle Financials, waiting for approval, and some time during office hours in the next 1-2 days someone in finance will copy the order into the supplier's website, omitting one order line by accident.
The federal government actually operates in the opposite way. They cosign a credit card under your name, you have to pay it off at the end of every month, and they reimburse you after the fact.
That's pretty much the mechanism of acheiving the effect that I was describing on State governments I’ve seen, too. I was just trying to generalize on the level of responsibility, rather than detailed payment flow.
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You have quite the imagination. Your fantasy of Musk's competence is unmoored from reality
So, remove the checks and balances that were already put in place over decades to make sure employees are spending responsibly. Um, sure.
With the employee cards, all the transactions are traceable and can be monitored with a minimum of red tape. How exactly would one improve upon that? It's literally the technologically-enabled solution.
Do you shut down your entire business before rolling out a new system?
If you want to save money and remove bureaucracy, you first create a system, then migrate to it and sort out issues, then remote the old system. Now it's going to take months to get something new in place, while also juggling manual approvals and getting things through payment systems individually.
Wouldn't it be prudent to do that before rolling out such a change?
while you imagine this, let's waste order of magnitudes more in red tape, that is if your imagination and DOGE's imagination are in the same place.
Re-discovering why things worked the way they did (waste, corruption, and fraud prevention) is gonna be fun.
You think they would have mentioned that in the memo if they were.
Exactly. That's why there are charge cards.
I suspect that a charge on the card involves at least 15 seconds of writing down what the charge was for.
The point of giving employees the authority to spend from charge card without excessive additional oversight is to keep it at the 2-3 minutes (realistically it's going to be at least that, not "15 seconds") per expense, rather than 2-3 hours of bureaucracy.
I have a company credit card. Guess what I do for every transaction?
Per transaction.
You know what’s way more efficient though?
Cards.
Exactly, automation.
Part of the effeminacy is they get what they need now not some time in the future. The old school requisition systems where everything had to be approved in advance and the purchase handled by a purchasing agent was slow and inefficient for small orders. Which is why organizations give their employees a card with a spending limit.
Your little tin-pot business has absolutely nothing to do with the procurement formalities of a large organisation.
Apparently some of the transactions were in strip clubs. I'd be willing to bet that the procurement formalities of a small business of quite a bit in common with the formalities of a large business...
As if you don't have to do that when using a govt credit card for expenses.
You own a “business” that’s clearly just you.
It’s almost as if, instead of “rooting out waste and corruption,” they are really just griefing workers, doing all sorts of big and small things to make their lives uncertain and miserable…
If they were really attacking waste, why haven’t they so much as made a peep about military spending?
They said they are going to review DOD. It's been 1 month?
Then why are they wasting time "reviewing" the IRS in the middle of tax season?
We are in fact seeing press attention regarding military budget cuts the Trump Administration's looking to enact:
16. Combatant Command support agency funding for INDOPACOM, NORTHCOM, (Northern Command), SPACECOM, (Space Command) STRATCOM, (Strategic Command) CYBERCOM, (Cyber Command) and TRANSCOM (Transportation Command)
17. Medical Private-Sector Care
DEI is a dog whistle to rally their base. They don't care abut DEI.
A lot of people who have keys to the kingdom may not really care about it. But it would be a mistake to think that there aren't any white nationalist ideologues within rank and file. At the very least, they are enabled and empowered.
I think they genuinely hate DEI. And genuinely think women are inferior in everything. They genuinely believe that minorities are inferior.
They genuinely believe domestic violence is something you should tolerate and accept. Etc.
These types of people blame the failures of their own policies on the scapegoats because they're convinced their ideology is actually natural law.
They control the courts, presidency, congress, most state houses and governors offices, have most popular news shows and networks, and they're unwilling to admit their policies are incompetently administered so therefore socialists and trans people must actually be running things, somehow, somewhere, in some invisible way.
They refuse to take responsibility and imagine conspiracies where some scapegoat is puppet mastering their failure.
Don't dismiss it. They deeply believe this.
You might have who I'm talking about confused. Musk, Vance, and their cabal don't actually believe in it. It's fascism and fascism needs an enemy to point at. That isn't to say they don't have people in their ranks that don't believe in it.
Nazi really believed their own ideology. They did not cosplayed hating Jews, Slavic or homosexuals. They were scapegoats because they were hated.
It is the same here. People scapegoat who they dislike.
They do though. They mention obscure authors and theories about white replacement and neo-eugenics. There's constant controversies of people finding the online handles of these power players on sites like gab and bitchute where they express pretty unambiguous sentiments.
Musk has a trans child he's cutoff all contact with. There's very little evidence these people are faking it. There's never been a group chat that gets leaked to expose them as secretly fine respectable people.
We have this tendency to think socialist and leftist are all very serious about it while the people on the far right don't actually believe it, they're just pretending.
Nonsense. They're for real.
They're not cutting the budget, just rearranging spending priorities (i.e., more to the border -- as if that is where our biggest military threat will come from).
In fact, the upcoming Budget calls for an _increase_ in the defense budget.
One thing to keep in mind that Federal Spending represented 23.4% of GDP in 2024. Around 12% of that is defense spending. I have yet to see any way these cuts do not result is massive decreases in GDP. Even if all of it is redirected to defense.
Indeed. It's moreso the case that they view everything as "waste and corruption" and are making everyone miserable, but if you look at the (currently) top thread[1], it's a deliberate move at that.
Your article points out that that's a rare topic where there is a disconnect among the Administration. Not everyone in Trump/Elon's orbit seems to be aligned on what to do about military spending. DOGE has so far steered clear of it.
They are definitely not as laser focused on that as they are on nickling and diming workers and removing database columns that deal with diversity and inclusion.
How many people work for Doge? It's only been a month, after all. From what I've seen, I assume from their limited staffing, they're moving from department to department, rather than attempting to look at all departments in the government at once. It's seems reasonable to target the military later, for PR and utilitarian reasons.
You would think, with limited staffing, they'd want to start by focusing their efforts on departments where they could have a much bigger impact. Yet they decide to start with such small potatoes instead of the huge spenders?
It feels as though I'm trying to cut down my household spending and I focus on canceling my $15/mo Netflix account rather than negotiate down my $1000/mo credit card bill or work on finding an apartment that's $1500/mo rather than $4500/mo.
Military is pretty far down the list on total spent [1].
SS is biggest spending, and one of the first departments. USAID was viewed, by the administration, as being 100% waste.
Rather than starting at the biggest spender (and subjective greatest waste), what do you see as the metric for ordering? Do you think PR should be involved in the ordering? Do you think the administration ordered based on PR?
This is why in the debate of : Are they fascists or idiots? I tend to come down on idiots.
Fascist can be idiots, of course, but they tend to glorify the military (per Eco). And thus far, these guys have shown that they are mostly going to just bumble around and be gloryhounds. Sure Donny like the pomp, but real fascists wouldn't be gutting the NNSA or the DoD. They'd be building it up and expanding it, even at this early stage.
The only 'but' I can think of is that they are going to gut the military, then build it back up with fellow nutters. Something that many admins (and countries!) have tried to do to the Pentagon, and have all failed at.
Still, assume stupidity, not conspiracy, per Hanlon's razor.
> real fascists wouldn't be gutting the NNSA or the DoD. They'd be building it up and expanding it, even at this early stage.
Not necessarily. If those organisations were not blindly obedient to the leader (which they shouldn't be in a functioning democracy) then the fascist playbook then would be to neuter them and replace them with a more loyal apparatus.
In Hitler's Nazi germany, the SS were a new organisation with loyalty to the Fuhrer rather than the state. The SS acquired immense power and became a virtual state within a state.
You're also assuming that the fascist end goal is global domination. If the Fuhrer was driven primarily by narcissism, and by nature lazy rather than as hard working as Hitler apparently was, and they already have control of the largest democracy and arsenal in the world, then war and global domination may not be required to satisfy their psychological urges.
There are fascist, but of the Mussolini type, not the Hitler type.
I think this is an excellent point. If Trump and Musk were as brilliantly malicious as the Left claims, they’d be going about this much smarter. I think they’re solipsistic, nihilistic fools, and they’re going to ruin tens of millions of people’s lives.
> brilliantly malicious
The left overwhelmingly describe Trump and Musk as idiots.
While they repeatedly lose to them. I find it hilarious.
From my perspective you are all dupes to the billionaires.
That people could fall for the left vs. right narrative is what I find hilarious (not in the "ha, ha" kind of way, though).
"Dupes to the billionaires" sounds like something a dupe to the bureaucracy would say. I've never once had a problem with a billionaire. They have the common courtesy to stay out of my life. Can't say the same for the bureaucrats and their worthless gatekeepers and credentialed "experts" I'm forced to pay and spend time on because of their endless rules.
Smart and winning are not the same. Left was very correct about conservatives, Trump and Musk. They were correct about Vance too. They were punished for being correct.
Plus the rules are assymetric - Republicans can lie, strike outrage and do massively amoral things, but left and democrats are criticized for the same. Both sidism ensures that when Republicans do something bad, center knee jerks with euphemism it away while massively criticizing minor issues on democratic side.
What a clown show:
> The memo, dated Tuesday, calls for military leaders to provide a proposal for eight percent in budget cuts each year for the next five years. The proposals for the massive cuts to the Pentagon’s budget of approximately $850 billion are due by February 24, less than one week after Hegseth issued the memo.
> It was issued the day before President Donald Trump endorsed the House’s budget plan which includes a $100 billion increase in defense spending, suggesting a major disconnect within the administration. Hegseth himself called for an increase to the defense budget one week ago. While visiting Stuttgart, Germany, Hegseth said, “I think the US needs to spend more than the Biden administration was willing to, who historically underinvested in the capabilities of our military.”
A highly competent government in America has been a massive contributor to our success. The conservative opposition with shrinking government and making it ineffective is profound error that will make it harder to start and grow businesses, invest in innovation and compete on the world stage. We should be working to have the best government in the world not the smallest.
I wouldn't say highly competent. Even at its best the US has such a tribalistic view of politics that has held back so many improvements
This isn’t remotely true. Have you been to a country that doesn’t have a competent bureaucracy? There are no roads, no economic data for business to plan. The list goes on and on. The sheer volume of goods and services we each rely on and benefit from working flawlessly in the background without ever realizing is staggering when you stop to think about it. Go travel to a country that doesn’t have the cdc, the federal reserve etc, and tell me how easy it is to do business and build a life.
This is one thing that has always confounded me about conservatives. America is really number one in a lot of ways. The awful terrible bloated government they complain about has fostered the best university system in the world, the best companies in the world, massive wealth, an invincible military, a dominant position on the world stage, the world's reserve currency... and they want to throw a wrench in the machine that produced those results? Is #1 economy not good enough??
This is why the voluntary weakening of America's position in NATO is so wild. The US has so much power over Europe and the whole world through this. Everyone will (for better or worse) do whatever we want. And they even spend tons of money at US defense companies. Just look at Rheinmetall's stock price to see what the market thinks of this. Germany, UK, and France will all re-militarize without the US.
If Trump sets in motion a series of events that cause the world to switch to a different reserve currency, a lot of Americans are going to realize how good we had it. American hegemony may not be great for the world, but it sure is great for Americans.
There's a meme going around of Xi Jinping just sitting back and letting Trump dismantle the US himself. Except that it's not a joke, it's reality.
Absolutely. The idea that increased European defence spending will be with US defence companies is for the birds.
Europeans now know that the military spending (and the factories) need to be on the correct side of the Atlantic, and not vulnerable to the whims of an unreliable ally
Exactly this and unfortunately it’s too late. No one will trust America after this. The global order will unravel and everyone will pull into their own self reliance.
> There's a meme going around of Xi Jinping just sitting back and letting Trump dismantle the US himself. Except that it's not a joke, it's reality.
I wonder if the liberals had it wrong: that Trump isn’t beholden to Russia, but to China instead. The goal s to destroy America’s credibility by bullying our allies even more than our supposed non-allies. He wanted to tariff Mexico and Canada at 25% but China only 10%. I see the end of his term with China replacing the USA as the premiere super power, they already are rapidly catching up with key investments in green energy, Eavs, AI, automation, drones, etc…they have things the world wants to buy while we have…bluster, bullying, and nothing else really appealing (buy our manufacturing output that costs 2X and is half as good!).
Paul manafort got an excel file with voter data from someone he knew to be a Russian operative. Trump publicly asked for Russia to hack his opponent, now we are negotiating directly with Russia and only Russia to end a war it started and splitting the spoils by getting rare earth minerals from Ukraine. Thats a consistent thread if I ever saw one.
25% or 10% additional tarrifs. Not sure what the current tarrifs for China or Canada are.
But some trans women are playing sports!
I’m only half-joking. It really does come down to “cultural issues” for much of Trump’s base, many of whom don’t have the education or curiosity to understand what they want to destroy.
The same people who spent highschool snorting mints and failing biology want to tell me how biology works and that they totally understand the immune system.
The annoying thing is that preventing males from intruding upon the female category in sport would've been a perfectly fine left-wing policy from a feminist perspective.
It's so ridiculous that it took Trump of all people to address this and similar such lunacy that's even more harmful, like locking up males in women's prisons.
Democrats should've dropped this trans nonsense years ago when it started becoming obvious how policy based around "gender identity" adversely affects women and girls.
Instead they pushed and pushed to the point of absurdity, making an absolute mockery of their political platform. It's such idiocy.
> A highly competent government in America has been a massive contributor to our success.
I doubt this. Do you really think the government is the reason Silicon Valley has been so successful? Sure the government created the internet, but after that many tech companies flourished in Silicon Valley with very little regulation. I think that's why America has been so successful. If you look at anything the government gets its hands in, costs sky rocket (education, healthcare, etc).
Yes, why is it called Silicon Valley? Are you aware it’s because the federal government set up a nasa program in the Bay Area that concentrated engineering talent and kick started the first set of companies? Are you aware government contracts provided much of the initial demand that got those companies revenue? Are you aware of the massive public investment to establish the internet? Or the GPS network? I could go on and on. The government pays for the basic research and infrastructure that isn’t commercially viable, companies then take up the mantle of commercialization from a significantly derisked reality.
Many of those SV success stories received funding from VC firms and eventually IPO'ed, systems that are SEC-regulated.
Not to mention NSF, DARPA, and other grants from federal agencies. That’s how we got Google.
The whole point is a highly competent government is one the does have an appropriate level of regulation. Regulation like disallowing non-competes. I think that there is plenty of good evidence that the whole reason Silicon Valley is in California is their long (and historically unusual stance among US states) history of disallowing non-competes.
This is why all this DOGE shit is so frustrating to a lot of people. I don't disagree that there is government waste, or that there are regulations that should be scrapped. But people don't realize how much success in this country is due to having largely fair and functioning institutions. That's all getting chucked out the window now.
DODGE is that new middle manager who thinks they know how everything works but doesn’t… and isn’t smart enough to ask.
And gets a big bonus for the "savings". And gets promoted before the consequences are seen.
I wonder what the DODGE credit cards look like…
I bet if you audited the company cards and other discretionary perk-spending of the top brass (who are in Elon's orbit) at Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, you'll find tons and tons of "inefficiency and waste" if not outright strip clubs and hookers type stuff.
The real waste is always produced by the folks who are exempt.
Yeah I find it odd that DOGE hasn't found any inefficiencies with SpaceX's and Tesla's contracts with the government.
It's almost like they don't really care about things being "efficient".
Yea, such an odd coincidence! I wonder how many parts of the government they'll declare as "inefficient" and "wasteful" where there's a corporate donor just licking their chops, waiting to swoop in and profit from the same work. That'll be such a goofy coincidence, too.
It sure will be, it's not like there's a streamlined way to directly and easily bribe the president with cryptocurrency or even just buying his a stock on an exchange, so I don't see any conflicts of interest at all.
It all seems above board and not depressing at all.
You mean like when musk walked into twitter and just started blurting THIS IS TOO MANY MICROSERVICES because he thought it made him sound smart?
Literally the Pointy Haired Boss but somehow Scott Adams ended up on their side.
Considering every other attempt at cutting costs has failed, I'm ok with giving this a go.
State debt goes up during republican goverment and down during democratic one.
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I know that's what people say, but this entire DOGE experiment has proven to me that Elon is fundamentally extremely lazy.
On the one hand, you might say "he's good at eliminating waste", but you can also say "he spends about five minutes looking at a problem and decides that problem is stupid and declares it wasteful".
You might be saying "tombert! He's the CEO of 5 companies! How is that lazy?!" but that actually proves my point. There is absolutely no fucking way he's doing five full time jobs, that doesn't even make sense, so clearly the jobs cannot be that hard.
Also, Elon lies about everything. If he says a statement, there's about a ten percent chance that it's actually true. He lied and said that we could do full self driving "today" in 2018, he lied about the moon trips going to be ready in 2022, he has lied over and over again about government spending (like saying we're spending 8 million dollars on condoms in Gaza), he lied about having autonomous robots in factories, he lied about having "baby AGI" in 2023.
I could keep going but I don't need to. A lot of his success is theoretical, and based on him making shit up.
ETA:
How could I forget...He cheats at Diablo!
You might think that's kind of a non-issue, and I would normally agree, but I think it exemplifies my point: He lied about something that fundamentally did not matter. There was no money on the line, it didn't matter if he was actually a top 20 player in the world, it's not like people would think he's better or worse at running a company based on his Diablo performance.
If he's willing to lie when there's zero stakes, why should we assume he's telling the truth when it actually matters?
Cheating at a video game shows how deeply flawed his psyche is. Terrifying how much power he has.
It just cheapens all of his other accomplishments; he went on Joe Rogan and bragged about being one of the top 20 Diablo players in the world, despite the fact that he was just paying someone to play it for him.
If he’s going to brag about something completely inconsequential and false, why should I take his word that he’s somehow really instrumental in any of the success of Tesla or SpaceX?
Guess what? You can see all this information, because of government transparency (not DOGE):
$39.7 billion in total program spend.
$506 million in refunds earned by agencies/organizations.
$441 was spent on average for each transaction.
Having used a government credit card as a federal employee, I can tell you this: If you actually cared about government efficiency, you would make those credit cards easier to use, not harder. I guess I was relatively sheltered, but for the time I was involved with it, doing the paperwork for that goddamn credit card was by far the most frustrating part of my job, and I didn't even use it that much.
The cruelty is the point. Never forget that simple but sharp observation. The point is to make an example of federal workers. They are the scapegoats now. Every power grab needs scapegoats to justify the power grab. The more the scapegoats suffer hardships, the better. It has to be public humiliation.
This a million times. The architects of this have been telling us for decades what they want. They want to drown government in the proverbial bathtub. On mobile so I can get a link to the quote from decades ago.
I wonder what effect DOGE will have on attracting talent to government jobs. It was already challenging to recruit qualified individuals to government positions; with these changes, I believe the situation will worsen significantly.
> I wonder what effect DOGE will have on attracting talent to government jobs. It was already challenging to recruit qualified individuals to government positions; with these changes, I believe the situation will worsen significantly.
The idea is to replace these government positions with private positions.
Remember feudalism? Some guy with all of the capital - which, in those days, meant arable land - basically got to dictate how things worked, because he had the stuff you, as a peasant, needed to live. He was called the king. If you didn't do what he wanted, your life got cut short. Government was just one guy's ideas enforced by his brute squad. In many ways, it was a sole proprietorship. Eventually, nobility was required to administer the land, and that nobility eventually turned into a structure that could keep the king somewhat in check, lest they carry out a coup. They became the administrative state. Today, we have legislative, judicial and executive bodies that - at least ostensibly - need to win election in order to do the same thing, thus replacing the nobility.
That's the ultimate goal here: the dismantling of the administrative state. The administrative state carries out laws made by a body - in this case, Congress - that, at least in theory, puts society's desires at the center.
A number of these laws directly impact the ability of capital holders to generate more capital. Since the people holding this capital think that the only reason humans do anything is to create more capital, they go to any lengths to keep society's "unprofitable" desires at bay.
Since the accumulation of capital can result in monopoly, you will, at some point, have someone controlling all of the capital again. This is a return to feudalism. You won't be swinging a scythe in a field in a toque and tunic, but the structure will be the same.
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Feudalism is when everyone works for the government.
Yes, yes, we know. You won't believe us until we actually are living in the feudalist society they're working, right now, to create brazenly in public. Enjoy gloating about crazy we are until you realize we really are not.
They won't believe anyone, ever.
The narcissist is incapable of being incorrect and will always find a scapegoat to explain the consequences of their poor decision-making.
The world is now run by these people, and because most people are more ape than man, they will emulate and elevate these people until some other stronger ape comes around to convince them to emulate and elevate them instead.
This is a really unfortunate perspective. The people that you are casting as "more ape than man" believe you to be doing the exact same thing you accuse them of; emulating and elevating people they think are also ruining the world.
I genuinely don't understand how you can comfortably make such sharp insults towards people who don't agree with you. I understand that it's easy to get caught up in echo chamber - which any website that uses upvote/downvote based ordering and hiding schemes inherently encourage - but the people that disagree with you politically aren't apes. They're not narcissists. You are not special or above others.
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I think this article explains where I'm coming from better than I ever could, stumbled on it today quite presciently:
Ironically, I'd say what characterizes a "man" vs an "ape" is their capacity for self reflection... which is your moniker.
A narcissist, as described in the article, has no capacity for self reflection because it requires them to enter a reality outside of their ego from which to observe themselves objectively.
I can comfortably make these observations (not insults) because I'm describing what I have observed over the last many decades, not reacting to some news ephemeral news item.
What amazes me is that this is a conversation about Elon Musk and Donald Trump and their sycophants... people who are even more caught up in echo chambers and more insulting to our fellow humans, all while being far more insulting in their online speech.
And what is rich is you trying to cast me as the one who thinks they're special because I'm insulting the people who blindly follow Musk and Trump in their naive belief that they're helping to "save humanity" or "America" or whatever.
I live in the real world, not echo-chambers, this is the place I post most frequently and it's still like once every other week/month (and declining). My comment was directed at a group of people in general, while yours makes all kinds (very incorrect) assumptions about me personally.
You actually sound very much like the person who is "too online" and "in an echo chamber" since you seem to respond to the least charitable interpretation of what is said in order to score internet points.
It's certainly a lot easier to respond to my comment as if I was dehumanizing entire swaths of the public based on their voting choices or political beliefs... much more difficult to consider that I'm speaking about a very narrow segment of the population defined by their specific belief that Musk and Trump are special and can do nothing wrong and will not countenance any evidence to the contrary.
There is a podcast from New York Times with interviews from government workers [1].
From all accounts the firing was incompletely indiscriminate and so many people who you would think would never be fired were e.g. US Army Corp of Engineers working on flood prevention.
And so I can't imagine anyone wanting to join the government when there is a strong chance you will be fired in the medium term with no notice and with no reason. All after you've physically moved you/family to Washington because remote work is no longer available.
It's already standard in many agencies for employee credit cards (IBAa or individually billed accounts) to have their spending limit set to $1 when the employee is not traveling. When travel is approved, the spending limit is temporarily raised based on the estimated travel costs. These cards are mainly used for hotel and rental car charges; federal employees are given a per-diem reimbursement when traveling to cover meals and incidentals, which they pay out of their own pocket. You can see per diem rates at https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-book/per-diem-rates . This move seems like something that makes a great sound bite but isn't actually a problem.
That sound bite successfully spawned hundreds of outraged comments even on this “intellectual” discussion forum.
This whole situation makes me think of a child who says "If I were president for a day, I would ..."
Anybody would do a better jobs than these clowns.
I think they are doing really well (by their own standards), the job is to destroy the government. They want to get rid of taxes and rules and regulations that prevent them from keeping their money and doing whatever they want.
Nah, that is like saying a child could make a Jackson Pollock or Basquait painting. It looks like random chaos but it is most definitely intentional.
Except Pollock didn't behave like a child.
Except most children have empathy.
Have you met children? They're total psychopaths.
that's a very charitable interpretation of all this.
more realistically, it's "if i wanted america to fail, i would..."
Trump's platform the first time he ran was practically "what do bumpkins in country diners say the government should do?" Those of us with connections to those kinds of people and places recognized shit like "build the wall!" because we'd been hearing "they ought to just build a wall" for decades from our dumber associates. (though half the time this took the form of "they should just place landmines the whole length of the border" and at least he didn't pick that part up)
This did have the interesting effect of making some of his positions cross-party populist, like his neoliberalism- and free-trade-skepticism. Normal republican voters hate that stuff and will tell you so, as do lots of left-wingers, but both parties (from about 1980 to 2016) loved all of it. He also talked some weirdly leftist talk, a few times, about healthcare, but with no specifics or clear plan, and that wasn't something he ended up taking action on. Same reason, though: Republicans have been told to hate "Obamacare", so they do, but lots of them also hate our existing healthcare system and insurance companies especially. Another gap between the voters and what their own party's officials were delivering, for him to exploit. They'd 100% eat up universal healthcare if a Republican promoted it, it's all in the letter next to the name.
It's why I figured he'd at least get the R nomination, if not win the whole thing, well before most folks considered him anything but a joke candidate.
> Those of us with connections to those kinds of people and places recognized shit like "build the wall!" because we'd been hearing "they ought to just build a wall" for decades from our dumber associates
Those people are not the problem, rather the problem is the people who voted for him who don't have being that dumb as a justification.
I felt a great disturbance in The Force, like a million SAAS and cloud companies crying out.
Who administers these cards?
The GSA system works through Citibank and U S. Bank, which take a small percentage off the top.
There have been alot of companies getting funded to create SAAS for the government.
Magazines and news media will suffer most. SaaS / B2B contracts larger than a certain amount won't be on employee credit cards.
Using cards is the preferred procurement method for expenses under the $10k threshold. I suspect that covers a lot more than magazines and news.
Not employee cards
The article directly states that this applies to the GSA smartpay cards. Those are limited to approved purchases under the micro procurement threshold under GSA directives.
Exactly my point. Micro-Purchases.
The micro threshold is $10k, as I said earlier.
Yes, I get that. You may be underestimating the size of typical PubSec deals.
I'm not talking about the multibillion dollar agency deals, I'm talking about day to day procurement like equipment, printing costs, office supplies, etc. You know, the routine purchases that keep the government running.
Orrrrrrr you misunderstood and have been doubling down repeatedly when the real numbers are literally on the same screen as your comment.
$39.7 billion in total program spend.
$506 million in refunds earned by agencies/organizations.
$441 was spent on average for each transaction.
How do you figure? Is this conjecture based on the propaganda out of DOGE? The media spend they're purporting are also over that certain amount.
No. Employee cards are not used for significant purchases. They are for employee expenses.
Not exactly. They can be and are often used for larger provisional purchases. For example, when we wanted to get Slack or any SaaS, it was put on a charge card so we could start using it quickly, but that would start the clock ticking on an official procurement, which entailed legal and security reviews, etc.
Exactly my point. Serious pubsec procurement is not done on employee cards.
That is incorrect. They are for business expenses, like buying gas to fill your company car while traveling.
I'm not American, but it seems this has been going for weeks now. Are these changes/this access to various things actually impacting normal Americans at all? I understand the impact on government workers, but I'm curious if this is actually changing peoples lives in any way.
We were barraged for 6 months about how Twitter would fall over the next day when Elon took over there and took a radical stance, and it just didn't. I'm curious if this will be similar.
Tens of thousands of people are now out of work, with more to join them soon. The job market is already tight. That is going to have ripple effects throughout communities all over the country. We will probably see an uptick in housing foreclosures. At the same time, grant money for community support programs has been turned off, so these folks will have a harder time getting help.
Farmers who produced food that was sent abroad by USAID are not getting paid, and will have stock piling up that they don't have a buyer for.
Scientific and health agencies have been muzzled during a time when we are fighting bird flu (millions of flocks dying), there has been human transmission and there is a high risk of another pandemic (bird flu or anything else) coming along. People will die who wouldn't otherwise have to.
The agency which protects Americans from predatory bank fees has been shuttered, so we can expect our banking (like $35 late fees) to get more expensive.
I could go on and on, but our country is not Twitter; it's not even comparable, on almost any level.
To add to your list, Federal Spending represents 23% of GDP. If you cut Federal Spending you cut GDP. And if you take just a sliver of any of that spending and think about it critically, you can imagine the ripple effects it will cause.
Cutting funding for biotech results in loss of jobs and loss of patent filing. Loss of patent filing means loss of people needed for filing patents. On and on. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out (some pun intended).
Not really since their plan is to cut taxes too. It shifts spending to individuals rather than cutting GDP, though there are always costs associated with such a transition.
Those tax cuts will heavily favor the wealthy. So I guess it depends on your belief in whether trickle down economics works.
Additionally, the Federal Government is the largest employer in the country. If you both lay off a significant portion of that workforce and cut things like unemployment and other social programs, you are going to have significant increase in unemployment unless there is somehow new jobs for everyone. Add inflation to the mix due to tariffs and a perfect storm of economic despair is on the horizon.
Not sure how true it is, but a few housing focused accounts I follow(that are admittedly more doom and gloom) are claiming house prices in and around DC are taking a beating as a result. It makes logical sense, but it's not something I would have immediately connected.
> I could go on and on
Could you go on and on with any actual examples since all of your statements were riddled with "probablies" and "mights" and "wills"?
