The agencies were democratically put in place for a reason. Removing them with no public discussion of the original reasoning is deeply undemocratic. At the very least, someone thought that the cost of having them in place was less than the cost to society of not having them there. Has that changed?
Angela Merkel was great at that — even when she had a majority anyway, she'd take care to act in such a fashion that ~half of the opposition voters approved.
“Deleting entire agencies” was not part of Donald trumps campaign afaict, his platform page is still live: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform
>>Has that changed?
'that' 'reason' for any government is to ensure its own survival till eternity. Though eternity might not be possible. Its really more on the lines that governments exist to ensure their own survival, and the survival of their interests. Its often a misunderstanding that Government work for the people, they just work for themselves. To that extent, unless the government is going down due to this very reason, Im guessing it doesn't make any sense to chop departments whole sale this way.
Another factor is budgets just don't work the way these people imagine, its not that budgets would reduce or that they would return some money back to the treasury. These sort of actions just mean that budgeting just goes on as is, the money that now is saved will be used up by the other departments. Im guessing the armed forces.
I think they know very well that the fences of democracy are in their way. That's why they want to dismantle the guardrails.
The danger in this situation is that the DOGE will dismantle the safety mechanisms of the state, some of which depend on the state inertia, i.e. it's much harder to execute a coup when there are 4 agencies with overlapping duties.
Time will tell, but it is an end of something for sure IMHO.
What I find very interesting is that in the early 1990s when the deficit hit 4.5% of GDP (1992) Congress actually viewed it as a major issue and decided to cut spending but now the deficit is above 6%+ of GDP and reducing spending is an extremely controversial topic.
You may even increase it and still reduce spending since it's such a small part of the spending.
For example, there are at least 1200 positions that need to be confirmed. It can take half the presidency to staff a full cabinet. I think we can agree that’s excessive.
We’ll find out more when the actual Trump administration starts I guess, but so far it seems like a broad concept that two guys can use for tweets.
It's (edit: going to be after Innauguration Day) a Presidential Task Force
Presidential Task Forces have zero power, as they can only give recommendations.
All this hyperventilating over DOGE is distracting from actual issues to worry about - like the upcoming showdown between Senate GOP Leadership and the Executive Branch over a number of confirmations.
What is “temporary” about validating new food or pharmaceutical products?
So exactly what are they good for while sitting around pontificating for years on end?
Even if they’re not temporary though, agencies should have clear goals, metrics, and be held accountable to those. For example how many times have we seen wasteful spending on opaque homelessness programs on the west coast with zero results?
In my opinion we need to rethink how agencies are funded. Why do we need to give a bloated government a big tax check instead of having agencies work hard to win customers and charge them fees? Agencies should also (sometimes but not always) be forced to face competition from alternative private providers to keep the pressure of competition on.
On the tech stack, it's like claiming that everyone should understand assembly. It's useful for some folks to know assembly, but the vast majority of folks don't care. They just want to use the stuff that's built upon it.
I have friends working for the CS department of one of the main Universities in Argentina. Their salaries are so bad that none of them makes a living - they all have second jobs or international grants. Two of them left to take positions in China and two more are considering it. The list of candidates for open positions is currently empty.
This is a direct result of the president's decision to defund public education at a moment where Argentina ranks 71 out of 79 countries in math (PISA 2023). And if Computer Science is doing that badly, I don't want to think about slightly less marketable careers.
Does Argentina need to reign in corruption? Yes. Was an adjustment necessary? Also yes. But what future are they building and who will benefit from it is far from clear.
I worry about cuts to departments that is on clean energy, EV, sustainability in general. (For thinking that Musk is in that industry so it wouldn't happen, there's consideration that cuts on Govt support in that area will actually benefit the one that's ahead.. that's Tesla for the charging network, the EV sales, the peaker plant replacements, etc.)
I get that there's almost certainly a lot of bloat in the government, but just outright axing stuff doesn't seem like the right way to fix things. I also don't think that we bleed the most money on those anyways, and that entitlements and what to do with them are the real elephant in the room (but of course it's not politically expedient to talk about doing anything to those, at all, ever). Fixing our debt problem (and it's a real problem, no matter what crackpot modern monetary theory believers say) will involve some pain, including likely and unfortunately raising taxes and curtailing benefits somewhere.
DHS can easily be folded into the FBI and cuts made
TSA is a non-brainer, they don't really provide much security, let airports handle it on a case by case basis
Do they really need a NSA and a CIA?
Space force - just roll it into the air force
Bam - that's probably like 500 billion right there
"As a person who doesn't know anything about this, here are my ideas" is, er, one approach to things, I suppose (as someone else mentioned, you've just given the FBI a fleet of over 2,000 watercraft, which doesn't seem terribly sensible).
The reverse might make a tiny, miniscule amount of sense, but that way it is just silly. FBI is a subunit of DOJ with ~35,000 employees; DHS is an organizational peer to DOJ with ~260,000 employees; the active duty uniformed component of the Coast Guard — one unit of DHS — is around ~45,000 people.
Easily? You just folded the Coast Guard, FEMA, Immigration, and the secret service along with many other agencies under the FBI.
> Space force - just roll it into the air force
Already part of the air force.
We’re currently in the bloviating stage of this election cycle; once attention dies down I fully expect DOGE to achieve very little and to die a slow death.
The sad part of all of this is that the government could absolutely be more efficient than it currently is, while still providing the same services. But that’d take serious thought and consensus building, which the incoming administration has no desire to engage in.
There will be a website on Day 1 that will get overloaded with traffic and then it'll be soon forgotten about.
You're right but the Republican-led House and Senate absolutely do have the power to both do that and grant these guys the power to do it.
Everybody who stayed home, and decided that they'd be fine with a Trump Presidency... this is your fault. I know your whole litany of excuses. Let them keep you warm, while the greater of two evils actually does the evils they said they were going to do.
