DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes

I don't think the current admin codes Russian or NK as hostile states.

I fail to see how the cuts as being implemented actually make US citizens safer from Russia, Iran, China, and NK. Can you elaborate on how they do that?

The most obvious case is the CFPB, which returns roughly twice its cost to taxpayers. I would argue that's honestly very inefficient, I'd like to see the CFPB returning a multiple of its cost to taxpayers... but nonetheless it is obvious shutting it down will cost taxpayers more.

> It scales linearly because the same ratio of services to people continues

That would be scaling with population, not GDP.

> The payors and providers share the same incentive to raise rates because they each collect a percentage of premiums

This must be an oversimplification. Why would insurers ever reject a claim, or spend time negotiating lower rates, if they're only incentivized to see health costs increase?

Don’t worry, RFK will be gone in 6mo once the pharma lobbyists get through to Congress members if he touches anything that affects their profits.

Service delivery can be improved by advances in productivity for both public and private sectors equally - The difference is that the private sector is constantly focusing on reducing costs of the most expensive business areas. For most businesses this is operations/service delivery, and reducing these costs allows the business to extract higher profit and gain the flexibility to compete on price. Employees who deliver cost out effectively are also rewarded. There is risk but also high reward.

Government organisations don't have the same profit incentive as they aren't in a competitive market, nor are there any personal incentives for executives to achieve these efficiencies. Government does eventually implement productivity improvement however it lags behind the private sector, with investment in productivity only occuring once risk has effectively been eliminated.

I've worked in both sectors, and people working in each sector are equally frustrated with inefficiency and seek to improve things. The problem with government isn't really the people nor the agency nor the sector, it's that the organisation and it's people only gain rewards by improving the status of the politician running the agency.

Nowadays saying that $X billion is being spent is more important than whether it successfully achieved the outcome. The effect of this is that one politician can announce $X billion to more efficiently achieve the same outcome as another politician announcing $2X billion at half the productivity and the second politician sounds like (or can easily be spun to sound like) they are achieving more/ care more than the first. The end result is massive expenditure on very little.

The tax code can be looked at as written by the rich to pad their pockets. But it can also be looked at as the main lever by which the government manipulates us to get what it wants: affordable housing, high employment, cheap energy. There are a lot of real estate, business, and exploration / mining tax breaks presumably because the government wants to incentivize that activity.

The book “Tax Free Wealth” covers this and points out that the tax code looks pretty similar across all western countries when it comes to the way the activity the code is trying to stimulate.

I personally don’t like the tax code being used for such manipulations regardless of the motive behind it.

They absolutely benefit significantly more, from roads for shipping/traveling to educated workforce, to a more stable economy, more stable international trades, to a more stable electrical grid, plumbing, more stable buildings to house their business, and on and on etc… etc…

it’s absolutely wild to me how people fail to see how much more companies benefit from taxes.

GDP increases are generally measured in real (i.e. inflation adjusted) terms, so a doubling of rent costs don't imply a larger GDP. If we're talking nominal GDP, then I'd agree we should expect gov expense to increase as well.

To understand what's going on here, compare corporate income tax with VAT.

These are very similar taxes: A business takes its revenue and subtracts its expenses, the tax rate is applied to what's left. The distinction is that VAT is paid to the jurisdiction where the corporation's customers are, whereas corporate income tax is paid to the jurisdiction where the corporation files paperwork. It should be obvious what happens when you do the latter: International corporations start filing their paperwork in the countries with lower tax rates.

To fix this you need to tax corporations using a different kind of tax which is tied to some actual activity happening within the jurisdiction, which is what the US has been doing piecemeal rather than all at once, with corporate income tax playing a smaller role as time passes.

> Don't forget, a percentage of that GDP increase is just inflation.

By design, GDP measurements are adjusted for inflation, unless you're looking at 'nominal GDP' (which nobody does because it's pointless).