All my statements started with a concrete fact, all of which are easily found in current news articles. Perhaps you should go do some reading.
sorry, you wanted people to spoon-feed you examples in reply to your low-effort low quality dismissals?
"If we let go of this it will fall"
"oh yeah 'will' I want real examples of things falling"
"here are examples of things really falling"
"lol right"
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> Tens of thousands of people are now out of work, with more to join them soon.
...and?
This is such a common thing in tech we have entire websites built around it to track the layoffs.[0] In fact, using that site you can see in February (only 20 days so far) we've had 10,950 tech workers laid off. Expanding it further, in 2024 alone there were over 152,000 tech workers laid off. 2023? Only a mere 264,000 layoffs.
Where is the outrage and emotional blackmail over this for the lowly tech worker, yet we're supposed to bend over and take it while saying this is a bad thing for government workers?
Personally, I think they're just finally experiencing the America they run and they don't like it when it bites them like it bites the average American, and I have to assume that's why it seemingly has such high approval ratings among independent voters.[1]
In tech, you get absurd salaries that mean even if you get laid off, you would still take home a lot more than your average government employee.
The number one attraction for working for the government is stability, and that's baked into the salary.
If you want to attract skilled workers to work for the government, have the same experiences getting laid off, and get paid less, they're just going to turn to private industry.
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> In tech, you get absurd salaries that mean even if you get laid off, you would still take home a lot more than your average government employee.
Apparently, as of late 2023, the average federal employee made over $101k[0]. "Tech" is vague, but assuming software engineers, the BLS estimated in 2023 a median of $132k[1]. That's not a big enough difference that you wouldn't be worried about layoffs in the private sector. Not everyone gets paid $400k working at a FAANG, and plus, federal jobs have a lot of benefits beyond that headline salary figure.
> The number one attraction for working for the government is stability, and that's baked into the salary.
The longstanding deal was that career civil servants don't get fired every time the White House changes hands and in return, they behave apolitically and implement the decisions made by political appointees (who are responsible to the electorate) in a neutral and expert manner.
That was the whole premise behind stability in government jobs. Back in the days it used to be the case that everyone did get fired between administrations, and they realized this was pretty inefficient.
But career civil servants broke this rule with Trump's first term, with a lot of opposition to political decisions brought on by people who are supposed to be neutral to the politics of it all. What is being reaped now was sown back then. Of course, it sucks for the people who did their jobs as they were supposed to; there is certainly an element of the whole class being punished for the misbehavior of a few.
I feel bad for tech workers they were laid off. And civil servants. It's the same people orchestrating both!
Exactly! Do they not realize they all sat around (poorly) administrating systems like h1b that have caused millions of us to be laid off with no notice or reason.
I can't imagine crying on linkedin like some of these .gov workers showing up in my feed. I would never be hired again.
I can't imagine a talented employee crying to HN about how they can't compete with the ESL labor pool.
What's the matter? The market feeling a little too free for your tastes?
You do realize it's your bosses that hate you and want to replace you and not random civil servants?
Series of posts by former Department of Labor economist and professor starts with:
https://bsky.app/profile/jrothst.bsky.social/post/3liin7up3c...
It seems almost unavoidable at this point that we are headed for a deep, deep recession. Just based on 200K+ federal firings & pullback of contracts, the March employment report (to be released April 4) seems certain to show bigger job losses than any month ever outside of a few in 2008-9 and 2020.
Higher unemployment leads to lower consumer spending - the USA economy is built on consumer spending.
My university announced a temporary freeze on PhD admissions due to issues with federal funding, with many departments announcing that they cannot accept any new students, and I know we're not the only one. A lot of people are wondering if they'll have a job in a year, myself included.
They've already damaged research/education, even if somehow it all gets undone. There's absolutely no reason to cause a brain drain in a country that has historically attracted students from all over the world.
N = 1, but I have friends in the US who lost their job because of the recent budget or grant cuts or whatever it was. They are very much non-tech normal people and considering options to emigrate. So yes, there are real people being affected by this.
> They are very much non-tech normal people and considering options to emigrate
Normal people don't consider leaving their country over losing one job.
I guess. In this case maybe normal people that are priviledged enough to consider emigrating. What I meant is people with real and constructive professions. That happen to be affected by federal decisions.
I'm saying that with a bit of self-deprivation. These people in my opinion bring value to society with their jobs. In contrast to many IT roles where that can be a bit questionable sometimes. My own employment included.
In many cases it's not just one job. NIH grant funding, for example, remains frozen with no explanation of when it's going to restart. If I were in biomedical research I'd definitely be looking for options in other countries rather than rolling the dice on a potential 4 year pause in my career.
>I understand the impact on government workers, but I'm curious if this is actually changing peoples lives in any way.
Well, our inflation rose to 3% in a month, a few people have died over all these illegal spending freezes, we had a repeat of the Saturday Night Massacre[0] where 6 or 7 judges resigned due to Trump wanting to basically hold blackmail over a corrupt Mayor's case to be temporarily dropped. Those are the most immediate and obvious effects seen after one month off the top of my head.
>Elon took over there and took a radical stance, and it just didn't. I'm curious if this will be similar.
I don't know why people say this when Twitter had clear changes to day to day use. Let alone to anyone investing in Twitter. Smaller content creators get even less organic engagement, celebrities are harassed more because of blocking changes, commenters get worse, more toxic community.
The effects only aren't felt if you use Twitter to get news and you avoid comments, or an account. Even then Twitter makes it harder to view stuff without an account. The fall of Rome took years, if not decades. If you're just expecting anything software to collapse like a demolition project you need perspective on how people define "drastic".
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On topic: no, don't compare this to Twitter that no one needs in a day to day. The US economy will get noticeably worse, jobs will be harder to find and more people will be let go, The GDP will fall, and if March goes horribly a lot of old people will be on the the street dying. It's not going to all happen in one day, but lives will be lost over these reckless changes. The US isn't exactly doing too well with foreign policy either so that'll be the most obvious effect for you. Our country will probably shift to rely less on us goods.
> I don't know why people say this when Twitter had clear changes to day to day use. Let alone to anyone investing in Twitter.
That wasn't my point though. Twitter itself changed, which was expected and (I assume) intended. My point was the months of us being told constantly by the media that the sky is falling - the servers would fall over tomorrow, the advertisers would all leave and there would be no money, etc. This was literally daily for at least a month.
Now, Twitter is still up and running fine (from a technical and assumedly financial perspective). It appears Elons methods worked fine, and all the other major tech companies also went on a mass firing spree to trim the fat.
I'm honestly not sure how this compares with similar changes to a federal government - or if it does at all. But the context of my comment came from the GPs point, fat cutting and applying highly profitable tech start approaches to a federal government is an interesting thought exercise and especially so for a country that values capitalism over people so highly.
Every significant government policy being added or removed has real world impact - both positive and negative. I'm curious if the positives will outweigh the negatives in this case.
>My point was the months of us being told constantly by the media that the sky is falling - the servers would fall over tomorrow, the advertisers would all leave and there would be no money, etc. This was literally daily for at least a month.
That seems to be my point tho. you're imagining Twitter collapsing in a few days and going out of business. That's not really how things work.
Twitter went private so no one really knows how well it's doing. I'd bet any confidence in Twitter these days isnt really in Twitter so much as Musk hype, however.
>. It appears Elons methods worked fine, and all the other major tech companies also went on a mass firing spree to trim the fat.
By waht metric? Financial is dubious of you're following the scene. Workers, certainly not. I guess in the metric that it let him buy the election. That's pretty big, I'll admit. I don't think thst trick will work twice, given his current reputation.
In the sense that "it is operating as a domain?" MySpace is still"up and running fine " in 2025. Digg is still up and running in 2025. Such name brands so well known don't really die in a literal sense; someone's going to buy and try to salvage it even after Musk sells it one day.
>MySpace is still"up and running fine " in 2025. Digg is still up and running in 2025. Such name brands so well known don't really die in a literal sense ; someone's going to buy and try to salvage it.
What positives are you imagining? We pay off the defecit? This ephemeral mood of "corruption" is dealt with? That you get a tax cut? Maybe the 3rd one will save you a few thousand a year.
I don't see many upsides here that counter balance this. That's pretty much my whole reservation of this comment. It just seems to be saying "well maybe we get something good out of it" while dimissing the bad that's already come. All on a basis of a company that didn't completely die out from the same cuts and suggesting it "works" because of that.
Lots of inflationary pressure building.
- Debt repayments are entering a level similar to 1990s due to high rates and debt, meaning the government will eventually have to use inflation to reduce it.
- Trump's hostility to energy and housing, two primary drivers of inflation
- Tariffs
- Deportations of farm workers
Inflation expectations according to surveys and rates markets are back up to 2021 levels.
The only thing pushing against inflation is a relatively strong real economy, which isn't guaranteed to last if the tariffs and deportations happen.
Prosecutors resigned, not judges.
March will be no different than January.
March is when congress decides on a budget. Aka the first legal time in Trump 47 administration that they can actually influence the budget. Some GOP propositions propositions include Medicare cuts and overall trying to lower the budget by 33% IIRC. I'd bet good money we're going to see a bloodbath in the Capitol, be it among congress, or among the people reacting to whatever results happen.
Medicare "cuts", it's 100% of Medicare, and big % of foodstamps as well. And increasing debt ceiling, seems like most of it will go to tax cuts for the rich.
Just to be precise, it's a cost equivalent of 100% of 2024 Medicaid (sorry, I typed the wrong one) spending, amortized over 10 years. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't mean it's cutting all of Medicaid at once, right?
It's still drastic, though. 10% every year means 100b in cuts to Medicaid. More money than what's allocated to the DoED
I think you mean Medicaid, not Medicare.
To be honest, I lost track of which ones they wanted to cut. It probably was Medicaid instead. I wouldn't be surprised if Medicare and even Social Security come down the line at this point.
98% of Americans 65 and older are on Medicare and are overwhelming happy with it. This is true both for those on traditional Medicare and on Medicare Advantage.
For most of them having to switch to any of the existing ways that people under 65 can get health insurance would cost them significantly more and significantly reduce their coverage.
For those who are on traditional Medicare it would also mean going from being able to see nearly any non-HMO doctor (over 90% of non-HMO doctors accept Medicare) to going to managed care insurance where they have to deal with in network vs out of network and where the insurance company is practically looking over your doctor's shoulder and interfering in your care.
Messing significantly with Medicare would thus seriously piss off about 60 million people over the costs and reduced coverage that alternatives provide, and piss of the 28 million of those who are on traditional Medicare even more because of having to switch to managed care.
45% of those people have guns in their households. Most probably wouldn't resort to violence, but there are 27 million of them. That's enough that I'd be surprised if that doesn't leave thousands who would resort to violence.
Look at how many people seem to think the UHC CEO killing was justified, and this would be a lot more disgruntled people.
How much would you like to bet? Is 20k a good number? Can you be more specific about how you’d define bloodbath so we can agree if it does or does not happen?
>Can you be more specific about how you’d define bloodbath
Sure, there's 3 vectors I'm looking at here.
Legislative:
- The government shuts down for 3 or more days before deciding a budget. 1990 shutdown was the most similar situation (which includes Medicaid cuts, but ironically enough was trying to raise taxes) and lasted that long.
Executive:
- Trump vetoes the budget more than once. 1990 as a reference once again, H.W. Bush vetoed the 2nd proposal , once total.
Judicial:
- Trump and congress decide on a budget but judges intervene on the allocation. I'm not sure if this ever happened, but I couldn't find any accounts. So I'd say involving all 3 branches qualifies
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- I'll also lump in any significant attempts at violence or death (natural or otherwise) over any politicians involved in such budget debates as part of that (the most literal "bloodbath" possible)
Those seem like fair enough criteria?
>How much would you like to bet? Is 20k a good number?
I'm sadly still a part of an extended job search, so I have no real money to bet. But if this was 2022, I'd probably put 5k onto it in terms of confidence.
> understand the impact on government workers, but I'm curious if this is actually changing peoples lives in any way.
The effects have started to be felt, but nowhere near the lecel they will be if things continue much longer this way; as well as the directed impacts, a generale economic slowdown is expected as a fairly near-term second ordee effect. Lots of direct job losses plus people holding off spending because of a cloud of uncertainty is a great way to make a recession.
>and it just didn't. I'm curious if this will be similar.
If I were to bet on it, yes it will be similar. My guess is that things will over all be better 3/4 years from now, after some initial pain.
Twitter is replete with bots, videos rarely work, and it’s almost entirely tilted to the right side of the political spectrum. Twitter didn’t fall over the next day but there’s no disputing it’s a worse platform than it was.
A homeless shelter down the road will be closing in a few days and putting ten families onto the street. It's colder than your freezer outside, and the city already cleared out all the camps a year ago, so these people might literally die. Children. Babies. People who have lived here for generations but consistent ratcheting up of rents means they can no longer live anywhere.
The expanded ACA tax subsidies are very unlikely to be renewed. This will result in about 5.6 million Americans (26% of the people with marketplace insurance) who can no longer afford healthcare and are left to rely on emergency rooms, which is a cost we all end up bearing anyway.
Our allies have lost all trust for us. They already hated Trump in his first term because he was stupid and confrontational and transactional in a truly ignorant way, and him getting re-elected after some pretty obvious poor governing means that our allies no longer trust not just our government, but the actual people who voted him in. The ignorance and pettiness and hatred of the American voter means investing in the US as an ally has become a very stupid thing to do.
I'm cancelling a vacation outside the US because I have no interest in interacting with border agents who feel empowered and vindictive. I already cannot travel to certain US states where a pregnancy scare can become a crime.
Our state economy has been buoyed nicely by the shitload of Asylum seekers from all over the world who are educated and just want to work, but are often not allowed to for dumb reasons. Lack of funding and a hostile immigration environment will only hasten the death of our state, which has a very old population.
Three large parts of our economy are: Lumber trade with Canada, Tourism with a lot of that coming from China, and selling lobster to China. With another trade war, that's all fucked. Before China became a buyer of our lobster, the industry was dying because they were catching too much and they had to keep selling lobster for cheaper than ground beef.
The farmers up state who grow potatoes will be fine, since it's been industrialized since before I was born. Everything else we grow is going to get a lot more expensive with less migrant labor, so I hope you don't like broccoli. Alternatively, we replace migrant labor with chain gang workers from the local prisons and enjoy the (literal) fruits of slavery.
The average American rarely deals directly with the federal government.
The average American files their tax return with the IRS once a year. The IRS just lost 15,000 employees. This tax season is going to make 2020 look smooth and efficient and fast.
But what did those 15k people do? If their job was to audit family and small biz returns, I don't think anyone will miss them.
So it seems like this just puts is back to how it was in 2023. Doesn't seem like a drastic change.
The average american uses the one page form 1040 ez and just sends it in electronicly or in the mail.
1040EZ was discontinued in 2018.
And fortunately, Musk only said he "deleted" the IRS's Direct File program and people might get to use it one last time.
But the effects cascade down to other levels of government, service providers and businesses in their area.
Yeah Americans are all super healthy and blessed so we dont need healthcare
Why do government employees have credit cards? When i was in the Air Force, we had GPC cards but honestly it was easier to just pay out of pocket and get reimbursed when i had to travel for training. The Air force took care of flights and i just had to pay for hotels and food and they gave me X per day based on location.
Seems like a smart move to just remove the GPC program in general. you can spend up to 10K with literally no competition requirements... Seems like there is alot of room for fraud, waste and abuse there. Better to reduce red tape for procurement and have a more centralized purchasing manager coordinate like every company does.
Step 1. Cut gov payroll by 30%. Save $X per year. Claim victory. Praise Trump!
Step 2. Hire consulting companies like Bain to provide services previously provided by the gov, at a higher price. Spend $X * 1.5 (if you're lucky) per year. But by then, the public has moved on to some headline-grabbing news (invading Canada, or Greenland, etc.), and the budget increase is buried on page 4.
Scamming the American public.
It's hard for me to imagine that the software built around this isn't just going to start crashing with enough of these changes. You've given a handful of (generously) junior engineers access to decade+ old software and they've just started changing things willy nilly. There will be downstream effects of this that software stops they're putting in place just stop working.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone changes this accidentally in a way that a limit like this is by-passable with minimal effort in the coming weeks (if not already).
If a piece of software crashes in the forest, and no-one is around to hear it, did it really crash at all?
I'm sorry for the chaos you're going through in America, but as a Canadian, every day of internal chaos is one fewer day I have to worry about your soldiers killing my children.
The likelihood of Trump sending troops across the border is pretty low right now. The chance of Trump trying to destroy Canada economically with America's weight is relatively high.
Please continue to disentangle Canada's economics from the US; it's much more likely your kids starve then are shot.
The odds might be low, but they are substantially larger than zero. Most people I know are preparing in some way by offshoring what money they have, researching places of refuge, etc.
The path to violence is:
* imposition of punitive tariffs by Trump
* Retaliation which escalates to energy export tariffs.
* At some point Canada shuts off electricity transfer to the US and restricts water transfer, which shuts down the eastern seaboard. Trump declares this an act of war.
> At some point Canada shuts off electricity transfer to the US and restricts water transfer
This is what won't happen. People are far, far too comfortable for that, you'd need to see 30%+ unemployment rates for that to change.
It's easy to go crazy when you can break any federal law without consequences.
1. The president has immunity for official acts,
2. The president can pardon anyone who does his bidding, and
3. 2/3rd of the Senate is needed to convict and remove the president and there is loyal thrid.
No matter how much Trump, or his henchmen screw up, they know they can walk away after 4 years and nothing can touch them.
So how many SaaS subscriptions to support minor but perhaps part of critical chains that aren't expensive enough and get put on credit cards will break next month?
Honestly, if the Chinese had hacked into all of our government systems I don’t think they could do as much damage as the Destruction of Government Efficiently. I am still waiting for my tax refund.
Ok. So for Musk I would like to cap the money borrowed against his stock portfolio to also be $1.
This will waste money. People’s time is worth more than 1 dollar.
There is a part of me that occasionally checks in to see if people are realizing they are getting conned yet. Musk is trying to sell critical government functions to his buddies in the Founder's Fund and a16z by literally making the government more inefficient. Burying the government in paperwork has been the Republican dream for decades.
They don't seem to be yet. Two people with cult followers willing to contort themselves to the dear leader's position at any moment.
I thought and was somewhat hopeful they could make a difference way back in 2016, not unlike Obama's rise to power, but after that shitshow and very much noticing something very, very wrong (IQ ~110+1/2SD and a real knack for deduction and pattern recognition combined with a strong interest in psychology and the human condition) I tried to warn my Trump supporting American friends to no avail.
Devastated to see a once great nation (and with that I mean 80s/90s United States, _not_ current United States) rapidly falling apart as fast as my own.
i think of it as federal autophagy. probably even many federal employees are glad for the chance to rebuild something simpler and more efficient
Okay steelman this for me. What are some concrete examples of someone needing a government credit card? FBI agents replenishing bullets after a firefight with a UFO?
I forget where I read this, but shutting off the cards was part of the playbook when Musk took ownership of Twitter. If I remember correctly, they shut off the cards and waited to see who complained. Apparently they discovered a bunch of subscription services that no one had even signed into or used at all, just paying out for years.
Or instead of guessing we an take them at their word:
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work"
That sounds like more of a failure of management than of the employee charge card system. They should be screening those charges and periodically reviewing contracts anyway.
> Twitter will no longer be covering several costs or paying for a number of perks made available to employees, some for many years, for example. And the maximum amount allotted for work-related trips has been limited, as those trips are also set to become rarer.
> The allowance for a mobile phone bill is now $50 per month and the daily allowance for food while on a work trip is now $75... Meanwhile, the overall limit on expenses for any kind of work-related travel has been "revised" by seniority level
Searched for things like "expenses," "cards," "subscriptions," etc.
Yeah, you don't even have to look on employees perks. Can easily go to the list of hundred (or hundreds already) of SaaS and similar stuff available in my company, and see contracts in the hundreds of thousands a year that nobody know who's using it. Or multiple contracts with the same function. Or Hashicorp contracts. :P
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DOGE may not be doing much to actually benefit the American people, but it's sure providing great entertainment value; reports read like Onion articles. If this was a movie script it would be rejected with "wildly unrealistic".
I always find it fascinating to see people rage against the current regime without any hint of self awareness that the alternative would have been just as bad, if not worse.
Absurd. The opposition had none of this in their platform.
You can enumerate the failures of Dems if you'd like but casting both sides as the same is utter nonsense.
And your little dig of "without any hint of self awareness" makes me think that you think you know better.
Seems like a great thing to try and see what breaks what with all the employee card fraud going around these days.
If any Silicon valley company did this HN will have a party roasting it.
These days I'm convinced that the usual "The government can't do anything right!" pro-Trump guys are not saying it as a warning or complaint: it's an aspirational quote for them.
Everyone here has had management with overly tight 'you must track your time' and 'you can only work on XYZ tasks' (normally where XYZ is capitalizable or billable) requirements and we all know how that turns out.
What DOGE is doing has happened in China 10 years ago. Instead of “fighting corruption” they claim “government efficiency”, but the ultimate goal is to silence and destroy any opposition. Because bureaucracy is inherently universally corrupted, to some extent, and the US has tons of laws at the DOJ’s disposal. That is Xi’s playbook to solidify his power and I am afraid Trump may be using the same one. I certainly hope we won’t be going down that road but to be honest I am not bery optimistic.
I noticed this parallel too. At least the US has the option for some sort of change in two and then four years.
This is yet another thing that will help bring on a recession/depression. First they create unemployment and lower spending from the layoffs. Now anyone left cannot spend money. What effect do they think that will have on the economy?
Pretty clear at this point that Trump is not about creating jobs. And that DOGE isn't about government efficiency. I mean, he declared himself king. This is just a direct attack on America as we know it.
They want the 10 year down to zero again. The only way it goes there is to force a recession.
There is no other way to do it fast enough to blame the recession on previous administration than to up the unemployment rate fast.
Why would you force a recession to escape interest payments totalling 4% of GDP? It makes more sense to preserve a strong real economy to help fund those interest payments.
The interest payments are greater than the defense budget. It will bankrupt the US.
> In 2024, the U.S. government paid $1.2 trillion in interest on its debt, which was a record high. This was the second largest federal expenditure, after Social Security.
If 4% of GDP will bankrupt the US, then why would you want a recession which will lower GDP by more than 4% compared to the status quo?
A recession does not hurt the wealthy, it helps them. They buy everything the poor sell to stay alive. "You will own nothing and be happy" was a command.
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Imagine all those people overseas trying to unwind their foreign work/life.
Oops. No credit!
Not to mention the bazillion other legit reasons for expenses.
At least now I know what happens when you take Homer's makeup shotgun to the US government.
"so-called DOGE"
The article is paywalled, but I would be willing to bet that there's not much discussion were those credit card transactions were made.
These obviously popular and important posts getting buried is sad. I think this site should be called Silicon Valley Greed News instead. Fuck all of you libertarian Musk worshippers downvoting these posts. Our government is being taken over. Hackers used to make useful things for people for free, for the love of the craft, not suck as much money out of the system as possible.
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a) Based on polling, only 3/10 Americans support DOGE [1].
b) There is widespread (almost unanimous you would imagine) support for reducing waste, corruption etc in government. The issue is how you do it and whether you are negatively impacting people for little gain.
c) And from what we've seen to date, DOGE has not found anything that wasn't already known long ago by the Inspectors Generals.
Got anything more recent? Such as, after they started doing stuff?
Even supporters were wary of creating a new department for this, because of the risk of it just lingering around without doing much and expanding the federal government, before seeing how they went about it.
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> a) Based on polling, only 3/10 Americans support DOGE [1].
and yet, here's an article that says the almost all of their focus group supports doge[0], saying explicitly:
> "These swing voters are delighted by Musk's Trump-endorsed government housecleaning,"
Why would someone acting in good faith do as much outrageous trolling as Trump and Musk do?
Well if his opposition would listen to reason, maybe he would try reasoning with them. There comes a point where argument goes off the table.
Little faith in the government it didn’t get to pick, like when hysterics were blaming Biden for everything wrong in their lives for four years?
Care to elaborate on your point? What's the "averqge' American as of now?
Someone who isn't predicting the fall of the federal government over a temporary card spending limit, I assume.
Nowhere did I say that. It's a shame an honest request for clarification is met so hostilly these days.
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Unpopular because it's so flagrantly ignorant. How much do you know about the "egregious" expenditures by rank-and-file federal employees just doing their jobs?
Maybe $2T too much?
Maybe it is, but also maybe it's actually really expensive to run a country as big as the United States, and maybe people offering simple truisms and simple solutions to complicated problems are just full of shit.
Just maybe.
$2 trillion is all of the discretionary spending including defense. Are you saying the whole federal government except for entitlements should be eliminated?
Anyone who worries about spending without talking about taxes is not serious or being deceptive. The cause of the current deficit is mostly Trump tax cuts. Plus all of the temporary spending to get out of the pandemic recession. The solution is to remove the Trump tax cuts.
USA government spending as a percent of GDP is on the lower side of developed nations (high 30s depending on the source). Our peers are Luxembourg and Norway, and we’re well below France and Germany. Granted that we are one of the few developed nations that don’t provide universal healthcare which biases us lower.
While I’d share your concerns about fiscal sustainability, we’re an outlier on tax receipts not spending.
I think the worrying part is the debt/GDP ratio where the US is among the top 10. Also there's a high amount of private/household debt.
I'm not from the US but I'm worried. The economic signs are worrying and a US that is overloaded with debt has been historically devastating for the global economy.
All the political uncertainty and questionable economic policies don't help that either.
It's unpopular because it's incorrect. This isn't fiscal "restraint", this is a spanner thrown into the federal government with the intention to cause dysfunction. When the government is no longer able to meet the needs of the people because it has been intentionally kneecapped, the billionaires who made this choice will push to privatize the affected services instead.
And in doing so, they will take the value and experience that was built up in our federal institutions over generations and throw it away to enrich themselves.
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> The list of absurd spending makes me super angry; I never voted for climate change grants for Sri Lanka, or funding operas in Columbia or research in to Vietnamese bathhouses, or supplying birth control to the Taliban
I suggest you save your anger for real problems you actually understand. It will save you a lot of stress.
All of the “absurd” spending DOGE cites may seem like a lot of money, but it’s a tiny amount in comparison to the overall budget, and remarkably skewed toward specific, hot button issues like climate change, DEI, etc. Where are the cuts to the $852B military budget, which has been shown for decades as being insanely wasteful? Why isn’t DOGE investigating ways to cut down our $952B in interest payments due in 2025?
"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the military to prepare plans to make drastic budget cuts over the next five years, with an exception for border security, according to a new memo obtained by CNN.
The memo, dated Tuesday, calls for military leaders to provide a proposal for eight percent in budget cuts each year for the next five years."
That’s great to see. If executed, that’s ~$68B per year.
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The card is not a "perk". It's not there to make expenses that benefit you.
For travel expenses, it gives the company more control/monitoring and a tiny percentage benefit because they get the equivalent of cashback/points, not you (for you, the advantage is that you aren't required to front the company the money).
For non-travel expenses, it means you can spend company money on tools without wasting hours over $20 in shitty bureaucratic spending processes meant for much bigger purchases. If you need a specific adapter for work, and your manager approves that, you can buy it from Amazon or your local retailer, rather than filing a request to add a vendor to your purchasing system so this $20 item can hopefully be delivered in two months.
The alternatives are either you paying the $20 out of pocket because you don't want to deal with the hassle (i.e. essentially the business blackmailing you into donating money to them with the threat that your work would really suck otherwise), or you literally telling your boss, for months, that that urgent project is still waiting on that adapter, which is waiting on the approval that typically comes within 2-3 months.
I was once on a team part of which was putting procurement cards into our (local, British) government. We were doing it to save money: the cost of processing an invoice on paper was ~£10, and effective controls on petty cash were difficult.
It worked. We got less bureaucracy, lower costs, and better management data. The project was neither controversial nor expensive. Why would it be?
Firstly, comparing government to private companies is already a a bad premise. The point of a private company is to make money. They make cuts to try and save money. Cutting credit cards is a sign that they want to reduce traveling and decrease efficiency by counting every penny. Instead of discounting microcharges as that and just bundling them up later on to handle at once.
With that said: someone claiming efficiency would not resort to penny pinching, especially with a budget in the trillions. It's not efficient in any metric
>just think I've been through private downsizing events and I don't really know why the public sector shouldn't occasionally have similar occurrences.
They do pcc. It's just a meticulous process becsuse government jobs are not at-will employment. But generally the country is growing so of course the government grows with it. That parts no different from the private sector.
Also keep in mind that this downsizing, outside of its legal dubiousness, is not in any way planned. It's not performance based and there's been no audits on what they are trying to reduce costs on. It's just a wrecking ball and Musk's tried and false method is to try to pick up the pieces afterwards. That's not how you want to treat people with access to a country's money, nuclear technology, taxes, and weapons.
If your bank wanted to downsize, how would you feel about them doing it by allowing a rogue team of 20-something software developers access to all its most sensitive IT systems?
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Source?
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It doesn’t work because I wasn’t making shit up, and the commenter above made no statement of fact. Troll.
> The real critique in my opinion is lack of professionalism but this gets somewhat subjective.
I think that's the point here, the overt pettiness from Musk/Trump. If they feel like employees shouldn't have company cards, then fine, just take them away! Surely it would be cheaper to cancel the cards than to keep track of all (now effectively useless) active cards?
