>Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.

Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).

The billionaires who don't like regulations and like the idea of a semi-starving population that are forced to work in inhumane conditions for the lowest possible wages. Also, destroying democracy seems to be desired by them as they wish to concentrate all the power into their own hands.

Of all the things a 250 year-old federal government serving hundreds of millions of people across the entire spectrum of services should be run like, "a start-up" is pretty close to the bottom of the list.

I'm impressed we managed to arrive on an idea more detached from the fundamentals of public governance and less worthy of trust than running government "as a business." It takes real, concerted effort to be that thoughtless and shallow.

Sounds to me like the claim is—with the perspective of somebody who has lived an entire professional life within the federal research award system—that it actually was highly efficient.

So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place.

What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?

They're saying that the federal government that DOGE "investigated" was already highly efficient.

Elon's goons are mostly a pack of bumbling morons sent on a mission to steal data for private purposes.

> What's the evidence for that?

If your mandate is to identify fraud or optimize a system, wouldn’t your success or failure be determined by the number of fraudulent cases you successfully prosecuted and won, as well as the amount of money you were able to recover?

Their god "genius" and leader promised[1] $2 trillion in cuts, if they haven't been achieve their stated goal, does that not mean that majority of the $2 trillion was being put to good use?

Running a government is nothing like running a company, because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating (example the military, food stamps, farmer subsidies) but are key to the successful operation of the government.

This is why it is often a terrible idea to have former CEOs ( who only care about revenue and profits) run governments or government arms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_X6VmsMWiI

A weird question to ask in a thread about the destruction of evidence.

DOGE's record.

> What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.

There's no need to do work for the jackbooted thugs at this point.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-gover...

"One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired."

Well, they sure seemed to fail at finding much meaningful savings to be had. The government seems to be throwing money in the furnace at rates never seen before while actual outcomes seem anywhere from mixed to bad depending on your viewpoints.

I've seen both sides of it. It's an unpleasant discussion but the government did drastic overhiring and now there are thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs.

But how do you fix it? These thousands of people have these jobs that their families depend on for survival. It's not their fault that the government severely messed up their hiring pipelines. If you cut the fat and leave those people out to dry, they certainly are not going to find work anywhere else. It's a lose lose situation.

What’s the sample size here? Sounds like anecdotal evidence to me.

You are largely misinformed, and if you are going to make such a wild (and defaming) claim, perhaps you'd back it up with some evidence.

Not only are they highly skilled, they are completely dedicated. They are straining to meed the needs of researchers right now, with staff volunteering on the weekends, against policy, to help out where they can, because they believe in their mission and are highly motivated and competent at doing it.

With the default arguments in the 1990s strip wouldn’t strip “linking information” it would just strip debugging symbols. You wouldn’t have been able to debug a core dump say but dynamically linked binaries would have been totally fine.

Good thing trumps on that fraud by bolstering the IGs and not just gutting them across all agencies...

Yes, the GAO exists. But under the current administration, it's basically like a security guard that just sits there and watches crooks do bad shit, reports it, and then nothing happens.

Also: https://sam.gov/

There is also Michael Lewis's book "Who Is Government?" if you want more meaningful stories.

People don't pick up pitchforks because they don't understand something; people pick up pitchforks because they're told to pick them up. The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.

no no, they mean some other thing, which is different in totally unexplainable ways and – most importantly – doesn't make one feel stupid for not knowing it existed

That's the thing. The waste isn't in Federal beuracracy, it's in Federal contracts to private industry without strong self-interested oversight. The privatization trend takes a highly motivated group (companies) to milk money from an inefficient overseer.

My spouse works in the DOI and while there maybe some inefficiencies, particularly in process, it isn't the people themselves which are the problem. Her group operates on razor-thin budgets and personnel constraints. They suffer the frustrations because they believe in the work.

I had an edit in my comment about military spending being an exception but I decided to leave it out to not distract from the core idea.

Though there is nuance there too, as some wasteful military spending seems to be more of a jobs program for specific congressional districts.

You are correct and DOD contracts also have been coopted by the political system to fill other needs like funneling money to senators' districts.

You’re confused becuase they set out to confuse you.

The waste isn’t in employees doing their jobs, it’s what they are doing.

IRS enforcement is a great example. Enforcement is the most expensive way to get tax compliance. The IRS spends lots and lots of money collecting small amounts of money from people with no political clout and limited value. But, because the congressional budget says so, they ignore really obvious and common tax avoidance, which encourages the behavior and drives more losses.

DOGE fired more people and made it worse. I’m running an estate waiting for a determination from them to close out tax obligations, a pretty significant amount. I escalated the issue with my US Senator’s office. I was told they have 2 staff capable of working the issue nationally, and to expect a 2-3 year wait after it being escalated. According to my attorney, these issues took 6-8 months previously.

There is a general misunderstanding about "waste" in firms, organizations, and governments. Perfect efficiency DOES NOT EXIST and even if it did, it is NOT EVEN A DESIRABLE STATE for these entities. Sometimes when you see "waste", and you relentlessly try to drive efficiency, you destroy the _system_ that makes the desirable parts possible in the first place.