> Most people, as they get richer, want to have services increase, as they can afford to pay more

This makes sense. But I'm not sure how many people believe that they're getting what they pay for, esp when it's not actually paid for, but financed

Another factor is cost of debt. In a decreasing interest rate environment it's possible to run with increasing deficits without any major issues, but once you bounce off zero, even if thos deficits are not currently a problem, projections show that they will be.

spending doesn't take into account debt payments though, and those snowball.

I don't understand this logic.

For simplicity, imagine one program like food stamps. It costs X dollars per person on the program.

The cost of that program should scale with inflation and population. If taxes and government should scale with GDP, that implies either making more programs or expanding existing ones. As an example, you'd increase the amount of people eligible for food stamps as the population became wealthier.

I can understand that as an argument but implying that the government isn't growing because the relationship to GDP hasn't changed seems to prove the opposite to me.

The federal budget, if the size of government remained static, should be Inflation * Population increase, shouldn't it?

GDP is rising faster than inflation so the services that the government provides should take less, as a percentage, of the population's money.

Who said the problem is solely deficits? I don't think spending should just "scale" with anything and there is empirical evidence that that is a horrible way to run an economy.

You are literally just suggesting we spend more no matter what. Obviously, there is a massive difference in types of spending right? And we have an incredible amount of bad spending. In fact, in places like public education and health, we continue to spend more to get worse outcomes.

You're making large, sweeping generalizations and most of the positions espoused are more political than scientific.

> Scaling with GDP, rather than population, implies that government spending is scaling with the country's ability to provide services commensurate with prosperity.

This is only true if the value of government services increases over time and not just their cost. If GDP doubles and the government then spends twice as many real dollars to provide the same level of services as before, all you've done is cut efficiency in half.

There kind of is though. There are now grocery delivery services that amortize the cost of the trip by delivering groceries to multiple people, and self-driving cars.

Moreover, a major role of the government is record keeping, which computers have made dramatically more efficient. Many of those roles have in fact been replaced in the government, with the savings being reallocated to new spending rather than returned to the public. And many of them haven't been but could be; take any instance of something that could reasonably be done via a government website only the website doesn't support it or is broken so instead the government is still paying a large staff to do it manually.

Australians are more litigious than Americans, with similar insurance costs for doctors, yet our healthcare costs are still half of the USA's.

So insurance costs may be a factor, but its doubtful that its a large factor in healthcare costs, they largest factor is by far the public vs private system.

I experienced US healthcare when I went to visit a doctor in the US for a simple (obvious) ear infection. I was charged $600 USD for a five minute consult because the doctor wanted to milk as much $$$ from me as he could, giving me lots of unrelated/pointless blood tests (which were pointless because I was flying out the next day and wouldn't get the results).

In Australia it would have been a $65 fee paid by the government, and $10 for the antibiotics, around 1/10th of the US costs.

The problem in the US is that doctors and hospitals are incentivised to give patients unnecessary tests and medication, because it inflates their bills, and they make more profit.

I've noticed the same thing happening in Australia with private vets & vet hospitals because they are less regulated. They try and talk you into a lot of unnecessary procedures, test, and drugs because they make more profit, and the industry is not where near as well regulated as healthcare.

At least with a vet you can usually shop around, when you are sick often you cannot.

I would need to see a citation for this story. Medical malpractice/negligence premiums are very high - OBGYNs pay some of the highest rates. Just a few google searches shows that rates can exceed $200k (annually) in some locales in 2024.

So to claim in 2004 that there are doctors paying > $1m/year in malpractice insurance is at least an order of magnitude away from what casual googling discloses.

I agree that the whole system is fucked, but I would like to make sure we are working on a solid set of base facts.

I found this article [0] from the NYTimes in 2005 that highlighted a neurosurgeon who was paying >$200k/year in malpractice premiums around that time

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/business/behind-those-med...

> Obstetrics is obviously a illustrative case.

OBGYN is not an illustrative case, it's an outlier.

> How are the professional negligence premiums across the other specialties?

