I’ve got an idea: take some good economics courses so that you learn how government spending actually works.
I wonder what will happen to all these Signal conversations when the inevitable scandals/lawsuits/inquiries happen. Surely the public will be able to scrutinize them right?
Policy wonks and lawyers have run America into the ground with reckless spending and forever wars.
I would venture that introducing fresh ideas and technologists with first principles thinking will yield better results.
Fresh ideas from individuals with experience from all walks of life should be entertained. Doesn’t mean they’ll be followed.
Furthermore, DOGE has no actual power administratively, really all they can do is advise. Congress would need to grant them power first. Saagar Enjeti gas a good take on this, he’s pretty well versed in Washington-Speak
For one, who said anything about "first principles thinking"? Elon Musk has a pronounced ideological bias. Anyway, first principles thinking is practically useless when it comes to highly complex systems, because such systems do not behave in self-evident ways. Empirical knowledge is the only thing that gets you anywhere.
Moreover, "DOGE" is not a break from the status quo in any way. Corporate interests have informed governance since long before either of us were born. That, rather than "policy wonks," is the rot at the heart of the government. Forever wars happen because they are extremely profitable for weapons manufacturers, not because warfare is a wonkish policy.
The only novelty "DOGE" brings to the table is the aesthetics of an SF tech startup, which won't help the government any more than it helped WeWork. It'll actually do less: WeWork was taken seriously, at least for a while. "DOGE" is impossible to take seriously.
And yet they're allying with Trump and his Republicans? Republicans are responsible for the most recent US "forever wars", and Trump has threatened to invade various countries Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, publicly proposed annexing Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland, has fired missiles into numerous countries like Syria, assassinated an Iranian general, etc.
And Trump loudly opposes various orgs that are responsible for holding aggressive powers at bay, like how NATO represents a check on Russia's apparent violent expansionism.
Trump's approach to geopolitics seems just as violent as his predecessors but more mercurial and erratic.
It could, maybe. Provided the people you appoint have some measure of credibility and integrity. Or at least seem to have some kind understanding of the basic mechanics by which governments (even when reduced to a bare minimum) need to operate.
Elon and Vivek plainly do not fit this description, and that should be screamingly obvious by now.
Scottish Government bans use of WhatsApp for official business (2024)
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scottish-government-b...
> The decision follows a fierce backlash over the mass deletion of messages by ministers and officials during the Covid pandemic.
I have no interest in defending Elon, but this assessment is unfair. Recall how during the Obama transition, a bunch of Silicon Valley'ers got hired in to help modernize government tech (and doubly so after the disastrous obamacare website rollout). Very few of those people had experience in govt, civics, etc.
https://changelog.com/gotime/154
I knew contractors in their wake working at companies that grew out of their work in CMS, such as Ad Hoc (a name of the original team to not be called WHITE HOUSE HOT SHOTS or DOGE or something similarly jarring to thereby take agency away from the people who had to you know do the work once they knew they'd roll off) and Nava as they expanded beyond that one system 5 years later.
Let's see how the braggadocios we'll solve all the problems at once flavor of the moment goes, then judge the healthcare.gov teams.
So comments like your are little more than flamebait.
I think running successful companies and making lots of money like this is just random luck sometimes. how did a person with no ability to introspect, surrounds him self with people that like and cant critically think manage to make so much money.
[1] often ghostwritten
People who watched Europe through the Great Recession and walk away thinking "I guess austerity works" are not people seriously consuming information, they are ideologues.
The basic position is that a government should raise enough taxes to cover its expenses. You can call that ideological and suggest there are superior options if you want to. Maybe there are, a little debt can be a good thing. But to suggest it won't work is a bit out there. It works. It is one of those simple strategies that is too boring to fail.
Also, if the strategy switches from spending more than you earn to less, obviously there will be a period where people are worse off. It is the same with paying back any obligation. Overspending foolishly obviously increases living standards while it is happening - the problem is the part where people no longer fund the debtor and said debtor didn't invest in productive capital. You need an argument that accounts for that to claim austerity fails. It is expected to do worse than the status quo for a while. Saving money isn't much fun on Day 1 either, it can take a decade to pay off.
