After 'coding error' triggers firings, top NIH scientists called back to work
316 comments
·April 7, 2025jmward01
Terr_
Also, it's completely destroying an incredibly valuable asset: The reputation of being a stable long-term employer! (This is possibly their corrupt intent.)
The immediate "savings" reduced workforce (even assuming the same level of work gets done) can easily be obliterated by the long-term damage of needing to pay more to attract equally-qualified applicants away from the private sector.
Some quick napkin-math just to illustrate:
* Assume the stupid and illegal firings continue, shrinking the workforce to 90%.
* Assume payroll expenses move the same, to 90%.
* Now workers require 5% more to be hired at a flaky employer with dodgy benefits.
* After just two years, the "savings" are erased. Every year the broken trust continues makes it worse.vintermann
If a corporation did this, we'd rightly accuse them of pumping their quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term viability.
dmurray
The saved money and the payroll for new money are both in dollars per year, not one-time costs. So the additional premium needs to be 10%, not 5%, to erase the benefits, and it doesn't matter how many years you look at.
(I'm ignoring one-time costs like severance pay and signing/relocation bonuses which I don't think were the point of your message, and also the elasticity effect where you can pay existing workers the same even if it costs more to hire new ones. And I agree with your point in general that this is not a sensible way to save money, I just think your numbers are wrong).
benterix
> Also, it's completely destroying an incredibly valuable asset: The reputation of being a stable long-term employer! (This is possibly their corrupt intent.)
Yeah but what's the plan? They already have crappy pay and now it gets unstable - who'd want to work for the government? Only desperates.
Doxin
> who'd want to work for the government?
No one and I think that's the point. The current administration seems hell-bent on making corporations able to do whatever they please. Destroying government institutions is probably a good way to go about achieving that.
kelnos
> This is possibly their corrupt intent.
Trump's OMB head has said as much: they want to demoralize the federal workforce and make them dread going to work every day. They want to give the federal government the reputation of being a bad, undesirable, unstable place to work. This is all no accident.
const_cast
Nobody considers long term damage, particularly in a business sense.
If you look at the history of American company that have failed or are currently failing, there is one common denominator: short-term decision making.
As soon as business have even an ounce of success, they immediately give up on and start optimizing for the now, not the tomorrow. Take a look at Tesla. They invested a lot in the early days of their company and it paid off heavily. But as soon as they saw market success, they took a page from GM. Stop innovating immediately, start cutting quality. You’re safe now, no need to be competitive. No need to think about the future, it’s secured.
But it’s not secured, and this ambivalence is their downfall. Smarter, long-term thinking business will run Tesla into the ground, as history has shown with GM.
fastball
Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?
I generally wouldn't want those people to work for my company, so not sure why I'd want them to work in my government.
autoexec
> Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?
Yes. People looking for a stable job put down roots and grow communities. They gain deep knowledge of the systems and people they work with, and they gain valuable wisdom from experience. I have no idea why you wouldn't want people looking for a stable job at your company. Why would you want an employee who was looking to work at a place where they were likely to be fired for no reason at any moment and couldn't expect any of their co-workers to still be there tomorrow?
loktarogar
> Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?
Yes, if you can't offer someone market rates then you need to offer them other things to fill that void. Stability is one of them, and is actually a good thing in government, when politics is so volatile. If the workforce is fired every time a new party comes into power, you don't have a stable government.
Working with those constraints, you _can_ improve things, by building better systems and processes, that better use the resources you have. That's far better long term, but it's not as fast and does not generate headlines for DOGE.
hollerith
>Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?
Yes we do.
Software development is unusual in that if a coder's mind goes off the rails and he starts committing bad code, the organization can easily use `git reset` to revert his changes.
Most jobs aren't like that. For example, on the factory floor, if a machine operator gets too creative, inspired or enthusiastic about the work, people tend to start losing limbs. And the managers of the factory floor are keenly aware of that, which is why passion is not a quality they want in their machine operators and neither is wanting to change the world.
