DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers

But sooner or later almost everyone uses the services of the federal government: so when there is a month additional delay in their VA medical appointment, a two month delay in getting an IRS tax refund check, a really lousy experience when they visit a National Park because of a lack of staff there, worse care in the Medicaid paid for nursing home for their grandmother, as well as a substantial increase in the cost of living because of tariffs: MAGA voters are going to get upset.

Hard agree. "Owning the libs" is pretty much the only actual item on the MAGA manifesto.

> MAGA voters don't care about the government making their own lives better. It's about making their opponents' lives worse.

I know a lot of people who flipped this election and voted for Trump NOT for his politics, but to stick it to the Dems. A scant few are regretful and the rest appear indifferent.

Anything that either "the libs" bring up, or is attributed to them, becomes fodder for polarization propaganda. So there is no stable statement of MAGA being "satisfied" with something since the goalposts are always moved by propaganda. For example, "Defeat Project 2025" projects were derided as libs acting dumb, e.g. (1) Trump had attempted to sidestep association with it, (2) libs were demonstrating more of their "Trump Derangement Syndrome", (3) some parts of p2025 had been highlighted and praised in MAGA media. So a positive association with p2025 by MAGA was not due to thoughtful committment to some principle or desire. They're flooded with misinformation, and don't believe they should be concerned about being misinformed, partly because anything negative about MAGA is projected as "the bad thing the libs do", e.g. be misinformed is the other guy's problem, not mine.

Hopefully, Musk being a disaster for Trump is similarly oracular.

So why isn't the charitable interpretation that the system works well, there is even correction built into it, since they backtrack when necessary?

The debt is not a minor problem, which is why conservatives should be unhappy. The cuts so far are at best rounding error. We're cutting the cheap useful programs (USaid, Ed) and leaving the big issues with entitlements for future bipartisan efforts which everyone knows will never come. The opposite of the 80/20 rule seems to be guiding the process. And a lot of people on the right are free market liberals, including many key never trumpers, so the Milton Friedman fan club and CATO types are not going to point out the obvious math.

That’s definitely be much better than what they’re doing but it’s too low-level to make big savings. The things which cost large sums usually go back to high-level policies. In the case of the post office, that’s the congressional mandate to pre-fund employee pensions - they have to pay in your full estimated decades of pensions costs before you retire, whereas normal pension plans assume the company won’t disappear the day you retire – and the expectation that they provide service in rural locations. That’s a public benefit, vital for many people, but the post office can’t book that public benefit on their financial ledger.

A more widespread one is also more familiar to most HN readers: governments need a ton of IT, like everyone else, but are prohibited from offering competitive salaries or hiring staff instead of engaging a few large contracting companies. That has the direct impact of doubling costs and increasing turnover, but even worse is the higher likelihood of failure caused by not having institutional knowledge and expertise: contracting only works when you can provide clear instructions and hold the vendor accountable, but that requires you to have staff capable of doing so. Some agencies have been able to recruit skilled people based on their mission, but those are many of the teams being gutted now and it’ll take many years of better governance to convince people to come back after seeing how their public-spirited predecessors were treated.

That doesn't sound terrible but honestly I don't think DOGE has the right staffing to do this. All the DOGE employees I've heard about are very young and come from programming backgrounds. Do they have any accountants? Anyone with experience in auditing or logistics? At best, any attempt to do what you suggested would end up like a bad reality show and I wouldn't expect long term improvement.

Almost as if it's intentional. As if its purpose is to create a thin excuse to fire people.

Simon says...

Heh. Yeah, self-driving has been the laggard which muddles the predictions, right?

The way I see it (and probably mostly wrong), is that you can't fund AGI with capitalism. Progress under capitalism is driven by consumer demand. But, at this point, most consumers already have everything they need. So, you need to fund progress a different way.

But, Gov spends trillions. All you have to do is direct some of that toward AI development and continuously show decreasing spending. And, as AI gets better, you save more, and you redirect more and more into AI. And, continue that cycle.

I'm guessing self-driving is lagging because of social friction. People really like to be in control - enough so that they're willing to risk death (something like 1 in 90 chance of death from driving). Even though automated driving currently is probably safer (and an order of magnitude safer if all vehicles were self-driving).

Must’ve just missed the ideology tests and purity purges under the previous admin. Could you link to some evidence?

