[HN Gopher] DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
___________________________________________________________________
DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
Author : belter
Score : 377 points
Date : 2025-02-22 12:03 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| anoxor wrote:
| I like that the focus is on the issues with the disruptors that
| have been running for a few weeks, not the egregious spending for
| decades.
| NotGMan wrote:
| The trashing of a (hopefully) dying octopus.
| mieses wrote:
| hopefully to be replaced by something less rotten
| DFHippie wrote:
| That egregious spending bears a family resemblance to the
| malfeasance that cost Trump the 2020 election and Iraq's
| weapons of mass destruction.
| qwe----3 wrote:
| I bet back in the day you were the complaining about 200000$
| toilet seats in Iraq. Now that's it's not on your side of
| politics it's a fabrication
| anoxor wrote:
| Both sides for the past decades have been terrible.
| DFHippie wrote:
| It's fun to put thoughts in other people's heads!
|
| I'll try.
|
| I bet back in the day you were eating babies.
|
| Fun!
|
| I don't doubt there is waste in the federal government. I
| also don't doubt it is largely in programs that tend tend
| to be lavishly funded, not squeezed to death, so
| agricultural subsidies, construction projects, and defense.
| These are programs conservatives love. DOGE is
| concentrating its "waste, fraud, and abuse cutting" to
| ideological enemies. In other words, it isn't about finding
| and cutting waste or fraud; it's about the ideological
| capture and remolding of government outside of any
| framework of accountability or democratic input.
|
| A lovely example of their creative approach to their
| alleged project:
|
| > In another case, DOGE claimed $232 million in savings on
| a contract providing information technology support to the
| Social Security Administration. But The Intercept reported
| that only a sliver of the contract was canceled -- a
| program to let users mark their gender as "X" -- bringing
| the actual savings closer to $560,000.
|
| They lie about what they accomplished, and what they did
| accomplish was just performative cruelty with negligible
| effect on the budget.
| mc32 wrote:
| And honestly it's been both parties who have been more than
| happy to pay lip service to the problem but instead of paring
| things add additional oversight that has no enforcement power
| so they only add more weight to the bureaucracy with a few
| reports no one reads to show for. In the face of deficits, they
| don't retrench as individuals and private entities have to.
| watwut wrote:
| both parties invoked in highly assymetrical situation is
| getting old.
| mc32 wrote:
| Who in the Repubs doesn't like spending? Like maybe three
| of them?
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| You forget they talk about responsible budgeting when
| Dems are in office. Talk talk talk. Then they balloon the
| debt when they're running the show. Sure did talk
| though...
| anoxor wrote:
| Totally agree. I think the debt is at 100k per taxpayer.
| Either taxes or inflation will have to be used to pay that.
| watwut wrote:
| Debt goes up during republican goverment and down during
| democratic one, so anyone who cares for it would not vote
| for conservatives.
|
| Nor for Trump whose lifetime history is to make debt go up
| and then fail upwards.
| anoxor wrote:
| Biden added 1 trillion dollars every 100 days to the debt
| in the last year. Not in war or recession.
|
| He used inflation to hide the issue in the price of
| everything else on top of that.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| You have to be blindly partisan to be unable to recognize
| basic facts about the debt load and that republican
| governments are responsible for the vast majority of it.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > Either taxes or inflation will have to be used to pay
| that.
|
| Or the .01% class who own the debt could get burned.
| Sometimes that happens when you make a bad bet, you know?
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Now we have the experts advocating for default... truly
| mindboggling stupidity.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Well I know this - if the 'smart' option is to have every
| American born into crippling generational debt, I want no
| part of it.
|
| And I know that when inequality reaches these sorts of
| levels, heads have a tendency to roll.
|
| One way or another, some form of jubilee is gonna be
| necessary for a sustainable future.
| pizza wrote:
| What's wrong with evidence?
| fhd2 wrote:
| One could agree with the goals of reducing government spending
| and still argue that "the disruptors" are moving too fast and
| breaking too many things.
| anoxor wrote:
| Sure, where are the nytimes articles that praise and
| highlight the good cuts?
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| You wanna list those out? So far all I've seen is cutting
| of body parts to lose weight.
| rvnx wrote:
| They don't always say negative things, there was positive
| article praising the success of Elon Musk in promoting
| Doge-scam:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/technology/dogecoin-
| bitco...
| JoshTko wrote:
| And illegally
| phh wrote:
| I personally wouldn't want my government run by unchecked
| people who get the value of something off by three orders of
| magnitude. In a meritocracy private company someone confusing
| 8M with 8B is at best put in a closet job. More likely getting
| fired, and probably getting sued. When Jerome Kerviel was off
| by 5B he went to prison.
| anoxor wrote:
| By unchecked, do you mean appointed by the democratically
| elected president and under intense media scrutiny ?
| mlnj wrote:
| Unchecked means without oversight and without the checks
| and balances.
|
| The various lawsuits against the actions in the last month
| alone show a blatant disregard for process and legal
| procedure.
|
| The media coverage I have seen falls into these 2
| categories. 1. Declaration of great success in short one
| liners. This comes without evidence every time. This comes
| as tweets or from the administration. 2. When evidence is
| looked into we see that the numbers fall short, the
| "alleged" corruption is not corruption at all or the entire
| claim is a falsehood.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| Are you seeing evidence that scrutiny is making DOGE more
| accountable?
| agumonkey wrote:
| don't get fooled by the disruptor narrative, it might very well
| be just pretentious immaturity
| relaxing wrote:
| Always was.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Gives me hope that I too one day can benefit from all my
| psychological flaws
| noah_buddy wrote:
| There is a dual point:
|
| - many of the organizations cut certainly have done evil which
| the average American would not support.
|
| - I do not expect Trump to do less evil. I expect him simply to
| command it more directly.
| biophysboy wrote:
| People regularly discuss the debt, this is a strawman.
| user9999999999 wrote:
| destroying institutions is the plan. it's a cynical party. the
| only time "build" is mentioned is border walls. unfortunately
| "great" countries aren't BUILT on fear and cynicism.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I'm still not sold on this. I can't yet distinguish if the plan
| is to get rid of institutions or to gut what's their and
| rebuild it how the want it.
|
| We may not end up with a smaller government, just a different
| one.
| Master_Odin wrote:
| The Republican plan for the federal government for decades
| has been to try to kneecap various agencies and departments
| so fully that they can't function well, go "look how poorly
| they operate! Time to close it down and let private sector
| handle it!"
| _heimdall wrote:
| That wouldn't be the goal though, just the means to their
| end. The goal would have to be shrinking the government,
| for example, or to move authority out to the private
| sector.
|
| The entire party is psychos wanting to kneecap departments
| just to watch them bleed.
| chneu wrote:
| It's called Starve The Beast
| underseacables wrote:
| I can't recall when government was so enthusiastic about
| rooting out fraud. I kind of like this, and I want the
| government to actively pursue fraud and mismanagement. Feels
| like it always gets buried in some bureaucratic report.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| What fraud has this "rooted out"?
|
| For you, is it the chart of 100+ aged in Social Security
| and the lies that Mosk et all push about Social Security?
|
| There were the boring "bureaucratic reports" about this
| issue, which shows there was no fraud.
| https://apnews.com/article/social-security-payments-
| deceased...
|
| Don't let reality bring you down tho!
| _heimdall wrote:
| There have been plenty of claims of specific waster and
| fraud found. The problem is knowing what is actually true
| and accurate right now. Things have been moving quickly
| and its become such a political firestorm that it's
| extremely difficult to find unbiased reporting.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Therefore, claims of waste and fraud should be assumed
| false until proven otherwise, and confirmed by an
| unbiased third party.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I'd tweak that slightly. I think they should be
| considered unproven or unsubstantiated, that doesn't make
| them false.
|
| Assuming they're false because they haven't been nearly
| immediately proven publicly makes it too easy for those
| concerns and allegations to be written off and ignored.
| monocasa wrote:
| Musk et al have been caught lying several times here.
|
| It's fair to treat everything they say in this realm as a
| lie until proven otherwise, or until they work to build a
| modicum of trust.
| watwut wrote:
| A guy with history of lies including false accusation of
| pedophilia working for a guy who lies constantly are not
| a duo to be trusted.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I also would be in favor of rooting out fraud and even
| closing many of the departments we have today (along with
| getting rid of the legal authority that allowed them).
|
| When a strongman figure is in charge yelling one thing,
| though, I do always look in the other direction. Its like a
| magic show, look where they want to distract you from
| rather than what they're pointing at.
|
| I'll be very interested to see where this ends up, and a
| little surprised if its an honest attempt to find fraud and
| shrink the government or balance the budget.
| viraptor wrote:
| Unless there's a detailed report about the specific fraud
| being stopped, there's nothing. So far it seems people are
| happy to stop "fraud" as in "things they don't like and
| won't justify". Tweets don't count.
| _heimdall wrote:
| It seems like a reasonable opinion for a voter to agree
| with things they don't like to be stopped though.
|
| Maybe the voter doesn't actually care about fraud, but
| why shouldn't they appreciate having fewer of their tax
| dollars being spent on things they don't even agree with?
| viraptor wrote:
| It's a short term strategy though. If you go with
| "doesn't matter if it's true if it benefits me", the next
| "fraud" to be removed may be yours/you. And someone else
| will like it too.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Politics is full of short term strategies.
|
| I agree that's a bad approach in almost every situation,
| but it is par for the course. That isn't to say its okay,
| but there are worse examples of short term strategies to
| take issue with if that's the concern.
| relaxing wrote:
| > why shouldn't they appreciate having fewer of their tax
| dollars being spent on things they don't even agree with?
|
| Democracy doesn't mean we all agree.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Of course. Democracy does mean we make our bed and then
| have to sleep in it though.
|
| Assuming we do have a democracy today (I'd argue that's
| questionable for many reasons), a majority of voters
| _and_ electoral college representatives voted for Trump.
|
| Trump so far is doing many of the things he said he would
| do. For better or worse our democracy picked this. If it
| goes poorly we can only blame ourselves.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > Assuming we do have a democracy today (I'd argue that's
| questionable for many reasons), a majority of voters and
| electoral college representatives voted for Trump.
|
| It's not a winner take all system. If a bunch of racists
| get elected to office, they can't just claim a "mandate"
| and declare the Civil Right Act null and void by refusing
| to enforce it. The President enforces all the laws, even
| the ones his voters don't support. If he wants to change
| them, he can sign a bill into law, he can veto a bill,
| but he can't pick and choose to enforce just Republican
| passed laws.
| _heimdall wrote:
| If a bunch of racists run on such ideas and say that's
| what they will do, _and_ they win an election what are we
| supposed to do?
|
| We either believe in democracy and accept that means
| majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a
| different system as we don't really believe in the
| principles of democracy.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Democracy does _not_ mean majority does whatever they
| want. The Constitution says the majority has to follow
| the _law_ , even if the law was passed by the people
| currently in the minority. If they want to change the law
| they have that power, but they can't just break the law.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Of course, existing laws do limit what that group would
| do. If they won in sufficient numbers though, laws on the
| books would allow them to change the laws restricting
| them.
|
| I'm not saying its a good thing, just how it works. True
| democracy is a leap of faith, you need to trust that most
| people are generally good and are generally well
| intended.
| watwut wrote:
| I would printout that they spent a lot of effort to deny
| they are racists. Even now as they are enacting long term
| plans their supporters claim it is something else.
|
| Trump did not run on "I will anex canada, make inflation
| higher, order damm release and slash department of
| education".
|
| Some parts he run at - he promised to harm trans and he
| is delivering.
| linkgoron wrote:
| If that's true why have a constitution and laws limiting
| the power of the government? Using your logic, every
| decision made by the government is fine.
|
| If the majority runs on cancelling democracy itself (e.g.
| that if they're elected there will be no more elections
| and they will stay in power), and they gain a small
| majority, is it fine for them to now cancel all elections
| in the future?
|
| If a party runs on (say) taking the homes of those that
| voted for the opposition, do you think that it's fine if
| they do it if they get in power? Maybe put them in jails
| or camps?
|
| Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about
| protection of minorities, different rights like free
| speech or property rights, free trial and other things.
| There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts,
| legislative branches etc.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > If that's true why have a constitution and laws
| limiting the power of the government? Using your logic,
| every decision made by the government is fine.
|
| For sure, laws limiting power are extremely important. My
| point is simply that if a person or members of a party
| get elected in numbers to change that, and were clear of
| their intentions with voters, its totally within
| Democratic principles for the laws to be changed.
|
| Abe Lincoln changed the laws with regards to slavery. He
| was elected by popular vote but that meant he went
| against a sizeable minority of voters and fundamentally
| changed laws limiting powers and rights. I don't see any
| problem with that. To be clear, I'm not drawing any
| comparison directly between Lincoln and any other
| politician today.
|
| > Democracy is not just about majority rule. It's about
| protection of minorities, different rights like free
| speech or property rights, free trial and other things.
| There's a reason why there's are constitutions, courts,
| legislative branches etc.
|
| Democracy is a political model for how to elect those in
| charge. The ideals built into the US bill of rights are
| _in addition to_ democracy, not part of it directly. You
| can democratically elect a bigot for example, but the
| election was still democratically held.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > We either believe in democracy and accept that means
| majority rules, or we don't and we might as well pick a
| different system
|
| We did not, in fact, pick unlimited democracy, largely
| because never in the history of the country has there
| been a trust that giving unlimited power to an unchecked,
| potentially transitory, majority was a good idea. It's
| why we have Constitutional limits on government. Its why
| we have dual sovereignty. It's why we have separation of
| powers in the federal government. It's why we have
| staggered elections to the Senate. It's why we tend to
| add _additional_ Constitutional limits on government over
| time, not fewer.