HeatrayEnjoyer
Do you want to attract talent or people who take anything they can get? People who know what they're worth aren't going to waste investing their time into an employer who can't even guarantee that they'll still have a job next week.
Mundane government employees are some of the most dedicated workers I've met. There's a deep array of jobs that aren't flashy but are foundational and depend on staff who can build up long institutional knowledge.
bdhcuidbebe
> Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?
Yes, absolutely.
razakel
Governments are not startups. Boring and predictable is what the public and the markets want.
flir
> Money is not the point of a government.
_DeadFred_
We had federal employee turn over every political cycle. It was horrible to the point the two parties got together and created the Federal Civil Service concept so that positions would have stability.
foobarbecue
I think it's worse than that. Appears to me that the methodology here is intentional sabotage of the government. When your platform is explictly anti-government (also, explictly anti-empathy, and implictly anti-expert), and someone hands you the government, you smash it, along with the lives of all those losers who dedicated themselves to public service.
Freedom2
Don't forget to say "See! Government doesn't work, we've been right all along!" after you've smashed it.
SlightlyLeftPad
Exactly, I’m glad you mentioned it because there are many who can’t see through the smoke. This is the long con but I still struggle to understand the motive there, if for nothing else, is it the simple ideal that government should be small? Why go through all the trouble?
kelnos
Yes, this is the GOP playbook in a nutshell.
1. Rail against the idea that any social program can work, or that the government can do a good job administering it.
2. Fight for amendments to bills around it that reduce its funding or scope in key, critical ways.
3. Let the new thing fail, because you crippled the bill that authorized it.
4. Crow about how you were right all along, that government can't do this or that, and that these social programs are doomed to fail.
dkjaudyeqooe
There's no methodology at work, it's just indiscriminate firings to cull as many people as possible.
This is clear from other other departments where they fired everyone they could.
"Coding error" is just a modern version of "the dog ate my homework". Lame but people will swallow it. They knew what they were doing, they just regret getting caught.
Sadly, once the firings, rehirings, refirings, court cases, and compensations are done, there won't be any money saved at all, probably more wasted.
That public servants do important work under less than ideal circumstances and funding is entirely ignored.
kelnos
> There's no methodology at work, it's just indiscriminate firings to cull as many people as possible.
That is the methodology, though. Musk's biography (I believe) contains a bit about how one of his business strategies when trying to make drastic changes is to just fire, fire, fire, fire people. And if you don't realize afterward that you fired too many, and have to hire back at least 10% of them, then you didn't fire enough in the first place.
It's a terrible, inhumane way of dealing with people.
XorNot
Well, that and it justified doing something which gives him a power trip anyway.
Reports from his antics years earlier[1] at Tesla was that he would go on firing sprees, which was a problem they tried to manage because predictably it was enormously disruptive.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-giga...
joquarky
Treating people as fungible objects: is this not a clear sign of some serious anti-social mental problems?
dkjaudyeqooe
Mass firing is such a destructive process, you lose good people who were hard to source in the first place and it destroys moral and trust. If you're broadly firing people, you fucked up, it's not some magical skill, it means you can't plan and manage your business.
johnnyanmac
"coding error" makes it seem like some technical issue. Meanwhile, anyone in tech knows this is at best an administrative error and that there was no "coding" involved whatsoever. But you don't want to blame admins who are doing your bidding, no?
Anyone who really thinks this is "efficient" need to understand that they are firing the IRS during tax season and realize how absurd that is. It's like announcing a mass layoff the week before shilling our a product. You at least wait until shipping before the layoff wave hits
joquarky
"The computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody"
sollewitt
A beloved Terry Pratchett character defines evil as when you treat people like things.
vintermann
Sounds also a lot like the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative.
m463
so, anthropomorphism to be safe?
euroderf
Well then, that's pretty much an indictment of capitalism.
daedrdev
This is an indictment if bad leaders and politics, which also happens under other economic systems as we have clearly seen
croes
Staff department vs Human Resources
oneshtein
Yep. Just look at countries with unbounded capitalism, like Russian Federation after fall of Soviet Union. It was a mess.