Big Tech is just as guilty of this. It’s just not the public’s money.

The DOD might be the one exception to federal waste in spending precisely because they cannot be audited. Every single other federal agency is audited nonstop. The DOD due to military and security reasons is not

Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term.

*edit: spelling

None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway.

Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.

Excellent quote. It's easy to draw conclusions one way or another, but the real challenge to fixing the budget is easily just as much trying to understand what the hell is going on with it.

I imagine it like if you were trying to clear hard disk space but QDirStat only gave obscure indications of what the files were and you had to go through a complex legal process to delete anything.

Because Bill Clinton pushed Democrats rightwards with his electoral policy of "triangulation". That was the start of establishment Dems embracing Reaganomics.

Clinton benefited from an era where if a voter was going to hear how bad your idea was then he got a chance to defend it.

His cuts were actually considered and targeted. He didn’t just hire a billionaire to take a chainsaw to ‘woke’ gov programs.

> You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare

You’re using a number that includes private and public spending. There are problems with this topic, but it’s a different topic than federal government spending waste.

There are some real federal government spending inefficiencies, but you picked a topic that is predominantly private spend.

The spend is on private health insurance going to for-profit middlemen. It's not mostly on the government. People love to crow about Medicare and Medicaid (safety net government-run insurance) waste but the vast majority of "waste" is the record profits put up by private companies.

Isn’t healthcare is the prime example of government run programs being much more efficient and efficacious than privatized ones?

The US has a massive tangled hodgepodge of private companies, having poor coverage, very high prices, and quite poor outcomes. Meanwhile there are numerous European countries with public healthcare systems that are far cheaper and provide much better outcomes.

Here’s one of a million sources:

https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-syst...

> The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which administers research grants, is a division of the Department of Education. Given your point, how much of this funding was dedicated to research? Even if $500 million (its much more, but I digress) has been invested in research since 1980, this does not negate your point since the Department of Education does more than advancing academic achievement?

Each state has its own rules for education. The Department of Education mostly funds programs based on federal law, but they can only regulate state's activities they’re breaking federal law, you can't solely blame the department for failures of multiple state governments.

Are you saying that the priorities of the Department of Education have been misplaced, or that it was a mistake to have a Department of Education at all?

"Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.

test scores have actually gone down in a number of states I don't think whatever the department of education is doing is actually working.

And when there is a profit motive, and no meaningful competition, there is also no motive to be efficient or effective. This is what you'll find in many of the large DOD contracts.

So it's a compounding effect. It's down to whether the overseers of the contracts care enough to rein in the contractors, or to do just enough to stay on this side of legal. And the contractors certainly aren't doing charity work, so they'll balloon the costs up to the point of significant pushback and then tighten it down a bit.

The US has made an active policy decision for decades to be the world police, flowing from that policy spending on world policing isn't automatically waste unless it's highly inefficient.

>and for-profit hospitals.

but only 36% are for-profit?

https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership

Depends on your definition of wasteful. Americans expect their government to be able to waves hands DO SOMEthing about various things in the world. Maintaining that capability is expensive.

I don't know if that desire is caused by intentional propaganda or if it's just who we are as a people because of our history.

Maybe it's not right, but it's what Americans expect from our government right now.

> playing world police

The most expensive are purely for oil, for hawks feeling manly bullshit wars.

They cut much more than DEI programs. They aggressively and ignorantly cut jobs and grants which could have benefited the planet and saved lives.

https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...

It's horrible that there are 14 million children now in graves because of Elon Musk. He's literally worse than Hitler. I also don't understand how he spends all his time. SpaceX and Tesla are successful but Elon doesn't contribute to that at all, he's clearly not actually doing anything in those organizations. So where does his time go? I guess he's secretly just been doing actual work and actually contributing at DOGE this entire time, finding countries he doesn't like and murdering as many people as he possibly can. I bet he jokes about it with Trump while paying prostitutes to pee on Obama's bed.

It should also be the legacy of voters that chose this and I don't think I'll soon forget or forgive it.

Why am I responsible for this person's death? He had fallen on the subway tracks all on his own, it was his fault. All I did was extend a hand to him, let him climb halfway up, and then kick him in the face back down. So why is everyone looking at me now? The outcome is the same it would've been if no one jumped in to help. Why aren't you calling the bystanders murderers too?

Because feeding starving children is the right thing to do.

We are all humans sharing one planet.

It is the abrupt cancellation of such enormous funds and projects that caused the most damage. If DOGE / Trump had taken his 4 years to "slowly" cancel, far fewer people would have died.

(though still far too many)

Because we're rich and powerful and we believe the world should be a better place.

It doesn't matter what other countries do. We should want to step up and help. Leaders lead.

A patient is in the middle of surgery. The surgeon is informed that the patient's insurance no longer covers the procedure. Should the surgeon leave the patient sliced open on the operating table, pull their tubes and IVs, and slam the door on the way out?