|
| The history of American involves a fairly intense, often
| quite violent, debate about these issues. There is no
| simple settled comprehensive position on what should be
| within the scope of majoritarian control and what needs
| to be kept outside of it (and which method should be used
| to do that.)
|
| Pretending that there is a simple consensus around
| unchecked majoritarianism, or that the choice is between
| unchecked majoritarianism and something radically
| different from the Constitutionally-limited
| representative democracy the US has had, misguided if not
| actually dishonest.
| TomK32 wrote:
| A government run by a convicted felon... It all sounds very
| shizophrenic.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I don't like trump and have never voted for him, but I
| would take someone convicted of financial or business
| ethics crimes over Andrew Jackson (not a felon, but damn
| he was a bad person).
|
| The "convicted" piece carries a lot of weight here too.
| Plenty of presidents have done terrible things but were
| never convicted.
| mcphage wrote:
| > I can't recall when government was so enthusiastic about
| rooting out fraud.
|
| They're very enthusiastic about rooting out. The fraud is
| still missing, however.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Do you expect that there isn't fraud in the $4.92T
| budget, or that it just hasn't been found or proven
| publicly yet?
| acdha wrote:
| There isn't anything like the amount of it being
| promised, and gutting the auditing and staffing for
| programs is the last thing you'd do if that's your
| concern.
|
| For example, Musk lied about social security but the
| records he mentioned were reported by the SSA IG years
| before. They concluded there wasn't much fraud because
| over 98% of the old records weren't receiving money (and
| hadn't made contributions in over 50 years) and it was
| noted that cleaning them up would cost significantly more
| than it could possibly save.
| mcphage wrote:
| Oh, I'm certain there's fraud. Now, is there a higher
| percentage of fraud in what he is cutting--or in what he
| is leaving behind? That is an open question.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| They aren't rooting out fraud. They have published their
| intentions over and over.
|
| "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/ad
| ministrati...
| mlnj wrote:
| It is not to have a larger/smaller government. The plan is to
| privatize as much as possible. I mentioned this in another
| comment: 'Elon has already tweeted "The safety of air travel
| is a non-partisan matter. SpaceX engineers will help make air
| travel safer"'
|
| I believe the number of air incidents has been 2 a week in
| the last month. Any time now the government just will be
| ready to declare FAA as a disaster of the previous regimes
| and that Tech industries will be better at running the admin
| for the aviation sector.
| relaxing wrote:
| Their stated goals are lower taxes, less regulation, less
| government presence. What they want bigger is private riches
| through industry and church. They all believe this, voter and
| representative.
|
| What part do you think gets built back? Maybe the FBI, when
| they're sure it can be weaponized against their enemies.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > What part do you think gets built back?
|
| I wouldn't even begin to guess. This has all moved so
| quickly that I've yet to find what seems to be a reliable
| source on what is actually changing.
|
| My point, though, was only that we've so far seen moves to
| reduce headcount and pause programs. That could be the
| first step to closing down departments entirely, but it
| could also be the first step to rebuilding their own
| version of that department.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| For sure, when they say they want to close down
| departments, I'm sure they don't mean it. I see the
| insanity of their actions and, I too, find comfort in
| pretending that there is going to be something stable
| left afterwards /s/
| relaxing wrote:
| They've moved quickly, but this has all been in planning
| for decades. Their beliefs and motivations are all out
| there for everyone to see.
|
| There's nothing to suggest they want to rebuild.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Interesting, that hasn't been my experience of the
| Republican party over the last few decades.
|
| I grew up over that time in a very red part of the
| country.
|
| In the 90s I always heard of the republican party as the
| party of small government and individual freedoms.
|
| Starting at least with Bush/Cheney that didn't line up.
| The party seemed to want a larger military budget,
| increased federal powers, and a stronger executive
| branch.
|
| Republican voters I knew largely followed that pattern.
| They didn't want to see departments closed or authority
| removed from the government. They just wanted _their_
| views written into law. Abortion is a great example, the
| republican party strongly pushed for regulating what
| individuals could or could not do, very few were arguing
| that abortion rights were outside the federal government
| 's authority.
| relaxing wrote:
| Yes but these aren't "spend more money on the department
| of X" laws or ideas. Other than military and law
| enforcement, which I already mentioned. Bush
| consolidating power under DHS and expanding wiretaps is
| of course Republican party values.
|
| Bush cut funding for education and pushed it to private
| schools. He cut antipoverty initiatives and pushed
| funding to church groups. Cut funding for stem cell
| research. And of course cut taxes for the rich.
|
| The antiabortion response is to cut funds to anything
| touching abortion (not, say, provide more support to
| mothers.) And make way for expanded power over
| reproductive rights at the state level.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > The antiabortion response is to cut funds to anything
| touching abortion
|
| The voters I know who vote primarily on this issue want a
| law on the books banning abortions, they don't want to
| just defund programs.
|
| By no means does that mean I can extend that view to
| other voters, but I have yet to hear anyone who feels
| strongly pro-life argue only for defunding.
| relaxing wrote:
| That is also not a "spend more money on a department of
| prolife"type of idea.
|
| The question was will they build back, remember? A ban
| isn't rebuilding anything.
| watwut wrote:
| Personal freedom, except for things they don't like and
| except for people they don't like. It was always like
| that.
|
| That being said, right now there was enough written over
| years by hard core conservatives and specifically by
| heritage foundation and in project 2025 to know what they
| want.
|
| The same people were not to remove abortion protection
| either, I still remember how everyone and his brother
| framed that worry as paranoid ... two years before the
| exact same people did it.
| _heimdall wrote:
| To be fair, we never really had abortion protections. A
| supreme court ruling isn't law, its precedent. Precedent
| can be challenged much easier and can be superseded by
| legislation.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Their stated goals are lower taxes, less regulation, less
| government presence.
|
| And if you believe Project 2025, which I do, however the
| Trump campaign tried to halfheartedly distance itself from
| them, lower education:
|
| Project 2025 talks of how children finishing school should
| be looking more to "buying a house and starting a family"
| than college. Of course, how the average 18 year old with a
| high school education and single income (because
| homeschooling is also a very big goal of Project 2025) is
| meant to buy this house is left as an exercise for the
| (uneducated) reader. The important thing is less education
| and more future "Warriors for Christ" (as someone I know on
| my FB feed calls their children).
| _heimdall wrote:
| I haven't read 2025 so I'm going only off what you have
| here.
|
| I think a strong argument could be made that an 18 year
| old with a strong work ethic _should_ be able to get a
| job that allows them to afford a house in a reasonable
| timeline.
|
| I don't have any expectation that's actually what 2025
| argues, but it would be a good ideal. Why shouldn't a kid
| out of high school willing to work hard be able to save
| up for a house and a family in a reasonable amount of
| time? Should we gate keep that behind college degrees or
| similar?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| That's the Heritage Foundation christo-fascist plan.
| Unfortunately they've teamed up with the mad Libertarian wing
| of the Republicans who turn up in places like HN and complain
| that all taxation is theft and are ready to burn the country
| to the ground because they've been so well programmed by
| propaganda that originally just wanted to build support for a
| tax cut for the already rich but metastasized into a
| superpower destroying cult of insanity.
| EasyMark wrote:
| All you have to do is read project 2025 and you will know all
| their plans and reasoning for Stage 1 of fascism
| jimmydoe wrote:
| The plan is not destroying, but taking over. Once the cut
| narrative is fulfilled, these institutions will regrow with Don
| King's own people.
|
| Despite DDoS on the wave length, DOGE will not really gain much
| in the end, the real matter to balance the sheet will come from
| selling Ukraine which obviously takes some time to materialize.
| squarefoot wrote:
| You missed the part where they're deleting a ton of
| scientific papers from government sites.
| mlnj wrote:
| Just read that the Justice Department deleted the database
| tracking federal police misconduct. Good luck USA.
| squarefoot wrote:
| context:
|
| https://www.police1.com/federal-law-enforcement/national-
| law...
| jimmydoe wrote:
| it takes time and resources to review them one by one, so
| once the King restaffed these institutions, some of these
| papers will be back, as long as they are not inconvenient
| for the King.
| belter wrote:
| "U.S. Government Removing EV Chargers From All Federal
| Buildings Because They Are 'Not Mission-Critical" -
| https://electrek.co/2025/02/21/trump-to-shut-down-
| all-8000-e...
| rvnx wrote:
| Well seems like a great opportunity to use Tesla chargers
| and directly increase Tesla revenue using public money.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Nope. King Trump has also ordered all of the government's
| electric vehicles to be sold/scrapped.
|
| That's how you make government more efficient: Scrap the
| brand new fleet you have and buy another brand new fleet.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| EVs are also literally 4x as efficient as ICE.
| malshe wrote:
| I posted that article yesterday and it was flagged almost
| immediately
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| If institutions can only be created and never destroyed, how
| many institutions per person would we end up with?
| TomK32 wrote:
| They can be dismantled. By Congress who created them in the
| first place and gave the president and his executive only a
| limited range of powers.
| phgn wrote:
| https://archive.is/YSlkm
| MisterKent wrote:
| Two points that are often missed:
|
| 1. Perfectly tracking every dollar is more expensive than having
| some slack in the system. There's an optimal amount, at least
| from an overall value perspective.
|
| 2. We spend too much, and both sides of the aisle repeatedly
| blocked attempts to curb spending for literal decades while our
| debt got higher. That's how someone doing something coming in
| with a hatchet and no plan to build gets cheered instead of booed
| by a large percentage of the populace.
|
| The problem Americans have with the political system has roots on
| Webers concept of politics as a vocation.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Strong points in the face of this inaccurate, politically
| biased ledger that has revealed zero fraud, corruption or
| waste.
| MisterKent wrote:
| I am maybe cynical, but I sincerely doubt there's no fraud or
| corruption in the government spend. Among trillions of
| dollars of money being spent by people who can easily siphon
| some off, etc.
|
| Intuitively, there _must_ be some corruption.
|
| I have zero faith that Musk is interested in finding real
| corruption. He seems to be more interested in changing budget
| allocations and calling the removed regulations / "woke"
| things corrupt.
|
| I also think that corruption was within my acceptance
| tolerance of wastage. _Think_ is doing a lot of work in that
| sentence, but maybe that's all that really matters when it
| comes to something like this.
| rincebrain wrote:
| It's also a very hard line to draw, in some cases, since
| you can have the right things happening for the wrong
| reasons.
|
| If a bill contains funding to help fix a main street in a
| city that was destroyed by a natural disaster, is that
| corruption?
|
| What if there's 500 other destroyed main streets and that
| one got picked?
|
| What if it was destroyed by decades of the local gov't
| neglecting it?
|
| What if it was included because you directly bribed the
| person writing the bill?
|
| What if it was included because you did some horse trading
| and gave them something they wanted in another bill you
| wrote?
|
| The intent there is not to argue that defining corruption
| is impossible or futile, but that some people might
| reasonably argue different sides of whether something was
| corruption without either side obviously being morally
| bankrupt.
| leereeves wrote:
| Zero waste? I haven't been following DOGE but it only took a
| minute to find an example:
|
| Federal retirement claims are processed by hand by hundreds
| of workers working in a mineshaft. "The average processing
| time was 47 to 73 days."
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-retirement-mine/
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| This is absolutely bizarre. It sounds like something out of
| Portal
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Are you telling me that the US Government is storing its
| data in a data storage facility?
|
| https://www.ironmountain.com/services/vital-records-storage
|
| When will this woke madness stop?
| leereeves wrote:
| Read the article. It's not just data storage. Hundreds of
| people actually work there, processing the applications
| there, by hand, on paper.
| djur wrote:
| The article says they couldn't confirm Musk's claims
| about the number of employees.
| leereeves wrote:
| Snopes hasn't confirmed it in 2025 but they did say that
| in 2014 the Washington Post reported that 600 people
| worked there.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| So 0.01% of the Federal workforce or so?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The facility website says they have roughly 1100 workers
| there daily, but those aren't all government since other
| work goes on there too.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Hers a PDF detailing some of the audio and photographic
| professionals that work "down the mine" in the state of
| the art digitisation facilities that corporations have
| there:
|
| https://edge.sitecorecloud.io/ironmountain-c8dd68e9/media
| /pr...
|
| So why would it be by definition considered waste that a
| government has employees working on paper records stored
| in the same place?
|
| There is absolutely no reason to think this is
| ridiculous. These types of sites exist all over the
| world. Yet Elon Musk claims it's ridiculous and people
| now have to defend that claim?
| EasyMark wrote:
| Also why does it matter if it's in an underground ex-
| mining facility or a basement in Washington? It matters
| how much does this cost vs a modern computerized system.
| Instead the big brains over at X act like this is how the
| entire government works. They found maybe 1 or 2% of
| waste in USAID? "Shut it all down and lose all the
| experience and relations built over decades" they don't
| want efficiency. They want to slash and burn all
| government departments that aren't enriching
| billionaires.
| raydev wrote:
| Physical backup of important documents seems like the
| opposite of waste.
| leereeves wrote:
| It's not backup, the forms are processed by hand on
| paper.
| EasyMark wrote:
| that's why you fix it, not act like you can just destroy it
| and what it does. It is also why you think practically and
| tell us, the voter, how much extra it is costing us over
| your "new and improved" program. Just lying about it and
| exaggerating the concern is a sad, sad, disingenuous way of
| governing. I want fixes and unrelenting attempts at
| efficiency and not "hur-duh-hur I can make a meme out of
| this on X and not offer a single solution"
| acdha wrote:
| That's a good example of penny-wise, pound-foolish
| thinking: they've been asking for funding to modernize for
| most of this century but Congress chooses not to allocate
| the money. A big contributing factor is that when money is
| allocated, it's often directed towards contractors who cost
| twice as much and have a higher failure rate so
| congresspeople can say they "shrunk" the government.