The malpractice insurance is about 1-3% of the cost. The physician and nurse salaries are about 15% of the cost in total.

The majority of expense goes towards prescription drugs, devices, and for the admin costs.

This was an argument in the 90s/early 20s. TX, where I live, implemented tort reform in 2003 to limit doctor's exposure, and decrease insurance costs.

It hasn't had much impact on costs:

https://healtheconomicsreview.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

If US healthcare is optimizing for outcomes, it’s doing a poor job and maybe we should optimize for something else. Our outcomes based on relative rating does not justify the additional cost.

That's the point of looking at global healthcare plans, which are giving two prices for the same person depending on whether they will or won't be in the US.

And while they aren't giving the same service, there isn't much evidence the service is necessarily worse. More healthcare doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes, it's not uncommon for more liberal treatment guidelines to only improve through statistical errors or to lead to compensatory idiopathic illness.

This is systematically incentivized in the US, where both the doctors (obviously) will be paid more for more/worse care, but also the insurers which have to follow the 80/20 or 85/15 rules and are therefore incentivized to increase costs to increase total profits, especially in places where they have little competition, or agreements with hospital systems to pay a similar amount to other insurers.

Additionally, the spurious nature of claims in the US system wastes massive amounts of resources where insurers (with their 15-20% of premiums) but also practitioners (sometimes even over 20%) spend their time just haggling over approvals instead of using a clear and deterministic system, which also causes knock-on consequences later.

I think you’d be surprised how little price competition there would be if everyone paid out of pocket. It won’t change insurance premiums; it won’t change the amount of investment (training and certification) needed to become a health care provider; it won’t change the price of advanced medical equipment; and it won’t change the price of patented drugs.

Before you conclude that the free market can solve everything, consider too that health care isn’t a typical service that follows ia supply/demand curve. The demand curve is practically vertical, especially when your life is on the line. You’re not going to shop around when your appendix is about to burst. Plus there are still high base costs, and scarcity (artificial or otherwise) of healthcare resources. And the monopolies granted to medical device and drug makers through the patent system keep prices high so the patentees can recoup their investments.

There is no easy way to solve this problem, despite breathless claims to the contrary that have been plaguing our airwaves since the 1980s.

This wouldn't work when you can't get an accurate, up-front price for anything, and all unexpected costs fall on the patient with no real recourse.

Why do Americans think competition on price is practical for health services? The most expensive services people receive tend to trauma care or for long term debilitating conditions. In both cases the ability to "shop around" is either literally impossible, or geographically limited (and the ability to travel is just another regressive tax).

>> Healthcare costs for the exact same care are 2x-3x what they are in Europe.

>And so are the salaries.

The original estimate was off by at least a factor of ten, so alas your comeback falls apart.

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.

> I believe we have pretty similar diagnostics and treatments to other developed countries

I don't know. I remember reading an MIT PhD thesis describing how Kaiser Permanente does autism diagnosis [0] – and comparing it to my personal experience of the same topic in Australia, it seemed significantly more rigorous – e.g. specialist centres that only do autism diagnosis, using the multidisciplinary team diagnosis model instead of the single clinician diagnosis model, use of research reliable examiners for ADOS (the training and validation process required to use ADOS in research settings is much more intensive than that required to use it clinically), etc. Now, the thesis does acknowledge that Kaiser is somewhat of an outlier in this regard compared to the US average (plus it is 10 years old so now so I don't know how things have evolved since), but I still get the impression that this highly rigorous approach to autism diagnosis is much more of a thing in the US than in Australia – and if that's true of autism, maybe it is true of other conditions as well.

[0] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/90070 – the first half of the thesis uses the pseudonym "Allied Health", but I know from other sources that "Allied"=Kaiser; the second half discusses Kaiser without any pseudonym

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.

> 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

I have my doubts. Over the last 50 years the ratio of US per capita health care costs and European per capita health care costs (or per capita health care costs for most of the rest of first world countries) has stayed about the same.