This is effectively what DOGE did by "feeding USAID into the woodchipper" rather than developing a plan to gradually taper aid. Thousands of people in the middle of medical treatment just died. Thousands of children relying on USAID food and supplies just died. There are plenty of articles with first-hand accounts of this.

Worst part is, Musk and his boys did it this way for shits and giggles, or maybe for the adrenaline rush. Monsters.

Every other country is responsible. But in proportion to their wealth and power, and the US is far and away the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world so we bear an outsized share of the responsibility for keeping the world stable and safe. We built the international order around free trade to suit us, and it works exceptionally well to enrich us, so we have a strong motivation to ensure the stability of that international order by reducing the causes of international conflict and civil disorder like hunger or disease.

Regardless, even if your amoral nihilism were correct rather than the hallmark of a morally repulsive psychopath with the imaginative capacity of a tapeworm, there were two things DOGE did wrong. First, much of the actual damage they caused was not from the US cutting aid per se, but rather how quickly and with such little warning they cut aid. DOGE denied aid recipients that were relying on the US to keep people alive with life saving medicine and food a reasonable opportunity to make alternative arrangements. People are dying not because the rest of the world is incapable of supplying ARVs to HIV patients in Africa, but because we took those critical life saving drugs away in a manner that made it impossible for the people depending on us to adapt. We killed many those people. You can't just stop taking ARVs and be OK, and someone make a few hundred dollars per year in rural Africa is not well positioned to find alternative suppliers. Many thousands of HIV positive pregnant women who would otherwise have been able to give birth to a child without the child contracting HIV now have to figure out how to survive HIV themselves and how to care for a child needlessly infected with HIV. Many of these people are now dead because of our negligence, arrogance, and stupidity. Because of your negligence, arrogance, and stupidity.

And it didn't even save us any money to do it that way, it was nothing less than abject cruelty and racism. DOGE let perfectly good drugs and food we had already paid for go to waste in warehouses rather than allow it to be delivered. For literally no reason, it saved us not a single penny and instead deprived many innocent people.

Above all, cutting aid like this was unbelievably stupid and self-defeating. Because even if psychopaths like you are objectively correct about reality (you aren't), when the world's richest man and the world's richest country murder millions of the world's poorest people for literally no reason, that makes us look really bad to the rest of the world. And then they do not cooperate with us. See, e.g., Trump begging the Europeans he so frequently attempts to bully for help with Iran. Idiots like you and Musk have trashed America's hard-earned reputation as benevolent superpower. That will cost us trade deals. It will force our allies to hedge against us by making trade deals with China instead as a counterbalance, as Canada has begun to do. The US is so phenomenally wealthy we can afford to be sociopathic assholes to the rest of the world for a little while at least, but it is difficult to overstate just how naive, ignorant, and outright moronic you are if you think that doesn't come at a price to American interests that far outweighs the negligible amounts of foreign aid spending DOGE illegally cut.

And I won't even get into the illegality of an unelected jackass impounding congressionally authorized spending because you do not seem like the sort of person who has any concept whatsoever of the value or importance of the rule of law and respect for the constitutional order.

Well, for one, we know there were DOGE members that exfiltrated social security data for personal use [1]. And that's only what we know of so far.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-se...

I read "looting" as installing a non-controlled StarLink terminal to silently pilfer protected data about Americans without going through existing infrastructure and leaving an audit trail.

> everybody involved should get audited and investigated for fraud and corruption

This is absolutely what should happen, but what will almost certainly happen is that the most openly corrupt president the US has ever had will blanket pardon everyone who remains loyal to him for the remainder of his term and there will be no federal level criminal legal consequences for any of these people.

And this is kind of the optimistic outcome, the one where the corrupt people in power don't find a way to extend their power indefinitely, which is certainly their plan (their incompetence may stop this from happening).

Perhaps that’s what the 2nd Amendment is for

Overthrowing democratic rule feels like an overreaction.

The use of Signal or other disappearing message apps for government communications violates records keeping laws (that date from the age of memos) unless the user diligently screenshots and archives all messages.

All written communication for government business is supposed to be saved.

The CISA document you referenced doesn't seem to be clear on this point, although it is marked as not applying to sensitive communications anyway: "Sources may use TLP:CLEAR when information carries minimal or no foreseeable risk of misuse". https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...

It does seem like members of both political parties have had issues following the law on this point though - after all, Hillary's famous personal email server was an issue for the same reason.

Please don’t use HN for ideological battle. You’ve not commented here in over a year (and have posted only 25 comments in a decade, most of them ideologically-flavored), and you now chime in with three inflammatory comments in this thread.

If you want to participate here, please read the guidelines and make an effort to contribute in a way that's consistent with HN’s intended spirit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So talking about the crimes Trump and his clique commit is Trump derangement syndrome, how convenient

That's not the impression I get at all. A bit of extremely understandable rage at the Trump admin's ignorance and arrogance, but if you CTRL-F for "Chesterton's fence" you'll get that acknowledgement you're looking for.