If he arms himself with the right mathematical tools, he might just discover that the default he’s expecting is actually not imminent.
Even if the US has a bunch of runway before shit actually hits the fan, 2024 saw over a trillion dollars servicing the debt. That could be funding a lot of government programs instead.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S
Seems not ideal, but also not terrible. We have much less of a hole to dig our way out of than we did in the 1990s. Certainly doesn’t look like a crisis. The recent jump seems entirely caused by the response to the Covid crisis and not really a structural problem.
This is assuming you never get to the stage of hyperinflation, but you can probably just print a whole bunch of new physical currency as well.
For example, I wish someone could convince my city to stop planting a specific high maintenance tree on my street that constantly clog sewers and crushes cars.
Policy is far from perfect and there is plenty of room for improvement.
None of that can be said for making a facile observation about US government spending.
I think the salient observation is that there are abundant opportunities for improvement and cost saving if there is a stakeholder that actually cares about cost savings.
> there are abundant opportunities for improvement and cost saving if there is a stakeholder that actually cares about cost savings.
This fails to explain why private corporations (which presumably have from one to millions of stakeholders that care about cost saving) would waste millions of dollars. The idea that "for profit" organizations have some builtin magic trick that means that they improve and save money in ways that other sorts of organizations cannot is just demonstrably untrue.
What is true, of course, is that no matter what the type of organization, if there are people who care about and are empowered to meaningfully tackle waste and inefficiency, then things can improve. And this happens, both in government and non-governmental organizations. You don't hear about it much, for broadly the same reason you don't hear about for-profit organizations wasting money: it just isn't news.
The second assumption that I think you're making is that "wasteful outcomes" are by definition a bad thing. The problem is that government often is tasked with tackling problems where wasteful outcomes are a more or less builtin part of the way things get done, and we accept that (sometimes) because the full cost (not just financial cost) of trying to reduce waste is higher than the waste itself. A typical example: yes, there's no doubt that some government benefits go to people who are not eligible for them. However, the task of identifying all those people has many costs, both direct and indirect. The whole system becomes massively more invasive of everyone's lives when one of its prime directives is "make sure that not one cent goes to some not entitled to it". So most societies accept that there will be a level of waste, which is made up for by the benefits of treating things as if they are closer to a universal benefit.
There are plenty of other examples of this in different domains where the government operates.
Which I doubt many politicians have it.
Not just him, but the other 'smart people' who he mentions in the post who also work at DOGE (for like the 4 weeks he can dedicate his brilliance to solving the worlds burning issues, sorry world, if it takes longer than that).
Arguably positive budget categories like Education, research, and infrastructure make up a miniscule part of the overall pie.
I'd say many of the moves towards autocracy in the west are pointing in that direction, for better or worse.
Wake me when a majority of actual US voters would pick someone based on their educational qualifications for the job.
A pitfall for experts in one field to assume their skills are transferable.
That appears to be the premise of DOGE.
This sentence also killed me:
>working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about
It's not because they're classified. It's because a bunch of unaccountable private citizens are plotting behind closed doors to tear down the government.
Of course, DOGE isn't really going to do anything to fix this either. Complete theater that the fixes will low and behold happen to work in the financial interest of those running DOGE.
The young who don't think the debt matters are almost guaranteed at this point to have to deal with US fiscal dominance in their lifetime. That is going to be a brutal lesson in youthful ignorance and stupidity.
He states he learned that hiking without training was dumb and acknowledges it was dangerous. Good. Lesson learned?
No. Still has no clue GOVERNMENT - y'know, the most complicated thing in the world to do right - may be, bear with me here, just a tad bit more complicated than elementary hiking safety training (recall: the very basics of the thing he just learned he should have learned, and risked dying for not learning)
I'm sorry if I'm a bit harsh but god damned if this doesn't sound like a completely clueless person.