In other words, health care costs have risen at about the same rate throughout the first world over the last 50 years. So if in 1970 the US was paying say 3x per capita what some other country paid the US would still now be paying about 3x what they are now paying. Both would be paying maybe 35x now than they were in 1970.

Over that same time both US and European obesity rates went up, but they went up way more in the US. If obesity was a major factor driving health care costs then I'd expect US health care costs to be rising significantly faster than European health care costs.

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.

GP is not talking about permission. It doesn't matter that people can have these conversations if they won’t.

Yes you do, leftist talking point are systematically downranked on X.

If you don't believe me, open a new X account, navigate to the "for me" page and count the number of left-leaning tweets. The expected number is zero.

Education + thinking critically and having educational credentials are not the same thing. At least, there needs to be some justification that they are related.

The quality of high school educations have fallen, which is the most important to develop critical thinking. This is measurable when the education level of U.S. high school students is compared in global rankings.

On top of that social media has put people in echo chambers and force fed them outrage content. People who are outraged and surrounded by peers who are also outraged are less likely to think critically.

I personally think that the replacement of newspapers that invite critical thinking by yellow journalism and social media has had a more significant effect on critical thinking than the drop in education quality.

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.

This is an incredibly disingenuous to my post. The people MAKING these cuts have stated what I posted. My posting their own statements can not be considered disingenuous, only informative as it shows their goals and motivations. While my post might be inconvenient to those trying to relabel their goals/motivations, posting 'inconvenient' statements they have made as to their goal is not disingenuous.

Disingenuous would be more something like me posting Umberto Eco's item three on his list of the 14 Common Feature of Fascism:

3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the...

Sixty percent is high. So high, that it almost seems impossible. Can you provide some details? What's the breakdown?

> Perhaps you're constraining it specifically to 'insurance', rather than the only slightly broader question of private health coverage

Correct. Our major uses of our $4.9tn of annual healthcare funds are 31% to hospital care, 20% to physician and clinical services and 9% to retail prescription drugs [1]. Lowering that number begins and ends with better price transparency from and efficiency in hospitals and physicians' practices.

Our sources of funds are private health insurance (30%), Medicare (21%), Medicaid (18%) and out-of-pocket (10%). Within the context of federal spending, Medicare and Medicaid are relevant, as well as the price and utilisation of the aforementioned uses.

> You seem to be conflating corporations with wealthy people

I'm specifically saying these are separate, and that taxing the latter would strike me as fairer than raising taxes on McDonalds franchisees.

[1] https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf

> they seem to exhibit punitive behavior like this a lot less than their Republican counterparts

It's not about being punitive. It's about finding resources to deliver goodies to your voters. Democrats have plenty of spending priorities. They're also, at least now, cognisant of the electoral impact of inflation. That means no more trillion-dollar deficit packages, but finding places to cut. Republicans have the poor. Democrats had deficits; if they can't figure out how to pass tax increses on the wealthy or corporations, that only leaves cuts, and the first place to start is where people who will never vote for you (and are already turning out to the opposition) live.

> the whole “it would be political suicide” thing

It was political suicide because the 18% of Americans who are veterans turn out to vote, are seen sympathetically by other voters [1] and were often swing voters.

The last part was critical: veterans are already turning out, so offending them was less about turning out votes for your opponent than losing your own votes. But if they aren't voting for you [2], you aren't losing anything by them. Meanwhile, the resources they're getting could help you gain votes (or turnouts) with others.

[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1363-7.html

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/30/military-...

> No it hasn't. It rose until about 1980 (mostly until 1970), and it's been about the same for the past 45 years.

Yes it has. In 1980 it was 34.25%, in 2022 it was 36.25%.

> And yes, it rose 1925-1980 as we built the modern social services state. With social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and so forth.