Developed countries installs thousands of regulations (100k - 2M regulatory acts per developed country) on top of wild capitalism to tame it.
However, even heavily regulated liberal capitalism is better than other systems.
lostlogin
> an indictment of capitalism.
Capitalism is the least bad system we have tried.
mrkstu
Communism doesn't fare any better under that rubric. Any unbridled 'ism' taken to its extreme tends to fail most human centered tests.
esalman
US government is used to doing this with non-us persons. I guess that's partly why there's no real pushback against this practice this time.
ZeroGravitas
Fascism being colonialism returned home was a big lesson from the middle of the 20th century that not enough people learned.
strogonoff
A slightly less obvious problem with trimming fat is that an amount of fat within any system is good to have if you think long-term.
1. Fat is useful leeway. In critical times, it can be trimmed without otherwise disrupting the operation. Once you have eliminated fat during the good times, you can’t do it in the bad times.
2. A lean system without any fat by definition is tailored to just the current situation. It has much fewer degrees of freedom and is harder to steer to a new course if necessary.
arkh
In military term you'd call this "fat" the reserve: an unused percentage of your capacity which you can deploy to exploit an opportunity or to plug a hole.
Now, the difference between those reserves and what you usually get in most administrations is that you're keeping your reserve sharp and not just letting them socialize at the water cooler and on Facebook.
strogonoff
In this case it’s top scientists and people who do the grunt work for them, presumably.
Regarding not letting employees socialize… I cannot speak to any presumed dysfunction in US government, but to clarify my point—employees spending every hour working at 100% efficiency on the exact thing that needs to be done right now is not indicative of a fat system (more like the opposite). Being able to spend a day pondering or exploring or maybe even indeed socializing is.
joquarky
Efficiency is often at odds with Wu wei.
I think if humanity strived more for the latter, we might align ourselves better with sustainable prosperity and contentment.
strogonoff
What particular meaning of the term “wu wei” do you have in mind?
dyauspitr
This is not what they are doing either. If you look at the overall “savings” so far, it’s actually negligible. This is a front for an ideological purge only and that’s the entirety of what they are doing.
dehrmann
The other issue is if you try to bring someone back who doesn't need the job, they have extraordinary leverage in negotiating their new contract.
somenameforme
[flagged]
jmholla
Your comment is incomplete as well. They were put on leave ahead of their scheduled termination.
> The researchers, who were all placed on leave with pay until their future official dismissal date, were told a “computer error” or “coding error” led to their accidental terminations.
wesselbindt
Anyone with half a brain understands the argument you put forward, and there is not a single doubt on my mind that the current administration does. But the point is not the savings. The point is incapacitating the government to the point where privatization starts to looks like a viable alternative. This has been the strategy since Thatcher and Reagan, look up "starving the beast". This administration is just really good at it.
autoexec
> The point is incapacitating the government to the point where privatization starts to looks like a viable alternative.
Privatization is almost always going to be the worst option. If the true cost to deliver a good or service to the people is $X, the government can do the job for $X. A private company will also need $X to provide the service, but they must charge the public well above $X so that they can stuff their own pockets with money. A government's work is providing services, not generating profits for shareholders.
wesselbindt
I completely agree.
joquarky
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Facilitating the link because I hope more people see this.
tasty_freeze
In general it is a good practice to assume other parties are making a good faith effort, but after so many obvious cockups, that grace has been exhausted.
My assumption is that there is a lot of blow-back so they are restoring a few high profile names so they can say, "see, we aren't stopping science!". It is good this handful of people are back on the job, but I assume the NIH is like most other organizations -- the top name isn't doing the work themselves. They lead a team of people and their expertise is used to provide them direction and as a resource to help analyze surprising results. If the top experts lose their staff, I doubt they'll get nearly as much done. Having the 65 year old braintrust spending hours pipetting and staining samples is wildly inefficient. DOGI.
mlinhares
Also, if you're nearing retirement and you look at this mess, you're not coming back, there won't be anything to be done.