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Have you considered that DOGE is an opaque, unaccountable bureaucracy that is motivated to optimize for ragebait? Who don't seem to know the consequences of their actions, or have any skin in the game if they make mistakes? Who have been given alarmingly high level of control over some of the most sensitive pieces of information and governance of our government, and never made any effort to assure the public that they aren't acting carelessly? And for some of these services they have basically left broken, there is an obvious conflict of interest when Musk suggests that the government buys replacement services from him?
You're asking the people to act in good faith but it doesn't seem like DOGE either understands or cares that there are a lot of people who have basically had their contributions and service to the country basically shattered overnight, because Elon wants to get x amount of likes from a certain culture war faction.
Nobody cried for the Keystone pipeline workers that lost their jobs. There wasn’t much of a whimper when Bill Clinton cut 400,000 government jobs. The duplicity is obnoxious. Even Jon Favreau, former Obama speechwriter lamented that Obama’s team should have done some of what DOGE is doing.
> There wasn’t much of a whimper when Bill Clinton cut 400,000 government jobs.
People are not concerned with cutting, they are concerned with how it's being done which is causing disruption:
The cuts that Clinton made to the federal workforce followed a six-month period called the National Performance Review, launched in March 1993, soon after he took office. The review process ended in September of that year with a report that found nearly 400 recommendations, which Clinton then implemented gradually so that essential services were not interrupted even as the workforce shrank considerably.
"Nothing could be more different in that approach than the approach that Musk and his team have taken, which is to assume the federal government's employees are the enemy, and the less of them we have, the better," he said.
You don't seem to get that the money is spent when Congress allocates it, not when a public servant puts it on a credit card. You want accountability talk to your representative.
This will just make government less efficient as it goes through extra steps to request invoices and post payment, or perhaps even spending petty cash.
It will exclude government from buying certain products where this isn't possible.
Of course this is all quite irrelevant, since it's a publicity stunt for the people who are not interested in saving taxpayer money but hating and destroying.
If they need more they can get an increase, what's the issue
Again, wrong end of the pipeline. It's just more busywork to do. The staff is already responsible for what is spent on the card and to match it to approved spending and their budget.
Just building in more red tape and expense to a system.
Saying we shouldn't improve spending oversight because the real problem is at the budgeting level is like saying we shouldn't put security cameras in a store because the owner should have hired more trustworthy employees. Sure, hiring matters, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also keep an eye on the cash register. If Congress allocates funds irresponsibly, that’s a separate issue—but ensuring that spending is properly tracked and justified helps prevent waste and misuse at the point where it actually happens.
Obtaining that increase implies further bureaucratic overhead. That's time (and thus money) that they didn't used to have to spend in order to get a job done.
You're also positing that the people in a position to grant the increase will do so in good faith. That's the opposite of Musk and Trump and their M.O.
> Taxpayers, however, require accountability for the taxes they pay in a functioning democratic republic.
Accountability to taxpayers is a really weird excuse for bypassing Congress on changes in whether and how money Congress has directed with law is actually spent.
And by “weird” I mean really “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”-level abuse of language.
They're just angry because sometimes people in Congress spend money on things they don't like in places they've never been to to serve constituencies they're not part of. And they look at the $4/month or whatever that that costs and they would rather have the extra cup of coffee than see bags of food go to Africa or Gaza.
IF they wanted to spend $4 for food to Africa, they can voluntarily do that. The unique feature of government is that you can compel someone else to do it that doesn't agree.
This is just adding to the bureaucracy, instead of approving all purchases on the card at once now they have to get approval for each and every purchase.
Bureaucrats revel and rejoice in paperwork
So DOGE is in fact pro-beauracracy?
First is reduce cost, if it takes more paperwork to reduce costs then so be it.
I really hope you understand what cache coherency is if you work in tech. It's the exact same context here on why this is less efficient in time and money here.
>First is reduce cost
So, what do you think we are reducing costs for? You said you own a business, so I suppose you would benefit more than average from tax cuts.
so musk is a bureaucrat now?
as a taxpayer, id like the costs of each of these broad actions to be analyzed add shared for public review before doing them.
>Taxpayers, however, require accountability
What do you think is unaccounted for? Especially on an electronic credit card?
Does your credit card statement report exactly what you bought or just where you bought it?
The receipts you provide to support your claim for taxpayer reimbursement for the payment you have to make on the card report exactly what you bought, and come with a justification for buying it, or you aren't getting reimbursed.
How the fuck does kneecapping the ability of government employees to purchase things on a credit card increase accountability? Either they’re monitoring purchases or they aren’t, it isn’t any more difficult to do so with a credit card.
Like, you do understand that all purchases on a CC are inherently digital and thus logged by default?
[flagged]
> Like 290 year olds getting social security benefits.
You have yet to explain how this is an attempt to improve accountability in any way, shape, or form. All your comments in this thread are smug, vague nods to unrelated issues or platitudes. Neither you nor DOGE has presented anything resembling a coherent, logical plan. From your comment history it’s clear you have the mental capacity of a can of beans and I’m fucking appalled I (probably) have to live in a country where your votes influence policy decisions which affect my life.
I get that you're frustrated, so let me be specific. One concrete step toward accountability is DOGE worked with the treasury to make the 'reason' field mandatory for payouts. Previously, many transactions had no explanation, making it difficult to track where funds were going. Now, every payout requires a reason, making auditing possible and improving transparency.
On top of that, this change already had an impact—treasury was able to track down Social Security payouts going to people well beyond the standard human lifespan, something that likely wouldn't have been caught as easily before. If you have specific concerns, I'm happy to discuss them.
oh you're referring to musk not understanding the "no data" condition as "150 year old benefits"?
huh? what idea are you trying to convey?
That seems pretty low.
Magazines and news media will suffer most. SaaS / B2B contracts larger than a certain amount won't be on employee credit cards.
> larger than a certain amount
Larger than $1 is in this case zero, there's nothing one can buy for $1 on a credit card. I'm not sure why they chose this amount and didn't just set it to 0. Not sure when this is coming but soon government employees will need to bring their own paper and other needed officeware from home, unless they'll have to bring toilet paper and soap as well if the cut is too deep. At the same time the billionaire class has nearly doubled their wealth and nobody is batting an eye for it. Strange times we're living indeed.
Afaict, they're doing everything the easy way. I wouldn't be surprised if the CC bank doesn't allow a $0 option, but DOGE doesn't want to actually administratively cancel all cards, either, so they're left with this.
Government workers were already making do with a lot less than is generally accepted in the private sector, especially after the GSA conference scandal of somewhat over a decade ago.[1] During my time as a federal employee, many government offices had no soap at the kitchenettes, and some had no coffee. Folks tended to bring in their own drip-coffee pots for the office.
It's an interesting arch.. I was not aware it got this bad. This is breaking the norm of hygiene, come on, soap and toilet paper was only missing in the third world or communist Easter block or Russia.
Everyone griping about red tape don't understand that the red tape is the point. If your expense is important enough to go through the paperwork then it can be addressed and petty cash increased. Otherwise, what do you think is better in the long term for effectiveness. Cutting the limit on thousands or hundreds of thousands spending accounts and going through the exceptions or letting them spend without oversight forever while you try to comb the queue looking for fraud, trying to get people to answer the phone and playing email tag?
Where does it say there was no oversight in spending? That is a part of the lie. Locking up cards because “something could happen” is just a useless defense. The funds could get approved, the limit raised and then something could happen. Terrorists aren’t going to drain the Fed through government employee spending cards.
So now instead the red tape is causing inefficiency in an area that was already efficient as applicable to the risk.
Unless the red tape is expensive. The trick is to be smart at striking the balance between reining in spending while not having a paperwork system that costs even more. Setting the limit to $1 doesn’t seem like striking any kind of balance.
I'm reminded of the story of the Air Force designing cockpits for the "average" pilot, only to find that
> out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions [0]
Surely, there are so many employees in general that probationary employees aren't needed. And surely, most government employees don't need to purchase things on a daily basis, so we can inhibit their credit card use. And most contracts about XYZ aren't crucial, so we can cancel them.
But, my goodness, there is so much nuance and breadth to the things a government does, let alone the government that is responsible for the largest military and that props up a big part of the world economy, that compounding these rash decisions will have far-reaching and serious blowback. I'm all about efficiency, but why be stupid about it?
The plane that we're all on is being dismantled midair, the engines have been turned off, and we're just gliding now. Gliding or falling, anyway
[0] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...
Because this isn't about efficiency.
The people radicalized to these actions are trying to destroy the government. They haven't been especially subtle about it in their writing. The ideal outcome is not the same government outcomes but at 70% of the cost. The ideal outcome is the collapse of the federal bureaucracy so that the lords of capital can scoop things up and create their little kingdoms.
> The people radicalized to these actions are trying to destroy the government.
It's worse than that. They're also incompetent.
Look, I'm a radical anarcho-capitalist / libertarian / voluntaryist myself. I'm fine with the idea of "destroying the government" in general. BUT, even I would say that there's a right way to go about it, and that that involves dismantling things slowly and incrementally, identifying replacements (where available) for government services that are being wound down BEFORE winding them down, minimizing the harm done, taking "collateral damage" into consideration etc. These people are doing the equivalent of "destroying the government" by just randomly lobbing hand grenades all over the place, with no knowledge, consideration, or concern, for the outcomes.
Well, then get to resisting. Like it or not, people with your ideology aren't going to be distinguished from the people that burned the government to the ground, destroyed people's lives, and sold the ashes to the richest men on the planet.
It is a fascinating comment. Surely, you recognize things are hardly black and white. Like it or not, the guy has an actual popular mandate to do just that. If you accept that premise, the undistinguishing is already happening on both sides of the US' political spectrum.
Less than 50% of voters voted for him and what was total voter turn out? 60%? So maybe a 1/3 of eligible voters voted for him. A plurality does not equate to a mandate.
By that logic, no president is ever allowed to do anything - because IIRC that turnout is slightly higher than the historical average.
The populace is always arguing about how I have to pay up for taxes for muh roads and schools whether I want them or not, or else go in a tiny cage.
Now they have to eat their crow of what it's like to legitimize the violence of a republic.
It may not be right, and I also disagree with our governance, but by god the schadenfreude is off the chart.
I hope the 2/3 learn something from this.
I hope the 1/3 learn something from this
They never do
Many things are not black and white.
But if the outcome is that the existing federal system collapses and we have a collection of fiefdoms run by CEO-kings, endless nuance won't be the appropriate response.
If Trump has a popular mandate to illegally dismantle the government, then what was Biden's popular mandate? Why were such comparatively small things like student loan forgiveness seen as tyrannical? Where was the endless supply of pundits saying "well that's the mandate" then?
You have to understand that arguing from "mandate" is a nice way of saying, "Please stop talking." Its purpose is to end the conversation, not to engage in further discussion.
Trump didn't even get half the popular vote. That's not a mandate.
@cthalupa
> Trump didn't even get half the popular vote. That's not a mandate.
I think you confuse USA with some other country. Read about electoral votes.
I didn't say he wasn't elected. I said he didn't have a mandate.
If he did not secure even half of the popular vote then it is obvious that the median voter does not align with his views.
"Not even half" is being intentionally misleading: He did get more than his main opponent, by over 2 million voters.
No.
We are explicitly talking about a mandate - the will of the median voter. Someone who did not receive even half of the popular vote is not representative of the median voter.
Just winning is not enough to receive a mandate.
Mandates would come from popularity, not from weighted numbers.
I just had to check since I am admittedly sick. Even wikipedia has mandate[1] as
"mandate is a perceived legitimacy to rule through popular support. Mandates are conveyed through elections, in which voters choose political parties and candidates based on their own policy preferences."
Even if we play around with concepts here, in a very, very practical sense, if the mandate is conveyed through elections, at least at the very beginning of the administration, that administration has a mandate to govern. Now.. this perception may change, but you can't honestly tell me this administration has no mandate for one simple reason:
If it does not have a mandate, neither of the previous administrations did.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_(politics)
> If it does not have a mandate, neither of the previous administrations did.
I would agree with this. I think the last time an administration had a clear mandate was Obama's first term.
Every election since then the margin has been to small too clearly say that their policies reflect the will of the median voter.
Except that when democrats are in power, we don't hear "they have mandate" for them. We see obstruction at every level and a lot of vitriol. It is only when conservatives are destroying it becomes mandate for anything.
So, no. This is just another asymetric rule designed to enable.
Also, on cultural level, we are supposed to not consider all Republicans assholes, but if they mandated this, they are. Or when Canadiens boo American anthem, it is all "American people are not responsible for their leadership".
<< Except that when democrats are in power, we don't hear "they have mandate"
We don't hear it from democrats now either. What is your point? That each side uses the best argument that supports their position and they decide on the argument after they decide what their expected result is? We all know this and it has been unfortunate part of the discourse for decades at the very least.
<< We see obstruction at every level and a lot of vitriol. It is only when conservatives are destroying it becomes mandate for anything.
Could you elaborate on this point a little? I had a longer initial reaction to it, but I realized that the phrasing can be interpreted in several ways.
I will say this just to give you an idea of my initial read: the vitriol( from republican electorate ) was the cause of the mandate ( to clamp down on bureaucracy ). Now, said clamping generates its own vitriol ( and seemingly some vitriol as well ). Which vitriol you want to focus on?
<< Also, on cultural level, we are supposed to not consider all Republicans assholes, but if they mandated this, they are.
Why.. do I care about it at all?
Asshole designation is largely meaningless to me. I will push that point further, because I worry that I might be misunderstood on this point.
You may find that almost the entirety of the situation we find ourselves is a result of people 'just being nice' and trying not ruffle feathers. There was rather ample time to do some of the incremental changes some recommended here, but no one wanted to be an asshole. We are way past the point, where that label would even register ( not even have and impact; register ). Edit: I will separately note that on this forum, I noted years ago that if those issues are not addressed, we will find ourselves having to make rather unhappy choices.
I am pointing it out for one reason some may be misunderstanding some very basic reality. I will offer one more example of this weird blindness to zeitgeist.
Did you notice how Trump was able to simply shrug off the felon label? Have you considered the why behind it?
<< Or when Canadiens boo American anthem, it is all "American people are not responsible for their leadership".
Again.. why does it matter to me? They can boo all they want.
Being okay or ignoring such a label indicates a certain level of understanding it and accepting it. Trump is totally fine with being against the law because he is in a position of privilege - he can afford it. He doesn't care about those laws either, so basically is totally fine with being an antisocial - because a society codifies its principles in the laws it created. Now if another person is okay with being called an asshole, again it's because they are okay with being mean to others, to disrespect norms and generally other persons, out of a feeling of personal or group superiority and expected impunity - an impunity they see again and again in their role models. So while you cannot make the asshole care about it, the way you truthfully explained, it's important for the less-assholes to point this out to each other. Because the "others" are a group as well, even though nowadays it looks chaotic and actually just less visible in general. Just to be clear, I don't think anybody expects assholes fixing stuff for the rest, it's for the moment nothing more than flag waving. And also I agree that the system is seemingly built to be abused by assholes, something not even the founding fathers have considered. But what happened, happened, and the question is, what now?
<< Being okay or ignoring such a label indicates a certain level of understanding it and accepting it.
I am ok if people choose to believe that.
<< because a society codifies its principles in the laws it created.
In broad strokes, sure; no real disagreement here.
<< Now if another person is okay with being called an asshole, again it's because they are okay with being mean to others, to disrespect norms and generally other persons, out of a feeling of personal or group superiority and expected impunity - an impunity they see again and again in their role models.
No. Laws are laws. Norms are norms. Both are subject to change, but I worry that people confuse the two for whatever reason. Even the issue with Trump getting felon tag is resolved within the existing system since he is the president. You may disagree and despair that the norm "president shouldn't be a felon" is not upheld, but them is the breaks ( I was gonna write "that's democracy for you", but I don't think you would have found it as funny as I did ).
<< So while you cannot make the asshole care about it, the way you truthfully explained, it's important for the less-assholes to point this out to each other.
No. I am done with tacit acceptance of social coercion. It only allows current system to get more unstable as it basically rewards people who yell the loudest. If I really need to point out an example you may get behind, look at former Twitter. Musk bought recognizing that simple fact and used it to his advantage.
No. Pass on branding assholes with a giant A to point out to others.
<< it's for the moment nothing more than flag waving
Yes, thankfully thus far only minor incidents have taken place, but they are there and social media is not exactly helping.
<< But what happened, happened, and the question is, what now?
Honestly, I don't know, but my personal rule of thumb is to not make things worse.
>I'm fine with the idea of "destroying the government" in general. BUT, even I would say that there's a right way to go about it...
Earnest question: Does the second sentence here cause you to reflect on the first, because:
>minimizing the harm done, taking "collateral damage" into consideration...
acknowledges that the government is performing important functions on which people rely.
I know there's an argument that the private sector could instead provide some of these, but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?
> but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?
I believe the idea is that you can have multiple companies for a given purpose and switch between them (or form your own) depending on what you think works best for you and your community. You cannot have multiple governments - if the one elected on an piece of land you happen to live on does not act in your interests, you're pretty much SOL at least until the next election cycle (if it's a democracy) or the next coup (if it's not).
The obligatory caveat is that - of course - this does not work in practice. At the very least, it requires a perfect free and fair market which means it needs us all to be well-informed rational actors. And there are probably more requirements than just this.
The problem with this line of thinking is in people frequently ignore their own interests or just shrug their shoulders and "I got mine" in some way: The absolute easiest example that comes to mind is roads. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people complain about tax on gasoline and how they don't even use the majors roads and highways that much. Mention that nearly every single thing that keeps them alive will in some way require roads to exist and they'll move the goal posts to "I ready pay other taxes" or "I've already paid plenty" or less reasonably "fine let all this go away then because we got along fine 200 years ago without it".
With other things, it's just about impossible to convey to someone with this sort of mindset anything much less direct like the costs of having beauracracies creating and enforcing regulating building codes or workplace standards, and even those are easier to grasp than many other services
Exactly - no disagreement here. But if you understand it and I understand it, can we dream of a day everyone will? :-)
In the meanwhile, I support bureaucracies. Even if the long-term goal is to get rid of them, I currently believe that we desperately need those training wheels for the time being, and trying to dismantle them until we know how to do well without is irresponsible and dangerous.
It doesn’t work in practice. So needs regulators or you end up with cartels. And for regulators you need a government.
We got where we got because this already failed.
That's what I've said, yes. It does not.
Companies tend to deceive customers, as the incentives are frequently aren't aligned, so "voting with a wallet" is not functioning as well as it should. And profit-seeking leads to market consolidation, which, at least past some threshold is a net negative on society and turns into oligopoly.
A vision of a society without a government is utopic. It requires drastically different mindset and understanding of the side effects and unintended outcomes from every living person. Yet, I cannot help but naively like the idea of such society (which is entirely subjective thing), and so I wish we all could be smarter and knowledgeable, stop fighting for resources, and that some distant day whatever becomes of us may live in a world where cartels won't form because everyone understands how that's not really in anyone's interest (paradoxically, I believe that's not even good for the cartel itself in the long term - power and wealth are also a deadly curse).
The history of private fire departments is a solid lesson in the pitfalls of this perspective.
I did not expect that conclusion in the last paragraph.
It occurred to me that making a point of the type, "here's what I believe is best or here's what I prefer, but I understand that the current reality doesn't accommodate it" represents a level of non-binary nuance and maturity that is exceedingly rare these days. We'd all do well to emulate it.
You can think that someone doesn't deserve the benefit they get from the government but also think it's unfair to impose additional hardship by cutting it off suddenly.
> You cannot have multiple governments
I have 4. City, county, state, and federal.
For most states, there's only two governments--the city and county governments of most states are organs of the state governments and only have such authority as the state unilaterally deigns to let them have.
As for the distinction between state and federal, that's essentially the exception that proves the rule. The reason you cannot have multiple governments is because you end up with a situation of contested authority, and a brief look at US history (and I suspect every other federal system in the world, though I don't have particular knowledge for others) shows a litany of debates over whether state or federal government has primacy in a given jurisdiction. It's only barely tolerable by the fact that, even if the grant of authority to the different governments is unclear, at least the authority to decide who has authority is unquestioned.
>acknowledges that the government is performing important functions on which people rely.
>I know there's an argument that the private sector could instead provide some of these, but that causes me to consider whether such critical services should be in the hands of for-profit companies?
I think decentralizing and delegating some of those services to be closer to the people (to state governments) has merit. I agree with the OP that to shift to in that direction there's a right way and a wrong way to do that transition. In today's immediate self gratification culture though you'll get what we're getting. Patience is a virtue we were all born without. It takes displince and strong values to stick with it.
Oh but they can be just fine, you only need to look outside the States to see it working. They're not perfect either, don't start me on it, but I can see exactly that idea working in Switzerland: the state making the rules for the private providers _and_enforcing_ them. It might be against "muh freedom to rip everybody off" but I personally refuse to call that "freedom".
OTOH, some important things in Switzerland are still state-owned, like the railways or the post.
Some people treat Switzerland like some libertarian paradise, but in reality, while Switzerland does tend to be more economically liberal than many of its neighbours, it's usually pretty pragmatic and not committed to some ideology.
True, I was thinking rather about the health insurance system as a working example of private companies being controlled by state-defined rules.
So, like terrorists.
More like National Socialists.
They believed in government. It's more like Italy.
At least it's an ethos.
> that involves dismantling things slowly and incrementally
Yeah? been waiting, consciously, for over 35 years and all we managed to do is give billions to industries for no return for citizens, tenfold our debt, potentially bankrupt Medicare, and so on.
Democrats have been in power about equally (20 vs 14 years but just president isn't enough to be "in power"); so neither side is interested in fixing this country for the people instead of themselves.
This. In fact, since the system is built for gridlock, both parties happily pretend to care about given's electorate red meat, while blaming the other party for failing to do X. It is a perfect scenario for an elected official: do nothing -- the hardest thing to do in politics.
The lock is VERY one sided. Democrats were willing to work across the aisle and even adopted republican ideas.
The moment they do, Republicans reject their own ides. Republicans refused to cooperate.
It is assymetric and the knee jerk tendency to both side everything just enable it.
<< The lock is VERY one sided.
Hmm. Is it though? You are making rather broad statement here. Would you be willing to offer an example supporting that statement?
<< Democrats were willing to work across the aisle and even adopted republican ideas.
'Were'? It is a real question, but the spirit is the same as above. Can you offer an example you have in your mind. I suspect I know where you are going with this, but I don't want to assume too much.
<< The moment they do, Republicans reject their own ides. Republicans refused to cooperate.
Same as above.
<< It is assymetric and the knee jerk tendency to both side everything just enable it.
No. This is pure silliness and I am frankly tired of hearing this point so I will just call it out.
I like to see things as they are. If things happen to work in a way that I happen to not like, then I do not like those things, but it does not mean said those things are invalid, simply because it was a 'kneejerk' reaction to it.
And even trying to cast it as kneejerk is amazingly inaccurate. This resentment has been building for a long time now ( does anyone even remember Vance's CNN commentary that basically said 'can you hear us now?' ), which kinda sucks for the political class as they will need to figure out a different model ( and it seems they may have already ) to bamboozle the population.
I am happy to discuss further, but you need to give me a little more.
While I do think gp should give you an example, I also invite you to provide a counter example, otherwise both of you are just stating your vibes.
If you are _actually_ willing to discuss, you can't just demand the other side to give, you can also set the standard by giving.
Fair point. I will respond to parent's comment below.
Obama was literally that. And republicans refused to do any cooperation at all and punished own republicans for any compromises. Obama eventually understood it well into his period.
Trying to both sides here is just lie. And yes, knee jerk complain is about people saying 'both sides' because they feel like they have to, not because both sides would be the same.
<< Obama was literally that.
I will admit it is a good response, because McConnell is effectively on the record[2] for actively torpedoing any opposing party moves. Still, affordable ACA passed with -- I might add -- 'bipartisan' support ( quotation, because phrase is thrown out the moment even one opposing party joins the vote ).
On the other hand, we may need to go over some definitions, because it is possible we are somehow not talking about the same thing, but use the same words further confusing this conversation.
<< and punished own republicans for any compromises. << ( previous comment ) The moment they do, Republicans reject their own ides.
Practical question. Sides or ideas in the above as it will affect my interpretation.
>> In fact, since the system is built for gridlock, both parties happily pretend to care about given's electorate red meat, while blaming the other party for failing to do X. It is a perfect scenario for an elected official: do nothing << The lock is VERY one sided.
Let us assume for a moment that I buy into your premise.
The current system is built around gridlock. I am not joking. The whole separation of powers is basically saying 'if you can't work something out, each side has opportunities to grind the system to a halt'. Which side uses the feature more is irrelevant to equation given that the system effectively incentivizes its use. We can talk all day about how things should be, but you don't exactly win golf tournaments by performing synchronized swimming routine.
Anyway, my very subtle point that both sides are the same stands. Do you know why? Because the 'sides' that do not understand the system and the rules it operates under do not last in congress very long ( and are ousted as you pointed out in your example ).
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act [2]https://www.inkl.com/news/mcconnell-wrote-blueprint-on-obstr...
The problem is that it wouldn't get done. To do it that way you would need the cooperation of the bureaucracy and they are just not going to cooperate here. And who can blame them? I wouldn't do a good job if my bosses asked me to do an analysis of how to cut my job. The conclusion would be "the collateral damage would be catastrophic." I think that's why large corporate layoffs are always a shitshow too.
What about early retirement for unnecessary bureaucrats? You give them their most recent salary and benefits until they're 65 or would've been eligible for retirement, then handle their retirement plans as though they'd been working all that time. So that's fewer bureaucrats, less resistance to the change, more people moving to the "more productive" private sector, and the money still flows to communities via federal wages.
This kind of plan would be crazy for a private company that needs to fight to survive each quarter, but it works for governments who should be planning decades ahead.
Then it's worth asking: surely no matter what your perspective is, it's possible to come up with intelligent and capable malefactors who'll further your power and that of your side?
No matter who you consider to be malefactors. Let's say we call ancaps malefactors, and we're talking about the reformation of society. Surely it's possible to find capable people who will set that in motion and lock it in so it can't be avoided? There must be so many people able to plan this out. You might be one of those people!
And yet, how come we're looking at a pile of nonsense people, hurling grenades and being catastrophically useless in their own rights, across the board?
Do you consider them incompetent, when the claim is they'll make everything great and you hope they'll serve your interests?
Or do you consider that they're doing exactly what they are meant to do, but they're meant to be saboteurs and the damage IS not only the point but the only real plan?
In that case, they might not even be in control of what they think they're intending, but they've been selected to do exactly what they're doing. Some of the bigger ones seem to be carrying on like Bond villains, presumably because they enjoy that, but even they are poised to do catastrophic damage to what they're supposed to 'rule'.
So do they even expect to rule anything, or are they simply trying to break everything before fleeing the ruins? They're not acting like they're trying to build power, it's something else. Even Trump's bluster is not really building power in any way, it's only undermining American hegemony at a staggering rate.
That might be the only purpose.
<< They're not acting like they're trying to build power, it's something else. Even Trump's bluster is not really building power in any way, it's only undermining American hegemony at a staggering rate.
That is arguable, but let us assume it is true for the sake of the argument. If that is true, would you agree that US hegemony seriously waned over the course of at least 4 administrations before Trump?
[flagged]
I notice you very actively defending Musk in threads but typically leave the conversation when someone ask you to defend the indefensible.
I can assure you that a great number of the people who disagree with you don't just "hate Musk" or have Trump derangement syndrome or something. This assumption that people only disagree with you for bad faith reasons or aren't "remaining curious" is weird, and you should reflect on it.
[flagged]
"Just hire them back" is not actually a cost efficient option.
Take TB medication delivery, one of the many programs halted by the USAID cuts. If you stop a TB treatment midway through you make the development of drug-resistant TB more likely and you make it more likely that this strain spreads to others. Even if Musk decides that actually it really is unconscionable to not tackle the deadliest disease on the planet (which happens to be treatable), the delays cause deaths. This isn't like turning some web server back on.
Rehiring people is also a fucking joke when they've been fired in this manner. People have been forced to rapidly leave the countries that they are deployed in with minimal support from leadership. Those relationships are burned.
> Those relationships are burned.
That's the bigger point. This is the destruction of the United States as a viable partner, today and for the future. It's the most anti-American thing you could do, which makes you think how much of this is incompetence and ideology and how much of it is compromise.
> Those relationships are burned.
Also, everyone knows that they're more likely to get messed around as a government employee now, so the market rate has gone up. It is now more expensive to hire people for the same roles.
Government jobs don't work like that, do they? There's a pay schedule for the job title and that's what you get paid. The codes start with G and go from 1-16 and beyond. Idk look it up. You don't really get to negotiate wages as a federal employee. The only thing you can get paid more on hire is if the schedule for the title is like GS4-GS5 DOE
The flip is they get paid time off, a lot, retirement, health coverage, and maybe early retirement.
They do once no one applies at those rates. The deal just changed, dramatically.
I guess we'll see. I don't have a rebuttal or anything fancy to say other than i disagree with your assessment.
> You don't really get to negotiate wages as a federal employee.
Not on an individual basis, no. But the rates get set according to the market just like everything else, to the lowest that results in sufficient supply. The market is always moving. Recent changes will result in positive price pressure. Rates will inevitably lag, but they do not exist in a vacuum relative to the market.