US government spending on healthcare is about as most other developed countries yet they are able to provide universal or similar healthcare access. Americans spend that amount again privately on healthcare, and the result is worse outcomes in many objective measures of public health. Just one example since healthcare is one of the biggest expenditures. This is not a good thing.

The idea that "some government good" = "more government better" or "less government worse" is just not a sound argument. At all.

> This was a worldwide phenomenon too, not just the US. People asked for more from their governments. This is a good thing.

Not many Americans I know of asked to pay universal healthcare tier costs without getting universal healthcare. Not many asked to pay for forever-wars and interventions and meddling all over the globe.

> It does not look like it's currently trending upward, from your own data.

It does to me. The linear trend plotted from 1980 to 2022 does have it increasing too.

Bill Clinton had the "line item veto" which allowed presidents to get rid of things in bills (spending) they didn't like. Ultimately this power was rejected by the courts as unconstitutional. Congress is supposed to allocate and deal with spending.

This line item veto was supposed to stop congress people from attaching things into bills that just benefited their constituents (to get their vote).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto_in_the_United_S...

"Congress granted this power to the president by the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 to control "pork barrel spending", but in 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the act to be unconstitutional in 6–3 decision in Clinton v. City of New York.

The court found that exercise of the line-item veto is tantamount to a unilateral amendment or repeal by the executive of only parts of statutes authorizing federal spending, and therefore violated the Presentment Clause of the United States Constitution. Thus a federal line-item veto, at least in this particular formulation, would only be possible through a constitutional amendment. Prior to that ruling, President Clinton applied the line-item veto to the federal budget 82 times."

>It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution?

For starters, these people are in fact idiots. They randomly fired people at NNSA with virtually no warning. What the fuck? [0]

In response to your point: Why throw USDS in the trash? That was a great example of an effective, agile non-partisan tech workforce. [1]

Now federal workers are having to submit to political loyalty tests. [2]

Perhaps their true intentions here aren't really cost savings, if that isn't blatantly obvious already.

>We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, ...

That's like trying to cure cancer with cancer, but on the face of it and not in some clever cutting-edge way.

Actual solutions? Take highly effective organizations and copy them. USDS and JSOC come to mind.

I don't buy it. Shucks, we've exhausted every other method—therefore, the solution here is to hand over the reigns to immature, extremely low caliber people with conflicts of interest that are absolutely massive [3], and whose motivations are questionable at best?

Yeah, no thanks. I dislike government waste and inefficiency as much as the next person, but using the guise of cost cutting to rapidly install loyalists at critical power junctures isn't a good thing. Never mind the flagrant disregard for the law that's taking place as this is all unfolding.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298190/nuclear-agency-...

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/doge-engineering-director-resign...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/trump-loyalty-white-house-maga-ve...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/us/politics/elon-musk-com...

Simply audit defense spending. It's the vast majority of government spending and hasn't been auditable in ages.

> None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.

That's nonsense.

> There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.

Provide proof of this claim please.

Didn’t he fire something like 200,000 people?

None of the existing cuts target deregulating SpaceX/Tesla, and the proposed regulatory cuts affect everything across the board and not just Musk's companies.

When it comes to deregulation, we can pretend like this is new, or we can have an honest discussion and acknowledge deregulation in various forms has been a key component of the Conservative, Libertarian, and Liberal platforms for decades. Recently even the Socialist platform has adopted deregulation for key industries like housing and infrastructure.

You can both hate Musk and Trump (as both are demonstrably all of the things you said above) and acknowledge that ultimately what they are doing is the best progress we have had on this front in 20+ years. Regardless of how many bureaucrats parade on media claiming otherwise, we must not forget that the government is and has historically been incredibly inefficient, reckless with spending, and filled with endless waste. This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!

We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_. It is not perfect, nor is it optimal, but it is far better than the last 5 attempts.

It would of course be better if you stuck to known facts instead of rumors from anonymous people on X. But even if misuse of USAID money comes to light, which I’m sure there is, wouldn’t it be better to understand al the facts, and change course if need be?