Exactly right. Revanchist politics lead to boom/bust debt cycles in government. One party spends way too much and hurts the citizens, the other party uses their mandate to fix the overspending as a pretext to subvert government controls and agencies, and slash and burn in a way that hurts citizens. And 95% of the population blindly, religiously even, suport this and yet don't feel at all responsible for the current state of affairs. "They did it!" seems like the new American ethos.

Do you have any examples of this happening in corporate America outside of the Twitter takeover?

I have never heard of this approach. I’ve heard of new management coming in with a strong opinion and firing people, or new management spending some time understanding the situation up close.

Also: Corporations don’t have a mandate to serve the public writ large. A corporation imploding itself through dramatic reinvention every 4 years is perfectly fine. A government doing this type of purge every 4 years is obviously fucking insane, though I assume you’re operating under the assumption that the other side can’t/won’t/shouldn’t conduct ideological purges when they get into power?

Most administrations know there are people with varying levels of ideological commitment to their causes and they accept this friction because relative operational stability is a feature of a democratic government, not a bug.

You should watch office space, specifically the 2 Bobs. Now replace them with a fraternity bro or an "AI system".

How would you feel if your startup got bought by a new PE firm and they decided if you stayed or went based on "justify your existence in a text message no longer than 200 characters"?

It would be far more humane to do this how corporations do it, which is tell departments "you need to cut by X% - go do it". I've never seen or heard of the new CEO deciding on an individual case-by-case basis, depending on what each person puts into a status update email"

That’s because you know the people you work with and trust them (hopefully well placed) to have the same incentives you do.

If you had more experience in large organizations with political dynamics other than the success of your as-of-yet unproven business (things change when people aren’t worried about going out of business if they play hardball with some other part of the organization - most startup people know they can’t afford to shoot holes in the boat), you’d understand the traction: for example, if you worked at a Fortune 500 and some McKinsey consultant sent out an email demanding you explain what you work on, most people would correctly interpret that as “senior management wants to fire as many of you as possible”.

An email like that in any organization is unacceptable. It shows complete disrespect for the individual and is a clear demonstration of toxic leadership. You likely work in startups for the opportunity to work on exciting new things, have a high salary with potential for a big pay day which as part of that you accept the stress and the risk. A lot of people work in government jobs for the stability and consistency of the work, as part of that they accept lower pay than the private sector. Their work I would argue is far more valuable to society than any startup and should not be devalued by people who have contributed virtually nothing to society by asking them to justify their jobs.

I work for an American mega corp, though not in the US.

I like to consider myself a high value employee - my pay check certainly thinks I am.

If whoever was in charge started pulling shit like this, I would quit immediately and start working for the competition.

Doing this on the scale of a couple of million people, with incredibly diverse roles is very different to a startup. That said as someone who spent a bunch of time working in companies and startups this isn't a technique any new management has ever thought appropriate in my experience, especially coupled with an ultimatum.

If you never ask you will end up thinking highly productive employees are the same as those not doing any work at all. It means the productive ones should quit asap.

> an email from the new management asking people to justify their jobs that wouldn’t even make the news if it happened in corporate America

This exact crap made the news repeatedly when Musk was pulling it at Twitter. It was considered heavy-handed, authoritarian, and intentionally traumatizing.

https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5304271/trump-russia-pu...

But we'd need a way to email them all. Maybe we could give them all cell phones first.

Do not pass go.

A Fed promotion means your newly promoted position is probationary means DOGE requiring you be fired. Elon/DOGE creating super smart work incentives!

Government workers don't get promotions on a whim.

The system has been steadily redesigned by authoritarians to remove accountability. I don't call my lawmakers since they all regard me as an enemy - calling any GOP lawmakers is pointless, they aren't accountable to their constituents, they do the party's business not the people's business. Protests are limited to "free speech zones" and almost entirely ignored by mass media, even mass protests are invisible to most. And elections are so heavily manipulated with intimidation at the polling places and large scale disenfranchisement that they don't reflect anything like any popular interest. It's bad, we're working on leaving the country.

We are doing these things. But we don’t and shouldn’t expect them to just work immediately. It’s a slog, and we’ve got to keep at it.

I am extremely demanding but my representatives are totally ignored when this party holds the house and senate. We can’t keep quietly chanting “be reasonable” forever.

I bet he means Orban and Putin.