Benefits of government employment exist, but other changing factors still move the market.
>It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back. Performance metrics are unreliable, but firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t. It shows you who is really critical.
I might believe this if there was actually any time between the firing and rehiring. This isn't the administration firing people, observing the result, and then restaffing the programs that did actually become less efficient. There have been multiple times in recent weeks in which this administration fired people and then immediately moved to rehire them because they didn't have any idea of who they actually fired in the first place.
I just don't understand how anyone could think all the confusion and uncertainty we have seen over the last month is part of a well constructed and good faith plan for a more efficient government.
Its picking up rocks to see what makes threats or scatters.
A large portion of the effect you seem to be experiencing is trump and elon troll, and the media just mangles the trolls until I do not believe any story, comment, etc about Trump, doge, musk, Zelensky, Putin, whatever unless I literally see their words or hear their words.
Ex: the executive branch policy executive order today or yesterday. MSM and people on the internet "he's bypassing the checks and balances!"
OK no that's not what the EO says; but just for fun check what EO Biden signed about this many days into his presidency.
Hint: Reformation of the US Supreme Court.
It's just what they do. Presidents.
Also for the record Trump has signed 68 and in the same timespan Biden signed 34. Most of both were rescinding the others EO.
The example I gave was people being fired and immediately rehired[1][2] and you're blaming that on the fake news not understanding Trump's "trolling"? That is your defense that this is all "part of a well constructed and good faith plan for a more efficient government"? The President of the United States is trolling federal workers by firing and then immediately rehiring them?
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjev24184vjo
[2] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o
as my wife pointed out earlier today, they weren't fired. she said the best term she could come up with at that exact moment was something like furloughed. They're getting paid for months without having to show up and clock in.
that is not fired.
thank you for proving my point though. Probationary employees won't have their employment renewed, and everyone else you're calling "fired" was furloughed. Since she's a government employee, i tend to listen to her, rather than some other government mouthpiece over in Britain.
Your wife seems to be confused and is probably lumping together the previous round of voluntary deferred resignations with the more recent round of firings and layoffs.
The exact word used by both the USDA spokesperson and NNSA email was "termination" with the latter specifically saying "effective today"[1]. These are the words directly from the people whose job it is to communicate on behalf of this administration.
This matches the pattern of what has been happening to other federal workers who have generally had their termination letters cite "performance", regardless of their past reviews, as the reason for the termination[2], presumably so they can be let go without any notice or severance pay.
[1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-adm...
[2] - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/federal-workers-except...
the first article you linked uses the phrases "terminated, fired, laid off, mass firings, termination notifications, ending contracts"
Do you see how you're not actually getting any information from that?
the second article isn't any better "fired", "laid off", "sent letters that were lying", “The U.S. Department of Transportation finds, that based on your performance you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Department of Transportation would be in the public interest,” the letter to fired staffers read. “For this reason, the Department of Transportation is removing you from your position with the Department of Transportation and the federal civil service effective today.”
That letter was to probationary employees. maybe. I've never seen a nat-pop in a news article like that before. It is in reference to something near the top, maybe?
What you're reading and linking to me is fuel. It isn't useful information.
people who get fired for being poor at their jobs - do they usually own up to it? or do they squawk about how unfair everything is. "i'm not poor at my job and my supervisor said so" yeah does your supervisor still work there or? There's poor management; just like employees, C levels, and politicians.
>Do you see how you're not actually getting any information from that?
I don't know what to tell you. There is information in these articles and you don't even need to trust the journalists who are reporting them. All these articles have included quotes directly from the relevant government officials and emails.
Here is another article[1] with a direct quote from the following:
-White House deputy press secretary saying "Any key positions that were eliminated are being identified and reinstated rapidly"
-Trump's Secretary of Energy saying "When we made mistakes on layoffs at NNSA, we reversed them immediately, less than 24 hours."
- Even Elon Musk saying "We are moving fast, so we will make mistakes, but we'll also fix the mistakes very quickly."
And yet you are still refusing to admit what the people directly involved are telling you is true? You still think I'm just being misled by bad journalism?
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fired-rehired-dizzying-conf...
so the secretary called them "layoffs"? Alright, so they weren't fired? Thanks again. I said they weren't fired. The comment you replied to originally was about the threat of auditing agencies is kicking up a lot of ruckus.
It is fine if you think these layoffs, firings, or whatever are not necessary, even if the only reason you think that is msm reporting and a dislike of elon and donald. I don't really care.
The journalists you assure me are doing just fine used 5 different words that have different meanings to convey that the people were no longer "employed".
If you can get real information from that, great. I'd argue that you don't, since i've spent 3 comments arguing that.
> It’s the same with ...
This is the problem with your argument and all others like it.
Like the parent comment states in this thread, there is a truly mind boggling level of nuance and complexity that goes on in almost every single discrete field. The nuances that make you succeed in one field may not (are probably not!) the same as another field.
We can even see this within a field: Being a good engineering manager does not make you a good engineer, or vice versa. So why should we think either of these disciplines can be extended into geopolitics, finance, or anything else?
I don’t think it’s a good strategy in this case.
Some of the people you fire will not come back, even if you try to rehire them immediately. Some of the firings will not result in problems in the near term, but will cause problems later on. Some of the firings will cause problems that only occur under certain conditions, like catastrophic events and natural disasters.
Furthermore, you cause real harm to people who depend on these services in the interim period where you’re figuring things out. In some cases that harm cannot be undone.
The stated policy objectives to reduce waste could be achieved with much less disruption and cruelty simply by doing them more slowly and thoughtfully. There is no need to rush everything through in six weeks.
<< The stated policy objectives to reduce waste could be achieved with much less disruption and cruelty simply by doing them more slowly and thoughtfully. There is no need to rush everything through in six weeks.
If there is one thing that Trump has clearly learned from his first term, it is your window to effect actual change is surprisingly small and for that reason alone, historically speaking, presidents tended to open with their priorities ( whatever they were ).
I am mildly on the fence, but it has been my affliction most of my life. FWIW, I do hear you, but I do see a need for a drastic reduction. I recognize it is a gordian knot and it will be painful across the board. Doing it slowly may be just taking a bandaid off one hair at a time.
If the only thing on the planet you care about is efficiency, sure. How about the human lives impacted by all of it?
"Efficiency" is such a dumb thing to optimize for singlemindedly. Overly efficient systems are brittle and can't adapt to shocks. Look what happened to the efficient global supply chain when that ship blocked the Suez Canal.
Imagine if we demanded "efficiency" from fire departments; they'd only hire as many firefighters as they need to respond to the average number of emergencies per day, then totally flop when there's a mass casualty event.
Having a fast moving and inefficient government is what attracts people to the US! To live and invest there. Fast moving governments can destroy things, make them unpredictable and unstable based on the whims of a few. In this case an unelected billionaire with conflicts of interest and a pardon for all his crimes waiting for him in Dec of 2028.
People hate that.
Slow moving*
"move fast and break things" means iterating on a product but that's on a whole different scale when you are talking about space rockets and the USA government
You give a compelling argument. If the same strategy was being executed by someone else, I'd even consider giving it a thought. Heck, if the president was executing this independently, I'd still give him the benefit of doubt. But I don't trust Elon with what you're suggesting. He has nefarious motives.
>It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back.
Except that we're talking about human beings.
>Progressives will hate all of this simply out of a hatred of Musk
Consider that truly believing this instead of considering that some people have well-reasoned concerns, might make you closed to divergent ideas. And that is, of course, what you're accusing progressives of being here.
Which other leaders? Any who aren't about to be impeached for rugpulling memecoins?
> a brilliant strategy to quickly and comprehensively remove waste
A better strategy would have been to :
- spend 2016-2020 while Trump was in power auditing the NSAID / federal spending.
- spend 2020-2024 while they were hand-vetting thousands of loyalists and having Musk donate $240,000,000 towards their funds, plus other donations from other mi/billionaires, planning spending cuts.
- spend the pre-election time telling people what cuts they were planning and why.
- move to make those planned cuts quickly and comprehensively.
- release a tidy report of fraud and corruption found after 2, 3, 6 months.
This keeps confidence in the government high for national and international investors and governments, it would win over some Dems and undecided voters, it would reduce worry and stress from Republicans. They didn't do that, and you can't say it isn't a priority or they didn't have money or time or access to do it, so the possible remaining reasons don't look good:
1. they are just winging it. They don't know what the agencies do, what can be cut or what they want to spend.
1. The plans are so objectionable that if they told everyone their plans in advance, people would not have voted for them. (They don't care what the agencies do).
1. the chaos and hurt is part of the plan.
1. They want to be able to make stuff up, and have nobody able to call them on it. (see also: DOGE's actions are sealed by Executive Order, Musk has said some untruths about what they've found, Musk told interviewers that the things he says will be incorrect).
1. any other reasons? Any compelling reasons?
If you move slowly, agencies will circle the wagons and organise resistance.
I don't endorse it, but it seems like the "strategy" is mainly speed and surprise.
I'd say it's probably option 1.
Spoken like a true sociopath. These are people’s lives.
"lOoK HoW gReAt TwItTeR iS DoInG"
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It's been overrun by Nazis and is worth a fraction of it's purchase price. Having a website be technically online is not the measure of if it's "doing well".
>Operationally, Twitter is doing well, even with 80% of the workforce gone.
>It’s pretty clearly a success story on any objective measure.
Your comment actually underscores the problem. That is, even if Twitter really is more efficient operationally, the overall business is greatly diminished.
You point to the advertiser feud as the reason for revenue drop-off, as if it's a tangential thing. But, in fact, part of the reason for that is the chaos, as well as other, let's say..."human dynamics". And, now we're seeing a mass exodus from Twitter, the impact of which remains to be seen. It's all related. Having humans in the mix makes things far messier.
So, business success is not merely about operational efficiency and, when it comes to government, it's orders of magnitude more complex.
The advertisers couldn't care less about operational chaos at Twitter. They care about bad press. If Twitter was a lesser known company or Elon Musk wasn't a political enemy of liberal journalists, there would have been minimal revenue loss. This had nothing to do with the layoffs. Twitter would have the exact same problem even if they kept all the employees.
>The advertisers couldn't care less about operational chaos at Twitter
I wasn't referring to operational chaos or layoffs. I was referring to social chaos—you know, all of the controversial "free speech" stuff.
You could certainly characterize it all as merely political. But many would say (do say) that the kind of speech, disinformation, etc. that now occurs regularly there is much more than that.
Obviously, you're free to disagree, but then that leads to a somewhat tedious and unresolvable discussion wherein we debate what other people actually think or how much hate speech occurs; or we disagree over semantics of the "who decides what's hate speech?" variety.
Overall, I think most would agree that things changed under Musk. Some call it free speech. Some call it hate speech. But, whatever side you choose, it's controversial by definition. Advertisers, especially those serving a "general audience", tend to not like controversy.
Everyone has the right to choose and, among those with that right, are advertisers.
Advertisers don't care about "hate speech" being allowed or any of this controversy. If they did, they wouldn't advertise with Google of Meta.
Well, that's certainly an interesting take that I didn't anticipate.
Thanks for the chat. Take care.
Yeah, things are looking for for Twitter all of a sudden...
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/x-hinted-at-possible-deal...
objectively, the ad business used to bring in around $5 billion. It now brings in closer to 1. Sure, costs got cut, and now it's cashflow positive, but if the goal was really to reform the business from a strictly monetary point of view, it's impossible not to bring up the fact that there could have been an extra $4 billion in profit, if someone had just been less polarizing of a character.
so objectively, looking strictly at the numbers, it's not a winner. if I were a PE firm and my hired CEO's personality caused revenue to drop that hard, I'd find another CEO who could just as easily have cut costs without all the insanity. insanity brings risk and has cultural and political costs, and who wants that? Just make me money and don't get me in the newspapers.
so the only reasonable conclusion is that it's not about money or the stated goals but about power. Ever get annoyed with a waitress at a restaurant over something small? A normal person would just brush it off, but if you're a billionaire, you can buy the restaurant, cut her wages (because firing her is less humiliating), and have her boss treat her like shit, because it's fun for a billionaire to flex on the peasants like that.
It stopped being about the money a couple hundred million dollars ago.
You're probably part of the problem; folks like yourself are nearly universally ignorant of many Chesterton's fences.
Unless they radically edited what they said after you replied, I’d say the approach they favor necessarily includes understanding the fence. It’s a bit rude to just lump them in with “folks like themselves” as an ad hom.
Even as a left lib who thinks the primary purpose of a government should be to pool money into public good, I doubt all the fences that are up are there for good reasons anymore. Questioning them in a careful and rational manner is healthy, and I wish it were done more. Wanton destruction like we’re seeing now isn’t.
I think that’s in line with what your parent comment was saying too. They might be more surprised than I would be as to how many fences are justified, but it sounds like they believe it’s important to check.
I've worked in government and large institutions, and frequently deal with people who think like this.
Let's just say I'm perfectly comfortable with the ad hominem.
Literally 100% of the people I've encountered with this attitude either soften it once they're actually in, or they come in and break things.
Any time someone comes in with a "clean house" attitude," I know I have to get ready because they nearly universally have no clue of what they're talking about.
Pardon my French. - You need to be sharing a fuck ton of examples.
People make sense of things in many ways. One of the most fundamental are stories.
Share every example or story you can, or your friends can. This is one of the things conspicuously absent on HN, which is surprising since there should be many people with personal experience dealing with governments or complex systems.
It may seem simple, but they matter.
I respect your experience, but your message added literally nothing to the conversation besides “you probably suck because people like you generally do.” It was nothing but a personal attack.
That’s considerably harder to respect, and it put me in the position of feeling like I needed to defend the parent of your comment.
Being more direct, since you seem to value that: consider keeping that sort of thing to yourself unless it has an actual constructive point beyond insulting the person to whom you’re responding. However true it might be per your subjective experience, posting it here only makes you look bad.
If nothing else, choosing a straw man of not understanding Chesterton’s Fence, when that was already directly contradicted by the parent comment, comes off as you being the ignorant one.
You may be comfortable with the ad hom, but maybe you shouldn’t be so comfortable with that.
Identifying what the collateral damage would be, planning to minimize harm done, and identifying replacements for the functionality prior to replacement reads to me like an exact application of the principles recommended by Chesterton's fence rather than apparent ignorance of the concepts https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/:
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
If you still see it so differently I'd like to better understand some more of the reasoning why.
All of your theory sounds good.
I've NEVER ever ever seen anyone who comes in with this attitude do it effectively in practice. They always either soften greatly or screw things up.
I can't take any credit for theory as the above is just what Chesterton's Fence story is advising with nothing added.
I'm not particularly a DOGE fan myself but I've seen many folks like the above able to do great amounts of "cleanup" in organizations of 100k+ employees without much broken glass. Plenty who don't as well and create a mess of course... but those are not usually the ones who introduce themselves by way of being concerned about the effects and rate of change. People absolutely certain they know how something will go without doubt before even getting involved are usually the biggest problems, though they aren't wrong 100% of the time either.
Just as not every person who is hesitant to remove things is just a curmudgeon, freeloader, fake worker, lazy, or whatever else people like to characterize them as it's also true not every person who wants to remove cruft is ignorant, clueless, wreckless, royally screws things up, and so on. In both cases success is more tied with those focusing on the details, review, and planning of the execution rather than feelings on first thought.
Because this isn't about efficiency.
Last weekend the Washington Post published some internal DOGE memos showing this is absolutely true. What's happening has nothing to do with efficiency. It's all about ideology.
Got a link handy? I'm not finding it so far.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/dog...
The original claim was "these actions are trying to destroy the government", but the article only seemingly says they're trying to destroy DEI?
But DEI is what made JD Vance who he is today. To quote an article: "The truth is, if it was not for the Yellow Ribbon Program I would not be going to law school."
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/feb/19/ask-politifac...
Why are they trying to destroy it? Are they saying that they do not want more DEI, JD Vance-type people, that one is enough?
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> To quote an article: "The truth is, if it was not for the Yellow Ribbon Program I would not be going to law school."
That's not DEI. This program is about helping ex-military to find new employment.
DEI is about "we do not have enough racial / gender diversity at this company / office / organisation / employment level".
It absolutely is. I’m a disabled (technically, but not in any meaningful way) veteran, and you’d best believe that the first time I decided to mark those two boxes on job applications, my callback rate skyrocketed.
Please see my answer to someone else - "My message was specifically about the Yellow Ribbon Program, not if DEI includes people with disabilities.".
I assume that you're USA-based. Is there any chance that there're any state-sponsored programs for employers hiring people with disabilities?
I do still see a large difference between: - giving companies some benefits to cover the additional costs of having a disabled person working for them
vs
- requiring 40% women quota in board of directors: https://www.imd.org/ibyimd/diversity-inclusion/women-on-euro...
Again, my original statement was about what the JD Vance program is and what is not.
Veterans are included in DEI hiring practices. As are disabilities.
If you've applied for a job in the past 10 years surely you've had to declare your gender, ethnic background, veteran status, and disability status.
> Veterans are included in DEI hiring practices. As are disabilities.
My message was specifically about the Yellow Ribbon Program, not if DEI includes people with disabilities.
> If you've applied for a job in the past 10 years surely you've had to declare your gender, ethnic background, veteran status, and disability status.
I did not. I believe that here, in Switzerland, it'd be illegal to ask for your gender or ethnicity. Age is legal, although not often practiced in IT. Veteran status - not a thing.
Phase 2 consists of placing on leave employees in non-DEI roles — who DOGE determines are somehow tied to DEI — as well as other employees working at offices whose existence is mandated by law.
https://archive.is/7FMD9
>>What's happening has nothing to do with efficiency.
In my experience, efficient is rarely, if ever cheap.
The ideal outcome is that government fails, then they can point at the failing government and ask, why do we want to pay for something that is failing.
This - it's basically meme of the guy shooting the person behind him in the chair and then being incredulous.
Related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
This was a reckless plan.
If you want people to get onboard with spending cuts, you should raise taxes high enough to actually pay for all the spending so taxpayers feel the consequences of it.
Reducing revenues and letting people run up the credit card for decades instead, as an intentional strategy, was beyond irresponsible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_Wanniski#The_Two_Santa_Cl...
They've known for a long time that they can't cut spending. It will be terribly unpopular. So they cut taxes (especially on the rich) which keeps tax pressure on everyone else, but gets them wealthy donors.
Then the opposition has three choices: play chicken with the national debt, cut spending, or raise taxes. Usually raising the national debt is the easiest option.
What's their plan after that though? Privatization, I guess?
Ever read Snowcrash?
Yeah, their vision is us living in burbclaves of New South Africa, Mr Lee's Hong Kong and Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates and the bankrupt US Government with trillion dollar notes not to be used as toilet paper because it is illegal and clogs the plumbing.
I haven't, not yet anyway. I did read Termination Shock by the same author, though. I loved it, and promptly added Snowcrash to my TBR list.
so glad someone else sees this.
When you are Elon, or Trump, or even a moderately succesful business… all the government does (or at least what you perceive) is tell you no. You can't dump that here, you can't build that there, you can't fire that person for that reason, you can't do that without a permit, etc.. They just want to clear all the roadblocks out of the way for their PERSONAL gains.
Get rid of the government and you can do whatever you want. That is what they want. These are people who feel they have "won" the game of capitalism, and were still told, "No." That greatly upset them. How can a winner be told they can't do something?
There's thousands of homeless and underhoused people all over the US for the same exact reasons so you don't have to be rich to feel the effects of government telling you no. Didn't used to be that way at all. My grandfather built his own house ~70 years ago with his brother from trees they cut down on the property and set it on blocks. He lived in for 60+ years and it's still standing. It's a house I could buy and live in right now. But I can't just build a much better house with modern materials and live in it without an egregious amount of site work.
It's so dumb it's gotten to the point that there is intense competition for the most rundown house that's already utility connected so you can tear it down and replace it piece by piece to avoid all the ridiculous new rules. It's only feasible to build either million dollar+ homes or jank-station multi-families where you hear your neighbors toilets flush.
All the body does is limit cell growth for cells with potential! What has the body ever done for thee?
There's thousands of homeless and underhoused people all over the US for the same exact reasons so you don't have to be rich to feel the effects of government telling you no.
Somehow countries with bigger governmental social systems have less homelessness.
You know, goverment said no to the robosigning of fraudulent evictions, no to the predatory loans ...
Network states per Yarvin. Each ruled by a corporation with CEO. With a caste system for cheap labor vs "citizens"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no
There was a new EO recently that required all new hires to be approved by DOGE. So the goal would be to bring back something like the CSC had (which was essentially IQ filters for a job). Then the per employee productivity would increase in the government.
Government employees are unbelievably unimpressive, and it started in 1978 with the abolition of the CSC.
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That's partly because they like Hitler quite a lot though.
They don't care, they'll be fine.
Is the US going the way the aftermath of which is described in Neuromancer, or is it going to be Snow Crash, complete with visas to every city state, and the "US" part that's left deluded that they are in control?
It's snow crash, they're calling it network states. Tech billionaires want to be CEO kings of their own mini states, their goal is to destroy the federal government. Project 2025 is based on ideas (in particula, RAGE, retire all government employees) from Curtis Yarvin, good friend of Peter Theil and JD Vance.
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-plot-against-americ...
https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no
> Curtis Yarvin
So great the worst people alive are now in complete control of everything.
> This wasn't just theoretical—there were actual attempts to implement these ideas, like the Peter Thiel-backed “network state" project called Praxis in Greenland.
Huh.
Guess where Trump wanting Greenland comes from.
Accurately observed, but I think they're foolish and are only being used by a particular nation-state with a grudge against the US. Their alliances are pretty obvious, but an empire trying to reclaim its empire does not keep its promises to tech barons.
The Project 2025 people are probably sincere, but wildly impractical. Their impracticality has been indulged by a global adversary which simply intends to destroy the United States on every possible level. There's no reason the tech barons will be given mini states. Why would that happen?
They have money, there might be enough corruption in some states to allow them to accomplish this, or since they're in power they could sell federal land?
Not sure if anything but their own incompetence can stop them now, if not that a military coup might happen when trump cracks down on protests with soldiers, like he wanted last time he was president.
Yeah, they all are (immensely rich (for now)) useful idiots.
Their greed is being leveraged to have them dismantle their own nation -- no need for military action.
What happens afterward might surprise these rich plutocrats, but I personally won't be surprised by it.
It feels like they really want to make use of those expensive bunkers.
That's actually the problem. These tech shitlords KNOW there's a chance everything is destroyed in a way that doesn't leave them gods. But they place that chance at like 30%. They're degenerate gamblers basically, betting it all on red.
That's my take too. The tech barons are all remarkably stupid and think that if they destroy the federal government they'll be able to swoop in and take everything, but the end result is 50 individual governments that stop paying dues to the feds, many of which are going to be far more hostile to said tech barons.
They're not even smart enough to properly pay off and maintain the military so they could try and enforce the oligarchy.
The best part is this is trivially obvious to anyone who knows their US history. The articles of confederation were torn up and replaced with a strong federal government that could adapt over time in part because the "federated states" system resulted in a bunch of petty tyrant Governors who completely ignored and neglected their federal obligations, ran their states like fiefdoms, and consistently made things shitty for everyone out of their pettiness.
Lots of people insist that the US should be a loose federation of states that are mostly left to themselves, basically like a less bureaucratic Europe, but that's stupid, because if that model worked, the constitution would not exist
This is the most sensible take I have seen online in months.
Lately, I feel like I'm living in the William Gibson "Bridge" trilogy meets Douglas Adam's Zaphod Beeblebrox timeline.
> Douglas Adam's Zaphod Beeblebrox timeline
At least the galactic government had the good sense to make the President of the Galaxy a figurehead. (Or, uh, figureheads?)
I spent a long time trying to figure out who he could have been comparing himself to every time he was in the media for decades, until I was watching the Simpsons and realized Krusty had always been there but was no longer the worlds most beloved clown.
Ketamine is analogous to the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster? https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-don-lemon-small-am...
And yet he is allowed to have TS by the idiots running the DoD.
The film describes a "Despotism" (1946) cycle, and ultimate conclusion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdVB-R6Duso
Keep in mind people voted for this knowing the plan, but this book documents human behavior in general politics under a new ruler:
"The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith)
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
Removing political guardrails and community due-process is what is happening.
A king and his fool is unsustainable, thus... people with brains and money will simply start to vote with their feet and leave while they are able. Have a great day =3
> people with brains and money will simply start to vote with their feet and leave while they are able
That worked in 1935. It doesn't work in 2025, in a world with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. We're all stuck on this planet together now; there's no escaping from a US with a mad king at the helm.
"nuclear-tipped ICBMs"
Not unless someone is suicidal, the ultimate glass-cannon is practically only an economic-weapon designed to bankrupt anyone foolish enough to compete in such programs.
Besides, there are rumors of far worse things now like geriatric Fox media. lol =3
>Not unless someone is suicidal
There are plenty of examples of rulers suddenly becoming suicidal once the walls start closing in on them.
Narcissists love themselves more than anyone else, and would never deny the world of their joy in collateral misery. lol =3
"Don't Be a Sucker" (1947)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23X14HS4gLk
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The government was on life support because of the same people killing it now. If you want to shrink the government, you first break it, then say it’s broken and must be reduced as a result.
The alternative was followed from the 30s during FDR until arguably the 80s…make the government effective, and it was immensely successful.
That was dependent upon an interpretation of the 10th amendment achieved via intimidation to pack the courts. Before that most the regulatory apparatus would not be constitutional.
What many of us are welcoming is an end to most regulation of most intrastate commerce except as authorized by the constitution. It is time to undo the damage of Wickard v Filburn.
What damage? You think the American economy was better during the robber baron era before the federal government had the ability to regulate interstate commerce and redistributive taxation, strong unions, and things like the GI bill created a large middle class capable of buying goods and services?
We’re backsliding into serfdom forgetting what Henry ford said when asked why he was raising wages far above competition: “I’ll sell more cars if my employees can afford to buy them”
If it’s austerity why are they raising the debt limit by 4 trillion and awarding massive contracts to their cronies (or themselves)? They are not trying to cut costs, they are trying to reallocate wealth away from the working class and into billionaire pockets.
That's the endgame I see.
Oligarchy. Kleptocracy. Morons cheering because they're deluded enough to believe that the definition of "pork" is when the government transfers money directly to lower and middle class via paychecks.
Congress will authorize contractors to do these jobs instead. We get back privatized versions of the old government services at a higher price, and the money goes into the bank accounts of the rich.
I'd like to read the CBO report on what this shit will actually cost over ten years.
> awarding massive contracts to their cronies (or themselves)?
Source(s) that this is actually happening?
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"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
Yarvin's writing as Moldbug is very clear on the subject. Both Thiel and Vance are public admirers and have reflected Yarvin's RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) in public. Thiel acolytes and admirers are staffing DOGE, drawn from tech communities and web forums.
They do not believe in functioning democracy but instead in a Randian "utopia" where the lords of capital run regions of the country as kings and the poor are turned into "biofuel."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
There's a website that mockingly tracks the p2025 progress. I can't say whether it's accurate or fully honest.
I assume it's exaggerating but is pointing at some red flags and parallels:
https://www.project2025.observer/
It's from the admin of r/keep_track. It is far from complete (missing lots) and the summaries they write aren't always accurate.
The Federal Reserve section is one that's clearly incomplete, for instance, including just two goals when the document has several (e.g. curbing last-resort lending is missing).
That said, the site's a good portal if you're aware of those limitations. I really like that each item has a link to the PDF.
Yeah, the plans have been laid out in the public for a while.
We're seeing it happen in real time.
There are also various public talks and other published pieces by members of the admin, laying out exactly what they're planning to do (and now are doing) and why.
I dunno when they figured out they can just conduct conspiracies in public and nobody will call them on it, so there's little reason to bother with secrecy, but that's how they work now, and it's been weird to watch. I first noticed it with Bush II when prominent members of his administration published multiple pieces (before he was elected) calling for war with Iraq, and stating that the US should take essentially any half-decent excuse to go to war with Iraq even if that excuse itself is bad, then... did exactly that! And got away with it! Inexplicably, the media would interview them on the topic of going to war with Iraq and didn't make all the questions about that. It was barely a footnote to media coverage of the run-up to the war, which was so damn weird when anyone could just go read the text of these pieces themselves, with familiar names on them, telling us exactly how they were planning to fuck us. Didn't matter, they could just straight-up publish "here's how we're going to screw the public" and then screw the public exactly that way, and laugh all the way to the goddamn bank (literally, in many cases—they made so friggin' much money off the post-9/11 security apparatus and the wars)
It is really frustrating how news organizations don’t remember previous news cycles and connect the threads. That’s why the trump strategy of flooding the system with outrage constantly is so effective. People can’t maintain the narrative over time and so things get buried.
The public WANTS to be lied to.
They were basically asking for it.
People in positions of power gave the public exactly what they want.
Not sure how true this all is, but it's a centralized discussion of different systems of thinking I've seen associated with the current administration's tack https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-w...
If you prefer video, this explains it pretty well.
https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no
That video is terrifying.
If what happened to USAID isn’t evidence enough for you, I suggest you go and read up on Project 2025. Below is a link to the chapter on the commerce department where they call for the dismantling of NOAA. As the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russel Vought is one of the most powerful men in the executive branch and was one of the main architects of Project 2025.