The tactic right now seems to be to cause as much chaos as possible, to find and point to one silver lining and then to move on as quickly as possible. Ignoring all the irreparable harm caused along the way.

>Who are the “right people” who would’ve flagged and stopped $29 million in usaid funds going to destabilized the government in Bangladesh, or DEI projects in Serbia?

Congressional representatives. You can share what you know with your representative and ask they investigate. Congress regularly calls in bureaucrats to talk about budgets. If your case bears out, ask your members of Congress to propose amendments to the next budget cutting or fixing bad programs. And representatives very often add amendments targeting specific programs, or even sponsor such bills. We don't often hear about them because they're not sexy enough for news.

The goals toward which we spend tax dollars must be debated by representatives of the people. The executive branch will then be told the goals, the structure, the controls, and the budget. If the executive agrees, they sign the bill. Afterwards, the executive's power is in deciding who will carry out the goals and how to adapt to the situation on the ground while staying within the boundaries of the law. If the law is too restrictive, the executive can talk to Congress.

What must not happen is an executive deciding to ignore a law voted on by the majority of Congress and signed by a president. That's not an executive power, that's just an unconstitutional power grab. If we allow that, there's basically no point to Congress.

https://youtu.be/O4xHdUOI7ag?si=RPBNdpAiYHuYe7rf

I would strongly recommend listening to Rory Stewart's commentary in the first half of this podcast about the function and role of USAID as an expression of soft power.

Actually exit polls say that most people who voted for Trump did so because they thought he would lower grocery prices, not because they thought he would make the government more efficient. So far grocery prices have risen significantly under his administration. As far as I know there is no evidence that there was a program to destabilize bangladesh that doge cut, that appears to be another case of doge not really understanding what it was cutting. But if you have a credible reference on that which isn't just saying "Elon said so", I'd love to see it.

Here's what the "adults" in Congress are doing now:

"The newly released House GOP resolution proposes a $4 trillion debt ceiling increase while allocating $4.5 trillion in new deficits for the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee."

Even if DOGE finds $29 billion in waste, it would essentially be a rounding error compared to those numbers.

SpaceX is a government contractor, immediately presenting a conflict of interest.

Almost all of it would be related to military contracts and spending

As large as social security is, I'm sure there's some efficiencies to be gained too, but the military industrial complex is THE defacto leader in greed and wastefulness

But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them. You can't tell me they're competent after that big of a screw up.

I don’t know, maybe not the richest man on earth who also happens to have massive conflicts of interest, calls respected people he disagrees with “retards” and is clearly losing his grip on his sanity. I mean that’s just my dumb take, though. What do you think?

Stuff like this is why the Skunk Works at Lockheed was such a big deal.

Just a whole department of people who innovated without any of the red tape, in a government setting.

You might find this Washington Monthly article interesting as it echoes your point: "Fire the Contractors" https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/05/fire-the-contractor... "Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it. ... That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine ... have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."

Are you in the private sector or government?

More people need to internalize that moral. Efficiency is an optimization after you are achieving a goal. It is not the goal. Unless you are not looking to do new things, maybe?

This can be seen in every resource consumption ever. We get far more out of any single input now than was ever achievable in the past.

absolutely startups can be inefficient but government projects are at a wholly different order of magnitude. Some startups will crush $20M and then die, and yet the best ones, such as facebook, return 100,000x ROI on that same $20 mil. Govt projects will crush $200M, deliver nothing and then go to recompete so another vendor can have a turn.

I don’t mind startups wasting money unless I’m a seed investor with a vested interest. We all have a vested interest in the way government allocates or misallocates funds. That’s one difference.

The other, as someone else pointed out, is a matter of scale.

Most of the startups fail, I hope we don't want that in government things

This is not true, unless a tax cut is actually passed which lowers taxes for the poor. (And the poorest already aren’t paying that much in tax. And FICA wouldn’t get cut, since that money doesn’t fund what doge covers.)