| apical_dendrite wrote:
| The government does plenty of things inefficiently, but
| DOGE is making such a colossal mess with their rushed,
| uninformed, and frequently illegal actions that they're
| causing more problems than they solve. Indiscriminately
| firing people because they were hired or promoted within
| the last 2 years is incredibly wasteful. It means getting
| rid of the people who were most successful. It also means
| getting rid of people who had very specialized skills or
| who just went through a very expensive training process.
|
| Also consider how much disruption all of this is causing to
| the federal workforce and the contractors. People are being
| forced to upend their lives on very short notice to RTO.
| They were getting daily emails telling them to quit. It's
| hard to imagine anyone doing good work when they're scared
| that some indiscriminate process is going to fire them.
| intended wrote:
| Was this replaced by a better, more well funded and
| resourced system? Or was it made worse ?
| EasyMark wrote:
| his cuts are max 0.1% of government outlays, yet the MAGAs
| are acting like it's slash and burn and worshipping at the
| idol of their cult of personality(ies?) . Anyway it's so
| obvious to anyway who steps back and turns off the political
| blinders. Just look at the sheer number of lies coming from
| Musk and Trump about the "savings" ,about millions of people
| over 100 getting social security checks, that the few million
| of probably waste of money USAID was spending is evidence to
| cut without any other proof the entire USAID organization,
| even though it's a $50 billion dollar outlay. It's so effing
| sad that people fall for this, and that our education system
| is such a failure on probably the most necessary modern skill
| other than literacy--critical thinking.
| garden_hermit wrote:
| The insane thing of all this is that the 1% being cut is
| almost entirely in investments: money for research that
| drives economic growth, money for the USAID that provides
| the US influence around the world, cuts to CDC staff that
| could help mitigate expensive pandemics...the list goes on.
|
| So not only is the DOGE affair not reducing the debt, it is
| setting the country up for less wealth and more expenses in
| the future.
| rayiner wrote:
| [flagged]
| djur wrote:
| First, what was done with the money:
|
| > The $2 billion was used for the "decarbonization of
| homes" in low-income communities and paid for new household
| appliances, such as water heaters, induction stoves, solar
| panels, EV chargers, and weatherization, according to an
| April 2024 press release from Power Forward Communities.
|
| Second, the claim that it was given to Stacey Abrams, from
| the LinkedIn post cited in the article:
|
| > The coalition includes Rewiring America, Enterprise
| Community Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation
| (LISC), United Way, and Habitat for Humanity International
| and today, we've applied for $9.5 billion -- part of the
| Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund embedded in the Inflation
| Reduction Act -- to directly fund residential
| decarbonization and electrification... The application is
| already supported by 321 partners who have pledged to
| decarbonize housing units across 46 states and every EPA
| region. It also includes 156 communities pledging to
| decarbonize housing units, particularly in low-income and
| disadvantaged communities, and rural and Tribal
| communities.
|
| It appears that Stacey Abrams was in some way involved in
| organizing a coalition of existing nonprofits to apply for
| congressionally authorized grant money. There is no
| evidence I can see that she received any of the money or
| that any other impropriety was involved.
|
| "$2 billion to Stacey Abrams" is a falsehood, even based on
| the content of the inflammatory Fox News article.
| biophysboy wrote:
| The estimate should at least be within an order of magnitude;
| otherwise, the estimate is pointless.
|
| Also, I am booing them because all of the doge line items on
| their website are in the millions, and our debt is trillions.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Americans cheered for the gutting of USAID because they thought
| that spending 25% of the federal budget was too much, and
| should be around 10% instead.
|
| The _actual_ spend on foreign aid? Under 1%.
|
| Americans are systemically and catastrophically disinformed.
| Expecting us to be able to assess the real impact of the DOGE
| team's fuckups is a violation of GIGO.
| TomK32 wrote:
| It'd be fantastic if surveys would allow those surveyed to do
| a minute or two of research before answering or correcting
| their answer.
| jfengel wrote:
| They are voting based on their opinions without doing
| additional research. Getting at that opinion via a poll is
| informative, and letting them research it would actually be
| counterproductive.
| MisterKent wrote:
| People are not just cheering for that. They're cheering
| because of the stated causes that money was going to were
| "woke" and "not America first"
|
| The general public's understanding of soft power, a global
| economy, and maintaining an economic hegemony is just not
| there. We have a democratic Republic because our founding
| fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is
| not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on every
| issue.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > We have a democratic Republic because our founding
| fathers were smart enough to realize the general public is
| not smart enough (or, doesn't have the time to) rule on
| every issue.
|
| Maybe - _maybe_ - a merry band of lily-white slave-owners
| born hundreds of years before solar power and social media
| don 't know how best to run a modern government.
|
| And maybe we'd be smarter if our government didn't treat
| schools as a pipeline to factory work, or as a means to
| make billions from crippling and predatory student loans.
| "I love the uneducated", etc.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| We have this myth of the founding fathers as wisened,
| street smart old men. In reality, many of the signatories
| were in their 20s, often early 20s, hell the Declaration
| of Independence has a few teenage signatories.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Past a certain point, age has little to do with prudence.
| There are rational and knowledgable teenagers just as
| there are middle-aged dullards.
|
| One must also keep in mind that the man of the 18th
| century achieved the necessary milestones to become a
| self-sufficient adult _by_ his late teens. He will have
| already lived a full life at the age his 21st century
| counterpart crosses the starting line.
| Keyframe wrote:
| _many of the signatories were in their 20s, often early
| 20s, hell the Declaration of Independence has a few
| teenage signatories._
|
| really? i tried sourcing this and I can see there were
| only two in their 20s (26 each) out of 56. no teenage. 2
| in 20s, 17 in 30s, 12 in 40s, 9 in 50s, 6 in 60s, and 1
| in 70s (well, 70 exact - Benjamin Franklin).
| FireBeyond wrote:
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/08/how-old-were-
| the...
|
| "As it turns out, many Founding Fathers were younger than
| 40 years old in 1776 ... more than a dozen of them were
| 35 or younger."
|
| Peter Salem was the youngest signatory at 16.
|
| Alexander Hamilton, 21. Thomas Lynch, Jr, and Edward
| Rutledge, 26. George Walton, 27, and Thomas Heyward, Jr,
| 29.
| jfengel wrote:
| They didn't seem to reckon that against representatives who
| are sent to reflect the will of that same general public.
| They are not incentivized to contradict their constituents.
| In particular they do not have the responsibility to
| represent the demographic of their losing opponent, and in
| many ways are encouraged to do exactly the opposite.
|
| It may be the best of all bad plans. But it clearly does
| not succeed in producing compromises. At the very least it
| relies on some kind of good will between constituents. When
| you lose that you no longer have a nation.
| rayiner wrote:
| "Soft power" and "hegemony" are fake concepts invented by
| credentialed elites. Americans are properly distrustful of
| those ideas.
|
| The point of a Republican democracy is so the public
| doesn't have to decide the best way to build warships. But
| what values America should spend its money supporting
| absolutely are what should be decided by the democratic
| process.
| derriz wrote:
| How is soft power is a fake concept?
|
| At the scale of organizations and business, it's probably
| the most important tool you need to learn if you want to
| be at all effective. I've never seen a manager who was
| able to actually "get things done" who didn't skillfully
| wield soft power. The least effective managers I've
| worked beside needed to constantly resort to the use of
| authority and/or bullying to achieve results.
|
| Which also generally pisses off lots of people. Then
| again some people seem to get a kick out of pissing off
| others.
|
| It's quite reasonable to assume that a similar dynamic
| works at larger scales also.
| rayiner wrote:
| "Soft power" as a term of art used by liberal
| internationalists is bullshit. It's just a way to
| proselytize foreign countries in a way that makes them
| resentful.
|
| E.g. Biden's "human rights" push in Bangladesh. How did
| it help America to undermine the government's ability to
| kill Islamists? It didn't. It simply was ideologically
| captured Americans wanting to export their value system
| and use public dollars to do so.
| ergl wrote:
| Is this comment satire?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It's the most unhinged thing I have read all week, and
| that's saying something these days.
|
| I don't know even where to begin. I hope it's trolling.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| 2) is questionable. Most of the budget is spent maintaining
| global hegemony through military dominance.
|
| Whatever inefficiencies that exist on the civil side are nearly
| irrelevant.
| MisterKent wrote:
| I think many who are okay with our civil spend may take issue
| with our military spend.
|
| I have rarely encountered anyone who thinks the government
| isn't overspending. And nobody ever agrees on how we should
| be spending the money.
|
| I realize the comment above paints me as a conservative, I
| assure you I am not.
|
| However, I guess I can at least sympathize with how we got
| here (DOGE being acceptable).
|
| And from that I blame almost everyone in politics and every
| person tangentially related to those in politics.
| jfengel wrote:
| A lot of people think they government isn't overspending.
| They're the bond buyers, who loan the US government money
| at remarkably low interest rates. That's a true market
| signal, regardless of what people tell pollsters.
|
| Everyone would love to spend less money on other people's
| priorities. But as a whole, the bond market thinks the
| spending is ok, even if no individual will say so.
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| Of course it's worth noting that the bond market has
| massively sold off since inflation hit. The counterpoint
| is that it's arguably just going back to the mean, but
| nonetheless, it's a fairly historic move.
|
| US yields at the long end (the part of the curve that is
| sensitive to long-term stagflation and inflation) don't
| necessarily indicate that participants believe that the
| spending isn't a problem either. Once yield started to
| rise, the U.S. massively twisted issuance back to
| T-Bills, which are short duration and essentially risk-
| free. Fragility on the long end is being carefully
| managed.
|
| To some extent, you are seeing some financial repression,
| ie the shape of the yield curve is being actively
| managed. This expectation is built into the bond prices
| as well. If the long end starts to break down, nobody
| expects the treasury to start issuing even more long
| bonds. They naturally would expect them to pull back and
| start issuing more T-Bills and only term out the debt
| once the market/liquidity can handle it. There is some
| conversation right now about leverage limits in the
| banking system/SLR being expanded, so there is more
| capacity to warehouse the debt on the banking side.
| That's pushing in the direction of financial repression
| (where the banks are "incentivized" to shape the curve in
| a desired way).
|
| 0% interest rates were leveraged against the Fed Put, and
| it's arguable that there is a Treasury Issuance Put that
| is currently baked in.
|
| I think that the issue is broader than this though. It's
| about much more than just the inflationary effects of
| spending. It's an ideological battle as well. As for
| bonds, there's also the fact that US bonds are a "there
| is no alternative" asset to some degree. Remember that
| bond investors got their faces ripped off in the initial
| rate hike cycle. There's a good parallel to commodity
| futures prices here, in that prices of commodity futures
| are terrible indicators of the actual price in the
| future. There is a distinction between where a market
| clears and a bet on future prices. It is a somewhat
| subtle distinction, but it is grossly underappreciated.
| That said, of course you can isolate the inflation
| expectation aspect of the bond market and you are
| probably correct that this indicator does not red flag
| inflation driven by excess spending. Of course, growth
| expectations are also fairly healthy. So it's hard to say
| what it would look like if inflation expectations stayed
| high and growth expectations started to fall. Then the
| bond market might look quite a bit different. We haven't
| seen a true stagflationary market in 50 years.
| largbae wrote:
| I think you're on a reasonable track, but this isn't the
| whole picture. Most international treasury demand is the
| direct result of trade deficits in dollars.
|
| If you are a bank (or in aggregate a country full of
| banks) that takes in a bunch of $USD from your business
| customers selling products internationally in that
| currency, then you will receive a bunch of dollar
| deposits. These deposits can't be magically converted
| into the local currency, they have to be used as dollars
| somewhere else or traded with someone else who has a
| currency or commodity that you want for them. Long-term
| if there is a net surplus(from the other country point of
| view) of exports to imports, there will be a net surplus
| of USD as well.
|
| So what to do with those USD? Make some more! Whatever
| the going rate for T-bills is is likely better than
| nothing. Treasury bonds are considered a "risk free rate"
| in the sense that they are approximately as safe as cash
| under the mattress.
|
| Inflation is a more accurate measure than treasury sales
| of the reducing trust in our fiscal future. And that
| signal is lit.
| rayiner wrote:
| Without looking it up, what do you think is the military
| budget in comparison to the whole budget.
| sroussey wrote:
| Europe has a problem trying to spend a minimum 2% of GDP.
| We easily to 10x that.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| You should look at the CBO's reports on this. Most of the
| budget is spent maintaining Medicare/Medicaid and Social
| Security. The sleight of hand involved in the idea that the
| military budget is "most" of the spending is by calling large
| parts of the government's spending (but none of its military
| spending) "mandatory," and then slicing up the
| "discretionary" portion only, most of which is the military.
|
| However, the discretionary part of the budget is less than
| half the size of the mandatory part of the budget. If the
| entire discretionary budget were cut to $0, between mandatory
| spending and interest, there would still be a government
| deficit.
|
| That sleight-of-hand is how $900 billion of military spending
| becomes "most of the budget" when the full budget is $4.4
| trillion.
| rayiner wrote:
| The full budget is $6.9 trillion, not $4.4 trillion.
| dboreham wrote:
| Because people have been gasslit into believing that social
| security and medicare are funded by the same-named payroll
| withholding contributions.
| jhp123 wrote:
| if you take a dollar from government spending, then 60 or 70
| cents of that is coming from the bank accounts of retirees,
| disabled people, and the poor. If you return that dollar as tax
| cuts, as Trump has proposed, then something like 80 cents go
| into the bank accounts of the rich.