Enjoy your reading.
https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHA...
This isn't comprehensive but has been helpful: https://www.project2025.observer/
(also woo lucky 7777 karma)
Thanks, that's very interesting! I don't follow US politics closely, so it gives me a starting point.
The "starve the beast" strategy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast) has been around for a long time and is something that some right wing conservative people want to do. E.g. Norquist's quote that "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.".
As someone else mentioned, this isn't only about improving efficiency of the government but also about it doing less. So things that currently you would be getting from the government you would no longer be getting. You might agree or disagree with this idea.
Predicting what Trump is going to do is not easy. I don't think he really knows himself each day what he will get up to. Mostly draw a lot of attention to himself, seems the main goal. He's doing fantastic on that front. Regarding policy, he is a lot more purposeful vs his previous term and he is pretty closely following the Project 2025 playbook:
https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1itd7xq/whats...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RHMnJmuv82n6OuY8KYmJ...
Enacting government policy primarily through executive orders is an "interesting" approach. I would say that's not how you want a government to work. Maybe Trump's extreme use of EOs will prompt some reform or maybe it will become the new norm. The other branches of the US government don't seem very interested in actually performing their job.
The congress in 2021 seemed very interested in doing their job but the minority in the Senate did a really good job of obstructing anything and everything using the pocket filibuster.
meta: it's interesting because this kind of disingenuous "Just asking questions. I'd love to know more!" had been pretty effective at shutting down conversation when the topics were abstract. People were inevitably tired of explaining the same things over and over to a contingent that didn't want to understand.
But now that our country is being imminently destroyed by these treacherous looters, there are enough people ready to immediately jump in with straightforward answers that the FUD is a mere speed bump, making the technique pretty useless for shutting down discussion and consensus.
I'm not from your country and don't follow its politics closely. The GP had said that the intent had been clearly written but provided no breadcrumbs for me to research further.
Your country makes up 5% of the worlds population, the other 95% of us are not all following that closely and certainly not trying to commit some form of sabotage by asking for more information.
You're voluntarily in a thread about US politics. If this is your first such thread, reading it would have gotten you the background.
Also, the "I haven't seen" construction is quite dodgy on its own, as it has become common pattern of the neofascists to feign ignorance rather than acknowledge details.
If it was really an innocent one time question, you're certainly not the only one to have been harmed by this destruction.
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>Because this isn't about efficiency.
Being alive and happy is not effcient.
> The people radicalized to these actions are trying to destroy the government.
The federal government, right? They are in favor of state and local government, but object to federal, which they assert reduces the ability for states to have different rules and regulations that can drive competition amongst different legal frameworks.
This seems unclear. For example, the Department of Transportation just told NY they have to shut down the new (and apparently relatively successful) congestion pricing [1] in NYC. (As with some other things being torn down by the administration, apparently the rules say the government cannot do this.)
So it appears, at least, that the administration doesn't actually respect states' rights and is looking to take over everything.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-congestion-pricing-...
I'd be interested in understanding the property rights of the roads they were taxing. Were they taxing highways that had some covenants or contract ensuring toll free passage? I'm unfamiliar with the contract made for federally matched roads but it wouldn't surprise me if there's an agreement you can't just turn it into a toll road by calling it a new tax.
“ In a letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the federal government has jurisdiction over highways leading to Manhattan and that the additional tolls posed an unfair burden for motorists outside the city.”
However that seems like a dubious claim (Google results report the highways around Manhattan are operated by the state of NY, however New Jersey is adjacent).
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-administration-te...
I wonder if they could get around that by making the prices balance to zero? Like charge fees to people during congestion times and pay those fees outdistributed equally amongst those who enter during non congestion.
Then there would be no net revenue/toll. The optics would also be far better than green washing a net toll on people driving in from outside the city/state.
Charging people from outside the area so that they are less likely to come in a personal vehicle is one of the direct goals of congestion pricing. It isn't an environmental program, it's a traffic management program and isn't greenwashing anything.
You can call it whatever you like. I didn't say it was an environmental program, it is first and foremost a revenue generation program under a clever guise to dupe towards political leaning of new yorkers.
You can read their own description, they green wash advertising cleaner air, less emissions, etc.
https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03612
They didn’t need to dupe anyone; the program is indisputably not popular and they implemented it anyway. The two goals of congestion pricing have always been to generate revenue for the MTA and reduce congestion/pollution in Manhattan. They never hid that. Most transit advocates support both of those goals, and the beauty of congestion pricing (as opposed to a revenue-only option like an extra tax on businesses in the congestion zone) is that it can accomplish both at once.
I’d also note that popularity has been going up as everyone sees the benefits immediately and the predictions of a business meltdown turned out not to be true. It feels very similar to the bans on indoor smoking where smokers predicted restaurants and bars would close and the opposite happened.
It's not greenwashing if it actually does those things?
The horrors of less traffic and uh, less actual pollution.
Ye probably the wrong thing to accuse of green washing.
I think he tries to brown wash the tolls to hide that they are environmentally friendly to prying eyes by accusing the NYC road dep. of green washing.
edit: (Brown as in dirt, not anything else)
They seem to be in favor of state and local governments only so far as those governments agree with them.
Yes, and they have threatened action against those they disagree with. We’ll see if they can get away with it, but something to resist very strongly.
What is harder to fight against, however, is when they make deals with corrupt officials (looking at you democratic NYC Mayor, Mr Adams) to get what they want: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80yrglnn79o
The world's first volunteer slave.
Let's not call a Black mayor of a major city a slave.
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> They are in favor of state and local government, but object to federal, which they assert reduces the ability for states to have different rules and regulations that can drive competition amongst different legal frameworks.
As demonstrated by efforts to prevent state and local governments from acting independently...
> As demonstrated by efforts to prevent state and local governments from acting independently...
Ironically tempering states is an important function of the federal government (eg civil rights, environmental protections, etc).
If the federal government is used to force states to make things worse, that is something to resist very strongly.
> Ironically tempering states is an important function of the federal government (eg civil rights, environmental protections, etc).
Right, like shutting down congestion pricing plans. ;-)
State government? You mean states in the bible belt, right? Because they aren’t in favor of liberal coastal state government.
You want to distinguish between favoring federalism VS favoring the policies/culture/etc. of specific states.
So yeah; they are in favor of more state government in lieu of federal, even though they hate certain states’ policies. I think that’s obvious. Now, the question is whether or not they will succeed in handicapping states’ autonomy when they disagree with things. My take is they will try (and have tried), but it isn’t a foregone conclusion that they will succeed. There’s soft power and there’s violence, and I’m optimistic that it will be more the former.
> So yeah; they are in favor of more state government in lieu of federal, even though they hate certain states’ policies.
They just nixed NYC’s congestion fee. They are gonna do plenty of meddling.
More feudalism less federalism.
I thought this was already settled during the American Civil War, yet we're back at it again.
Apparently not!
An opposite question is interesting: why not abolish state governments and only have the federal government? I haven’t thought about it deeply so don’t have a strong sense that it would be better than the status quo, though I suspect it might.
Centralization and size comes with inefficiency and slow decision making. It also comes with economies of scale. For something like the Medicare, the economy of scale dominates and it makes much more sense to be federal. When it comes to running schools, there really isn't much economy of scale so it makes much more sense to run it locally.
Economies (and diseconomies) of scale exist, of course, but aren't central to what is the responsibility of the federal government and what is the responsibility of the state governments. That, of course, is laid out rather plainly in the founding legal document of the country.
The Civil War settled that the feds could rule over the explicitly authorized powers of the federal government. In the 30s the feds reneged and decided blatantly unconstitutional stuff like the (later passed) Civil rights act could hold if they just call everything interstate commerce.
When the US falls apart this will be a likely central focus .
how was the civil rights act not constitutional?
CRA under the 1875 version was found unconstitutional per the Civil Rights Cases of the Supreme court [0].
In the 1930s the executive threatened to pack the supreme court and many analogous private/intrastate commerce regulations were allowed federally by this bastardization of 'interstate commerce' by the court. Then they repassed the CRA with yet again stuff found unconstitutional, using their new version of 'interstate commerce' (everything).
The CRA objectively has been found unconstitutional by the Supreme court, and I believe it may be again under the latest generation of the court.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Cases
thank you for the reply
so, probably restating what you said, if someone wanted to pass something like that, a constitutional amendment is the better way since relying on interstate commerce clause is shaky ground... is that right interpretation?
Yesterday, Trump announced he was killing congestion pricing in New York City. A program set up by the state of New York, to help fund infrastructure in New York.
Seems like an issue that should be left to the state, and yet here they are asserting federal authority over it.
I’m not that familiar with US politics but I read that this was more a symbolic move and he actually can’t influence this law since as you pointed out it’s a matter of the New York state. He can announce things all day, which is exactly the strategy - do at least 5 ridiculous things every day and the media/people can’t react fast enough — bury them in shit
If it was purely symbolic then it may be even worse because the Truth Social post he wrote to announce it ended with "LONG LIVE THE KING!"
He loves a good troll and the media + commentariat eats it up like candy and gives him all the free airtime he wants.
He means those things. And does those things.
He is just a tell is how enablers made all these people sound innocent and their detractors crazy. At this point I believe it was often deliberate strategy. Plus crazy paranoid were actually 100% correct over years.
Like many things in US politics, “it’s complicated.” The program had to get approval from the federal government (which was granted by the Biden administration), it’s now up to the courts if Trump can rescind that approval.
The point is that saying power should go back to the states is really just a talking point conservatives use when it’s convenient for them, not actually a strongheld belief that guides their actions in any way.
> Trump says he may withhold federal aid for Los Angeles if California doesn’t change water policies - https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-republicans-taxes-ee....
Many conservatives agree including a sitting senator saying California should "change their ways".
> https://www.wxxinews.org/2025-02-20/new-york-governor-reject...
Louisiana wants to punish a New York doctor for prescribing medicine. Project 2025 in general wants to ban and criminalize medication abortion nationwide.
If I kept a running list of all the ways conservatives preach states right but don't really practice it, I wouldn't have much time to do anything else.
And "states rights" has been coded language anyway. Refer to Lee Atwater 1981 interview. Now the coded language has focused attention on "DEI", "trans", among other things.
Indeed, you're a sucker if you ever did believe it really ever was about state rights.
The thing you always need to ask when you hear about "state rights" is "state rights to do what?"
The answer is usually something Federal law or the Constitution would otherwise forbid, or that most people would consider morally reprehensible.
That states' rights were claimed to keep slavery, or any other morally reprehensible thing, does not mean that the concept of states' rights is wrong. It means slavery and other morally reprehensible things are wrong.
Of course, at any given time, there exist a number of issues facing the public over which there is no clear consensus on whether they constitute something morally reprehensible.
You're making the argument that what the federal government decides is right is always or usually the right thing compared to what states are claiming. I challenge you to claim that this is the case for, say, federal law forbidding marijuana versus states allowing it, or as was the case until very recently, enthusiastic support for pediatric gender reassignment from the federal government versus states outlawing it.
They are making the point that "states rights" is empty hypocritical talking point. It is meant to win argument by pretending you care about something you don't.
Everybody knows "state rights" imply conservative policies, but don't apply to anyone else.
> Everybody knows "state rights" imply conservative policies, but don't apply to anyone else.
Is that right? Has there been a widespread backlash on the states' rights grounds against, say, Colorado or Massachusetts legalizing marijuana despite it being classified as a Schedule I drug federally with no acceptable use?
How about sanctuary city or state laws? Those in support of such policies base it on the concept of shared sovereignty between federal vs. state and local governments, i.e. states' rights. So there's clearly liberal or progressive uses of states' rights, in addition to conservative uses.
>You're making the argument that what the federal government decides is right is always or usually the right thing compared to what states are claiming.
Nope. The word I used is "usually." Go back and read it. You're the one who decided to replace that "usually" with "always" and I'm not obligated to play the strawman role for you.
When states make a special case out of states' rights it's usually not for a good reason, otherwise they could just pass state laws. States' rights arguments imply things the Federal government would be opposed to, that states would need to weaken the power of the Federal government to accomplish, usually where regulations or anti-discrimination laws are concerned.
If it's usually not for a good reason, then it follows that sometimes it is for a good reason.
Weak, divided governance, so that they can ignore it.
They to have just enough government for them to extract as much wealth as possible. States rights is about them doing whatever they want without interference.
The US had a civil war that its defenders describe as being about "states' rights", with the most important right of all being the ability to literally own other people as property.
Make America Great Again is a about returning to those glory days.
> the ability to literally own other people as property. Make America Great Again is a about returning to those glory days.
Are you suggesting they want to allow states to reinstate slavery? That sounds very conspiratorial.
Slavery was never actually banned. The 13th Amendment leaves a Death Star sized loophole.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
I do not find it strange or otherwise see it as a loophole that duly convicted prisoners pay some of their debt to society by being forced to do labor.
It at least hinges on what people are convicted of being things that "deserve" slavery. Not all agree that possession of drugs for personal use meets that. Or performing or having an abortion. What if the government turns full Russia and makes political dissent illegal? Or championing/practicing "non traditional family values" like LGBT? There is also a moral hazard in being able to earn money on prison labor, as it incentives putting people in prison.
I agree that the moral hazard is there, and it's fraught with potential for abuse[0]. But prison labor also has the potential to teach convicts skills and discipline that would be useful after their sentence.
> Not all agree that possession of drugs for personal use meets that. [...]
I'm not sure if you're saying that there is disagreement in society about what things constitute crimes, or that there should be a difference in how we treat convicted prisoners on what they were convicted on?
On its face, I'm not sure why, say, someone convicted of manslaughter is "deserving" of being made to do labor and someone convicted of, say, felony reckless driving is not, or vice versa. But I'm sure there are arguments to be made in either case.
[0]: Like the "Kids for cash" scandal in Pennsylvania, though I'm not sure if there was a labor component involved there and not just a per-prisoner payment (which is just as bad).
Sure, until you get “duly convicted” of a minor crime like speeding or having a joint and sent to the labor camps.
There's this idea that America's prisons are full of people like you describe, which really isn't borne out by reality at all.
There are quite a few less nonviolent drug offenders in jail than, say, the 1990s, but that doesn't mean it can't swing back.
It's a deeply perverse incentive, even if it's not currently being abused. I don't love having it in the hands of politicians as an option.
Not really, just look up RFK Jr’s “wellness farms”. https://www.salon.com/2025/02/19/rfk-s-plan-to-make-america-...
> Are you suggesting they want to allow states to reinstate slavery?
Not as an immediate goal, but they would be ok with it.
> That sounds very conspiratorial
On my part? I wish. I wish I was delusional and could be proven wrong with certainty. The real conspiracy is happening right before our eyes.
Note the highlighted text from the wiki link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#:~:text=He%20has...
If they were in favor of state and local government, why is the federal government threatening to sue California for admissions in the UC system and demanding that NYC's congestion pricing be ended or else lose federal funding? Why are faculty members at state universities being forced to change their research because it is on a verboten topic?
The idea that Trump, Musk, or anybody involved in leadership of Trump's administration care about state and local government authority is, frankly, fucking ludicrous.
There's a certain sort of anti-intellectualism that revels in the idea that if there doesn't exist a simple solution, then there must not exist any solution. It is either an inability to grasp the notion of complexity, or a childish refusal to. Therefore, any system that is too complex for them to understand must be demonized and destroyed.
Reminds me of H.L. Mencken's "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."
1: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken#1910s
What’s the “well-known solution” to cancer?
Hard to multiply without a host.
https://xkcd.com/1217 aka "just remove the cancer"
How is that “neat, plausible”?
I’ve never heard of any “solution” to cancer, well known or not, that was neat and plausible.
I think you're about to understand the quote.
I think I already understood the quote at the time of writing the previous comment…
Hence why I quoted the exact words.
Do you understand it?
Not sure why you're being confrontational? I'm not the OP but it's clear there's some misunderstanding
The quote is: - neat - plausible - wrong
"Just get rid of the cancer" is - neat because it sounds obvious and tidy - plausible because we can and do cut out cancer - wrong because it ignores the nuance that cutting into a patient's body can have massive impacts on long term health. It can also be wrong because certain cancers have no tumor sites.
No, I don’t think there’s a misunderstanding, unless the parent has literally never seen anyone on HN quote exact words before.
They’re likely being dumb and/or intentionally misleading.
The quote is meant as a type of sarcasm/humor. Meaning if a presented solution is neat and plausible it's likely going to be wrong.
I know… that’s why I wrote I’ve never seen such a solution for cancer presented as if it where both neat and plausible simultaneously.
If anyone offers an example that could have plausibly fooled the median HN reader at the time of reading, then I will change my mind.
It's a lot like the old McNamara fallacy. It's especially tempting for technically-minded people to fall into. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
It’s emotional immaturity, like you said very childish.
Narcissists are deeply emotionally immature, in a way that is incredibly resistant to healing. Their entire life narrative and every action is based on a fundamental delusion. Most of us struggle with change and admitting when we are wrong… To heal, a narcissist must change their entire world view and admit they have been living a harmful lie their entire life.
It’s quite bad when such a person gains significant power and has goals that conflict with well-being of others.
It's very sad that the Nazis made eugenics into a taboo for the next century. The conclusion of WW2 should've been the opposite - narcissism and lack of empathy (also known as psychopathy) endanger the entire world and need to be minimized in the gene pool. It is, of course, too late now.
Lack of empathy is not just inborn trait, it is ideological expectation. Nazi praised lack of empathy (especially in men) and ended up raising people to be like that
And currently, quite a lot of what conservatives see as traditional masculinity is that - you look at what they teach young men and lack of empathy is seen as asset. Compassion is seen as weakness.
But it has zero to do with genetics, it is values.
I think related to this is the notion that if people are unhappy with the status quo, and a clearly defective solution is offered, they still go for it.
"Something needs to be done. This is something. Let's do it".
The fact that this something might make it worse is ignored.
A variant of this is watching someone demonstrate years of practice and assume you could as well(without practice). The underlying assumption is if something works that easily it must also be simple.
Beautifully said
> that probationary employees aren't needed
Remember that "probationary" doesn't mean new. I just learned this, but apparently when getting a promotion it puts you back into the "probationary" period at your new role. So people with 10+ years of service are being let go because they had recently been promoted.
Saw posts of national park rangers with 10+ years of experience who were fired for being "probationary" employees because they were recently promoted.
It's really, really hard to believe I have anything in common with people cheering on this cruel incompetence.
Firing any probationary employees withou a real cause is cruel, has zero dignity and looks totally stupid. But this makes it even worse!
Like what is the great thing that needs to be done right now that justifies trampling over peoples lives like this ?
That's what's fascinating. Given the capture of all three branches of government, they could presumably get all their wishes "above the board." Congress would willingly rubber-stamp shrinking the government to three nuclear missiles and the guy who polishes the exhibits at the Smithsonian, but actually enumerating what they want and waiting for it to wend through procedure was too slow.
Part of that might be that they know it's a smash-and-grab operation: the moment they started the cuts, the alarm was already ringing and it's only a matter of time before (Congress | the courts | Luigi Mangione | Several million annoyed pensioners) man up and interrupt the process. (exactly the nature of the interruption is clearly TBD).
When the dust clears, the fascinating thing to study will be the real priorities. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the collateral damage is a smoke screen around very specific grudges against specific people and agencies-- the financial equivalent of burning down the entirety of San Diego because your ex-wife lives there. There was the whole USAID/Starlink angle already, but surely other people got theirs.
Could be a round of promotions and pay raises coming so that they can fire more people and claim to save extra money.
I mean, that would imply some form of intelligence to all this. And, well, this first month has shown there is no intelligence.
Yeah, probationary in most civil service systems is attached to a particular class, so if you move up promotionally, or (in many cases) into a new career path, you retain seniority but are in probationary status again for some period of time. Usually, failing probation at the new level without additional problems means that you have reinstatement rights at your last non-probationary class.
Yes, and this example right here tells you how much research DOGE does (with anything they are doing). Highly inept people if measured by what their stated goal is...although we all know what the real goal is.
Hmm... interesting. Different departments might have different meanings then? I was in DIA nit ages ago and probationary only meant < 2 years.
We're going to get a great lesson on why 'command economy' style top down management doesn't work, from the guys who hate command economies.
Aren't they taking away the 'command' part of the government? No government, no command.
This is committing the classic mistake of forgetting that a government is just a corporation with an army behind it. "The government" isn't going away; just the one where you had any semblance of say in its operation.
This is exactly the insight that shifted me from being libertarian to progressive. Humans create organizations to coordinate behavior. Corporations are good for risk taking ventures, governments are good for social cooperation and coordination. Different purposes, time scales and objectives. Both are important and necessary. We should make them the best they can be.
Government ultimately is power over the citizenry -- it will always exist in one form or another whether it's the Church, the Mob, Warlords, etc. I believe our existing government is the least-worst option.
The goal is literally the end of democracy and a king reigning over techno-feudalist "states". They make no secret of this.
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I would like to see the IRS take my income when it's disbanded.
> a government is just a corporation with an army behind it
This is a bad analogy. A corporation, and a corporation that can use force, have completely different properties. Walmart cannot hold a gun to my head and force me to pay for illegal alien's hotels. They can only get by if they sell products worth buying, and in a free and fair market, they can flourish only based on merit. They must cut the fat and make better deals and better products if they want to grow. The government does not have the pressures of a free and fair market. If the government needs more money, they print it, or they take it from me. Both are a form of tax. They don't cut their own fat. They have no incentive. They only grow. I may get downvoted for this, but I think Elon is doing good work. He managed to get twitter running on about 20% of the employees and I think he can do the same with government. From my perspective, the only people who complain about this are those that want to see a perpetually growing central government who don't see the danger of having a centralized power encroaching and taxing every aspect of our lives, and those who are in on it themselves.
Would you say the East India Company had no command when its armies conquered India?
they will simply migrate the responsibility into the hands of a few billionaires who will act in their own best interest.
A big part of what the government does is provide stability. It's supposed to be slow an inefficient. It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.
If we aim for 100% efficiency we end up with massive unemployment, because a lot of jobs and businesses are just not necessary. We all just got to experience that first hand, as when COVID hit something like 1/3rd of people either stop worked or worked massive reduced hours and the truth of the matter is the world kept spinning JUST FINE, save for a some inconveniences.
The more efficient things becomes, the more another mechanism is needed to control people, so you are going to eventually have to bring back some kind of formal class system or slavery.
"It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.", what a ridiculous and condescending statement. If that was true, the number of federal employees would be much higher but in fact the number has stayed relatively flat for over 50 years at 2.8 million federal employees. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001
I'm sure there are bright and talented government workers, but it's not a stretch of the imagination to say that a lot of factors make government employment cushier for some people than they might otherwise find in private employment. Or do you think the 60k employees of the TSA actually stop terrorist threats to commercial aviation?
And I'm not sure how your logic follows; there's no link between GP's claim that some government jobs effectively function as a form of welfare and your claim that the number of people eligible for this welfare must increase over time.
> It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.
You seem to be implying that this is a desirable property of government. I don't think that's true, and I think that the Broken Window Fallacy applies to your argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Perhaps inefficiency is not desirable, but it should be deliberative. These rash, uninformed actions will have consequences.
> It's supposed to be slow an inefficient.
For creating new legislature. Because the relationship between the government and individuals is fundamentally that of force.
> It provides a lot of jobs to people who are otherwise unemployable.
I disagree. The purpose of the government is to secure individual liberties and provide national stability. ALL its programs must serve that strategic objective. Its purpose is not to provide handouts or employment; that is incidental. You don't want incompetent buffoons running the government anyway, or you'll get a bureaucratic inefficient mess.
> a lot of jobs and businesses are just not necessary
So what? There's nothing wrong with having people learn skills in the private sector. At least their relationship to the people around them isn't based on force like it is with the government. Who are you to proclaim what businesses and jobs are necessary anyway? If a business is successful, it must be serving someone, somewhere well enough for them to be paid anyway.
> when COVID hit something like 1/3rd of people either stop worked or worked massive reduced hours and the truth of the matter is the world kept spinning JUST FINE
A lot of people lost their jobs and livelihoods unnecessarily, because they were forced out by the new government regulations. Sure, they may have still lived, but I can promise you their quality of life has reduced. There was more unemployment. More people depended on government benefits provided by productive people still working, rather than depending on themselves and their own businesses. It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to make rhetoric that twists that into a good thing. It's only good if you want more and bigger government with more control, all at the taxpayers' expense.
This does kind sound like the same kind of doomsaying people did of Twitter. Now it's functionally better than ever and the centerpoint of where conversations happen, possibly even more than before.
Maybe let the guy iterate. That's what he does. Remove things till there's actual pain and not just moaning. Moderate by that. Has worked actually wonders till now.
> Surely, there are so many employees in general that probationary employees aren't needed.
I did read somewhere - and I may be incorrect - but a lot of internal employees are put on 'probation' after internal promotions, and not all probationary staff are like new hires.
> I'm all about efficiency, but why be stupid about it?
USA is bankrupt and the elites have known this since 2008. Trump and co. are the front for the bankruptcy proceedings and the rest is stage management. So this is class warfare in a system that is about to lose its preeminent (power) position in the world. As for alliances, I can guarantee every power center in East Asia has taken note of how US just threw Europe under the bus under the pretext of "change of presidency" as if!
I wonder if the future holds a civil war or a revolution. One of the two is a given at this point.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-20/-mar-a-la...?
Other administrations ( even Trump 1 ) had their chance.
Now somebody is finally addressing the debt/deficit.
If you think someone else can do better, have them explain their plan in detail.
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Except:
- Even in the best of cases, if this is your approach, you need a plan for how to add back the stuff that you learn is critical. DOGE haven't demonstrated that minimal level of competence. Firing National Nuclear Security Administration staff and cutting them off from their work emails meant that when those staff were quickly discovered to be critical, it wasn't possible to quickly bring them back. This is amateurish.
- But further, this principle works with designing rockets because you expect to build multiple rockets during the development process, and failing on one rocket doesn't destroy your ability to iterate. You don't do this with a rocket if you're in the rocket. If we crash the US economy or start a war, we impair our ability to just pick up the pieces and carry on as before.
- And this works with something like rockets b/c no one is actively trying to blow up your rocket, or take advantage of its weaknesses. The US has adversaries, and the current administration is destabilizing agencies in a pretty public way which those adversaries may take advantage of. A crappy way to discover that the NNSA is critical would be if, e.g. some reduction in global monitoring meant that we didn't notice some movement of fissile material to countries we aren't friends with, etc.
Maybe the tactics that work at Tesla and SpaceX aren't universally applicable and governing requires at least a somewhat different approach?
It's even worse than you point out. DOGE/Musk/whoever is really in charge didn't learn the NNSA staff was critical because the firings cause some immediate impact. Someone who actually knows what they're talking about likely told them about the problems it would cause and the firing squad actually listened. Had they relied on waiting for side effects to understand the impact, it would be far, far too late when you're talking about something like nuclear weapons.
In other words, not only is the strategy wildly likely to result in you learning things are critical years past the point of no return when talking about functions like nuclear weapons, it was completely pointless in this particular case. They didn't learn anything they couldn't have learned beforehand, but did manage to piss off a ton of people with critical skills who are likely looking for the exit now if they even came back at all.
So much this. Excellent points. Government is a unique organization with a unique purpose.
We are indeed in the rocket so maybe the minimum effectiveness for safety isn’t how we should evaluate the situation.
> firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t
Once you fire me, I'm not coming back.
Being hired into a known-unstable situation needs to involve a lot more cash than a stable-for-decades one. Is the assumption you're making that there will be no other market to absorb the employees? The ones who remain available will be the ones unable to find work elsewhere.
> Once you fire me, I'm not coming back.
I am, my salary is now higher. Much higher. And I no longer give a f' about the TPS report.
Nice and efficient. Get the same work for more money.
Actually maybe less work for more money because the employee now knows how vital they are but at the same time knows you don't give a shit about them so why should they care more than they have to about you.
Yep. They've made a decision to pay premium price for your service so you know you're worth more now.
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> It’s the same with firing people and hiring them back. Performance metrics are unreliable, but firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t. It shows you who is really critical.
No, it's not. They're not running a test to see who is missed, they are realizing they've made a huge mistake and fired the people who look after the nukes and the people looking into bird flu. Knowing whose job is important doesn't require leaving nukes unattended or bird flu to run rampant.
> but firing and then hiring back who you miss isn’t. It shows you who is really critical.
Maybe for companies (although I'd argue it's extremely bad there as well), but for Governments this is a terrible idea!
From a profit maximization maybe.
But the government employs people. And in most of the civilized world, employing people comes with responsibilities over those people. For starters, the responsibility of not firing or changing terms that effects them on whim just for the sake of efficiency.
The functions of government are not like a start up or company. Getting these things wrong isn’t like a rocket crash or twitter going down. The government provides society scale services, and interruptions can trigger contagion. Doge stoping insurance payments to providers has already resulted in companies going out of business. There will be hospitals in rural communities that shut down, and the job losses will close gas stations and grocery stores and collapse housing prices. These things cascade.
They fired FAA staff (that was already understaffed) and plane crashes are increasing. I have several friends that have stopped flying due to distrust of the safety.
They fired the Department of Energy staff than monitors and prevents the international trade of nuclear materials and weapons. Do we really have the luxury of getting that wrong by running an experiment to see “what’s the minimum staff necessary”? Seems like a dumb cost benefit calculation.