Its a trap. They'll get these folks back, there will be nobody else to do the work and they'll come back and say "see, these people were useless, we were right in firing them".
the_snooze
>Its a trap.
Trust is efficient. Lack of trust is inefficient. If someone untrustworthy like Musk fired me and suddenly wanted a do-over, I'd counter with a completely selfish arrangement like a $500/hr contracting rate with some non-trivial amount due up front.
tombert
Tangential, but I almost never get to tell this story.
In 2012 I was fired from a job (on my birthday!). I hated this job, I hated my coworkers, I really hated my manager, I was pretty sure that the higher-ups were alcoholics since they always smelled like beer or whiskey, and the work was mind-numbing where quite literally 3/4 of my work was designing nametags even though I was ostensibly a "Java developer".
Anyway, I got fired, and while getting fired always sucks, I was a little relieved that I didn't have to show up anymore.
The following Monday, I got a phone call from my manager demanding that I provide the password to unlock the Macbook that they had me using. I explained to him that I think it's a bad idea to share my password with people that I don't trust. He then told me that I "had" to provide it, to which I said "I really don't think I do, actually. I don't work for <company name> anymore. What are you going to do, fire me?"
This went back and forth for another thirty seconds, and eventually I said "Here's what we'll do, I'll drive over there, unlock the laptop, and drive back home, and you pay for my entire trip. I charge $200/hour."
He was clearly pissed off, eventually hung up, and I never heard back from them. A part of me likes to think that maybe they had to trash the laptop because they were too incompetent to figure out how to wipe the drive.
anonzzzies
Yep, exactly. I do that over far less. And otherwise, f off. People are way too nice to people screwing you over. Unlike we often see here, there are really good business owners who would (and do) sell all they have to keep all the staff through rough times. But those usually are (all I guess?) small businesses; I have the good fortune to contract (yes they even bend over backwards, both unconnected company owners, to keep their contractors) with 2 of them. And they pay well above market in the EU; American wages while they are from the EU. Most others will try to screw you and they call it 'it is not personal, it's just business'; while that's true, it rings hollow when you just did your stinking best. We are led to believe (mostly because of US tech in my case), that you need to work yourself to death while accepting everyone will throw you in a meat grinder whenever they wake up on the wrong side. Musk as poster child of this. But you make money! Sure, so especially for those, and especially in a pickle, our hourlies are bizarrely high and they still come back.
cyanydeez
The entire republican party setup a self-fullfilling prophecy of distrust, deep state, etc etc.
smt88
> In general it is a good practice to assume other parties are making a good faith effort
This has never been true for this administration, which A) already had a previous term to show us how incompetent its leaders are, and B) is working from a decades-old playbook of making government more dysfunctional so that people lose faith in it and want to eliminate it.
vkou
It's quite possible that the playbook they are looking at is more similar to C) starting a fire in the reichstag...
theteapot
Who's they? The Department of Health and Human Services?
tasty_freeze
There are proximate causes and there are the real causes. Yes, HHS let them go, but the reality is DOGE told HHS to cut them.
theteapot
The article states:
> "It’s unclear to what extent the employee lists used in the RIFs were influenced by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) .."
timewizard
DOGE has embedded itself into every federal cabinet department. They've got the gumroad guy poking around in the VA right now.
AIPedant
[dead]
barbarr
Is there any proof that they're coding errors? A simpler explanation, to me at least, is that they first blanket fired people by dubious criteria, and are now using this as an excuse to backpedal when they realize they've cut something important.
margalabargala
Software doesn't fire people, people fire people.
"Coding error" could mean anywhere from "we wrote an actual good-faith attempt to measure some sort of performance, there was a bug, and we blindly followed what it said without double checking" to "the code we wrote to 'select * from employees' when firing people was in 'error' in hindsight because we now wish to have some of those people working for us again".
No matter how you cut it, in the absolute best case scenario, the people doing the firing were so incompetent that no one can tell they weren't being malicious.