|
| The discourse of "wasteful government spending" is a
| smokescreen. It mystifies the basic operation of taking a
| dollar from a worker, retiree or poor person and giving it to a
| rich person.
| EasyMark wrote:
| 1. I can't agree with this. We have AI to raise flags and we
| have computers to make payment and bookkeeping trivial.
|
| 2. we may or may not spend enough. what we don't do is collect
| enough taxes to pay for it, that is the failure.
| rstat1 wrote:
| >We have AI to raise flags
|
| That it would like get wrong more often than not. No thanks.
| munchler wrote:
| "We spend too much" is a political opinion, rather than a
| statement of fact. Only Congress can change the amount of money
| spent by the government, so the executive branch's actions are
| unconstitutional, no matter how large the crowd cheering it on.
| This is exactly the sort of mob rule that the Founders wanted
| to prevent.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Depends on the lens. Depending on your tolerance for debt, we
| can argue that we objectively spend too much. Another lens
| can be that we don't collect enough taxes and therefore we
| don't have enough to spend.
|
| Now of course, since the lens isn't objective, we can't say
| it's an objective statement. And no, we can say that we spend
| too much and also think Trump is doing illegal stuff.
| rayiner wrote:
| It's quite debatable what the founders intended here.
| Congress has the power to appropriate funds, it's not clear
| as a constitutional matter it has the power to compel the
| executive to use all the appropriated funds.
|
| Even as a legal matter, the impoundment act only requires
| rescission notification once it's clear that the executive
| won't use all the money appropriated for a "program." When
| Congress is appropriating say $3 billion in a line item for
| USAID, DOGE can cancel a lot of individual contracts before
| it needs to invoke recession saying USAID won't use all $3
| billion.
| munchler wrote:
| Forget the Impoundment Act -- this is a Constitutional
| issue. The Supreme Court ruled in 1975 that the President
| is required to carry out the full objectives or scope of
| programs for which budget authority is provided by the
| United States Congress. Shuttering USAID, as Trump and Musk
| have done, goes way beyond mere line item impoundments.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_v._City_of_New_York
| zdragnar wrote:
| However, they claim that USAID was spending far too much
| on projects that were not in line with their objectives.
| Not even Congress can create an agency that is fully
| autonomous with zero oversight from anyone within the
| government.
|
| Whether that argument would hold up in court remains to
| be seen, of course.
| Volundr wrote:
| Can you clarify what USAIDs objectives are and which
| programs are "far outside those objectives".
|
| Most of what I see being complained about can easily fall
| under socioeconomic development, which is ostensibly one
| of the objectives.
| rayiner wrote:
| From your source:
|
| > Although one commentator characterizes the case's
| implications as meaning "[t]he president cannot frustrate
| the will of Congress by killing a program through
| impoundment,"[2] the Court majority itself made no
| categorical constitutional pronouncement about
| impoundment power but focused on the statute's language
| and legislative history.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Cutting matters not one bit if Congress doesn't pass tax
| cuts. Voters don't care about the national debt if they
| don't see more money coming to them.
| dboreham wrote:
| Voters generally speaking don't pay federal income tax,
| or pay so little that it won't make a difference.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is tantamount to saying that the executive not only
| has a line-item veto, but that it's non-overridable. Seems
| wrong.
| secos wrote:
| This planet money article lays out the arguments for both
| with lots of interesting links to follow.
| https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-
| money/2025/02/18/g-s1-49...
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > it's not clear as a constitutional matter it has the
| power to compel the executive to use all the appropriated
| funds.
|
| It seemed pretty clear to (now-Supreme Court justice,
| nominated by Trump) Brett Kavanaugh:
|
| "Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy
| reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra
| note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount
| appropriated by Congress for a particular project or
| program. But in those circumstances, even the President
| does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the
| funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission
| of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a
| rescission bill."
|
| https://casetext.com/case/in-re-aiken-cnty-2
|
| Though to be fair he wrote this in 2013 when a black
| Democrat was President so maybe now he feels like things
| are a little bit less clear for... reasons.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to
| invoke recession_
|
| This is not correct, particularly in the context of
| existing contracts (i.e. where the executive has already
| established that it would use the funds, which is what a
| contract represents).
|
| The recission process requires that the Executive branch
| notify Congress _upon appropriation_ that it will not use
| (or will defer the use of) appropriated funds. Congress can
| then decide to accept or reject the recission notice. If
| rejected, the funds remain appropriated, with whatever
| conditions Congress set.
|
| The argument could be made that this is a new
| administration with different priorities, so the previously
| appropriated funds will not be used. But, even then, the
| spirit of the law (and the Constitution) is such that the
| new administration would engage in the recission process is
| if the funds had just been appropriated.
|
| That is the same they would not just do whatever they
| wanted and inform Congress afterwards.
|
| It would be more correct to say that the Executive has
| latitude in _how_ it spends the money (within the
| conditions set by Congress). So, if they were to instead
| award a contract to another vendor, that would be in
| compliance with the Executive 's power to execute.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The Impoundment Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan
| support in the house and _unanimous_ support in the senate.
| It was a direct rebuke to Nixon deciding he had the
| presidential authority to not fund programs he didn 't
| like.
|
| It unambiguously _affirmed_ Congress 's _sole authority_
| over federal _spending_.
|
| The Constitution clearly gives Congress the authority over
| federal taxation and _spending_ , and this power is a key
| check on executive power. If the executive branch could
| ignore congressional spending decisions, it would
| effectively render Congress's "power of the purse"
| irrelevant.
|
| It's called the _Spending_ Clause, not the Appropriation
| Clause, for a reason.
|
| As to the rest of your argument: not allocating $100M in
| 100M Mars Bars for the Air Force because the price of Mars
| Bars dropped a couple cents, or Mars wasn't able to deliver
| the last 25 million Mars Bars, is not the same thing as
| "One person decided we don't want to give the Air Force
| Mars Bars so we just stopped paying Mars Candy yesterday."
| Sysreq2 wrote:
| I keep harping on this - but two points:
|
| 1) Our debt is above GDP and interest is rising faster than
| GDP growth. Debt is fine when being used as leverage but we
| are upside down at the moment.
|
| 2) We don't have the ability to issue more debt at the
| moment. The government has no money. They are using employee
| pension funds to meet obligations with a promissory note. We
| have negative cash flow and have run out of the ability to
| extend our line of credit until Congress raises the debt
| ceiling.
| xphos wrote:
| I feel funny to say it, but I think we have an income
| problem, not an expense problem. Republicans just spend
| money and then cut taxes.
|
| If people believe we need what we are spending on, we need
| to tax the difference. It sucks to pay taxes but we need to
| do it
| bamboozled wrote:
| One of my least favourite things is paying my credit card
| bill too :) I wish I could just stop , but we know what
| happens if we do.
| exe34 wrote:
| Sovereign debt and personal debt are apples and oranges.
| skywhopper wrote:
| If you need more money, you can get another job or get a
| better paying job. You might even take out a loan to
| start a small business. Raising your income is an
| alternative to cutting expenses. And taking on debt is
| actually a useful way to get the benefits of a purchase
| without having to save up for it first.
| cr__ wrote:
| So raise the debt ceiling?
| crabmusket wrote:
| > We don't have the ability to issue more debt at the
| moment. The government has no money.
|
| All spending is authorised by Congress, isn't it? So how is
| the debt ceiling any different? No federal programs "have
| money" short of Congress deciding it.
| Sysreq2 wrote:
| Right but until Congress raises the debt ceiling, the
| Executive Branch has an empty wallet and maxed out credit
| card. Funding doesn't go out all at once either. Some
| programs don't start until later in the year for example.
| They typically aim to distribute 1/12th of the yearly
| allowance per month. Sometimes agencies will over spend
| early and have to be austere later (like FEMA last year).
|
| Appropriations is Congressional and specifics how much an
| agency will get over the fiscal year.
|
| Apportionment is under the Executive and addresses when
| and how those funds are made available.
|
| They are two distinct things.
| skywhopper wrote:
| None of that has anything whatsoever to do with what DOGE
| is doing.
| skywhopper wrote:
| The debt ceiling is entirely artificial, and ought to be
| unconstitutional. Congress decides how much to spend.
| Issuing debt when necessary to pay for those allocations is
| implied.
|
| Everyone is missing the most obvious way to raise revenue:
| raise taxes.
| loanedempathy wrote:
| Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have both.
|
| Congress has abdicated its role, and the rot is now so plain
| that even a 78 year old can get the idiot masses to vote him
| in to do something.
|
| The thing about power...it only stays with the people who
| have the balls to wield it. Congress needs to find their
| balls or we'll just be back here in another four years.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Well, we either have a despot or mob rule--hard to have
| both.
|
| It's really not that hard to have that combination, i.e.,
| "authoritarian populism".
| vkou wrote:
| > Congress needs to find their balls
|
| Some of the GOP tried to do that a few years ago, and went
| against Trump.
|
| They were all destroyed.
|
| There's no longer an escape hatch from this.
| sbochins wrote:
| This is a silly charade. To actually cut the debt, it requires
| congress. Not just saving a couple millions dollars and posting
| on twitter about it. We'll need to cut Medicare, Medicaid,
| social security, the military, etc. All the popular stuff that
| was never easy and will never be easy to cut. We're not
| spending 2 trillion per year on condoms.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Won't wiping all this stuff just lead us into a Great
| Depression anyway ? I'm not an expert on the topic but my
| basic understanding was that we (government) just decided we
| didn't have any money, so everything just stopped.
|
| Like shutting all this stuff down or radically cutting it
| back will surely have some dire economic impacts?
| TylerE wrote:
| Yes. These cuts will set our nation back by decades.
| Institutions are being destroyed, and with them cultural
| and institutional knowledge that will never come back.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| Firing this many government employees, canceling grants,
| and imposing tariffs guarantees at least a recession.
| intended wrote:
| Yup. I've seen 2 grand disasters like this each worse than
| the last. Demonitization in India, Brexit, and now this.
|
| None of those other events had the same depth of damage
| going on here. America is dead, and doesn't know it yet.
|
| The only reason people aren't saying this everywhere, is
| because this is unbelievable.
| sroussey wrote:
| The government can just print money. So much so that
| inflation goes crazy and the national debt is pennies. Same
| with your savings. We have a lot of savers that are old.
| Wait until they are gone.
| secos wrote:
| or raise taxes.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| They are raising taxes.
|
| Income tax on everyone earning g less than 360K is going
| up, plus tariffs which are regressive.
|
| They're also cutting taxes for those earning more than
| that, the top 5%
|
| https://itep.org/a-distributional-analysis-of-donald-
| trumps-...
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Do we spend too much? Or do we not take in sufficient revenue?
|
| All these things BTW do have some limited ability to be
| controlled by the executive (Clinton did layoffs in the 90s,
| but kept supporting the same federal services). But ultimately
| most of this stuff is the mandate of congress and can't just be
| canceled by executive order.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| It is more we believe in magic. We hand out tax breaks like
| they are candy, cripple the government, and believe some DOGE
| waving a chainsaw will fix the budget. Extending the Trump
| tax cuts is estimated to cost $4.6 trillion over ten years.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tax-cuts-extension-
| republ...
| istjohn wrote:
| That's one way to frame it. Alternatively, one could argue we
| don't tax enough, and that's due to large tax cuts, first under
| Bush and then under Trump. Now Trump wants more tax cuts.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The people coming in with a hatchet are not planning to reduce
| spending. They're planning to use any money saved to fund an
| enormous tax cut that will primarily benefit the very rich.
| https://www.courant.com/2025/02/12/congress-budget-tax-cuts/
| James_K wrote:
| 2 is not a fact in the slightest. The American government is
| guilty of under-investment in perhaps every area outside of
| military. The notion of bipartisan climbing public debt is also
| false. Bill Clinton brought the government into running and
| Democrats have had consistently better budget responsibility
| than Republicans, though the reason for this is more that the
| Dems fund government through taxes where the Republicans fund
| government through debt to give out tax cuts. The actual levels
| of spending are not so much changed because it turns out that
| most of the money spent by government is quite important and
| you can't just get rid of it.
| roenxi wrote:
| If anyone has been involved in any sort of internal data
| analytics this is basically what is expected to happen. Data that
| is used in a new way tends to turn up all sorts of limitations
| and soft points. Trump, Musk, etc should have been (read:
| probably were) well aware this was coming; for what it is worth
| they've surely seen it a few times in business life.
|
| That being said, I doubt it is much of a factor. The strategy of
| hitting fast & hard is to bypass the unreliable data by
| triggering screams from the areas that are most important. In
| some sense, anticipating this revelation is why the strategy is
| chosen in the first place. Trying to do massive cuts slowly and
| carefully gets a few months in to the project then crumbles under
| the weight of unreliable data and analysis paralysis.
| watwut wrote:
| That is ridiculous strategy no business that wants to stay in
| business uses.
|
| and you know it.
| viraptor wrote:
| > hitting fast & hard is to bypass the unreliable data by
| triggering screams from the areas that are most important
|
| This works for companies which can risk some debt and
| restructure and maybe getting better. Worst case they'll go
| bankrupt. In this case the screams after mistakes will be
| literal screams of people dying.
| TomK32 wrote:
| Hitting fast & hard is not the legal way to do it. Congress has
| allocated the money and the President can't just stop spending
| it. You also ignore the human aspect, firing people in the most
| disrespectful way, with just single sentences, will hurt the
| trust in the government as a workplace for a long time. Good
| government needs good workers who trust the government.
| torlok wrote:
| Why is this flagged? Even if the comment section isn't up to
| standards, the article should be relevant to everybody.