Anyone with experience in a large org will hate this because it's a stupid, hamhanded way of forcing people to continually beg for the resources to do their jobs. Leaders think it's brilliant because it relieves them of the need to know what's actually going on in their organization, externalizing their responsibilities.
"Unplug it and see who screams" is not effective systems management.
People aren't rockets.
Especially once people stop caring about things actually working and go into CYA mode (stop begging).
"We wrote the memo that we don't have enough peope to check drinking water toxidity, guess leadership is okay with not testing for that anymore"
I agree and would add that people aren't machines either. The concept of 'fire everyone and rehire who is essential' seems to lack comprehension of human psychology. It seems analogous to 'cheat on everyone and marry the person who stays' in that you are settling for the people who have the least self-respect and/or the least amount of options outside of their current position.
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Are there some objective data for this ?
Rather I am seeing a lot of new companies and startups by ex-SpaceX people for example.
Your repeating this all over the thread doesn't make it so.
How do you square that "fact" with the CyberTruck?
How often do Tesla or SpaceX fire and rehire only the essential people?
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Organizational inertia can be cut through without causing a tremendous amount of pain and disruption. Stopping things by default is a very lazy way to do it. Doing it this way is a strongman fantasy that inflicts large costs: now your employees aren't doing their jobs, they're going through a round of "justify yourself" (when you should have had the organizational controls in place already).
And there's nothing new about this strategy, either. I read about these tactics decades ago in management self-help books. They were just as crappy and inhuman then as now.
It mainly allows you to quickly destroy your organization's ability to do anything, including repairing the damage you just did.
Which is, of course the goal: to destroy the United States. They already explicitly said that's the goal.
It's the exact opposite of "brilliant", it's extremely stupid and destructive. It shows they are absolutely incompetent at what they do and have zero understanding or even desire to understand how things work.
The issue is the goal with SpaceX is clear and something cool, whereas the Trump administration's goals are vile and DOGE's goals are at best unclear but probably just the same as Trump.
An aggressive anti-waste campaign would be more believable if it wasn't coming from an administration vowing to destroy the federal government and openly subverting the Constitution, led by a man who gets his political views from neo-Nazis that tweet at him.
> that compounding these rash decisions
You're only observing reporting about these actions. There's very little in the way of actual reporting on impacts. Are we actually objectively measuring government performance in any real way?
> will have far-reaching and serious blowback.
I doubt that it will be "far" or "serious." We did all of those things before credit cards even existed. It will be "minimal" and "altered on a case by case basis."
> The plane that we're all on is being dismantled midair,
I'm on the ground. Your government employees are in the plane. It's concerning to be sure, but not anything we can't fix if it goes poorly.
You (and other comments on this subject) reminded me of the old joke we had when working on the server farm and we found a server that wasn't registered to any specific owner.
We joked that we just had to unplug it and wait for something to fail or for someone to complain.
As a non citizen of USA, I'm genuinely curious of what will happen now that it seems that this joke is a normal way of doing this. "Let's shut everything down and see what we're really missing! We'll fix it if needed be. "
55 years ago the Cuyahoga River caught fire (it wasn't the first time) and the fix was to kickstart the EPA.
> we just had to unplug it and wait for something to fail or for someone to complain.
You could also have kept better records in the first place so this sort of thing didn't happen.
> that this joke is a normal way of doing this.
You'll find that there are many differences between the operation of a profitable company and a government.
> and the fix was to kickstart the EPA.
The _natural human response_ once the media got involved was to start the environmentalist movement. Most of the work to cleanup the river was done by Cleveland and Ohio state. Which is just quibbling over details. What you should really explain is why the EPA needs credit cards to do what they do.
> You could have kept better records...
Each time I see or hear that kind of remark (because it's said everywhere in the world) , its paradoxical nature baffles me. Many people want government agencies to be efficient, professional and productive... but they don't want to pay for it with their taxes.
The pure définition of wanting the cake and eat it too.
> Why the EPA needs credit cards...
As I said, I'm genuinely curious to see how all of this will pan out. My opinion clearly don't matter on such weirdly hyperbolized subjects that I personally qualify as trivial.
> Many people want government agencies to be efficient, professional and productive
That's you moving the goalposts. I just want it to be efficient. This idea that government is going to be "professional and productive" is ridiculous.
> The pure définition of wanting the cake and eat it too.
Adding acute accents does not make your point any smarter.
> My opinion clearly don't matter
Yet you so readily share it. When the question of "does the EPA having credit cards prevent river fires" comes up then you are silent. Who's actually eating their cake and then wanting it too?
> That's you moving the goalposts. I just want it to be efficient. This idea that government is going to be "professional and productive" is ridiculous.
Efficiency refers to the ability for an agency to achieve its objectives using the least amount of resources while maintaining high-quality service, transparency, and accountability.
There is a paradox in expecting high efficiency from a government agency while offering low pay to its employees.
Don't expect motivated and talented employees when you have a low pay, because there's also a good chance that they're easy to corrupt.
Hence my words "paradoxical nature".
> does the EPA having credit cards prevent river fires Does the EPA not having credit card prevent river fires ?
I'm still not sure about what's the best between a situation where someone has to fill 2 forms to asks for new pencils and that 2 directors have to approve it OR the same person has a budget of few hundreds dollars per year to buy pencils. (Back to the efficiency point)
Reducing those credit card to 1$ is just virtue signaling to poor people that thinks that those same employees pays their groceries with that credit card.
> Adding acute accents does not make your point any smarter. -1 for me for having a multilingual keyboard that auto corrected "definitions" to "définitions" (in French) and not proofreading.
>> My opinion clearly don't matter
>Yet you so readily share it.
I'm not in the US, that why my opinion doesn't matter.
You clearly didn't understood my point, I'm not saying it's good nor bad to do what they're doing, I'm curious of what's gonna happen.
From my joke, nobody ever decided to unplug that server and wait for someone to scream.
The current administration is now unplugging everything, everywhere. The results will be interesting.
If it goes poorly, it will take years to rebuild. And the same people who intentionally destroyed it will do everything in their power to prevent you from fixing it.
It was easy for X to get rid of advertisers. It was impossible to get income back. And while the old infrastructure and features work, their new ones are buggy and frequently reversed.
> it will take years to rebuild.
What evidence do you have for this?
> will do everything in their power to prevent you from fixing it.
They're the administration. This is their prerogative. Perhaps your ideas about "fixing it" aren't shared?
> It was easy for X to get rid of advertisers. It was impossible to get income back
Are we talking about for profit corporations or governments?
> And while the old infrastructure and features work, their new ones are buggy and frequently reversed.
Are we talking about a codebase or governments?
> What evidence do you have for this?
The history of building institutions in literally any country and time. You wont build it overnight.
> They're the administration. This is their prerogative.
You said "It's concerning to be sure, but not anything we can't fix if it goes poorly.", so do not be manipulative here. Now if it goes poorly, we cant fix it easily, because same people will lie and attempt to sabotage.
> Perhaps your ideas about "fixing it" aren't shared?
My whole point is that they want harm rather then fix. They do understand what "fixing" means like I do, but they want to break. They do not share my values.
> Are we talking about for profit corporations or governments? Are we talking about a codebase or governments?
We are talking about how much easier it is to break things then to fix them.
> You wont build it overnight.
There is literally tons of evidence littered throughout history that it can, in fact, be done overnight.
> because same people will lie and attempt to sabotage.
Show me the evidence.
> They do not share my values.
They won the election. Your values did not.
> We are talking about how much easier it is to break things then to fix them.
It's very easy. I've been spending my life doing it. Your imaginations are small.
Dumbest change ever. The employee charge cards are there to get rid of red tape. Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.
I worked for a company that at one point was worried about wasteful expenses.
Eventually to solve this resulted in a system where a $40 pizza lunch went to a committee of completely disconnected morons who debated it and would then forward it to a VP to make the final call. Probably a couple thousands in time costs with the paperwork and people time involved … for $40 of pizza. Oh and they had lunch while they debated.
I got an email from the committee once, I told them to forget it and I would buy my team pizza with my own money…. they actually tried to get me in trouble for that.
These kinda dumbass middle manager politics sound like they help (to people with no work experience…) but they’re more costly in the end.
Thankfully we were bought and the new CEO did away with it.
That is exactly why there are discretionary spending limits, if the overhead for sending the $40 pizza to a committee isn't priced in, then every cost will blown out.
Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock.
They don't care, destruction of the federal government is the point. Congress needs to do their job.
"Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock."
One day, deep in a build, I was so frustrated I got our CEO and COO and made them walk around the building with me as I fumed "Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" screen" - and our COO looks at me and said "are we really that bad?" and I said "THIS MEETING ABOUT MEETINGS COST US $5,000!!!!!!!!!!!" - sadly, we didn't get any screens, but a company wide email went out and meetings decreased.
>Every meeting should have a, "this costs $$$ per hour to run this meeting" clock.
Levels.fyi built this btw: https://www.levels.fyi/cost/
This would actually be impossible to use in most companies I worked for, as half of the workforce is usually consultants or contractors from various companies and their hourly rates are trade secret.
Just use a blended rate, it doesn't have to be on the nose accurate, it's just a reminder.
At my company we even buy condoms during office parties on company card.
The majority in Congress have — rather obviously — been paid off with luxury trips and RVs and trips to Russia.
We are truly fucked, you know?
Hey man Thomas is totally proud of that RV he paid for …. well didn’t pay for… also didn’t pay to park it…
Yeah, I was telling my wife last night that if we live long enough we might get to read some really interesting books from (to be) former SVR/GRU types about the time they made assets from most of th oval office.
Isn't this job of CIA and the NSA to prevent this shit?
Ultimately voters gotta care too…
Aren’t they about to be fired?
Haha!
That sound exactly out of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual
https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
Once when I was in consultancy, I was at a 10+ person meeting where they spent 45 minutes debating an hour's worth of charge for a PMs time on the project.
It didn't go down so well when I stated "I don't know how much each of you get paid, but I know the rough hourly rate my firm charges to have me here, and I can pretty confidently state we've just spent more money debating that hour's charge than the hour's charge is worth" -- it did move the meeting on to more important topics though.
"Penny wise but pound foolish" springs to mind.
>>These kinda dumbass middle manager politics sound like they help (to people with no work experience…) but they’re more costly in the end.
I knew a place which did the same for stationary. "Employees are using too many notebooks".
Eventually they would have a staff to stock, approve and disburse. Which Im sure costs darn more than anything the notebooks did.
Either way, its still unclear why you would ration notebooks of the things.
Eventually I guess people just want an illusion of control.
Reminds me of this sketch https://youtu.be/iB1hQkqtNso
That's the point.
These are people who want to prove, regardless of anything, that government is less efficient than private enterprises... particularly their private enterprises, who would be happy to help you with your problem, dear citizen, for a nominal fee.
It blows my mind how many people like "that's so inefficient!" or "that will create so many problems!", giving even a shred of consideration to this fake org that its goal has literally anything to do with what it says publicly. It's a complete farce.
I've said this a dozen times here now, but the word "efficiency" doesn't really mean anything in isolation; "efficiency" only really makes sense if you define what you're optimizing for.
Since they don't really do that, they can then define the term to mean whatever they want and then declare it as "successful".
Well if it isn't clear, I can help out: they mean financial efficiency. That's why everything they mess with is about money.
It's absolutely not clear that that's true, and "financial efficiency" doesn't make sense either in isolation.
You could only make the argument that what they're doing is "more efficient" if we're getting the same output while spending less money, but since they're cutting entire programs then I don't think it's fair to assume at all that we are getting the same output. It is absolutely not implied that spending less money and reducing the federal workforce is going to be "more efficient" by literally any definition of the term that I can think of.
And it's really odd the DOGE hasn't found any "inefficiency" in the contracts that Tesla and SpaceX has with the federal government. I would personally think that spending $400 million on a bunch of famously unreliable cars pretending that they're tanks is a waste of money, but I'm not the richest person alive, so what do I know.
ETA:
Looks like I was wrong about the Cybertruck stuff: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2025...
I stand by the rest of what I said.
Even dumber than that. The cards are there to make sure that the federal government doesn't pay state taxes.
This is literally going to cost the government more money.
It's not going to cost the government anything, when they destroy the government. That is exactly their intent.
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." - Grover Norquist, an unelected person, who many Republicans in congress signed a pledge to.
We're at the "small enough" phase, and soon enough we'll be at the "drowning" phase. This is their dream come true, unfortunately it's going to be a nightmare for everyone but the most wealthy.
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No. Now workers will not spend the $50 on office supplies, either paying for them out of their own pocket, or doing without.
Either way, they're saving $50, either by stealing it from the employees who'd rather pay themselves to be able to do their job, or by causing hundreds of dollars worth of damage to the productivity because someone spends 2 hours hunting for an unused pen instead of just grabbing one from the supply box in the corner.
This is the equivalent level of pettiness as removing free coffee from offices.
Many government offices had no free coffee already. This was the case in the mid-teens at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which houses the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where the federal CTO and CIO sit, and the National Security Council, just to name a couple.
I've seen news articles like "here the government spent $5000 on a party" like it's some crazy story of wasted money. And then it was like their annual Christmas party, with 100+ people paying less than ~$50 per plate and they had to bring their own beer. Like, hardly affluent spending.
Or "government sent their workers to this hotel on tax payers' dime!!" with a picture of some suite, and turns out they just attended a conference about their area and they only saw the conference rooms.
I don't get why spending money on government workers is so frowned upon. They deserve conferences, a nice office and some social stuff just as much as anyone. My Christmas parties as a government consultant cost probably 5x as much, never heard anything, and also paid with tax payer money, just through a layer of privatization...
I spent the first 9.5 years of my career at a large defense contractor. We never had free coffee.
Just one person taking a coffee break to go get coffee obviates any savings. The free coffee isn't there for the staff, it is there to save the org money.
The federal government is so worried about the appearance of spending excess taxpayer money that employees set up water clubs and coffee clubs where the employees all chip in for a water cooler and a coffee machine every month.
If only they extended this frugality to not hiring 10 people to do a job that could be done by 2.
It does not matter how efficient they are, people like you will a use them of inefficiency.
So, this particular contractor was big into efficiency and cost savings, to the point that we were all required to do a project where we made something more efficient and documented how much money we saved in doing so. The whole thing was mostly bullshit, but one of the interesting things I learned by doing it was that saving engineering time was essentially $0, because from the company's perspective we were all salaried, and as long as the time we were saving was charged to the same contract we would be charging our other work to, it didn't matter.
From that perspective, which I do not agree with, the cost of coffee breaks was also $0, while the cost of providing it was not, so no coffee. On one program I was on we at least managed to get facilities to install a commercial Bunn machine for us, but we were still responsible for buying all the supplies.
Under that simplistic model there is no space for higher quality, higher reliability, etc. Then "efficiency" is one dimensional and you have basically no agency. The cost model should be agreed upon collectively.
-2000 lines
You're right, and there were definitely situations where we could have done things better, but didn't, because the impetus wasn't there. It was really frustrating, and I wish I'd been able to get out sooner.
> -2000 lines
Not sure what this is a reference to, but one of the fun things I tripped over while there was that code changes were valued on dollars per LOC. Changesets with net negative LOC were... problematic. I think I once had a change that was near -2000 LOC net.
https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
And coffee itself is chiefly a productivity aid, to benefit the business.
"We need you in the office for CoLlAboRaTIon." "OK, we'll have coffee after our morning standup." "Absolutely not."
Worth noting that it is not at all dumb if your objective is to degrade the power and effectiveness of the US government. There are effective people in charge this time who know exactly what they're doing here.
This argument exists even if there is no bureocratic process for the purchase, assuming that the purchase is not done.
Suppose a 500$ monthly expense for taxi, where the employees need to use public transport in its absence. Or a software tool that saves 1 hour per week, and costs 20$/ month.
In both cases the employees need to spend more time and the costs are reduced.
But the salary cost is fixed (for the most part, whatever cuts where possible were already done), so the workload goes up in this phase. And I'm assuming they are just trying to crack the whip.
It's just a typical business management tactic of reducing costs, and maximizing workload per employee, (and increasing income usually, but in this case I think they'll translate it to reduced income as tax cuts, the increased income is for the private sector)
At least that's my take, pretty straightforward.
Placing back the red tape and requiring everyone to follow the rules is step one in a malicious takeover. It makes everything slow and inefficient, making every department fail their objectives and deadlines, providing an invented basis for reducing/upending/replacing/getting rid of whatever policy/program/department you want to get rid of.
The goal isn't to reduce spending. It's to create bad press to get rid of parts of the government that get in the way of the cronies in charge.
Exactly. This is all about power grab without going through a proper due process. The government is shitty and inefficient but DOGE is not the way to fix it.
Requiring people to "follow the rules" is malicious? Why did we even make the rules in the first place? What is this mythical idea that a government without red tape will automatically be operating in your interest?
This is a Capraesque idea of Washington D.C..
We had the first 4+ years to learn that "malice or incompetence" is not the right question. There's been more than enough pathological input to show it becomes a denial-of-service attack on observers.
The correct answer is both, until and unless the perpetrators wish to come forward and defend themselves as just malicious or just incompetent.
Now workers will have to spend $100 of their time filling out forms to buy $50 worth of office supplies.
Sounds like my company.
It finally got rid of the travel agency contract, so for my meeting last week I ended up spending $600 in salary hours making my own arrangements so the company could save a $50 commission to a travel agent.
Penny wise and pound foolish.
I've always found it much easier and faster to make the travel arrangements myself than to do it with a travel agency, but my work travel has always been pretty simple.
I've had the same experience, especially with making changes - places I've worked where we could arrange the travel, changes would be easy since we'd book flexible, make changes through the airline's web site and not pay fees, but with the travel agent we'd often have to call, so we couldn't easily make changes out of business hours (when we often needed to) and then we'd have to pay the agent a fee for the service of doing something we could have just done on the airline's web site ourselves.
I've always found it much easier and faster to make the travel arrangements myself than to do it with a travel agency
But that's the point. With the travel agency contact, employees did ZERO work. One day you just got an email with your flight, car and hotel information. The travel agency handled everything.
There was no "working with" an agent. Employees focused on their work, not figuring out travel arrangements.
That you worked with someone tells me we're talking about different things.
> With the travel agency contact, employees did ZERO work.
I've never worked anywhere where they just sent me flight and hotel information with no input from me. I've always coordinated with the travel agent so I could at least pick a travel time that worked for me.
Conversely, I've never worked anywhere where the employees had input on this sort of thing. The company's paying for it, travel is on company time, so barring conflicts like doctors' appointments, the company tells the employees when and where to go.
there's a bit of legit thinking that it'll scare employees into not charging things, to avoid the paperwork...
Dumbest change so far*
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Yes I'm sure your business spends roughly $10 trillion a year so the federal government should use your system because it scales so well.
If anything, such an extensive system should have better controls than a small business. Given that, there are trillions of dollars flowing around of other people's money.
You're falling for the sleight of hand if you think this is where bulk of the waste is.
Have you worked for the federal government? Employees literally have to fill out forms and follow a strict process to buy anything when they don't have these charge cards.
If my experience in non-federal government is any guide, they have similar requirements when they use the card, the difference is that it is after the fact and if the application gets rejected, the payment is the employee’s responsibility. The amount of red tape is the same either way, but with the caed the red tape happens after the purchase.
With the card, the urgent next-day-delivery order is already on its way while the red tape waits for approval. And the worker enters the order into the supplier's website directly.
With a standard order, the urgent order is entered into Oracle Financials, waiting for approval, and some time during office hours in the next 1-2 days someone in finance will copy the order into the supplier's website, omitting one order line by accident.
The federal government actually operates in the opposite way. They cosign a credit card under your name, you have to pay it off at the end of every month, and they reimburse you after the fact.
That's pretty much the mechanism of acheiving the effect that I was describing on State governments I’ve seen, too. I was just trying to generalize on the level of responsibility, rather than detailed payment flow.
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You have quite the imagination. Your fantasy of Musk's competence is unmoored from reality
So, remove the checks and balances that were already put in place over decades to make sure employees are spending responsibly. Um, sure.
With the employee cards, all the transactions are traceable and can be monitored with a minimum of red tape. How exactly would one improve upon that? It's literally the technologically-enabled solution.
Do you shut down your entire business before rolling out a new system?
If you want to save money and remove bureaucracy, you first create a system, then migrate to it and sort out issues, then remote the old system. Now it's going to take months to get something new in place, while also juggling manual approvals and getting things through payment systems individually.
Wouldn't it be prudent to do that before rolling out such a change?
while you imagine this, let's waste order of magnitudes more in red tape, that is if your imagination and DOGE's imagination are in the same place.
Re-discovering why things worked the way they did (waste, corruption, and fraud prevention) is gonna be fun.
You think they would have mentioned that in the memo if they were.
Exactly. That's why there are charge cards.
I suspect that a charge on the card involves at least 15 seconds of writing down what the charge was for.
The point of giving employees the authority to spend from charge card without excessive additional oversight is to keep it at the 2-3 minutes (realistically it's going to be at least that, not "15 seconds") per expense, rather than 2-3 hours of bureaucracy.
I have a company credit card. Guess what I do for every transaction?
Per transaction.
You know what’s way more efficient though?
Cards.
Exactly, automation.
Part of the effeminacy is they get what they need now not some time in the future. The old school requisition systems where everything had to be approved in advance and the purchase handled by a purchasing agent was slow and inefficient for small orders. Which is why organizations give their employees a card with a spending limit.
Your little tin-pot business has absolutely nothing to do with the procurement formalities of a large organisation.
Apparently some of the transactions were in strip clubs. I'd be willing to bet that the procurement formalities of a small business of quite a bit in common with the formalities of a large business...
As if you don't have to do that when using a govt credit card for expenses.
You own a “business” that’s clearly just you.
It’s almost as if, instead of “rooting out waste and corruption,” they are really just griefing workers, doing all sorts of big and small things to make their lives uncertain and miserable…
If they were really attacking waste, why haven’t they so much as made a peep about military spending?
They said they are going to review DOD. It's been 1 month?
Then why are they wasting time "reviewing" the IRS in the middle of tax season?
We are in fact seeing press attention regarding military budget cuts the Trump Administration's looking to enact:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/19/politics/hegseth-military-maj...
According to the news, they think the cuts will all come from DEI money
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/20/nx-s1-5303947/hegseth-trump-d...
They listed 17 things they want to spend MORE money on.
Here's the list they want to stuff more money into.
1. Southwest Border Activities
2. Combating Transnational Criminal Organizations in the Western Hemisphere
3. Audit
4. Nuclear Modernization (including NC3)
5. Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs)
6. Virginia-class Submarines
7. Executable Surface Ships
8. Homeland Missile Defense
9. One-Way Attack/Autonomous Systems
10. Counter-small UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems) Initiatives
11. Priority Critical Cybersecurity
12. Munitions
13. Core Readiness, including full DRT (training) funding
14. Munitions and Energetics Organic Industrial Bases
15. Executable INDOPACOM (India Pacific Command) MILCON (military construction)
16. Combatant Command support agency funding for INDOPACOM, NORTHCOM, (Northern Command), SPACECOM, (Space Command) STRATCOM, (Strategic Command) CYBERCOM, (Cyber Command) and TRANSCOM (Transportation Command)
17. Medical Private-Sector Care
DEI is a dog whistle to rally their base. They don't care abut DEI.
A lot of people who have keys to the kingdom may not really care about it. But it would be a mistake to think that there aren't any white nationalist ideologues within rank and file. At the very least, they are enabled and empowered.
I think they genuinely hate DEI. And genuinely think women are inferior in everything. They genuinely believe that minorities are inferior.
They genuinely believe domestic violence is something you should tolerate and accept. Etc.
These types of people blame the failures of their own policies on the scapegoats because they're convinced their ideology is actually natural law.
They control the courts, presidency, congress, most state houses and governors offices, have most popular news shows and networks, and they're unwilling to admit their policies are incompetently administered so therefore socialists and trans people must actually be running things, somehow, somewhere, in some invisible way.
They refuse to take responsibility and imagine conspiracies where some scapegoat is puppet mastering their failure.
Don't dismiss it. They deeply believe this.
You might have who I'm talking about confused. Musk, Vance, and their cabal don't actually believe in it. It's fascism and fascism needs an enemy to point at. That isn't to say they don't have people in their ranks that don't believe in it.
Nazi really believed their own ideology. They did not cosplayed hating Jews, Slavic or homosexuals. They were scapegoats because they were hated.
It is the same here. People scapegoat who they dislike.
They do though. They mention obscure authors and theories about white replacement and neo-eugenics. There's constant controversies of people finding the online handles of these power players on sites like gab and bitchute where they express pretty unambiguous sentiments.
Musk has a trans child he's cutoff all contact with. There's very little evidence these people are faking it. There's never been a group chat that gets leaked to expose them as secretly fine respectable people.
We have this tendency to think socialist and leftist are all very serious about it while the people on the far right don't actually believe it, they're just pretending.
Nonsense. They're for real.
They're not cutting the budget, just rearranging spending priorities (i.e., more to the border -- as if that is where our biggest military threat will come from).
In fact, the upcoming Budget calls for an _increase_ in the defense budget.
One thing to keep in mind that Federal Spending represented 23.4% of GDP in 2024. Around 12% of that is defense spending. I have yet to see any way these cuts do not result is massive decreases in GDP. Even if all of it is redirected to defense.
Indeed. It's moreso the case that they view everything as "waste and corruption" and are making everyone miserable, but if you look at the (currently) top thread[1], it's a deliberate move at that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43120677
Your article points out that that's a rare topic where there is a disconnect among the Administration. Not everyone in Trump/Elon's orbit seems to be aligned on what to do about military spending. DOGE has so far steered clear of it.
They are definitely not as laser focused on that as they are on nickling and diming workers and removing database columns that deal with diversity and inclusion.
How many people work for Doge? It's only been a month, after all. From what I've seen, I assume from their limited staffing, they're moving from department to department, rather than attempting to look at all departments in the government at once. It's seems reasonable to target the military later, for PR and utilitarian reasons.
You would think, with limited staffing, they'd want to start by focusing their efforts on departments where they could have a much bigger impact. Yet they decide to start with such small potatoes instead of the huge spenders?
It feels as though I'm trying to cut down my household spending and I focus on canceling my $15/mo Netflix account rather than negotiate down my $1000/mo credit card bill or work on finding an apartment that's $1500/mo rather than $4500/mo.
Military is pretty far down the list on total spent [1].
SS is biggest spending, and one of the first departments. USAID was viewed, by the administration, as being 100% waste.
Rather than starting at the biggest spender (and subjective greatest waste), what do you see as the metric for ordering? Do you think PR should be involved in the ordering? Do you think the administration ordered based on PR?
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-u-s-gover...
This is why in the debate of : Are they fascists or idiots? I tend to come down on idiots.
Fascist can be idiots, of course, but they tend to glorify the military (per Eco). And thus far, these guys have shown that they are mostly going to just bumble around and be gloryhounds. Sure Donny like the pomp, but real fascists wouldn't be gutting the NNSA or the DoD. They'd be building it up and expanding it, even at this early stage.
The only 'but' I can think of is that they are going to gut the military, then build it back up with fellow nutters. Something that many admins (and countries!) have tried to do to the Pentagon, and have all failed at.
Still, assume stupidity, not conspiracy, per Hanlon's razor.
> real fascists wouldn't be gutting the NNSA or the DoD. They'd be building it up and expanding it, even at this early stage.
Not necessarily. If those organisations were not blindly obedient to the leader (which they shouldn't be in a functioning democracy) then the fascist playbook then would be to neuter them and replace them with a more loyal apparatus.
In Hitler's Nazi germany, the SS were a new organisation with loyalty to the Fuhrer rather than the state. The SS acquired immense power and became a virtual state within a state.
You're also assuming that the fascist end goal is global domination. If the Fuhrer was driven primarily by narcissism, and by nature lazy rather than as hard working as Hitler apparently was, and they already have control of the largest democracy and arsenal in the world, then war and global domination may not be required to satisfy their psychological urges.
There are fascist, but of the Mussolini type, not the Hitler type.
I think this is an excellent point. If Trump and Musk were as brilliantly malicious as the Left claims, they’d be going about this much smarter. I think they’re solipsistic, nihilistic fools, and they’re going to ruin tens of millions of people’s lives.
> brilliantly malicious
The left overwhelmingly describe Trump and Musk as idiots.
While they repeatedly lose to them. I find it hilarious.
From my perspective you are all dupes to the billionaires.
That people could fall for the left vs. right narrative is what I find hilarious (not in the "ha, ha" kind of way, though).
"Dupes to the billionaires" sounds like something a dupe to the bureaucracy would say. I've never once had a problem with a billionaire. They have the common courtesy to stay out of my life. Can't say the same for the bureaucrats and their worthless gatekeepers and credentialed "experts" I'm forced to pay and spend time on because of their endless rules.
Smart and winning are not the same. Left was very correct about conservatives, Trump and Musk. They were correct about Vance too. They were punished for being correct.
Plus the rules are assymetric - Republicans can lie, strike outrage and do massively amoral things, but left and democrats are criticized for the same. Both sidism ensures that when Republicans do something bad, center knee jerks with euphemism it away while massively criticizing minor issues on democratic side.