The median scenario, they were simply being malicious.
sudoshred
Non partisan take, in every circumstance coding errors are a euphemism for “leadership is humiliated by the outcome and wants to shirk responsibility”.
arkh
Seen this real-life: management ask for some unannounced change on prices. Everyone in IT tells them "this is gonna backfire fast". No way to budge them on it so we apply. A couple hours later support and sales are getting hammered by unhappy clients so we get to rollback as fast as possible. The official excuse? "That's an error from IT".
Nope, the code worked perfectly and did what was asked of it.
Terr_
Unless perhaps they can furnish a really good post-mortem on the bug. Which is unlikely here.
BLKNSLVR
It's either an actual 'coding error' because DOGE doesn't actually understand WTF they're doing or it's what you're suggesting.
So it's Incompetence or Malice. Pick your poison.
furyofantares
It's 2025. Never attribute to incompetence or malice that which can adequately be explained by both.
Terr_
At this point the onus is on them for pleading their offenses as just incompetence or just malice.
jdwithit
I love this, thanks for posting. I mean, I hate that it is true. But it is perfect for this moment.
null
2muchcoffeeman
Both scenarios are incompetence and malice.
They are in charge of making cuts but never bothered to understand what the departments do, the value, or where the excesses are. Yet they still make the cuts.
_DeadFred_
The Trump admin has stated over and over it is malice.
Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for the director of the Office of Management and Budget (a job he held during Trump’s first term), has said: “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, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
BLKNSLVR
The Boys coming true, in banal form.
salawat
Serial incompetence without regard for due caution is indistinguishable from malice. Don't cut yourself with that rust old Hanlon's razor.
DLoupe
Its's Evil (Evil = Incompetence + Power)
ModernMech
Evil = Incompetence + Power - Empathy
I think there needs to be one more element like agency? Because under this definition of evil, a sponge elected as president is evil although it wouldn't do anything at all in any situation. Maybe that's still evil?
burgerrito
I sometimes wonder those people are evil or just incompetent, but it feels like those two are indistinguishable.
Cthulhu_
Doesn't matter if it's coding error or not, the blame lies with the people executing the firings and those ordering them; blaming it on code is a way to shirk responsibilities.
I get that within a software development project, blaming on individuals isn't a healthy way to deal with bugs, but this extends beyond just loss of revenue or uptime and well into personal tragedies.
Jtsummers
DOGE did take DOD's AutoRIF which was meant to assist with RIF calculations and modify it. It was also required to be reviewed by a human before initiating any actual separations with it, though DOGE probably went the efficient route and did a "lgtm" rubber stamp on it without looking. However it was just meant to do calculations based on RIF requirement (years in service, veterans preference stuff, and the like) not make any unsupervised decisions based on it.
garyfirestorm
It’s purely political.
“… fix the broken systems left to us by the Biden administration.…”
ch33zer
This was pretty insane to me. Like, whatever systems you're claiming Biden screwed up were 100% guaranteed untouched since the last trump admin. IT in the government moves slooooooow.
jdwithit
"Political enemies fired by a coding error" is an obviously idiotic claim on its face. And when called on it, they immediately double down on their innocence by somehow blaming the firings on Joe Biden. Who is triple checks notes no longer involved in the US government in any way. This has been Trump's playbook forever. Outright lie about things, and if that doesn't work, pivot to a different lie. Always deflect blame. Never, ever, admit fault.
A whole lot of harm could have been averted if the media was willing to call him out on this 10+ years ago instead of embrace the profit potential. But welp.
somenameforme
The article somewhat buries the facts but a couple of important ones:
- They were able to get them reinstated within 24 hours.
- A presentation seen by Science said the overall NIH RIF (reduction in force) was based on administrative codes and that some “may not have been intentional.”
monkeydreams
> but a couple of important ones
If this was the first "mistake" made by the new administration and DOGE, then these items would be understandable. Or the second mistake. Or the third, maybe.