| mlnj wrote:
| [flagged]
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Either that or, you know, we want to keep Hacker News about
| tech. Lots of us don't want /r/politics here.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Why is everything about their data access for example also
| being flagged? Sometimes there is a crossover between tech
| and politics so there needs to be some slack.
| dang wrote:
| Not all--for example, there was a megathread a couple
| days ago:
|
| _DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43112084 - Feb 2025
| (1644 comments)
|
| Why not more? The short answer is that avoiding too much
| repetition is core to HN. For a longer answer, follow the
| links I posted elsewhere in this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142645 - they'll
| give you more material on this than you could possibly
| want to read.
|
| > Sometimes there is a crossover between tech and
| politics so there needs to be some slack.
|
| That's how we look at it too. For more, see the links at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142682. These also
| point to years' worth of in-depth material, which you may
| or may not want, but all the common questions have been
| answered many times there.
| belter wrote:
| So would you say a story like this one, ( it's not even
| worthwhile to post as it would be flagged...)
|
| "NOAA scientists refuse to link warming weather to climate
| change" -
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/2469442-noaa-
| scientists...
|
| Is this about Science OR politics OR politics changing
| science? And can you elaborate why it should not belong
| here?
| watwut wrote:
| That is who all the pro homeschool posts stayed. Or pro
| Musk posts.
| mlnj wrote:
| Hacker News is not just about tech. There's plenty of
| discussion about philosophy, science, economics, health,
| hobbies and trivia.
|
| I doubt we would have much to talk about here if Elon was
| not deeply involved in this storyline. There's plenty of
| government stuff that goes on without much to comment on
| that is Hacker News material.
| JoshTko wrote:
| HN isn't just about tech, it's also about hacking. And this
| article is definitely about hacking.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Hacker News isn't about tech isn't about hackers. Right
| there in the name. Other systems besides tech systems can
| be hacked. What's happening with DOGE can be viewed as a
| hack of one of the biggest systems of all time. And it's
| ongoing. This article is chronicling part of that hack, and
| I can't believe the tech minds at HN aren't more interested
| in it.
| computerthings wrote:
| then why is it always the same handful of people saying
| that
| dang wrote:
| Posts about this from yesterday, with lots of additional
| links, if anyone wants to read about how we approach
| politics on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134514
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43134386
| aranelsurion wrote:
| I wonder, at the risk of turning HN to a Reddit clone,
| wouldn't it make sense to at least a have a few simple
| categories/tags here?
|
| Seems to me most people want to filter HN on "purely tech",
| "tech-adjacent news" (incl. politics) and
| "startups/business". Maybe if we had something like 3-5
| folders to put content here, everyone would be happier.
| dang wrote:
| I've been posting a lot about this lately. Here are some recent
| posts:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130700
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130063
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093299
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051836
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
|
| If you (or anyone) will read some of those and follow some of
| the links in them, you should get answers to all the common
| questions about this. If, after that, you have a question that
| hasn't been answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
|
| (Plus I'd like to know what it is! It's been a while since I've
| heard a new one.)
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I'd be glad if you'd do something about the influx of trolls,
| like maybe requiring a few submissions before allowing
| comments. Right now it's easy to create an account and then
| just post slurs on 30 or 40 threads before getting shadow
| banned (and those of us who have showdead turned on still get
| to see it).
| alecco wrote:
| > I'd be glad if you'd do something about the influx of
| trolls
|
| Mate, with all due respect, but the first few pages of your
| recent comments are mostly in US politics threads.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=anigbrowl
|
| I understand you must be upset. But a bunch of us don't
| care anymore about another country's internal stuff. It's
| not even worth the schadenfreude. For us it's been a clown
| show for a very, very long time. Remember weapons of mass
| destruction? Remember when one side raised the alarm on
| electronic voting and then 15 years later it was the other
| side, and then 4 years later back to the first side?
| Remember the massive bailouts, the Tea Party, and Occupy
| Wall Street? Remember Epstein? Borderline fascist pro-
| American exceptionalism Hollywood? Then ultra-woke self
| hating Hollywood? It's like a bad soap opera where the
| audience is numb to any further plot twist. Whatever
| happens, happens. Good luck. But please let us have this
| last forum not tainted with US politics. I'm sure there's
| plenty of welcoming threads on reddit, Facebook, X/BlueSky,
| and even YouTube comments.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Mate, with all due respect, but the first few pages of
| your recent comments are mostly in US politics threads._
|
| Simply not true.
| dang wrote:
| Who posted slurs on 30 or 40 threads before getting banned?
|
| If you're talking about the account you mentioned at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143257, that account
| was banned from the day they started posting, and not one
| of their comments was ever publicly visible.
|
| Yes, 'showdead' means you're signing up to see, among other
| things, the worst that the internet has to offer. I
| explained that in my other reply to you:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143611.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Can you not with these 'give me examples and we'll take a
| look at it' responses? You know as well as I do that
| there's a lot of driveby abuse accounts - anyone with
| _Showdead_ turned on can see as much. Perhaps you could
| speak to the remedy I proposed instead.
| alecco wrote:
| This is starting to look like a lost battle. Can we have a
| "US Politics" filter at least? Thanks.
| romaaeterna wrote:
| US debt is 124% of GDP. That's not as high as UK debt after WWII,
| 270%, which impoverished the country that had been at the top of
| the world. But combined with an aging population that has more
| people than ever hailing from the historically low-achievement
| global south, you can expect some standard of living adjustment
| to occur. Your grandparents had a house by your age, and the
| economic ability to raise a family. You get to slave for an
| apartment and a wife who works for another man. Historically,
| there were names for that economic arrangement and the class of
| people who were condemned to it.
|
| That Trump I and Biden did not have an effort like DOGE (which
| does not have Congressional support and therefore should not yet
| be enough to give serious people hope) shows how fundamentally
| unserious both of those administrations were. I hope that Musk
| can find a way to make it successful somehow. But if he does, it
| will break 1000x the number of eggs that you've seen him breaking
| so far.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| I love this reply. It's lots of serious words about the debt,
| and it ignores that Trump and the R party are currently trying
| to balloon the debt for their tax breaks.
| romaaeterna wrote:
| In fact the reply specifically criticizes Trump I, the
| administration that passed those tax breaks.
|
| Whether you consider yourself either a Democrat or a
| Republican, this is not a problem that continued party
| politics can solve.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| I see one side curbing the debt and one side ballooning
| it... definitely a both sides issue!
| belter wrote:
| > Whether you consider yourself either a Democrat or a
| Republican,
|
| Facts don't bend to party lines, and I pity those who let
| political loyalty eclipse objective reasoning.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop using HN primarily for political
| battle? You've been doing this a ton lately, as well as
| breaking the site guidelines in other ways. Regardless of
| how right you are or feel you are, this is not what HN is
| for, and we end up banning accounts that keep doing it
| (regardless of what their politics happen to be).
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=co
| mme...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| p.s. see also
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43141858
| belter wrote:
| > You've been doing this a ton lately, as well as
| breaking the site guidelines in other ways.
|
| You can't throw an accusation like this with further
| substantiation. I come to respect your difficult work,
| but this comment is a huge disappointment.
| belter wrote:
| Inflation and the US bond market will quickly sort this out.
| It is going to be beautiful and terrifying at the same time,
| the same way a cosmic collision is.
| romaaeterna wrote:
| Quickly? Countries that get into really serious debt
| problems more often never seem to come out of the
| catastrophe. This is generation-ruining stuff.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| Almost every presidency has taken more or less responisble
| effors to minimize spending. But they werent aimed at people
| who had prosecuted those in power, targetted at regulation
| agencies for the president's oligarch cronies, racially
| targetted, or driven by outsiders with no experience:
|
| Initiated under President Jimmy Carter in 1977, Zero-Based
| Budgeting (ZBB) required agencies to justify their budgets from
| scratch rather than just adjusting from the previous year.
|
| President Ronald Reagan pushed for privatization, deregulation,
| and reduced federal spending.
|
| The Grace Commission (1982-1984), led by businessman J. Peter
| Grace, was tasked with identifying inefficiencies in
| government.
|
| In 1993, President Bill Clinton launched the National
| Performance Review (later renamed the National Partnership for
| Reinventing Government), led by Vice President Al Gore.
|
| The NPR aimed to make government "work better and cost less" by
| cutting red tape, streamlining bureaucracy, and increasing
| customer service.
|
| Key successes included shifting more government services
| online, consolidating purchasing, and reducing federal
| workforce size.
|
| Launched by President George W. Bush in 2001, the President's
| Management Agenda (PMA) focused on:
|
| Strategic management of human capital
|
| Competitive sourcing (increasing private-sector competition for
| government contracts)
|
| Financial performance improvements
|
| E-Government expansion (improving federal websites and online
| services)
|
| Budget and performance integration
|
| 2010s: DATA Act & Digital Transformation
|
| President Barack Obama signed the DATA Act (2014), which aimed
| to improve transparency and accountability in government
| spending.
|
| Obama also created the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and 18F,
| teams dedicated to modernizing government technology.
|
| The Trump administration's PMA (2018) emphasized IT
| modernization, data transparency, and a shift to "shared
| services", where multiple agencies use the same administrative
| systems.
|
| The Biden administration has continued these efforts, focusing
| on AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation, as well as
| improving citizen-facing services like healthcare and tax
| processing.
| cuuupid wrote:
| I think impartial observers have not spent time in actual
| government bureaucracy. Basically everything will seem like
| "they're cutting something important!" Or "they're stopping
| critical research!" because every government contract needs
| justification; so naturally they will all sound good. The data
| and accounting itself is such bad quality in all cases that it is
| impossible to be perfect at this; there are entire industries
| dedicated to simply analyzing and tracking contracts and
| spending. None of them are above ~90% accurate. Many "analysts"
| born over the last couple weeks are talking about things they
| know nothing about; for example measuring savings off calls on
| BPAs or IDIQs is silly because a call = spent money. You cannot
| save money you have already spent, but you can stop the vehicle.
|
| I'm not saying DOGE is definitively good or even that they are
| going to actually accomplish their mission (probably their cuts
| will become a piggy bank that gets raided by OTA's at the end of
| the fiscal year). But it is absolutely true that the federal
| government is endlessly wasteful; it's insane watching everyone
| around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually
| efficient.
|
| What is on paper for government contracts is totally different
| from reality. Most of these programs accomplish nothing, are
| totally un-utilized, filled with employees who literally do not
| show up to work.
|
| I could write a novel with examples but here are some notable
| anecdotes:
|
| - Once, I built an intelligence solution for a large-ish
| intelligence program within a civil agency. After 6 months it was
| not used once but cost the government a cool ~12M$. Only after a
| full year did the program leadership finally take a look and
| discover, wait a second, none of these people have worked more
| than a week total in the past year. Only half got laid off, the
| rest are still gainfully employed elsewhere in the government.
| Many such cases!
|
| - I'll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let's talk
| about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir's
| contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average
| case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several
| contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive
| contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that
| replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound
| amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what
| your tax dollars are being used for!
|
| - Dozens of cases of the government spending on "XYZ tool" that
| sounds super critical. In reality they are paying $12M for a
| postgres database and an extremely basic data entry UI on top.
| Also, I can't believe I am about to defend Sharepoint, but
| realistically something like tracking 10 SIM cards can go in an
| excel spreadsheet and doesn't need a $12M "inventory tool."
|
| - Many cases of projects investigating bird flu in depth and
| tracking its spread as early as 2022. You would think this is
| critical with bird flu being a thing right now; however none of
| these $20M+ contracts have accomplished much at all.
|
| You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They
| essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and
| utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the
| same. The only way to go from GS-12 to GS-13 to GS-14 to GS-15 is
| just to spend recklessly. They are experts at justifying their
| budget and navigating internal hierarchies. However bad your
| experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x
| worse.
|
| (Disclaimer: "government" above refers to civil, exclusive of
| DoD)
| chillingeffect wrote:
| Great info thanks! Frustrating that we don't see anyone
| declaring victory by cutting off Palantir contracts.
| cuuupid wrote:
| It's probably a lot of things causing that:
|
| - new age defense tech companies band together pretty tightly
|
| - you can cut 10 Palantir contracts and save $200M but then
| you're stuck with the existing tools (Sharepoint+PowerBI or
| Salesforce+Accenture) that are usually super shitty and 1-2B$
| contracts vehicles for SI
|
| - Palantir actually has really low revenue, as recent as 4
| years ago they would have often qualified as a Small Business
|
| - if you cut down entire lines of effort, sweep out the legs
| from under an entire program, lay off bureaucrats, etc. you
| can stop more stab wounds and stem bleeding; this is an okay
| step 1
|
| Ironically the easiest way to quickly fix the deficit is
| actually to spend money. Most government employees are
| contractors because a GS-15 can earn maybe 150k while a
| contractor translating to only a GS-13 can earn 200k while
| their agency charges the government 600k a head. So if you
| raise the GS payscale to be competitive with the market, you
| can attract better talent that is willing to actually work.
| Then it is easy after a year to layoff 90% of the old
| bureaucracy with 0 risk as everything is appropriately
| staffed. Then you can cancel all the PWS contracts. By napkin
| math this would account for a cool ~$1T over 4 years.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| That didn't happen. Palantir Has not currently lost any
| contracts. They lost stock value.
| TomK32 wrote:
| Very nice examples, but why then doesn't DOGE go through every
| project? Why did Trump end all DEI contracts, why cause the
| disruption by freezing all outgoing money, why fire the
| Inspector Generals that are inspecting their agencies for
| waste, why fire all probationary workers, and why the fuck do
| they want to mess with the IRS, the one agency that brings
| money in at a very successful rate?