What a clown show:
> The memo, dated Tuesday, calls for military leaders to provide a proposal for eight percent in budget cuts each year for the next five years. The proposals for the massive cuts to the Pentagon’s budget of approximately $850 billion are due by February 24, less than one week after Hegseth issued the memo.
> It was issued the day before President Donald Trump endorsed the House’s budget plan which includes a $100 billion increase in defense spending, suggesting a major disconnect within the administration. Hegseth himself called for an increase to the defense budget one week ago. While visiting Stuttgart, Germany, Hegseth said, “I think the US needs to spend more than the Biden administration was willing to, who historically underinvested in the capabilities of our military.”
A highly competent government in America has been a massive contributor to our success. The conservative opposition with shrinking government and making it ineffective is profound error that will make it harder to start and grow businesses, invest in innovation and compete on the world stage. We should be working to have the best government in the world not the smallest.
I wouldn't say highly competent. Even at its best the US has such a tribalistic view of politics that has held back so many improvements
This isn’t remotely true. Have you been to a country that doesn’t have a competent bureaucracy? There are no roads, no economic data for business to plan. The list goes on and on. The sheer volume of goods and services we each rely on and benefit from working flawlessly in the background without ever realizing is staggering when you stop to think about it. Go travel to a country that doesn’t have the cdc, the federal reserve etc, and tell me how easy it is to do business and build a life.
This is one thing that has always confounded me about conservatives. America is really number one in a lot of ways. The awful terrible bloated government they complain about has fostered the best university system in the world, the best companies in the world, massive wealth, an invincible military, a dominant position on the world stage, the world's reserve currency... and they want to throw a wrench in the machine that produced those results? Is #1 economy not good enough??
This is why the voluntary weakening of America's position in NATO is so wild. The US has so much power over Europe and the whole world through this. Everyone will (for better or worse) do whatever we want. And they even spend tons of money at US defense companies. Just look at Rheinmetall's stock price to see what the market thinks of this. Germany, UK, and France will all re-militarize without the US.
If Trump sets in motion a series of events that cause the world to switch to a different reserve currency, a lot of Americans are going to realize how good we had it. American hegemony may not be great for the world, but it sure is great for Americans.
There's a meme going around of Xi Jinping just sitting back and letting Trump dismantle the US himself. Except that it's not a joke, it's reality.
Absolutely. The idea that increased European defence spending will be with US defence companies is for the birds.
Europeans now know that the military spending (and the factories) need to be on the correct side of the Atlantic, and not vulnerable to the whims of an unreliable ally
Exactly this and unfortunately it’s too late. No one will trust America after this. The global order will unravel and everyone will pull into their own self reliance.
> There's a meme going around of Xi Jinping just sitting back and letting Trump dismantle the US himself. Except that it's not a joke, it's reality.
I wonder if the liberals had it wrong: that Trump isn’t beholden to Russia, but to China instead. The goal s to destroy America’s credibility by bullying our allies even more than our supposed non-allies. He wanted to tariff Mexico and Canada at 25% but China only 10%. I see the end of his term with China replacing the USA as the premiere super power, they already are rapidly catching up with key investments in green energy, Eavs, AI, automation, drones, etc…they have things the world wants to buy while we have…bluster, bullying, and nothing else really appealing (buy our manufacturing output that costs 2X and is half as good!).
Paul manafort got an excel file with voter data from someone he knew to be a Russian operative. Trump publicly asked for Russia to hack his opponent, now we are negotiating directly with Russia and only Russia to end a war it started and splitting the spoils by getting rare earth minerals from Ukraine. Thats a consistent thread if I ever saw one.
25% or 10% additional tarrifs. Not sure what the current tarrifs for China or Canada are.
But some trans women are playing sports!
I’m only half-joking. It really does come down to “cultural issues” for much of Trump’s base, many of whom don’t have the education or curiosity to understand what they want to destroy.
The same people who spent highschool snorting mints and failing biology want to tell me how biology works and that they totally understand the immune system.
The annoying thing is that preventing males from intruding upon the female category in sport would've been a perfectly fine left-wing policy from a feminist perspective.
It's so ridiculous that it took Trump of all people to address this and similar such lunacy that's even more harmful, like locking up males in women's prisons.
Democrats should've dropped this trans nonsense years ago when it started becoming obvious how policy based around "gender identity" adversely affects women and girls.
Instead they pushed and pushed to the point of absurdity, making an absolute mockery of their political platform. It's such idiocy.
> A highly competent government in America has been a massive contributor to our success.
I doubt this. Do you really think the government is the reason Silicon Valley has been so successful? Sure the government created the internet, but after that many tech companies flourished in Silicon Valley with very little regulation. I think that's why America has been so successful. If you look at anything the government gets its hands in, costs sky rocket (education, healthcare, etc).
SV has very deep military origins... Steve Blank has some great posts on this... and modern SV has been the beneficiary of a ton of Superfund money to keep big areas livable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
Yes, why is it called Silicon Valley? Are you aware it’s because the federal government set up a nasa program in the Bay Area that concentrated engineering talent and kick started the first set of companies? Are you aware government contracts provided much of the initial demand that got those companies revenue? Are you aware of the massive public investment to establish the internet? Or the GPS network? I could go on and on. The government pays for the basic research and infrastructure that isn’t commercially viable, companies then take up the mantle of commercialization from a significantly derisked reality.
Many of those SV success stories received funding from VC firms and eventually IPO'ed, systems that are SEC-regulated.
Not to mention NSF, DARPA, and other grants from federal agencies. That’s how we got Google.
The whole point is a highly competent government is one the does have an appropriate level of regulation. Regulation like disallowing non-competes. I think that there is plenty of good evidence that the whole reason Silicon Valley is in California is their long (and historically unusual stance among US states) history of disallowing non-competes.
This is why all this DOGE shit is so frustrating to a lot of people. I don't disagree that there is government waste, or that there are regulations that should be scrapped. But people don't realize how much success in this country is due to having largely fair and functioning institutions. That's all getting chucked out the window now.
DODGE is that new middle manager who thinks they know how everything works but doesn’t… and isn’t smart enough to ask.
And gets a big bonus for the "savings". And gets promoted before the consequences are seen.
I wonder what the DODGE credit cards look like…
I bet if you audited the company cards and other discretionary perk-spending of the top brass (who are in Elon's orbit) at Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, you'll find tons and tons of "inefficiency and waste" if not outright strip clubs and hookers type stuff.
The real waste is always produced by the folks who are exempt.
Yeah I find it odd that DOGE hasn't found any inefficiencies with SpaceX's and Tesla's contracts with the government.
It's almost like they don't really care about things being "efficient".
Yea, such an odd coincidence! I wonder how many parts of the government they'll declare as "inefficient" and "wasteful" where there's a corporate donor just licking their chops, waiting to swoop in and profit from the same work. That'll be such a goofy coincidence, too.
It sure will be, it's not like there's a streamlined way to directly and easily bribe the president with cryptocurrency or even just buying his a stock on an exchange, so I don't see any conflicts of interest at all.
It all seems above board and not depressing at all.
You mean like when musk walked into twitter and just started blurting THIS IS TOO MANY MICROSERVICES because he thought it made him sound smart?
Literally the Pointy Haired Boss but somehow Scott Adams ended up on their side.
Considering every other attempt at cutting costs has failed, I'm ok with giving this a go.
State debt goes up during republican goverment and down during democratic one.
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I know that's what people say, but this entire DOGE experiment has proven to me that Elon is fundamentally extremely lazy.
On the one hand, you might say "he's good at eliminating waste", but you can also say "he spends about five minutes looking at a problem and decides that problem is stupid and declares it wasteful".
You might be saying "tombert! He's the CEO of 5 companies! How is that lazy?!" but that actually proves my point. There is absolutely no fucking way he's doing five full time jobs, that doesn't even make sense, so clearly the jobs cannot be that hard.
Also, Elon lies about everything. If he says a statement, there's about a ten percent chance that it's actually true. He lied and said that we could do full self driving "today" in 2018, he lied about the moon trips going to be ready in 2022, he has lied over and over again about government spending (like saying we're spending 8 million dollars on condoms in Gaza), he lied about having autonomous robots in factories, he lied about having "baby AGI" in 2023.
I could keep going but I don't need to. A lot of his success is theoretical, and based on him making shit up.
ETA:
How could I forget...He cheats at Diablo!
You might think that's kind of a non-issue, and I would normally agree, but I think it exemplifies my point: He lied about something that fundamentally did not matter. There was no money on the line, it didn't matter if he was actually a top 20 player in the world, it's not like people would think he's better or worse at running a company based on his Diablo performance.
If he's willing to lie when there's zero stakes, why should we assume he's telling the truth when it actually matters?
Cheating at a video game shows how deeply flawed his psyche is. Terrifying how much power he has.
It just cheapens all of his other accomplishments; he went on Joe Rogan and bragged about being one of the top 20 Diablo players in the world, despite the fact that he was just paying someone to play it for him.
If he’s going to brag about something completely inconsequential and false, why should I take his word that he’s somehow really instrumental in any of the success of Tesla or SpaceX?
Guess what? You can see all this information, because of government transparency (not DOGE):
https://smartpay.gsa.gov/about/statistics/
>> GSA SmartPay statistics for fiscal year 2024:
Having used a government credit card as a federal employee, I can tell you this: If you actually cared about government efficiency, you would make those credit cards easier to use, not harder. I guess I was relatively sheltered, but for the time I was involved with it, doing the paperwork for that goddamn credit card was by far the most frustrating part of my job, and I didn't even use it that much.
The cruelty is the point. Never forget that simple but sharp observation. The point is to make an example of federal workers. They are the scapegoats now. Every power grab needs scapegoats to justify the power grab. The more the scapegoats suffer hardships, the better. It has to be public humiliation.
This a million times. The architects of this have been telling us for decades what they want. They want to drown government in the proverbial bathtub. On mobile so I can get a link to the quote from decades ago.
I wonder what effect DOGE will have on attracting talent to government jobs. It was already challenging to recruit qualified individuals to government positions; with these changes, I believe the situation will worsen significantly.
> I wonder what effect DOGE will have on attracting talent to government jobs. It was already challenging to recruit qualified individuals to government positions; with these changes, I believe the situation will worsen significantly.
The idea is to replace these government positions with private positions.
Remember feudalism? Some guy with all of the capital - which, in those days, meant arable land - basically got to dictate how things worked, because he had the stuff you, as a peasant, needed to live. He was called the king. If you didn't do what he wanted, your life got cut short. Government was just one guy's ideas enforced by his brute squad. In many ways, it was a sole proprietorship. Eventually, nobility was required to administer the land, and that nobility eventually turned into a structure that could keep the king somewhat in check, lest they carry out a coup. They became the administrative state. Today, we have legislative, judicial and executive bodies that - at least ostensibly - need to win election in order to do the same thing, thus replacing the nobility.
That's the ultimate goal here: the dismantling of the administrative state. The administrative state carries out laws made by a body - in this case, Congress - that, at least in theory, puts society's desires at the center.
A number of these laws directly impact the ability of capital holders to generate more capital. Since the people holding this capital think that the only reason humans do anything is to create more capital, they go to any lengths to keep society's "unprofitable" desires at bay.
Since the accumulation of capital can result in monopoly, you will, at some point, have someone controlling all of the capital again. This is a return to feudalism. You won't be swinging a scythe in a field in a toque and tunic, but the structure will be the same.
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Feudalism is when everyone works for the government.
Yes, yes, we know. You won't believe us until we actually are living in the feudalist society they're working, right now, to create brazenly in public. Enjoy gloating about crazy we are until you realize we really are not.
They won't believe anyone, ever.
The narcissist is incapable of being incorrect and will always find a scapegoat to explain the consequences of their poor decision-making.
The world is now run by these people, and because most people are more ape than man, they will emulate and elevate these people until some other stronger ape comes around to convince them to emulate and elevate them instead.
This is a really unfortunate perspective. The people that you are casting as "more ape than man" believe you to be doing the exact same thing you accuse them of; emulating and elevating people they think are also ruining the world.
I genuinely don't understand how you can comfortably make such sharp insults towards people who don't agree with you. I understand that it's easy to get caught up in echo chamber - which any website that uses upvote/downvote based ordering and hiding schemes inherently encourage - but the people that disagree with you politically aren't apes. They're not narcissists. You are not special or above others.
I think this article explains where I'm coming from better than I ever could, stumbled on it today quite presciently:
https://open.substack.com/pub/claireberlinski/p/impeach-him
Ironically, I'd say what characterizes a "man" vs an "ape" is their capacity for self reflection... which is your moniker.
A narcissist, as described in the article, has no capacity for self reflection because it requires them to enter a reality outside of their ego from which to observe themselves objectively.
I can comfortably make these observations (not insults) because I'm describing what I have observed over the last many decades, not reacting to some news ephemeral news item.
What amazes me is that this is a conversation about Elon Musk and Donald Trump and their sycophants... people who are even more caught up in echo chambers and more insulting to our fellow humans, all while being far more insulting in their online speech.
And what is rich is you trying to cast me as the one who thinks they're special because I'm insulting the people who blindly follow Musk and Trump in their naive belief that they're helping to "save humanity" or "America" or whatever.
I live in the real world, not echo-chambers, this is the place I post most frequently and it's still like once every other week/month (and declining). My comment was directed at a group of people in general, while yours makes all kinds (very incorrect) assumptions about me personally.
You actually sound very much like the person who is "too online" and "in an echo chamber" since you seem to respond to the least charitable interpretation of what is said in order to score internet points.
It's certainly a lot easier to respond to my comment as if I was dehumanizing entire swaths of the public based on their voting choices or political beliefs... much more difficult to consider that I'm speaking about a very narrow segment of the population defined by their specific belief that Musk and Trump are special and can do nothing wrong and will not countenance any evidence to the contrary.
There is a podcast from New York Times with interviews from government workers [1].
From all accounts the firing was incompletely indiscriminate and so many people who you would think would never be fired were e.g. US Army Corp of Engineers working on flood prevention.
And so I can't imagine anyone wanting to join the government when there is a strong chance you will be fired in the medium term with no notice and with no reason. All after you've physically moved you/family to Washington because remote work is no longer available.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/podcasts/the-daily/trump-...
The intended one I imagine. They said they want to create trauma for government workers.
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
It's already standard in many agencies for employee credit cards (IBAa or individually billed accounts) to have their spending limit set to $1 when the employee is not traveling. When travel is approved, the spending limit is temporarily raised based on the estimated travel costs. These cards are mainly used for hotel and rental car charges; federal employees are given a per-diem reimbursement when traveling to cover meals and incidentals, which they pay out of their own pocket. You can see per diem rates at https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-book/per-diem-rates . This move seems like something that makes a great sound bite but isn't actually a problem.
That sound bite successfully spawned hundreds of outraged comments even on this “intellectual” discussion forum.
This whole situation makes me think of a child who says "If I were president for a day, I would ..."
Anybody would do a better jobs than these clowns.
I think they are doing really well (by their own standards), the job is to destroy the government. They want to get rid of taxes and rules and regulations that prevent them from keeping their money and doing whatever they want.
Nah, that is like saying a child could make a Jackson Pollock or Basquait painting. It looks like random chaos but it is most definitely intentional.
Except Pollock didn't behave like a child.
Except most children have empathy.
Have you met children? They're total psychopaths.
that's a very charitable interpretation of all this.
more realistically, it's "if i wanted america to fail, i would..."
Trump's platform the first time he ran was practically "what do bumpkins in country diners say the government should do?" Those of us with connections to those kinds of people and places recognized shit like "build the wall!" because we'd been hearing "they ought to just build a wall" for decades from our dumber associates. (though half the time this took the form of "they should just place landmines the whole length of the border" and at least he didn't pick that part up)
This did have the interesting effect of making some of his positions cross-party populist, like his neoliberalism- and free-trade-skepticism. Normal republican voters hate that stuff and will tell you so, as do lots of left-wingers, but both parties (from about 1980 to 2016) loved all of it. He also talked some weirdly leftist talk, a few times, about healthcare, but with no specifics or clear plan, and that wasn't something he ended up taking action on. Same reason, though: Republicans have been told to hate "Obamacare", so they do, but lots of them also hate our existing healthcare system and insurance companies especially. Another gap between the voters and what their own party's officials were delivering, for him to exploit. They'd 100% eat up universal healthcare if a Republican promoted it, it's all in the letter next to the name.
It's why I figured he'd at least get the R nomination, if not win the whole thing, well before most folks considered him anything but a joke candidate.
> Those of us with connections to those kinds of people and places recognized shit like "build the wall!" because we'd been hearing "they ought to just build a wall" for decades from our dumber associates
Those people are not the problem, rather the problem is the people who voted for him who don't have being that dumb as a justification.
I felt a great disturbance in The Force, like a million SAAS and cloud companies crying out.
Who administers these cards?
The GSA system works through Citibank and U S. Bank, which take a small percentage off the top.
There have been alot of companies getting funded to create SAAS for the government.
Magazines and news media will suffer most. SaaS / B2B contracts larger than a certain amount won't be on employee credit cards.
Using cards is the preferred procurement method for expenses under the $10k threshold. I suspect that covers a lot more than magazines and news.
Not employee cards
The article directly states that this applies to the GSA smartpay cards. Those are limited to approved purchases under the micro procurement threshold under GSA directives.
Exactly my point. Micro-Purchases.
The micro threshold is $10k, as I said earlier.
Yes, I get that. You may be underestimating the size of typical PubSec deals.
I'm not talking about the multibillion dollar agency deals, I'm talking about day to day procurement like equipment, printing costs, office supplies, etc. You know, the routine purchases that keep the government running.
Orrrrrrr you misunderstood and have been doubling down repeatedly when the real numbers are literally on the same screen as your comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121043
>>>>>>>>>
Guess what? You can see all this information, because of government transparency (not DOGE):
https://smartpay.gsa.gov/about/statistics/
>> GSA SmartPay statistics for fiscal year 2024:
How do you figure? Is this conjecture based on the propaganda out of DOGE? The media spend they're purporting are also over that certain amount.
No. Employee cards are not used for significant purchases. They are for employee expenses.
Not exactly. They can be and are often used for larger provisional purchases. For example, when we wanted to get Slack or any SaaS, it was put on a charge card so we could start using it quickly, but that would start the clock ticking on an official procurement, which entailed legal and security reviews, etc.
Exactly my point. Serious pubsec procurement is not done on employee cards.
That is incorrect. They are for business expenses, like buying gas to fill your company car while traveling.
I'm not American, but it seems this has been going for weeks now. Are these changes/this access to various things actually impacting normal Americans at all? I understand the impact on government workers, but I'm curious if this is actually changing peoples lives in any way.
We were barraged for 6 months about how Twitter would fall over the next day when Elon took over there and took a radical stance, and it just didn't. I'm curious if this will be similar.
Tens of thousands of people are now out of work, with more to join them soon. The job market is already tight. That is going to have ripple effects throughout communities all over the country. We will probably see an uptick in housing foreclosures. At the same time, grant money for community support programs has been turned off, so these folks will have a harder time getting help.
Farmers who produced food that was sent abroad by USAID are not getting paid, and will have stock piling up that they don't have a buyer for.
Scientific and health agencies have been muzzled during a time when we are fighting bird flu (millions of flocks dying), there has been human transmission and there is a high risk of another pandemic (bird flu or anything else) coming along. People will die who wouldn't otherwise have to.
The agency which protects Americans from predatory bank fees has been shuttered, so we can expect our banking (like $35 late fees) to get more expensive.
I could go on and on, but our country is not Twitter; it's not even comparable, on almost any level.
To add to your list, Federal Spending represents 23% of GDP. If you cut Federal Spending you cut GDP. And if you take just a sliver of any of that spending and think about it critically, you can imagine the ripple effects it will cause.
Cutting funding for biotech results in loss of jobs and loss of patent filing. Loss of patent filing means loss of people needed for filing patents. On and on. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out (some pun intended).
Not really since their plan is to cut taxes too. It shifts spending to individuals rather than cutting GDP, though there are always costs associated with such a transition.
Those tax cuts will heavily favor the wealthy. So I guess it depends on your belief in whether trickle down economics works.
Additionally, the Federal Government is the largest employer in the country. If you both lay off a significant portion of that workforce and cut things like unemployment and other social programs, you are going to have significant increase in unemployment unless there is somehow new jobs for everyone. Add inflation to the mix due to tariffs and a perfect storm of economic despair is on the horizon.
Not sure how true it is, but a few housing focused accounts I follow(that are admittedly more doom and gloom) are claiming house prices in and around DC are taking a beating as a result. It makes logical sense, but it's not something I would have immediately connected.
> I could go on and on
Could you go on and on with any actual examples since all of your statements were riddled with "probablies" and "mights" and "wills"?
All my statements started with a concrete fact, all of which are easily found in current news articles. Perhaps you should go do some reading.
Maybe the sky will fall too!
https://old.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/ has examples.
So does https://old.reddit.com/r/Project2025Award/
lol right
sorry, you wanted people to spoon-feed you examples in reply to your low-effort low quality dismissals?
"If we let go of this it will fall"
"oh yeah 'will' I want real examples of things falling"
"here are examples of things really falling"
"lol right"
[dead]
[dead]
> Tens of thousands of people are now out of work, with more to join them soon.
...and?
This is such a common thing in tech we have entire websites built around it to track the layoffs.[0] In fact, using that site you can see in February (only 20 days so far) we've had 10,950 tech workers laid off. Expanding it further, in 2024 alone there were over 152,000 tech workers laid off. 2023? Only a mere 264,000 layoffs.
Where is the outrage and emotional blackmail over this for the lowly tech worker, yet we're supposed to bend over and take it while saying this is a bad thing for government workers?
Personally, I think they're just finally experiencing the America they run and they don't like it when it bites them like it bites the average American, and I have to assume that's why it seemingly has such high approval ratings among independent voters.[1]
[0]: https://layoffs.fyi/
[1]: https://www.axios.com/2025/02/14/arizona-voters-trump-elon-m...
In tech, you get absurd salaries that mean even if you get laid off, you would still take home a lot more than your average government employee.
The number one attraction for working for the government is stability, and that's baked into the salary.
If you want to attract skilled workers to work for the government, have the same experiences getting laid off, and get paid less, they're just going to turn to private industry.
> In tech, you get absurd salaries that mean even if you get laid off, you would still take home a lot more than your average government employee.
Apparently, as of late 2023, the average federal employee made over $101k[0]. "Tech" is vague, but assuming software engineers, the BLS estimated in 2023 a median of $132k[1]. That's not a big enough difference that you wouldn't be worried about layoffs in the private sector. Not everyone gets paid $400k working at a FAANG, and plus, federal jobs have a lot of benefits beyond that headline salary figure.
> The number one attraction for working for the government is stability, and that's baked into the salary.
The longstanding deal was that career civil servants don't get fired every time the White House changes hands and in return, they behave apolitically and implement the decisions made by political appointees (who are responsible to the electorate) in a neutral and expert manner.
That was the whole premise behind stability in government jobs. Back in the days it used to be the case that everyone did get fired between administrations, and they realized this was pretty inefficient.
But career civil servants broke this rule with Trump's first term, with a lot of opposition to political decisions brought on by people who are supposed to be neutral to the politics of it all. What is being reaped now was sown back then. Of course, it sucks for the people who did their jobs as they were supposed to; there is certainly an element of the whole class being punished for the misbehavior of a few.
[0]: https://www.fedsmith.com/2024/01/22/average-federal-salary-t...
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
I feel bad for tech workers they were laid off. And civil servants. It's the same people orchestrating both!
Exactly! Do they not realize they all sat around (poorly) administrating systems like h1b that have caused millions of us to be laid off with no notice or reason.
I can't imagine crying on linkedin like some of these .gov workers showing up in my feed. I would never be hired again.
I can't imagine a talented employee crying to HN about how they can't compete with the ESL labor pool.
What's the matter? The market feeling a little too free for your tastes?
You do realize it's your bosses that hate you and want to replace you and not random civil servants?
Series of posts by former Department of Labor economist and professor starts with:
https://bsky.app/profile/jrothst.bsky.social/post/3liin7up3c... It seems almost unavoidable at this point that we are headed for a deep, deep recession. Just based on 200K+ federal firings & pullback of contracts, the March employment report (to be released April 4) seems certain to show bigger job losses than any month ever outside of a few in 2008-9 and 2020.
Higher unemployment leads to lower consumer spending - the USA economy is built on consumer spending.
Walmart expects lower consumer spending: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/walmart-for...
My university announced a temporary freeze on PhD admissions due to issues with federal funding, with many departments announcing that they cannot accept any new students, and I know we're not the only one. A lot of people are wondering if they'll have a job in a year, myself included.
They've already damaged research/education, even if somehow it all gets undone. There's absolutely no reason to cause a brain drain in a country that has historically attracted students from all over the world.
N = 1, but I have friends in the US who lost their job because of the recent budget or grant cuts or whatever it was. They are very much non-tech normal people and considering options to emigrate. So yes, there are real people being affected by this.
> They are very much non-tech normal people and considering options to emigrate
Normal people don't consider leaving their country over losing one job.
I guess. In this case maybe normal people that are priviledged enough to consider emigrating. What I meant is people with real and constructive professions. That happen to be affected by federal decisions.
I'm saying that with a bit of self-deprivation. These people in my opinion bring value to society with their jobs. In contrast to many IT roles where that can be a bit questionable sometimes. My own employment included.
In many cases it's not just one job. NIH grant funding, for example, remains frozen with no explanation of when it's going to restart. If I were in biomedical research I'd definitely be looking for options in other countries rather than rolling the dice on a potential 4 year pause in my career.
>I understand the impact on government workers, but I'm curious if this is actually changing peoples lives in any way.
Well, our inflation rose to 3% in a month, a few people have died over all these illegal spending freezes, we had a repeat of the Saturday Night Massacre[0] where 6 or 7 judges resigned due to Trump wanting to basically hold blackmail over a corrupt Mayor's case to be temporarily dropped. Those are the most immediate and obvious effects seen after one month off the top of my head.
>Elon took over there and took a radical stance, and it just didn't. I'm curious if this will be similar.
I don't know why people say this when Twitter had clear changes to day to day use. Let alone to anyone investing in Twitter. Smaller content creators get even less organic engagement, celebrities are harassed more because of blocking changes, commenters get worse, more toxic community.
The effects only aren't felt if you use Twitter to get news and you avoid comments, or an account. Even then Twitter makes it harder to view stuff without an account. The fall of Rome took years, if not decades. If you're just expecting anything software to collapse like a demolition project you need perspective on how people define "drastic".
----
On topic: no, don't compare this to Twitter that no one needs in a day to day. The US economy will get noticeably worse, jobs will be harder to find and more people will be let go, The GDP will fall, and if March goes horribly a lot of old people will be on the the street dying. It's not going to all happen in one day, but lives will be lost over these reckless changes. The US isn't exactly doing too well with foreign policy either so that'll be the most obvious effect for you. Our country will probably shift to rely less on us goods.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre
> I don't know why people say this when Twitter had clear changes to day to day use. Let alone to anyone investing in Twitter.
That wasn't my point though. Twitter itself changed, which was expected and (I assume) intended. My point was the months of us being told constantly by the media that the sky is falling - the servers would fall over tomorrow, the advertisers would all leave and there would be no money, etc. This was literally daily for at least a month.
Now, Twitter is still up and running fine (from a technical and assumedly financial perspective). It appears Elons methods worked fine, and all the other major tech companies also went on a mass firing spree to trim the fat.
I'm honestly not sure how this compares with similar changes to a federal government - or if it does at all. But the context of my comment came from the GPs point, fat cutting and applying highly profitable tech start approaches to a federal government is an interesting thought exercise and especially so for a country that values capitalism over people so highly.
Every significant government policy being added or removed has real world impact - both positive and negative. I'm curious if the positives will outweigh the negatives in this case.
>My point was the months of us being told constantly by the media that the sky is falling - the servers would fall over tomorrow, the advertisers would all leave and there would be no money, etc. This was literally daily for at least a month.
That seems to be my point tho. you're imagining Twitter collapsing in a few days and going out of business. That's not really how things work.
Twitter went private so no one really knows how well it's doing. I'd bet any confidence in Twitter these days isnt really in Twitter so much as Musk hype, however.
>. It appears Elons methods worked fine, and all the other major tech companies also went on a mass firing spree to trim the fat.
By waht metric? Financial is dubious of you're following the scene. Workers, certainly not. I guess in the metric that it let him buy the election. That's pretty big, I'll admit. I don't think thst trick will work twice, given his current reputation.
In the sense that "it is operating as a domain?" MySpace is still"up and running fine " in 2025. Digg is still up and running in 2025. Such name brands so well known don't really die in a literal sense; someone's going to buy and try to salvage it even after Musk sells it one day.
>MySpace is still"up and running fine " in 2025. Digg is still up and running in 2025. Such name brands so well known don't really die in a literal sense ; someone's going to buy and try to salvage it.
What positives are you imagining? We pay off the defecit? This ephemeral mood of "corruption" is dealt with? That you get a tax cut? Maybe the 3rd one will save you a few thousand a year.
I don't see many upsides here that counter balance this. That's pretty much my whole reservation of this comment. It just seems to be saying "well maybe we get something good out of it" while dimissing the bad that's already come. All on a basis of a company that didn't completely die out from the same cuts and suggesting it "works" because of that.
Lots of inflationary pressure building.