This is intentional. That is the only conclusion one can draw now. From the terseness of the letters of dismissal to the unreliability of the message ('you're fired! Wait, no you're not!'), one can only assume this is part of the destruction of democratic institutions that the current administration is pursuing.
somenameforme
This administration has tens of billions of dollars in spending and an immense amount of waste. Even if they were 99.9% accurate by this metric or that, there's going to be many mistakes. And the media is going to work to drag out the worst of the worst mistakes. And those worst of the worst are things like this - a guy being accidentally placed on leave pending dismissal for less than 24 hours?
Obviously everybody would prefer there be 0 mistakes, but I think in general this is, ironically, quite a good indicator!
grues-dinner
> A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.
It was true in 1979, it's true today.
Blaming "coding" for this is an explicit admission that someone is shirking their accountability.
e40
These people are shameless and will lie at the drop of a hat to get out from under any responsibility.
arkh
At least they only got fired. Not prosecuted for fraud like the British postal service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
> In all, between 1999 and 2015, over 900 subpostmasters were prosecuted and 236 went to prison.
autoexec
The more governments and corporations try to shove AI into everything the worse this problem is going to get. Blindly trusting computers was always a terrible idea, and now computers are getting even less reliable.
arkh
The main problem is the lack of responsibility all along the chain.
25 years and people who shifted blame and were OK with people going to prison so their bonus would not be impacted are still enjoying life out of jail.
Seeing this lack of consequence how can you expect people to behave ethically?
VMG
The modern corollary is
> ... therefore a computer must make all management decisions
wnevets
If a coding error can ruin people's lives like this than you're doing it wrong
avs733
The quotation marks in this article are under a heavy load.
Blaming people you just fired for a mistake you made firing people is as timeless as it is pathetic.
ibudiallo
Since it's a coding error, let's run git blame and see what comes out.
Being on the receiving end is never fun. For my case, after I was reinstated, I left shortly after. It was never the same with my colleagues.
bandrami
I stg DOGE is going to rewrite the Social Security software stack and it's going to crash and burn on the first person whose last name is "Null"
UncleMeat
Everybody should read the public reports about the status of the social security codebase and the (previous) plans to modernize it.
A lot of this code was written before meaningful computer networks existed. Records were committed nightly to tape banks. System limitations meant that a lot of unusual situations were handled with special magic values. Like imagines the norm of returning -1 to represent an error but all over the place and stored in databases. I'm sure that some of this was avoidable, but a lot of it was natural just given that codebase is so old.
This is how you get things like Musk saying that there are a gazillion 140 year olds receiving payments and that this must be fraud when actually this is a special data case. So what happens when the codebase is rewritten to be "simple?" Those people stop receiving payments because the special case handling gets lost. All that data consistency code that exists to handle the fact that a bunch of systems don't perform atomic global updates? Lost. Oops, rows just randomly get dropped now.
We can argue about the merits of LLM-driven programming, but it should be very obvious to everybody that "rewrite the social security codebase in a month with AI" is not well suited for these tools today and requires an incredible amount of arrogance to pursue. The annoying new hire who looks at the codebase, declares that it is messy, and demands to rewrite it but x1000.
kurthr
Oh, little Bobby Tables. Such a trickster.
goopthink
To be fair, this is already a very real and annoying problem for unfortunately named folks, predating any DOGE work: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/null-last-name-computer-scient...
shakna
They're going to try and rewrite the IRS' Individual Master File, and not care if it changes the way it behaves.
adrianmonk
Isn't that what the IRS has already been doing the last few years, and has been making good progress on, except that they have been doing it properly so it behaves right?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewleahey/2024/09/06/from-co...
It seems more than a little silly to try to rewrite something when it isn't necessary since it has already been done. And that goes double if the goal is efficiency since it cost money to do something that doesn't need to be done.
shakna
The team responsible for doing it right, have been fired, before the project's completion.
euroderf
As I understand it, the source for the Master File is lost to the mists of time. But a SoA A.I. can disassemble and comment it, yes ? Prep it for recompilation ?
shakna
The source hasn't been lost. It's just that the source was written in a combination of assembly code and COBOL, before COBOL was standardised. They can turn and recompile it any time. Doesn't mean that it's easy to modify or maintain.