|
| Clearly no one at Musk's DOGE has spent time in actual
| government bureaucracy.
| cuuupid wrote:
| These are good questions that are easy to answer once you've
| spent time in gov:
|
| - it is very hard to go thru every project and generally not
| worth it, it seems like they are sorting by contract vehicle
| size. there are 120k+ contracts spit out by the government
| every fiscal year alone so this is a monumental effort
|
| - the DEI programs are probably a PR thing, generally
| speaking though they accomplish essentially nothing; I would
| probably go further though and roll up any program staffed by
| less than 10 people, then furlough 20% of the workforce under
| the larger program
|
| - not all outgoing money has been frozen, idk how this rumor
| got started, it's very specific and generally just foreign
| aid. this is part of trump's campaign promise so while I
| don't agree with it and it is probably going to shatter US
| hegemony, it is also what people voted for. the government is
| still spending tons of money, we are still doing more in
| depth tracking but it seems like only a 3-4% decrease overall
|
| - the OIGs deserve to be fired they have not been able to
| stem any underlying issues for years, the outrage here is all
| manufactured. let me ask you this, if you hired an accountant
| and for the last 10 years they can neither tell you how much
| money you are spending nor find savings, are you going to
| keep that accountant?
|
| - the IRS is not really efficient! first of all a majority of
| their audits are on the bottom 80% of taxpayers. yes of
| course the top 20% are still overrepresented correctly, but
| they are actually losing money for every audit they conduct
| on the bottom 80%. estimates are around 0.96$ per dollar with
| ~6k$ per audit, so they'd save $240 per audit they skip on
| the bottom 80% of taxpayers. it's true they recover 6$ on
| average for every dollar spent on the top 20% which cost
| averages out to a little over 3$ recovered per dollar;
| however this is actually not much money, around $30B a year
| total. for such a massive agency and mission they do a pretty
| terrible job, and is very warranting of disruption
|
| People are being gaslit into thinking the government is
| efficient; in reality it is endlessly bloated.
| TomK32 wrote:
| DEI is not just a PR thing, it forces employers to look at
| places for candidates they haven't looked before. Not
| surprising that white women are those who benefit the most
| from DEI. Even one JD Vance, as a military veteran,
| profited from a DEI program at Yale
| https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/feb/19/ask-
| politifac...
|
| If outgoing money isn't frozen, why do farmers not receive
| money for the binding contracts why fullfill for the
| government. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/usda-freezes-
| farmer-funding...
|
| The IGs have be fired in a very specific way that involves
| informing Congress. It was not done correctly. https://en.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_... Cardell
| Richardson was in office since only May, don't know about
| you, but I'd give a new IG a year to get his ship running
| smoother. But looking at his picture I see why he was
| fired...
|
| Regarding the IRS, well then we can expect that from now on
| only the rich people will get audited?
| cuuupid wrote:
| Government contract vehicles are not binding, call orders
| are but can also be cancelled and provisions are made for
| doing so. You're pointing to one hyper specific example
| of cuts as frozen spending; it is easy to confirm
| billions have been spent in the last week alone. There is
| also a case to be made for malicious compliance in many
| cases with cuts. It sucks these farmers aren't getting
| paid, but this is not an uncommon occurrence and if they
| truly are owed money they will eventually be receipted or
| they will be able to sue under FAR provisions.
|
| Firing IGs without notice isn't great but if Congress has
| an issue with it they are free to take it up. I'm not
| sure why that is relevant to whether or not IGs should be
| fired.
|
| Cardell was an IG for literally two decades. This is like
| saying a SWE at Facebook for 20 years who now works in
| Meta's VR division has only been a SWE for 1 year.
|
| OIG at Department of State especially, among all OIGs,
| deserves mass layoffs. The track record of that office is
| the absolute worst.
|
| It is also typical for SES to get rotated out and
| replaced during any new administration. 1-2 years in
| office is totally fair game as not many make it past 3.
|
| Regarding the IRS, that's a campaign promise Trump made
| and seems to be keen on with his ERS plans. However I
| doubt it will come to fruition or have meaningful impact,
| the IRS is hard to disrupt due to longstanding
| relationships with Congress.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > not all outgoing money has been frozen, idk how this
| rumor got started, it's very specific and generally just
| foreign aid
|
| No, that's absolutely not true. My partner is the
| accounting manager for a university. All their access to
| federal funding was turned off for a couple of days, and
| several grants (which they could draw from and get
| overnight) have not shown up in several weeks (specifically
| there are some that even remotely hint at DEI, that the
| university now expects will never be fulfilled).
|
| It's not just "foreign aid".
| sxyuan wrote:
| You really think that reducing IRS funding will reduce
| audits on the bottom 80%, and not the top 20%? If you're
| going to go around telling people they've been gaslit
| (using a straw man, I might add), you might want to check
| your own biases first.
| umanwizard wrote:
| It's absurd to say anything is "what people voted for" in a
| system where only the votes of about 5 out of 50 states
| matter.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Trimming down a bureaucracy is a good example of Gall's Law:
| "A complex system that works is invariably found to have
| evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system
| that doesn't work cannot be patched up to make it work. You
| have to start over with a working simple system."
|
| The usual reason for this is simply _dependencies_. At some
| point in time, somebody took a working system, had some extra
| budget, and then invented a process that took the existing
| system as an input and produced some marginally useful work.
| But then next year, the new process was part of the working
| system, and they had more budget, and they added more roles
| and processes based on its output. Now you can 't take it
| away: regardless of how marginally useful it was last year,
| everything built on top of it will fail. That $10M contract
| with one user might have just one user, but that one user
| might be the crucial communication link that determines the
| budget for a 1000-person department. You might even have a
| contract with _zero_ users, but without auditing the inner
| workings of the whole department, how do you _know_ it has
| zero users and won 't just break everything when you
| terminate it?
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| [flagged]
| cuuupid wrote:
| Analyzing this is my job and one of the main functions of the
| startup I founded!
| yodsanklai wrote:
| All organizations are inefficient. My company would send people
| across the world in business class for a few meetings they
| could do remotely without problem. I'm pretty sure everyone
| could come with many anecdotes of waste in the private sector.
| I also worked in the public sector (not in the US) and frankly,
| I think it was pretty efficient. Most employees were competent
| and weren't paid very well.
|
| The problem with reducing costs with a heavy hand is that you
| will cut things which are actually useful. And probably, the
| saving will be very little compared to the overall budget. I
| think DOGE is primarily a demagogical operation.
| uses wrote:
| Even if you're 100% correct, these aren't the right people and
| these aren't the right methods. Completely the opposite
| actually.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Exactly. They exploit people like the one you're responding
| to as mouthpieces for their broader campaign against the
| institutions that regulate their businesses. As long as they
| can claim they've stopped some money from being "wasted,"
| these people will look the other way and let them operate
| unchecked.
|
| Trump and Musk are both petty, vindictive, greedy, and
| narcissistic billionaires, known for grifting, deception,
| abuse, and ruthless behavior. How can anyone trust them?
| christophilus wrote:
| I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in
| VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few
| weeks. There's no way I could "work" like that. They had teams
| and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a
| normal startup. I've never seen such bureaucratic waste
| anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft
| look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them about
| it, and they shrugged it off by noting, "We are way more
| efficient than our competitors."
|
| I'm not defending DOGE's specifics or competence here, but do
| we need to clean house? Absolutely, yes.
| Neywiny wrote:
| That's why I like where I am. We usually work in really lean
| teams. One person in each role. And usually we're making a
| physical product so that's one mechanical, one electrical,
| one sideways, etc. Has its downsides but I don't feel like
| we're wasteful.
| aSanchezStern wrote:
| Yeah, if you're actually interested in government efficiency,
| Ro Khanna has been advocating for significant cuts to the
| federal budget in a way that actually improves efficiency.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I love the narrative that some how "startups are efficient".
|
| I've worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to
| "inefficiency", burned through money before they made money
| or were acquired.
|
| I've worked for one major success story, and that was the
| most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and
| the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons
| at scale to appear bigger and more successful prior to
| acquisition.
|
| So yeah , sorry, startups can be extremely inefficient too.
|
| I've also worked for some of the biggest tech companies or
| have friends that work there now, including Meta, they are
| extremely wasteful in nearly all cases. They just make a lot
| of money. Probably like the collective United States.
|
| The moral of my story is that efficiency isn't necessarily
| profitable, desired or even required.
|
| In my opinion DOGE is telling stories to distract and achieve
| other ends. Last I hear most of Musks companies actively
| received government welfare :)
| PeterStuer wrote:
| "You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs.
| They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with
| amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of
| reports doing the same."
|
| This x100. For all those lambasting the public sector,
| understand that its flaws are not because of the 'public' part,
| but because of the size of the organization.
|
| Private sector organization's inefficiency, fraud and waste
| also scales directly with their size.
| croes wrote:
| Imagine you know you are sick.
|
| Doge is the one recommending bloodletting and brushing with
| burning straw.
|
| The issue is rarely that neither side can name the problem but
| what is claimed to be the reason and therefore the solution.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > However bad your experience with corporate politics, know
| that government is 100x worse.
|
| Reading your comment I saw so many similarities to any large
| organisation which I worked for that I can't help but think
| it's simply on the same level.
|
| Hell, my first internship was 100% budget filler and, in line
| with my role, I was useless.
|
| Regarding inefficiency: I'm a contractor for a large
| organisation and have been for over three years now.
|
| My contract is up in a few months and by that time I will have
| a total of four years of cancelled projects under my belt. At
| least one of them started out as an Excel sheet and in truth
| could have remained so.
| TomK32 wrote:
| Why is this flagged?
| rvnx wrote:
| It's criticizing the self-proclamed god elon musk. It's
| unofficially forbidden here to criticize a few people (elon
| musk, sam altman, etc), and asslickers are flagging such
| threads.
| dang wrote:
| This topic is by far the most-discussed right now, and the
| opinions you favor (to judge by this post at least) have been
| by far the most-expressed. Yet somehow it still ends up
| feeling as if they are forbidden! I call this the "nobody
| goes there anymore it's too crowded" theory of HN threads (ht
| tps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| ).
|
| The phenomenon isn't as paradoxical as it seems (it has a
| fairly simple explanation), but it's still striking to
| encounter it.
| computerthings wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Since I just recently asked you to stop posting unsubstantive
| flamebait and you've continued to do it non-stop, I've banned
| this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's
| rules with.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| p.s. I suppose I'd better add that (1) no, this has nothing
| to do with your political views, and (2) yes ban accounts who
| are doing the same thing with different politics. Oh and (3)
| yes, if other accounts keep doing this after we ask them to
| stop, we'll end up banning them as well.
|
| Macro trends notwithstanding (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRan
| ge=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), the amount of low-quality
| nastiness that HN has been hosting lately is a serious
| problem and we're not going to let it continue.
| computerthings wrote:
| You also said this
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113282 breaks site
| guidelines. You just call things "flamebait" and that's
| that.
|
| > no, this has nothing to do with your political views
|
| Who believes that at this point? Speak up.
|
| > Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
|
| If you want to order me to tolerate the fascism apologists
| has been having a field day on this site since over a
| month, you have to say that to my face. You do not have the
| personal capital or credibility to say "please". You made
| your bed, you sided with the anonymous, hooded
| executioners; we heard it the first time, now STFU already!
| And I'll speak my mind throttled to the showdead crowd, and
| if you make that impossible, _of course_ I 'll make new
| accounts. I'll make fake websites to have fake emails at
| JUST to not take orders from you.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Most of that user's comments seem substantive to me, even
| if they're not always agreeable.
|
| Maybe you should be focusing more effort on users like this
| one, who has been posing nothing but abuse for a _month_ :
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=13_9_7_7_5_18
|
| Sure their posts are hidden now, but why are they able to
| post at all? Why is anyone able to post like this? It's not
| good for the site, but it's endemic. Equating opinionated
| and acerbic comments like the one above with flamebait
| while saying and doing nothing about overtly abusive
| behavior makes no sense, and is not good for HN.
| dang wrote:
| > _Maybe you should be focusing more effort on users like
| this one, who has been posing nothing but abuse for a
| month_
|
| That account has been banned since the day it was
| created. Its comments have never been anything but
| [dead]. That's the maximum penalty that exists on HN.
| Several accounts related to that one (including, FWIW,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dangraper) are
| also banned. This is standard.
|
| (For readers who don't have "showdead" turned on in their
| profile: the account anigbrowl mentioned has been posting
| things like "Shut up, $SLUR", "Fuck off, $SLUR", and
| worse. They are banned and all their comments are killed
| automatically. This means that no one sees them unless
| they turn the 'showdead' setting on in their profile. Any
| user is welcome to turn that setting on, but please don't
| forget that if you do, you're signing up to see the worst
| that the internet has to offer on HN.)
|
| Banned accounts can continue to post, but their comments
| are killed by default. Why? Because otherwise they'd just
| create new accounts and pick up where they left off.
| Since new accounts are unbanned at first, there would be
| a time lag before we could catch those and ban them
| again. In the meantime, more abusive posts would get
| through.
|
| In other words, allowing banned accounts to post (but
| making their posts default-invisible) is the way to
| minimize their effect on a large open forum like HN,
| where there's no barrier to creating accounts. Attempting
| to restrict them further would just end up exposing more
| people to the abusive posts.
|
| HN would have ceased to exist long ago if we were "doing
| nothing about overtly abusive behavior", so I was a
| little taken aback at your assumption there.
|
| I agree, of course, that 13_9_7_7_5_18's posts were worse
| than computerthings's. That's why the former was banned
| immediately and the latter only after we warned them
| (many warnings, actually, if you count previous accounts
| that we banned) and only after they'd broken the site
| guidelines many times.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _In other words, allowing banned accounts to post (but
| making their posts default-invisible) is the way to
| minimize their effect on a large open forum like HN,
| where there 's no barrier to creating accounts.