The point I think is that at least half could apply to nearly an government or group, I don't know who this guy is or why his rules are important and merit any discussion, but generally generic rules written generically that can be interpreted any which way aren't super helpful in any discussion.

Surely there is some critical threshold that indicates that we can reject the hypothesis that fascism isn't happening?

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

> 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.

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.

So raise the debt ceiling?

This is tantamount to saying that the executive not only has a line-item veto, but that it's non-overridable. Seems wrong.

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.

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

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 spending the full $100M congress specifies in 100M Mars Bars for the Air Force because Mars wasn't able to deliver the last 25 million Mars Bars, is not the same thing as "One person decided Mars Bars are Woke so we just stopped paying Mars Candy yesterday."

>cancel a lot of individual contracts before it needs to invoke recession

This is not correct.

The recission process requires that the Executive branch notify Congress upon appropriation that it will not use 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 does not intend to use the previously appropriated funds. But, even then, the spirit of the law (and the Constitution) is such that the new administration would engage in the recission process as if the funds had just been appropriated. So, they would submit a recission notice before taking action.

That is, they would not just do whatever they wanted and inform Congress afterwards.

> 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.

> 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".

> 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.

> in debt (that we also can't pay for)

"Can't" here is not a statement of fact. First off, the US government can and is paying the interest on the debt.

Second, the debt is denominated in US dollars. If congress were to authorize it, the US government could print money and pay off one hundred percent of the debt in a single day. This would have negative side effects, but it's clear that "can't" is not the correct term.

So saying that too much is being spent is indeed a qualitative assessment, not a fact.

> To not have the money that you want to spend is, to me, the definition of spending too much.

I suppose no one should ever be able to take a loan.

> To not have the money that you want to spend is, to me, the definition of spending too much.

That's not how a reserve currency works. You borrow to fund growth and let inflation take care of the debt.

Firing this many government employees, canceling grants, and imposing tariffs guarantees at least a recession.

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.

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.

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.

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-...

Because the Project 2025 plan includes de facto destroying as much of the government as possible to make it easier to replace people with pure cronies.

There are practical limits to the amount of debt a government can take on. Additionally, the government usually collects debt from the wealthy, who then make money back through interest payments. The "fiscal responsibility" of the Democrats is how private individuals actually extract value out of the government. Republicans issue debt, Dems use tax money to pay the interest. I think the wealthy have become more sceptical about the ability of of government to pay back these loans.

There are reasons why both parties allowed the system to remain as it was. I find it's increasingly true that new politicians don't understand the value of the systems they are meant to control. They see Chesterton's Fence and tear it down with abandon. Someone like Trump has no clue why politicians act the way they do. He lies and bullshits and does whatever he wants, and it works in the short term, but the long term effect is disastrous. These people are taking a private equity approach to government. Buy it cheap and load it up with debt, then sell as much as you can and let it crash to zero. This is more looting than governing.

They aren’t

Assuming your general lifestyle when employed is around $100k of expense, the US saving $10m against a $6.9T budget would be the equivalent of you saving $0.14.

Even in the straits you’re in (and I sincerely hope the very best for you), how much effort would you put into saving $0.14? It just doesn’t seem like the best use of effort?

A trillion is a million millions. A million to a trillion is like a tenth of a cent to a thousand.

500 dollars when you have 10,000 in the bank is equivalent to roughly 200 billion to a governmental budget. The DoED budget last year is about 50 billion , for reference.

I hope that puts some of these plans in perspective. Musk's millions is wandering the street for loose pennies. Trumps plan to dismnantle the DoED is "saving" the equivent of paying some energy bill, while the US is going into more debt to pay rent.

The old joke used to go: "A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you're talking real money!"

We have since updated it to billion in order to keep pace with the times.

Ever heard of Bell Labs?

What do you mean destroyed? As far as I know they still exist?

Well no, why did the working class people vote for Trump then? Clearly they don't stand to benefit from any of this nonsense.