There were successful efforts to translate it to Java, already underway (CADE-2). They were probably going to finish somewhere in the next two years. The efforts were for bit-for-bit identical reproductions. [0]
An AI will not help you here. Because this little piece of assembly was created for mainframes, not for computers today (AS/400s, I believe). Even the concept of paths don't operate the way systems do today - the drives were direct access, and tape-based.
There is not enough material to train a model on, to make it close to accurate.
[0] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2020/10/...
MengerSponge
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
ineedasername
Yep, the ‘ol ”my finger slipped and I accidentally pushed ‘select * from table;’ instead of a complex and thoughtful set of filters”
That type. It happens, we’ve all been there
intelVISA
I doubt the outcome would've been much different had they used their complex and thoughtful set of filters (sys.rand)
jmyeet
Cruely and revenge upon one's perceived ideological foes are the core organizing principles of this administration. This is a purge, similar to that of Jews of the Germany in the 1930s. The NIH in particular and civil servants in general are just one facet of this. The purge of academic ranks is another (eg [1]).
What makes this possible is hyper-individualism, decades (if not centuries) of attack on any sort of collectivism and the fomented division of ordinary people based on race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender or religion. I'm reminded of this LBJ quote:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
It's wild to me that we're reliving Nazi Germany less than a century later while victims of the Nazi regime, direct first-hand witnesses, are still alive.
[1]: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/3/29/harvard-cmes-di...
hn_throwaway_99
> The spokesperson added: “This is exactly why HHS is reorganizing its administrative functions to streamline operations and fix the broken systems left to us by the Biden administration.
On previous software teams where I've worked, we had a joke that "You get to blame the guy who left for one month." That is you can do this type of complaining, "Oh man, this codebase is spaghetti, screw Bill who just left", for a month. But after a month, you no longer got to blame the guy who left - at that point, it was on you.
We said it (somewhat) tongue in cheek, but there was a real message that, at some point, it doesn't really matter what the guy before you did - we've all dealt with legacy, shitty codebases, but at some point you need to own it.
I realize taking any sort of responsibility for something that goes wrong is anathema to the current administration, but I think the "it's Biden's fault" excuse is going to start wearing really thin, even for Trump supporters if/when the economic shit show starts to affect them.
reportgunner
I am not american nor I live in america so I don't really have a horse in this race, but the DOGE approach seems to be the classic "move fast and break things" approach. The reactions to it are the classic reactions to that approach, competent people speak out to get broken things fixed and others are confused about what is happening.
The obvious methodology at work here is 'fire everyone then hopefully re-hire only what is blindingly obviously needed'. There are many, many problems with this approach in a business setting but even more from a governmental setting. The first, and what should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of empathy, is that these are real people who's lives are being toyed with. It isn't like you are trying out a new business process. You are literally playing with entire lives here as if they are disposable things. This alone makes what is happening inhumane. Even if it did make things more 'efficient' I would rather a humane government than whatever efficient government they are aiming for here. The second incredibly obvious reason why this is wrong is because this isn't a business. Money isn't the point. Let me repeat this one more time. Money is not the point of a government. I can't understand any argument about government efficiency that only looks at money. It is about total benefit to society, period. If you hire someone that is 'breakeven' in what they produce vs consume from a pure production point of view you could argue that for a business they should go, but from a government point of view you have employed someone and that person is churning the rest of the economy and society has one less drain. In other words all of society is way better off with that breakeven, or even net negative, person employed in government. In other words, an efficient government actually can have what would be considered waste in a corporate world and that is not only OK, but the right answer. I know of several people that are 'employed' but net negatives and society is way better off with that arrangement than having them on the streets. Is there a place for money/efficiency discussions in government? Sure, but if it is the only thing you look at then you really need to re-think things. There are many, many other ways this is morally and economically wrong but those are my top two.