| Attempting to restrict them further would just end up
| exposing more people to the abusive posts._
|
| But maybe there should be some friction to creating
| accounts, like requiring a few worthwhile submissions
| before granting commenting privileges (which is already
| how it works with downvoting and flagging), or revealing
| the email addresses of persistently abusive accounts.
| Just wiping he accounts and forcing them to create new
| ones increases the friction, which lowers the incentive
| to keep doing it.
|
| _HN would have ceased to exist long ago if we were
| "doing nothing about overtly abusive behavior", so I'm a
| little taken aback at your assumption that we were doing
| nothing about these._
|
| But you're not, really. Shadowbanning abuse accounts with
| a keyword filter is the weakest possible response, and
| that's why there's an endless influx of them. Since you
| can't really impose consequences (because usage is
| anonymous, any email address will do and VPNs make it
| impossible to track abusers), there should be some more
| friction to make casual abuse a less attractive pastime.
| tptacek wrote:
| Can I add: being disagreeable is a _bigger_ problem on
| threads like these than it is on threads with less
| volatile subjects.
| alecco wrote:
| I hope all this is not taking a toll on you. Stay healthy,
| Dang. You are doing a very good job. You can't make
| everybody happy.
| neilyio wrote:
| This whole place only stands up because of dang. Someday
| (too) soon, AI moderators will be all we have to keep the
| peace in our forums... and dang is our most precious
| training resource. I'm grateful he's so transparent in
| explaining his process.
| dang wrote:
| I answered this here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43142645.
|
| If you take a look at the links there, and still have a
| question that hasn't been answered, I'd be happy to take a
| crack at it.
| wdb wrote:
| Roughly 40 years of hard work of some entities, finally getting
| somewhere. Worrying and hope it doesn't further spread to Europe.
| mlnj wrote:
| Another thread getting flagged:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43138522
| ck2 wrote:
| and isn't annual budget $2,400 billion?
|
| so basically without caution or care
|
| or actually evaluating gains vs investments just slash and burn
|
| scorched earth, destroying lives
|
| to save 55 out of 2400 billion?
|
| which might only really be 7 billion "saved" ?
|
| How about the $10 million per month to go play golf?
|
| Or $20 million to watch half the superbowl and leave?
| projectileboy wrote:
| Frankly, this doesn't matter. What matters is that an unofficial
| agency of the executive branch is deciding unilaterally - with no
| oversight - to stop payments that were voted on by Congress. Even
| if Musk and team were geniuses and doing brilliant work, it would
| be outside the rule of law.
| munchler wrote:
| It still matters. In addition to just being criminals, now we
| know that they are also incompetent.
| krapp wrote:
| People already knew Trump was incompetent, other people just
| called it "Trump Derangement Syndrome."
|
| People already knew Musk was incompetent, other people just
| called it "Musk Derangement Syndrome"
|
| People were saying DOGE was full of incompetents prior to
| this, simply judging by their methods (or lack thereof.) They
| were dismissed as partisans, or using whatever thought-
| terminating cliche they have on hand.
|
| _Knowing_ this doesn 't mean a thing, no one is _doing_
| anything about it.
| rayiner wrote:
| DOGE is not stopping specific payments that were voted in by
| Congress. It is stopping payments and grants where Congress has
| voted the agency general budget authority with only loose
| guidelines. For example, the appropriations bill for USAID
| allocates $3 billion and says basically "use it for foreign
| development."
|
| Congress never voted for say DEI programs in Serbia:
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14344255/trump-
| mill.... That would of course never make it through Congress.
| Some Kamala Harris supporting bureaucrat in USAID made that
| call, and the new President absolutely can decide to override
| that.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Congress is well within its rights to delegate such
| authority.
|
| _That would of course never make it through Congress._
|
| Counselor, you know better than to beg the question like
| that. It's disappointing to see such an intelligent person
| resort to such fallacious arguments.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Congress is well within its rights to delegate such
| authority.
|
| Right, Congress told the executive "here's three billion
| dollars, spend it on foreign development." That means the
| executive decides how that money will be spent. It is
| entirely within its rights to cancel particular grants.
| Though eventually it will have to seek rescission as to the
| $3 billion if it doesn't use all the money. That's a long
| ways away.
|
| And I'm quite confident I'm not going out on a limb when I
| say line items for "DEI in Serbia" would never make it
| through congress.
| javagram wrote:
| If DOGE is going to spend the USAID-allocated billions on
| some other foreign development aid, they are saving zero
| money. Their claims of cost saving contradict a defense that
| they aren't violating the spending laws passed by Congress.
| wnevets wrote:
| These criminals don't care, their goal is to spread FUD then rob
| the tax payers.
| jmward01 wrote:
| People aren't voting for what benefits them which means we are
| now in post policy politics. That means that what matters is the
| messaging and not the actual things done or the impact of those
| things on people. This leads to doing things that you have the
| ability to message the way you want and not doing things that
| help people. The MAGA crowd figured this out and figured out that
| angry yelling is the easiest message out there.
|
| This is why democrats lost. They kept trying to have policy
| discussions about how to run the country along with ways to
| implement policy tied to impact on people, but that is hard to
| message. The MAGA crowd just finds things they can yell about. By
| the time impact happens they just yell about something else,
| louder and the people being hurt are just ignored.
|
| The discussion about how much money is being saved/spent/etc is
| basically meaningless in post policy politics. The average person
| can have a massive drop in life expectancy and quality of life
| and it won't impact their voting so why does it matter how and
| where government spending happens? The sound bite is all that
| people are looking at and because of that DOGE is a huge success
| for those using it to get what they want.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I don't really see a remedy for this behaviour too. It's quite
| horrifying. Like being strapped into a plane heading for the
| ground.
| ruraljuror wrote:
| Keeping Musk's interests in mind helps clarify what's going on.
| Scorching earth and constantly lying is the playbook for
| dismantling agencies with oversight into the companies he runs
| and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors (e.g.
| pulling the ladder up behind him after the DoE's Tesla loan). The
| Canada/China tariffs will cripple other automakers who depend on
| trade while Tesla's integrated manufacturing chain will leave
| them immune and provide a massive advantage. I don't see any
| reason to put any stock into any motivation DOGE may have toward
| increasing governmental efficiency, it is a purposeful
| distraction.
| timewizard wrote:
| > and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors
|
| Why are government agencies picking winners and losers at all?
|
| > pulling the ladder up behind him after the DoE's Tesla loan
|
| And no other automaker has ever received a loan from the US
| government?
|
| > integrated manufacturing chain
|
| Where do the batteries come from?
|
| > it is a purposeful distraction.
|
| Much like the posted article. They want to make the claim that
| DOGE can't even estimate this properly, while they themselves
| admit, they can't even estimate this properly. Meanwhile we're
| two months into the administration and reported errors are
| being corrected on the website.
|
| I don't feel that this is genuine reporting on an issue. This
| is disingenuous mud slinging. Which of course, since Hacker
| News feels slighted by Elon Musks' politics, they're going to
| eat up uncritically.
|
| Sad what this place has become.
| ruraljuror wrote:
| >> and agencies that promote potential growth of competitors
| > Why are government agencies picking winners and losers at
| all?
|
| Not sure how you got from my statement about promoting
| competition to the govt picking winners and losers.
|
| > And no other automaker has ever received a loan from the US
| government?
|
| My point was that Musk through Doge is trying to make it more
| difficult for automakers to get loans in the future, after
| Tesla has already benefitted from them. For some reason you
| misconstrue my point.
|
| > Where do the batteries come from?
|
| Did a quick search and they are manufactured in plants in
| China, Nevada and Germany.
| dimal wrote:
| Focusing on what's being cut and whether the cuts are "right"
| misses the point. The richest man in the world bought himself a
| department in the US government and now has free will to run
| amok. Our country has been an oligarchy for a while now, but it
| was behind the scenes and there was some hope of dialing it back,
| however slim. Now it's nakedly out in the open. What if this kind
| of shit becomes the new normal? We've been worried that Trump
| will become a dictator, but this almost seems worse.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Except, these are not mistakes. This is every single Musk's
| company modus operandi.
|
| Completely made up or inflated numbers, unrealistic timelines
| etc. Customers or investors buying into it, but if you look under
| the hood, outside of government subsides and contract, there is
| pretty much 0 money made from ALL of his businesses.
|
| He's just using the same playbook now, except when people will
| realize that the 5000$ DOGE checks are bullshit (btw, 5000 x
| ~150M taxpayers = 750 Billion $...) they may finally wake up.
| adrr wrote:
| They won't be able to cut checks unless congress approves.
| They'll say they will cut checks, get sued and lose. They'll
| blame the judicial system and it will probably be a pretense to
| undermine that branch of government.
| sxyuan wrote:
| For those who want to have a substantive discussion on the
| federal budget and believe these cuts are justified, I have a few
| questions (putting aside questions of constitutionality for this
| thread):
|
| 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control. How
| do you square that with the fact that spending as a percentage of
| GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the historical average
| going back to at least the 1970s, with the main deviation in the
| past few years coming from the after-effects of the pandemic? [1]
|
| 2. Federal spending largely falls into a few categories: taking
| care of the elderly (36%), defense and veterans (20%), taking
| care of the poor or disabled (22%), and interest on existing debt
| (13%). [2] This adds up to 91% of the budget. The US population
| is aging, which means that 36% slice is going to naturally grow.
| What do you think should be cut, and how?
|
| 3. The US pays far more for health care (28% of the budget if you
| include Medicare) and with worse outcomes on average. Why
| shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on the
| chopping block?
|
| 4. Corporate tax receipts have been steadily falling as a
| percentage of GDP. [3] Why shouldn't corporations (that benefit
| from a healthy and educated workforce, a safe and secure
| environment, a working transportation system, etc.) be paying
| their fair share to keep the national debt in check?
|
| [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
|
| [2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-
| guide/feder...
|
| [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DUdb
| e40 wrote:
| The reason these questions are not front and center is that the
| people with money don't want to talk about them. And, the
| ensure we are kept busy with cheap gadgets, entertaining tv and
| movies and enough controversies that don't matter to last a
| lifetime.
|
| Alsr, the population is less educated and able to actually
| think critically about these issues than they used to be.
| noirbot wrote:
| Citation on that last point? The amount of people I know who
| were the first in their family to attend college, and
| sometimes even graduate high school, makes me question that
| people are measurably less educated.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Education + thinking critically and having educational
| credentials are not the same thing. At least, there needs
| to be some justification that they are related.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| I believe it's more the critical thinking piece that's the
| problem. And, perhaps there has not been a decline there,
| but we're just witnessing an unprecedented cultural and
| technology-fueled abuse of an existing lack of reasoning
| ability (expansive reach, bot farms, algorithms, conspiracy
| theories, etc).
|
| I mean, any actor--including state adversaries--can
| essentially run military-grade psyops on our population. In
| a "stable" environment, an inability to think critically is
| somewhat buffered and fallout is limited. But, in a hostile
| information space--intent on manipulating subjects for the
| destruction of their society--it's catastrophic.
| TOMDM wrote:
| You don't need their permission to have these conversations.
| latexr wrote:
| GP is not talking about permission. It doesn't matter that
| people _can_ have these conversations if they _won't_.
| thrance wrote:
| Yes you do, leftist talking point are systematically
| downranked on X.
| incognition wrote:
| 1. Yeah, they weren't good at reigning in spending in the 70s
| either.
| qgin wrote:
| Number 3 can't be overstated. Healthcare costs for the exact
| same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe.
|
| Global health insurance plans usually come in two flavors:
|
| 1. Global coverage
|
| 2. Global coverage excluding United States (for half the
| monthly premium of the first plan)
|
| The United States in an extreme outlier in terms of cost. This
| is separate from rationing care. This is separate from even
| population health (ex. higher obesity rates)
| firejake308 wrote:
| I know of at least one source arguing that in fact,
| population health (mainly obesity and gun violence) explain
| upwards of 70% of the difference in healthcare spending
| between the US and other developed nations.[1] To me, this
| seems like the most likely explanation because I believe we
| have pretty similar diagnostics and treatments to other
| developed countries, and I don't feel like a British doctor
| would give me any treatment that an American doctor wouldn't,
| and vice versa. As for the other 30%, I think it's probably
| due to inefficiencies in the insurance-based payment system
| and our patents lasting too long making drugs more expensive.
|
| [1] https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-
| wisdom-o...
| silvestrov wrote:
| It is very expensive to run the insurance companies, plus
| all the time the hospitals need to spend to talk/plead with
| the insurance companies.
|
| When you have the state as a single payer then all those
| expenses just vanishes.
| yadaeno wrote:
| Even the various single payer models in Europe and asia
| still have insurance companies.
|
| The difference is that in these systems the government
| has some stake -- whether it's providing the public
| insurance fund, or owning the company itself -- so that
| the government is financially incentivized to reduce
| costs.
|
| In the US case everything is private so all parties are
| incentivized to increase costs as much as possible.
|
| We really should to copy the Bismarck model. Public owned
| "public fund", heavily regulated private insurance and
| care.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| The us healthcare statistics include people paying out of
| pocket for care that is extremely expensive and literally
| not available anywhere else.
|
| A number of gene therapies are to expensive for any public
| health system, so are only available in the us.
|
| Needles to say they're experimental and carry lots of
| weight in a effectiveness vs cost analysis.
| apercu wrote:
| The U.S. has orders of magnitude of admin costs due to
| middlemen at every stage in health care. This should be
| obvious to HN types.