- Debt repayments are entering a level similar to 1990s due to high rates and debt, meaning the government will eventually have to use inflation to reduce it.
- Trump's hostility to energy and housing, two primary drivers of inflation
- Tariffs
- Deportations of farm workers
Inflation expectations according to surveys and rates markets are back up to 2021 levels.
The only thing pushing against inflation is a relatively strong real economy, which isn't guaranteed to last if the tariffs and deportations happen.
Prosecutors resigned, not judges.
March will be no different than January.
March is when congress decides on a budget. Aka the first legal time in Trump 47 administration that they can actually influence the budget. Some GOP propositions propositions include Medicare cuts and overall trying to lower the budget by 33% IIRC. I'd bet good money we're going to see a bloodbath in the Capitol, be it among congress, or among the people reacting to whatever results happen.
Medicare "cuts", it's 100% of Medicare, and big % of foodstamps as well. And increasing debt ceiling, seems like most of it will go to tax cuts for the rich.
Just to be precise, it's a cost equivalent of 100% of 2024 Medicaid (sorry, I typed the wrong one) spending, amortized over 10 years. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't mean it's cutting all of Medicaid at once, right?
It's still drastic, though. 10% every year means 100b in cuts to Medicaid. More money than what's allocated to the DoED
I think you mean Medicaid, not Medicare.
To be honest, I lost track of which ones they wanted to cut. It probably was Medicaid instead. I wouldn't be surprised if Medicare and even Social Security come down the line at this point.
98% of Americans 65 and older are on Medicare and are overwhelming happy with it. This is true both for those on traditional Medicare and on Medicare Advantage.
For most of them having to switch to any of the existing ways that people under 65 can get health insurance would cost them significantly more and significantly reduce their coverage.
For those who are on traditional Medicare it would also mean going from being able to see nearly any non-HMO doctor (over 90% of non-HMO doctors accept Medicare) to going to managed care insurance where they have to deal with in network vs out of network and where the insurance company is practically looking over your doctor's shoulder and interfering in your care.
Messing significantly with Medicare would thus seriously piss off about 60 million people over the costs and reduced coverage that alternatives provide, and piss of the 28 million of those who are on traditional Medicare even more because of having to switch to managed care.
45% of those people have guns in their households. Most probably wouldn't resort to violence, but there are 27 million of them. That's enough that I'd be surprised if that doesn't leave thousands who would resort to violence.
Look at how many people seem to think the UHC CEO killing was justified, and this would be a lot more disgruntled people.
How much would you like to bet? Is 20k a good number? Can you be more specific about how you’d define bloodbath so we can agree if it does or does not happen?
>Can you be more specific about how you’d define bloodbath
Sure, there's 3 vectors I'm looking at here.
Legislative:
- The government shuts down for 3 or more days before deciding a budget. 1990 shutdown was the most similar situation (which includes Medicaid cuts, but ironically enough was trying to raise taxes) and lasted that long.
Executive:
- Trump vetoes the budget more than once. 1990 as a reference once again, H.W. Bush vetoed the 2nd proposal , once total.
Judicial:
- Trump and congress decide on a budget but judges intervene on the allocation. I'm not sure if this ever happened, but I couldn't find any accounts. So I'd say involving all 3 branches qualifies
---
- I'll also lump in any significant attempts at violence or death (natural or otherwise) over any politicians involved in such budget debates as part of that (the most literal "bloodbath" possible)
Those seem like fair enough criteria?
>How much would you like to bet? Is 20k a good number?
I'm sadly still a part of an extended job search, so I have no real money to bet. But if this was 2022, I'd probably put 5k onto it in terms of confidence.
> understand the impact on government workers, but I'm curious if this is actually changing peoples lives in any way.
The effects have started to be felt, but nowhere near the lecel they will be if things continue much longer this way; as well as the directed impacts, a generale economic slowdown is expected as a fairly near-term second ordee effect. Lots of direct job losses plus people holding off spending because of a cloud of uncertainty is a great way to make a recession.
https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/18/impact-of-trump-federal-...
>and it just didn't. I'm curious if this will be similar.
If I were to bet on it, yes it will be similar. My guess is that things will over all be better 3/4 years from now, after some initial pain.
Twitter is replete with bots, videos rarely work, and it’s almost entirely tilted to the right side of the political spectrum. Twitter didn’t fall over the next day but there’s no disputing it’s a worse platform than it was.
A homeless shelter down the road will be closing in a few days and putting ten families onto the street. It's colder than your freezer outside, and the city already cleared out all the camps a year ago, so these people might literally die. Children. Babies. People who have lived here for generations but consistent ratcheting up of rents means they can no longer live anywhere.
The expanded ACA tax subsidies are very unlikely to be renewed. This will result in about 5.6 million Americans (26% of the people with marketplace insurance) who can no longer afford healthcare and are left to rely on emergency rooms, which is a cost we all end up bearing anyway.
Our allies have lost all trust for us. They already hated Trump in his first term because he was stupid and confrontational and transactional in a truly ignorant way, and him getting re-elected after some pretty obvious poor governing means that our allies no longer trust not just our government, but the actual people who voted him in. The ignorance and pettiness and hatred of the American voter means investing in the US as an ally has become a very stupid thing to do.
I'm cancelling a vacation outside the US because I have no interest in interacting with border agents who feel empowered and vindictive. I already cannot travel to certain US states where a pregnancy scare can become a crime.
Our state economy has been buoyed nicely by the shitload of Asylum seekers from all over the world who are educated and just want to work, but are often not allowed to for dumb reasons. Lack of funding and a hostile immigration environment will only hasten the death of our state, which has a very old population.
Three large parts of our economy are: Lumber trade with Canada, Tourism with a lot of that coming from China, and selling lobster to China. With another trade war, that's all fucked. Before China became a buyer of our lobster, the industry was dying because they were catching too much and they had to keep selling lobster for cheaper than ground beef.
The farmers up state who grow potatoes will be fine, since it's been industrialized since before I was born. Everything else we grow is going to get a lot more expensive with less migrant labor, so I hope you don't like broccoli. Alternatively, we replace migrant labor with chain gang workers from the local prisons and enjoy the (literal) fruits of slavery.
The average American rarely deals directly with the federal government.
The average American files their tax return with the IRS once a year. The IRS just lost 15,000 employees. This tax season is going to make 2020 look smooth and efficient and fast.
But what did those 15k people do? If their job was to audit family and small biz returns, I don't think anyone will miss them.
I can't say what these specific 15k were doing, but the IRS was in the middle of a hiring spree: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2023/04/irs-hire-30000-emp...
So it seems like this just puts is back to how it was in 2023. Doesn't seem like a drastic change.
The average american uses the one page form 1040 ez and just sends it in electronicly or in the mail.
1040EZ was discontinued in 2018.
And fortunately, Musk only said he "deleted" the IRS's Direct File program and people might get to use it one last time.
But the effects cascade down to other levels of government, service providers and businesses in their area.
Yeah Americans are all super healthy and blessed so we dont need healthcare
Why do government employees have credit cards? When i was in the Air Force, we had GPC cards but honestly it was easier to just pay out of pocket and get reimbursed when i had to travel for training. The Air force took care of flights and i just had to pay for hotels and food and they gave me X per day based on location.
Seems like a smart move to just remove the GPC program in general. you can spend up to 10K with literally no competition requirements... Seems like there is alot of room for fraud, waste and abuse there. Better to reduce red tape for procurement and have a more centralized purchasing manager coordinate like every company does.
https://archive.ph/k1EdO
what about gas cards for postal workers and other delivery people?
https://www.google.com/search?q=gas+charge+cards+postal+work...
Step 1. Cut gov payroll by 30%. Save $X per year. Claim victory. Praise Trump!
Step 2. Hire consulting companies like Bain to provide services previously provided by the gov, at a higher price. Spend $X * 1.5 (if you're lucky) per year. But by then, the public has moved on to some headline-grabbing news (invading Canada, or Greenland, etc.), and the budget increase is buried on page 4.
Scamming the American public.
It's hard for me to imagine that the software built around this isn't just going to start crashing with enough of these changes. You've given a handful of (generously) junior engineers access to decade+ old software and they've just started changing things willy nilly. There will be downstream effects of this that software stops they're putting in place just stop working.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone changes this accidentally in a way that a limit like this is by-passable with minimal effort in the coming weeks (if not already).
If a piece of software crashes in the forest, and no-one is around to hear it, did it really crash at all?
I'm sorry for the chaos you're going through in America, but as a Canadian, every day of internal chaos is one fewer day I have to worry about your soldiers killing my children.
The likelihood of Trump sending troops across the border is pretty low right now. The chance of Trump trying to destroy Canada economically with America's weight is relatively high.
Please continue to disentangle Canada's economics from the US; it's much more likely your kids starve then are shot.
The odds might be low, but they are substantially larger than zero. Most people I know are preparing in some way by offshoring what money they have, researching places of refuge, etc.
The path to violence is: * imposition of punitive tariffs by Trump * Retaliation which escalates to energy export tariffs. * At some point Canada shuts off electricity transfer to the US and restricts water transfer, which shuts down the eastern seaboard. Trump declares this an act of war.
> At some point Canada shuts off electricity transfer to the US and restricts water transfer
This is what won't happen. People are far, far too comfortable for that, you'd need to see 30%+ unemployment rates for that to change.
It's easy to go crazy when you can break any federal law without consequences.
1. The president has immunity for official acts,
2. The president can pardon anyone who does his bidding, and
3. 2/3rd of the Senate is needed to convict and remove the president and there is loyal thrid.
No matter how much Trump, or his henchmen screw up, they know they can walk away after 4 years and nothing can touch them.
So how many SaaS subscriptions to support minor but perhaps part of critical chains that aren't expensive enough and get put on credit cards will break next month?
Honestly, if the Chinese had hacked into all of our government systems I don’t think they could do as much damage as the Destruction of Government Efficiently. I am still waiting for my tax refund.
Ok. So for Musk I would like to cap the money borrowed against his stock portfolio to also be $1.
This will waste money. People’s time is worth more than 1 dollar.
There is a part of me that occasionally checks in to see if people are realizing they are getting conned yet. Musk is trying to sell critical government functions to his buddies in the Founder's Fund and a16z by literally making the government more inefficient. Burying the government in paperwork has been the Republican dream for decades.
They don't seem to be yet. Two people with cult followers willing to contort themselves to the dear leader's position at any moment.
I thought and was somewhat hopeful they could make a difference way back in 2016, not unlike Obama's rise to power, but after that shitshow and very much noticing something very, very wrong (IQ ~110+1/2SD and a real knack for deduction and pattern recognition combined with a strong interest in psychology and the human condition) I tried to warn my Trump supporting American friends to no avail.
Devastated to see a once great nation (and with that I mean 80s/90s United States, _not_ current United States) rapidly falling apart as fast as my own.
i think of it as federal autophagy. probably even many federal employees are glad for the chance to rebuild something simpler and more efficient
Okay steelman this for me. What are some concrete examples of someone needing a government credit card? FBI agents replenishing bullets after a firefight with a UFO?
https://web.archive.org/web/20250220174125/https://www.wired...
I forget where I read this, but shutting off the cards was part of the playbook when Musk took ownership of Twitter. If I remember correctly, they shut off the cards and waited to see who complained. Apparently they discovered a bunch of subscription services that no one had even signed into or used at all, just paying out for years.
Or instead of guessing we an take them at their word:
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
That sounds like more of a failure of management than of the employee charge card system. They should be screening those charges and periodically reviewing contracts anyway.
Couldn't find much.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-ends-many-twitter-...
> Twitter will no longer be covering several costs or paying for a number of perks made available to employees, some for many years, for example. And the maximum amount allotted for work-related trips has been limited, as those trips are also set to become rarer.
> The allowance for a mobile phone bill is now $50 per month and the daily allowance for food while on a work trip is now $75... Meanwhile, the overall limit on expenses for any kind of work-related travel has been "revised" by seniority level
Searched for things like "expenses," "cards," "subscriptions," etc.
Yeah, you don't even have to look on employees perks. Can easily go to the list of hundred (or hundreds already) of SaaS and similar stuff available in my company, and see contracts in the hundreds of thousands a year that nobody know who's using it. Or multiple contracts with the same function. Or Hashicorp contracts. :P
DOGE may not be doing much to actually benefit the American people, but it's sure providing great entertainment value; reports read like Onion articles. If this was a movie script it would be rejected with "wildly unrealistic".
I always find it fascinating to see people rage against the current regime without any hint of self awareness that the alternative would have been just as bad, if not worse.
Absurd. The opposition had none of this in their platform.
You can enumerate the failures of Dems if you'd like but casting both sides as the same is utter nonsense.
And your little dig of "without any hint of self awareness" makes me think that you think you know better.
Seems like a great thing to try and see what breaks what with all the employee card fraud going around these days.
If any Silicon valley company did this HN will have a party roasting it.
These days I'm convinced that the usual "The government can't do anything right!" pro-Trump guys are not saying it as a warning or complaint: it's an aspirational quote for them.
Everyone here has had management with overly tight 'you must track your time' and 'you can only work on XYZ tasks' (normally where XYZ is capitalizable or billable) requirements and we all know how that turns out.
What DOGE is doing has happened in China 10 years ago. Instead of “fighting corruption” they claim “government efficiency”, but the ultimate goal is to silence and destroy any opposition. Because bureaucracy is inherently universally corrupted, to some extent, and the US has tons of laws at the DOJ’s disposal. That is Xi’s playbook to solidify his power and I am afraid Trump may be using the same one. I certainly hope we won’t be going down that road but to be honest I am not bery optimistic.
I noticed this parallel too. At least the US has the option for some sort of change in two and then four years.
This is yet another thing that will help bring on a recession/depression. First they create unemployment and lower spending from the layoffs. Now anyone left cannot spend money. What effect do they think that will have on the economy?
Pretty clear at this point that Trump is not about creating jobs. And that DOGE isn't about government efficiency. I mean, he declared himself king. This is just a direct attack on America as we know it.
They want the 10 year down to zero again. The only way it goes there is to force a recession.
There is no other way to do it fast enough to blame the recession on previous administration than to up the unemployment rate fast.
Why would you force a recession to escape interest payments totalling 4% of GDP? It makes more sense to preserve a strong real economy to help fund those interest payments.
The interest payments are greater than the defense budget. It will bankrupt the US.
> In 2024, the U.S. government paid $1.2 trillion in interest on its debt, which was a record high. This was the second largest federal expenditure, after Social Security.
If 4% of GDP will bankrupt the US, then why would you want a recession which will lower GDP by more than 4% compared to the status quo?
A recession does not hurt the wealthy, it helps them. They buy everything the poor sell to stay alive. "You will own nothing and be happy" was a command.
Imagine all those people overseas trying to unwind their foreign work/life.
Oops. No credit!
Not to mention the bazillion other legit reasons for expenses.
At least now I know what happens when you take Homer's makeup shotgun to the US government.
"so-called DOGE"
The article is paywalled, but I would be willing to bet that there's not much discussion were those credit card transactions were made.
https://archive.ph/k1EdO
Thanks
My guess was true. No mention of strip clubs or casinos.
https://time.com/4472824/pentagon-spending-strip-club-casino...
These obviously popular and important posts getting buried is sad. I think this site should be called Silicon Valley Greed News instead. Fuck all of you libertarian Musk worshippers downvoting these posts. Our government is being taken over. Hackers used to make useful things for people for free, for the love of the craft, not suck as much money out of the system as possible.
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a) Based on polling, only 3/10 Americans support DOGE [1].
b) There is widespread (almost unanimous you would imagine) support for reducing waste, corruption etc in government. The issue is how you do it and whether you are negatively impacting people for little gain.
c) And from what we've seen to date, DOGE has not found anything that wasn't already known long ago by the Inspectors Generals.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5105472-donald-t...
> by Filip Timotija - 01/24/25 3:04 PM ET
Got anything more recent? Such as, after they started doing stuff?
Even supporters were wary of creating a new department for this, because of the risk of it just lingering around without doing much and expanding the federal government, before seeing how they went about it.
> a) Based on polling, only 3/10 Americans support DOGE [1].
and yet, here's an article that says the almost all of their focus group supports doge[0], saying explicitly:
> "These swing voters are delighted by Musk's Trump-endorsed government housecleaning,"
Got any sources for your "c" claim?
[0]: https://www.axios.com/2025/02/14/arizona-voters-trump-elon-m...
Why would someone acting in good faith do as much outrageous trolling as Trump and Musk do?
Well if his opposition would listen to reason, maybe he would try reasoning with them. There comes a point where argument goes off the table.
Little faith in the government it didn’t get to pick, like when hysterics were blaming Biden for everything wrong in their lives for four years?
Care to elaborate on your point? What's the "averqge' American as of now?
Someone who isn't predicting the fall of the federal government over a temporary card spending limit, I assume.
Nowhere did I say that. It's a shame an honest request for clarification is met so hostilly these days.
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Unpopular because it's so flagrantly ignorant. How much do you know about the "egregious" expenditures by rank-and-file federal employees just doing their jobs?
Maybe $2T too much?
Maybe it is, but also maybe it's actually really expensive to run a country as big as the United States, and maybe people offering simple truisms and simple solutions to complicated problems are just full of shit.
Just maybe.
$2 trillion is all of the discretionary spending including defense. Are you saying the whole federal government except for entitlements should be eliminated?
Anyone who worries about spending without talking about taxes is not serious or being deceptive. The cause of the current deficit is mostly Trump tax cuts. Plus all of the temporary spending to get out of the pandemic recession. The solution is to remove the Trump tax cuts.
USA government spending as a percent of GDP is on the lower side of developed nations (high 30s depending on the source). Our peers are Luxembourg and Norway, and we’re well below France and Germany. Granted that we are one of the few developed nations that don’t provide universal healthcare which biases us lower.
While I’d share your concerns about fiscal sustainability, we’re an outlier on tax receipts not spending.
I think the worrying part is the debt/GDP ratio where the US is among the top 10. Also there's a high amount of private/household debt.
I'm not from the US but I'm worried. The economic signs are worrying and a US that is overloaded with debt has been historically devastating for the global economy.
All the political uncertainty and questionable economic policies don't help that either.
It's unpopular because it's incorrect. This isn't fiscal "restraint", this is a spanner thrown into the federal government with the intention to cause dysfunction. When the government is no longer able to meet the needs of the people because it has been intentionally kneecapped, the billionaires who made this choice will push to privatize the affected services instead.
And in doing so, they will take the value and experience that was built up in our federal institutions over generations and throw it away to enrich themselves.
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> The list of absurd spending makes me super angry; I never voted for climate change grants for Sri Lanka, or funding operas in Columbia or research in to Vietnamese bathhouses, or supplying birth control to the Taliban
I suggest you save your anger for real problems you actually understand. It will save you a lot of stress.
All of the “absurd” spending DOGE cites may seem like a lot of money, but it’s a tiny amount in comparison to the overall budget, and remarkably skewed toward specific, hot button issues like climate change, DEI, etc. Where are the cuts to the $852B military budget, which has been shown for decades as being insanely wasteful? Why isn’t DOGE investigating ways to cut down our $952B in interest payments due in 2025?
"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the military to prepare plans to make drastic budget cuts over the next five years, with an exception for border security, according to a new memo obtained by CNN.
The memo, dated Tuesday, calls for military leaders to provide a proposal for eight percent in budget cuts each year for the next five years."
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/19/politics/hegseth-military-maj...
That’s great to see. If executed, that’s ~$68B per year.
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The card is not a "perk". It's not there to make expenses that benefit you.
For travel expenses, it gives the company more control/monitoring and a tiny percentage benefit because they get the equivalent of cashback/points, not you (for you, the advantage is that you aren't required to front the company the money).
For non-travel expenses, it means you can spend company money on tools without wasting hours over $20 in shitty bureaucratic spending processes meant for much bigger purchases. If you need a specific adapter for work, and your manager approves that, you can buy it from Amazon or your local retailer, rather than filing a request to add a vendor to your purchasing system so this $20 item can hopefully be delivered in two months.
The alternatives are either you paying the $20 out of pocket because you don't want to deal with the hassle (i.e. essentially the business blackmailing you into donating money to them with the threat that your work would really suck otherwise), or you literally telling your boss, for months, that that urgent project is still waiting on that adapter, which is waiting on the approval that typically comes within 2-3 months.
I was once on a team part of which was putting procurement cards into our (local, British) government. We were doing it to save money: the cost of processing an invoice on paper was ~£10, and effective controls on petty cash were difficult.
It worked. We got less bureaucracy, lower costs, and better management data. The project was neither controversial nor expensive. Why would it be?
Firstly, comparing government to private companies is already a a bad premise. The point of a private company is to make money. They make cuts to try and save money. Cutting credit cards is a sign that they want to reduce traveling and decrease efficiency by counting every penny. Instead of discounting microcharges as that and just bundling them up later on to handle at once.
With that said: someone claiming efficiency would not resort to penny pinching, especially with a budget in the trillions. It's not efficient in any metric
>just think I've been through private downsizing events and I don't really know why the public sector shouldn't occasionally have similar occurrences.
They do pcc. It's just a meticulous process becsuse government jobs are not at-will employment. But generally the country is growing so of course the government grows with it. That parts no different from the private sector.
Also keep in mind that this downsizing, outside of its legal dubiousness, is not in any way planned. It's not performance based and there's been no audits on what they are trying to reduce costs on. It's just a wrecking ball and Musk's tried and false method is to try to pick up the pieces afterwards. That's not how you want to treat people with access to a country's money, nuclear technology, taxes, and weapons.
If your bank wanted to downsize, how would you feel about them doing it by allowing a rogue team of 20-something software developers access to all its most sensitive IT systems?
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Source?
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It doesn’t work because I wasn’t making shit up, and the commenter above made no statement of fact. Troll.
> The real critique in my opinion is lack of professionalism but this gets somewhat subjective.
I think that's the point here, the overt pettiness from Musk/Trump. If they feel like employees shouldn't have company cards, then fine, just take them away! Surely it would be cheaper to cancel the cards than to keep track of all (now effectively useless) active cards?
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Have you considered that DOGE is an opaque, unaccountable bureaucracy that is motivated to optimize for ragebait? Who don't seem to know the consequences of their actions, or have any skin in the game if they make mistakes? Who have been given alarmingly high level of control over some of the most sensitive pieces of information and governance of our government, and never made any effort to assure the public that they aren't acting carelessly? And for some of these services they have basically left broken, there is an obvious conflict of interest when Musk suggests that the government buys replacement services from him?
You're asking the people to act in good faith but it doesn't seem like DOGE either understands or cares that there are a lot of people who have basically had their contributions and service to the country basically shattered overnight, because Elon wants to get x amount of likes from a certain culture war faction.
Nobody cried for the Keystone pipeline workers that lost their jobs. There wasn’t much of a whimper when Bill Clinton cut 400,000 government jobs. The duplicity is obnoxious. Even Jon Favreau, former Obama speechwriter lamented that Obama’s team should have done some of what DOGE is doing.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-bros-doge-stuff-ve-14192594...
> There wasn’t much of a whimper when Bill Clinton cut 400,000 government jobs.
People are not concerned with cutting, they are concerned with how it's being done which is causing disruption:
https://www.newsweek.com/how-bill-clinton-shrunk-federal-gov...You don't seem to get that the money is spent when Congress allocates it, not when a public servant puts it on a credit card. You want accountability talk to your representative.
This will just make government less efficient as it goes through extra steps to request invoices and post payment, or perhaps even spending petty cash.
It will exclude government from buying certain products where this isn't possible.
Of course this is all quite irrelevant, since it's a publicity stunt for the people who are not interested in saving taxpayer money but hating and destroying.
If they need more they can get an increase, what's the issue
Again, wrong end of the pipeline. It's just more busywork to do. The staff is already responsible for what is spent on the card and to match it to approved spending and their budget.
Just building in more red tape and expense to a system.
Saying we shouldn't improve spending oversight because the real problem is at the budgeting level is like saying we shouldn't put security cameras in a store because the owner should have hired more trustworthy employees. Sure, hiring matters, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also keep an eye on the cash register. If Congress allocates funds irresponsibly, that’s a separate issue—but ensuring that spending is properly tracked and justified helps prevent waste and misuse at the point where it actually happens.
Obtaining that increase implies further bureaucratic overhead. That's time (and thus money) that they didn't used to have to spend in order to get a job done.
You're also positing that the people in a position to grant the increase will do so in good faith. That's the opposite of Musk and Trump and their M.O.
> Taxpayers, however, require accountability for the taxes they pay in a functioning democratic republic.
Accountability to taxpayers is a really weird excuse for bypassing Congress on changes in whether and how money Congress has directed with law is actually spent.
And by “weird” I mean really “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”-level abuse of language.
They're just angry because sometimes people in Congress spend money on things they don't like in places they've never been to to serve constituencies they're not part of. And they look at the $4/month or whatever that that costs and they would rather have the extra cup of coffee than see bags of food go to Africa or Gaza.
IF they wanted to spend $4 for food to Africa, they can voluntarily do that. The unique feature of government is that you can compel someone else to do it that doesn't agree.
This is just adding to the bureaucracy, instead of approving all purchases on the card at once now they have to get approval for each and every purchase.
Bureaucrats revel and rejoice in paperwork
So DOGE is in fact pro-beauracracy?
First is reduce cost, if it takes more paperwork to reduce costs then so be it.
I really hope you understand what cache coherency is if you work in tech. It's the exact same context here on why this is less efficient in time and money here.
>First is reduce cost
So, what do you think we are reducing costs for? You said you own a business, so I suppose you would benefit more than average from tax cuts.
so musk is a bureaucrat now?
as a taxpayer, id like the costs of each of these broad actions to be analyzed add shared for public review before doing them.
>Taxpayers, however, require accountability
What do you think is unaccounted for? Especially on an electronic credit card?
Does your credit card statement report exactly what you bought or just where you bought it?
The receipts you provide to support your claim for taxpayer reimbursement for the payment you have to make on the card report exactly what you bought, and come with a justification for buying it, or you aren't getting reimbursed.
How the fuck does kneecapping the ability of government employees to purchase things on a credit card increase accountability? Either they’re monitoring purchases or they aren’t, it isn’t any more difficult to do so with a credit card.
Like, you do understand that all purchases on a CC are inherently digital and thus logged by default?
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> Like 290 year olds getting social security benefits.
Please do share what you're referring to here.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076
You have yet to explain how this is an attempt to improve accountability in any way, shape, or form. All your comments in this thread are smug, vague nods to unrelated issues or platitudes. Neither you nor DOGE has presented anything resembling a coherent, logical plan. From your comment history it’s clear you have the mental capacity of a can of beans and I’m fucking appalled I (probably) have to live in a country where your votes influence policy decisions which affect my life.
I get that you're frustrated, so let me be specific. One concrete step toward accountability is DOGE worked with the treasury to make the 'reason' field mandatory for payouts. Previously, many transactions had no explanation, making it difficult to track where funds were going. Now, every payout requires a reason, making auditing possible and improving transparency.
On top of that, this change already had an impact—treasury was able to track down Social Security payouts going to people well beyond the standard human lifespan, something that likely wouldn't have been caught as easily before. If you have specific concerns, I'm happy to discuss them.
oh you're referring to musk not understanding the "no data" condition as "150 year old benefits"?
huh? what idea are you trying to convey?
That seems pretty low.
Magazines and news media will suffer most. SaaS / B2B contracts larger than a certain amount won't be on employee credit cards.
> larger than a certain amount
Larger than $1 is in this case zero, there's nothing one can buy for $1 on a credit card. I'm not sure why they chose this amount and didn't just set it to 0. Not sure when this is coming but soon government employees will need to bring their own paper and other needed officeware from home, unless they'll have to bring toilet paper and soap as well if the cut is too deep. At the same time the billionaire class has nearly doubled their wealth and nobody is batting an eye for it. Strange times we're living indeed.
Afaict, they're doing everything the easy way. I wouldn't be surprised if the CC bank doesn't allow a $0 option, but DOGE doesn't want to actually administratively cancel all cards, either, so they're left with this.
Government workers were already making do with a lot less than is generally accepted in the private sector, especially after the GSA conference scandal of somewhat over a decade ago.[1] During my time as a federal employee, many government offices had no soap at the kitchenettes, and some had no coffee. Folks tended to bring in their own drip-coffee pots for the office.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/04/03/14993...
It's an interesting arch.. I was not aware it got this bad. This is breaking the norm of hygiene, come on, soap and toilet paper was only missing in the third world or communist Easter block or Russia.
Everyone griping about red tape don't understand that the red tape is the point. If your expense is important enough to go through the paperwork then it can be addressed and petty cash increased. Otherwise, what do you think is better in the long term for effectiveness. Cutting the limit on thousands or hundreds of thousands spending accounts and going through the exceptions or letting them spend without oversight forever while you try to comb the queue looking for fraud, trying to get people to answer the phone and playing email tag?
Where does it say there was no oversight in spending? That is a part of the lie. Locking up cards because “something could happen” is just a useless defense. The funds could get approved, the limit raised and then something could happen. Terrorists aren’t going to drain the Fed through government employee spending cards.
So now instead the red tape is causing inefficiency in an area that was already efficient as applicable to the risk.
Unless the red tape is expensive. The trick is to be smart at striking the balance between reining in spending while not having a paperwork system that costs even more. Setting the limit to $1 doesn’t seem like striking any kind of balance.