| harry8 wrote:
| 20 years ago I read a story about an obstetrician in the USA.
|
| His premiums at that time for professional negligence were
| $1m per year. He would have to keep paying those premiums for
| 18 years after his retirement.
|
| Same for every obstetrician.
|
| Professional fees then must be set to cover those insurance
| premiums.
|
| Has that changed for the better in the USA? Seems very
| unlikely to be the same in Europe.
|
| Obstetrics is obviously a illustrative case. How are the
| professional negligence premiums across the other
| specialties?
|
| Why does the effect of the US legal system never seem to come
| up much in the "US healthcare is insanely expensive"
| discussion? Is the effect of it really not significant?
| newzisgud wrote:
| The core question is less about the cuts themselves and more
| about if we the people are getting what we're paying for.
|
| 1) It kinda doesn't matter if it was caused by the pandemic or
| not, what matters is it needs to be fixed. Cherry-picking
| "since the 1970s" keeps us in difficult times energy-wise which
| we've attempted to correct for with more spending. If you go
| further back, our current ratio is what it was during WWII. Do
| you currently see federal government production as similar to
| during WWII, or are we not getting value out of what we're
| spending?
|
| 2) Assuming we all agree with those percentages, there's still
| an obvious 9% to look into. At these levels, that's real money.
| Also, certain initiatives are way more destructive than the
| spending would suggest, e.g. just about everything found out
| about USAID impacts hearts and minds, which impacts further
| negatively productive efforts outside the federal government.
|
| 3) Of course healthcare is on the list. Single-payer systems
| have their problems, free market systems have their problems,
| our current hybrid gets the worst of both. So it needs to be
| addressed, but perhaps not "first" because the answer here is a
| total rework, whereas there's plenty of other savings available
| right now as low hanging fruit.
|
| 4) Corporations do not pay corporate tax, their customers and
| employees do. Why should we burden our productive populous with
| tax on their income, tax on their workplace before they even
| get paid, inflation due to government spending, etc? If the
| argument is that tariffs are passed on to the customer, then
| corporate tax is definitely passed on to the customer and the
| employee. Additionally, corporations are not currently
| benefiting from a healthy workforce (look around), or an
| educated workforce (steady decline since the DoE was
| established), or a safe environment (go to SF), or a working
| transportation system in many cases. Again, are we getting what
| we're paying for?
| sxyuan wrote:
| Thank you for responding. I'm glad we agreed in principle on
| #3. I'm afraid we'll have to disagree on the other points
| though:
|
| 1. The claim that spending / GDP is at WWII levels is simply
| wrong: please take a look at the link in my original comment.
|
| 2. 9% isn't nothing, agreed. It does, however, pay for:
| scientific and other research (mostly medical, then much
| smaller slice for general science, then a much much smaller
| slice for everything else); keeping national parks running
| smoothly; keeping planes in the air; shutting down financial
| scams; and other wonderful things like that. Like you said,
| it comes down to what we get for that spending. I think
| there's bound to be some waste here and there, but I rather
| like all these things our tax dollars are paying for. Oh, and
| funny you mention USAID - I rather like the idea of feeding
| starving children around the world too, with a triple whammy
| of moral impact, winning hearts and minds in other countries,
| and putting money into the pockets of US farmers. Would love
| to hear properly sourced arguments on why USAID is as
| terrible as you seem to think it is.
|
| 4. You forgot about the shareholders. Corporations mostly get
| taxed on profits, not revenues, so it's hard to see how
| consumers are part of the equation. (We're not talking about
| consumption taxes, which tend to be state level anyway.) And
| employees pay income tax - the only part that the corporation
| covers is the employer end of payroll taxes. Wikipedia has a
| nice breakdown and comparison:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax
|
| (Yay, thanks to whoever saved the parent post so my thumb
| exercise wasn't entirely wasted.)
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| > Corporations do not pay corporate tax, their customers and
| employees do. Why should we burden our productive populous
| with tax on their income, tax on their workplace before they
| even get paid, inflation due to government spending, etc?
|
| I can answer this one: Corporations come with a veil, to
| shield risk takers from financial liability and ruin.
|
| That's normally good, as we want to encourage business.
|
| But the corporate veil was never intended as free pass to
| break or subvert the law; nor to undermine national
| interests.
|
| It's both the corporate veil and the sheer size of some
| multi-state and multinational companies: It takes
| considerable resources to police.
|
| A single multinational has the resources to undermine any
| state, with lawyers to delay; and lobbyists to influence
| legislators against their constituents interests. This
| undermines government credibility and rule of law.
|
| Look at the broadband fiber fiasco:
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/verizon-
| wiring-u...
|
| Or the garbage tier right to repair law, written up by the NY
| lobbyists:
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/29/23530733/right-to-
| repair...
|
| You say corporations are very productive, but these hidden
| costs are being born by everyone including the consumer.
|
| This why limited-liability businesses are expected to pay
| more: It takes a lot of money to provide necessary oversight.
| rKarpinski wrote:
| > 1. There are claims that federal spending is out of control.
| How do you square that with the fact that spending as a
| percentage of GDP is only slightly elevated compared to the
| historical average going back to at least the 1970s, with the
| main deviation in the past few years coming from the after-
| effects of the pandemic? [1]
|
| That might not be the best metric. Sure it's only "~13%" higher
| than the running average, but in that 55 year period only 4
| years (2008, 2020,2021,2022) had a higher spending to GDP ratio
| than 2024. Also those years all had ZIRP
| cassepipe wrote:
| ZIRP ?
|
| Ok, Zero Interest Rate Policy
| largbae wrote:
| I think these are good reasons why our fiscal picture is not
| hopeless, but not good arguments agains improving our
| efficiency:
|
| 1. Thank you for linking that graph, it seems to show that our
| spending is 25% higher than it was in the 1970s as a % of GDP
| (23 vs 18). But our level of _debt_ is approx 375% higher (as a
| % of GDP) than it was in the 70s (120% now vs 32% then). That
| doesn't sound like we are sustaining it well, and tht interest
| is compounding as we borrow to pay it.
|
| 2. The underlying assumption that makes this argument
| compelling is that every dollar being spent on these noble
| categories is being done efficiently. What if fixing healthcare
| costs cut them in half for the same effect? What if there is
| fraud to cut in the programs for the elderly? We should tighten
| these and prepare to pay more as we age.
|
| 3. Strongly agree and hope to see some action. It seems that
| fixing the incentives and inefficiencies of the healthcare
| system is the core mission of RFK Jr., despite all the vaccine
| FUD.
|
| 4. Strongly agree. I wonder if a VAT would be effective for
| this.
|
| [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
| JoshTko wrote:
| We all know what efficient healthcare systems should look
| like, there are a dozen countries with lower overall
| healthcare spend per capita than US with better outcomes.
| What specific skillset of RFK do you find as compelling
| evidence they they will be extract higher efficiency similar
| to these other nations?
| largbae wrote:
| I'm not sure I meant to take a mantle as RFK's personal
| champion, but my _hope_ comes from hearing his points on
| prevention and improving the quality of the food supply.
| The incentives of both the healthcare and food industries
| in the US seem to be misaligned with a healthy population,
| much moreso in the US than in other countries in the West.
| generalizations wrote:
| It doesn't look good for the quality of discussion here if the
| most substantive response to your questions was flagged &
| killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43143579
| sxyuan wrote:
| I agree. I actually typed up a whole response to that post
| (which I vehemently disagreed with, but appreciated
| nonetheless) but by the time I hit submit it was already
| dead. Vouching wasn't enough to bring it back. I understand
| the temperature is running hot, but I hope that at least on
| HN we can strive to have civil discussions about these
| issues. I say this even though I am personally quite
| distraught about the current state of affairs.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Since it's still accessible to read, I'd be eager to read
| your response
|
| EDIT: The response was saved from the dead, yay
| istjohn wrote:
| Long doesn't equate to substantive.
|
| Edit: I didn't flag it, to be clear.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Sure but parent said "substantive" so since you're implying
| it's not (but rather just long), I'd like to read why _you_
| think it wasn 't
| sxyuan wrote:
| Y'all, original poster here - please don't downvote or flag
| kill responses to this that are good-faith attempts to discuss
| the issue, even if the response seems misinformed to you. I
| don't think anyone will change their minds when that happens.
| int_19h wrote:
| FWIW many people who believe that federal spending is out of
| control would say the same about 1970s.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Where I grew up, federal spending has been out of control
| since the Spanish American War.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| > Why shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item
| on the chopping block?
|
| I don't understand this question: how can the private companies
| in the industry be placed on the chopping block? By outlawing
| them?
| sroussey wrote:
| Medicare?
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| The private industry fraud and overcharging that targets
| Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense has been long term problem.
|
| There are also outlier issues like being unvaccinated and
| unhealthy-lifestyles that tax payers are forced to pay for.
|
| I highly doubt DOGE is actually targeting these types of fraud,
| however.
| jimmar wrote:
| 1. US GDP estimated GDP in 2024 is $29 trillion. According to
| your first source, U.S. Federal Spending was 23% of GDP. If
| that were reduced to the 2014-2019 average of 20%, that would
| trim $870 billion from federal spending. That seems like good
| progress toward avoiding a potential debt crisis.
|
| 2. Reduce defense overall and make the process of getting money
| to the needy more efficient.
|
| 3. No comment. Healthcare is mess.
|
| 4. Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto
| consumers. I'm in favor of tax reform, but thinking that taxing
| corporations is a way to stick it to rich people is
| shortsighted, IMO.
| sxyuan wrote:
| 1. I actually mostly agree with you (and the other reply that
| said something along the same lines). IMO, the debt situation
| isn't great, and it's getting worse. Bringing down spending
| as a percentage of GDP doesn't necessarily require trimming
| the budget, though - it could also be done by keeping the
| budget flat and letting GDP growth catch up.
|
| 2. Personally, I'm not opposed to trimming defense spending.
| However, how do we square that with the current security
| environment (an increasingly antagonistic Russia, China,
| etc.) and the fact that defense spending is also essentially
| a domestic jobs program?
|
| 4. The share that corporations have been paying has been
| falling over time. I'm not saying we should stick it to rich
| people - but what about making corporate taxes more in line
| with what they've paid in the past, instead of having
| employees (those same consumers you're talking about) pick up
| the slack?
| everdrive wrote:
| It's also the case that even if you wanted to make the
| remaining few percent more efficient via spending cuts,
| randomly grepping through database entries and claiming success
| without any real understanding of what you're cutting is
| complete bullshit.
| balderdash wrote:
| The social security administration estimates ~$60b a year in
| fraud on ~$400b budget! [1] [2]. People can have a rational
| discussion as to where and how fraud and abuse are rooted out,
| but I have trouble understanding how people don't think it's an
| issue?
|
| [1] https://blog.ssa.gov/medicare-fraud-prevention-week/ [2]
| https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
| pstuart wrote:
| It is an issue and should be addressed. But it should be
| fixed, not burnt to the ground.
| sxyuan wrote:
| See my third point. :)
|
| Article from 2022:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/upshot/medicare-
| advantage...
|
| In short, yes there's fraud, yes it's a problem, and the
| biggest offenders are probably insurance companies. This
| shouldn't surprise anyone who has dealt with the US health
| insurance scam, er, I mean system.
|
| P.S. To clarify for others who may not bother to click into
| the links, the parent post mentions the social security
| administration but the numbers and sources are specifically
| referring to Medicare, which is what I'm responding to.
| heartbreak wrote:
| You linked to a blog post about Medicare fraud, not Social
| Security fraud.
| hnmullany wrote:
| That's because the original responder's data was about
| medicare fraud although the estimate was provided by the
| Social Security Administration
| taeric wrote:
| Medicare would not include SSN payments, though? With a quick
| search showing Medicare will have a trillion dollar budget.
| Feels like you are picking incompatible numbers to exaggerate
| a point.
|
| Fraud is also tough, as it is an optimization problem. You
| want the amount of fraud to be less than what it would cost
| to fight it more. Especially since a lot of mistakes are
| labeled as a type of fraud.
| apercu wrote:
| > 3. The US pays far more for health care (28% of the budget if
| you include Medicare) and with worse outcomes on average. Why
| shouldn't the health insurance industry be the first item on
| the chopping block?
|
| Because late stage Capitalism. Greed.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| 1. But debt as percent of GDP has been growing. Can't do that
| forever. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
|
| 2/3. If the US pays more for health care and gets worse results
| why should we give them more money?
|
| I don't think health insurance companies should be abolished by
| royal decree. I think the government should offer an
| alternative and when that alternative is 4x as dollar efficient
| the health insurance companies will die a natural death.
|
| 4. Your chart shows corporate tax rates have been flat for 50
| years. Seems fine?
|
| As an aside, I dislike the overemphasis on Federal spending and
| Federal income tax. The real question is federal+state+local
| spending and revenue.
|
| I wish as a society we could work backwards. What services do
| we want to provide? How much will that cost? How do we pay for
| it? We've turned into a culture where some people thinking
| spending is good solely for the sake of spending. When
| politicians trumpet how much money they're going to spend
| rather than the benefits they're going to be provide I get very
| sad!
| JackYoustra wrote:
| Rule of law is what allows us to grow. Acemoglu won a nobel prize
| showing that institutions cause growth. Destroy institutions and
| you'll undershoot potential.
| thrance wrote:
| Pet peave: there is no Nobel prize of economics, Aldred Nobel
| didn't include "economy" in his will. Instead there is a "Nobel
| Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences" whose purpose is to give
| credibility to the unscientific field of economics. The prize
| itself is mostly awarded to economically liberal economists and
| does not always represent the majority views in the field.
| wolfcola wrote:
| "mistakes"
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