Get it? There is no limit... so long as we don't go past the limit!
We already spend ~20% of federal revenue on debt service. How high would that percentage need to get before you would consider it a problem?
So this is meant to illustrate that the limit on debt is more a function of the concrete circumstances. In this line of argumentation, debt is not limited by a mathematical formula that just takes GDP and similar statistics as input.
Civilian bureaucrats - in fact pretty much all discretionary spending - are line noise in the federal budget.
By far the largest components of spending are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and defence.
Cutting social security means that old people get less money in their retirement, no ifs, ands or buts. Good luck with that one.
By American standards, Medicaid and Medicare are pretty efficient. So any cuts are going to mean that either doctors get paid less or fewer health services are provided. Yes, politically, Republicans can get away with cutting Medicaid, but it’s the much smaller piece of the pie compared to Medicare. Good luck with either one of the options above with Medicare.
As for defence, procurement is a giant money tree for defence contractors, but a large part of the reason why it remains a giant money tree for contractors is that they build plants in every single congressional district there is, so trying to apply some sanity to the defence procurement process is politically untenable. Beyond that, are you going to be the one to tell the Marines they don’t need their own aircraft carriers?
Of course, tanking the American economy by removing a significant chunk of its labor force (undocumented immigrants) and increasing costs (by putting tariffs on things) is just going to make the problem harder by crunching revenue.
The right of politics has forever claimed that they can painlessly cut taxes, and it’s always nonsense.
It took me years to understand that this line of reasoning is why Trump won (twice). I noticed in my own job, that whenever someone would propose an moderate but still-obvious improvement, someone else would smack them down saying "that's not the highest priority!" In the end, nothing ever gets fixed.
I think people see Trump as that guy who steamrolls the naysayers and gets shit done.
Now, I disagree that Trump really gets any useful thing done, but I definitely recognize that constant naysaying against any improvement is a real actual problem.
- Gun violence? Eh. Nothing we can do there. Best to just get used to it. Thoughts and prayers.
- Climate change? Nothing to see there. Drill baby, drill!
- Covid? Best to just ignore it, let it run rampant, let the weak die. No biggie.
- Universal healthcare? It'd totally suck. Wait times. Higher taxes. Pay no attention to the nearly 100 other countries successfully pulling this off.
The Republican Party is the party of maintaining the status-quo, insisting solved problems are unsolvable. Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party's central thesis is: Government is inept. Let's neuter it as much as possible. Many of us see DOGE just as a cringely-named continuation of this mission.
The fact that is rather difficult to make changes to the government so that it runs more efficiently and gets better stuff done might - just might - be related to the fact that one of the two major political parties in the USA is absolutely bound to the "fact" that this is not possible.
Some ppl collecting SSI have other income over $400k. They won't miss $30k of SSI. The dem's plan was to tax that overage - not even remove it altogether - to maintain SSI, but "they're eating the dogs and cats" won and now the unelected guy who made his fortune on government contracts is in charge of choosing who to cut off from that government money supply.
Are you suggesting there is no possible way to make the government more efficient in a way that reduces costs by some significant amount?
That seems like an extreme statement.
The one big opportunity to do that is defence and it is the one that Republicans, particularly, treat as a sacred cow.
Social Security is already extremely efficient in that the cost of moving money around is minimal.
Medicare and Medicaid are also more efficient than the private sector.
Is government perfect? Hell no. But in the really big picture the big and rising areas of civilian expenditure are not where the inefficiencies lie.
Every system has inefficiencies, including the government.
The fallacy is to assume that businesses inherently have less inefficiencies than government and/or that a government’s cost/benefit equation improves if it’s run as a business. Often, their functions overlap and this can be the case. Automated traffic monitoring is cheaper than having people count cars. But beware privatization that promises efficiency and lower costs—the result is almost always worse services, maintainable debt and in time a government bailout.
Often, their functions do not overlap. The purpose of social security is not to tighten spending as much as possible, it is to improve quality of life as much as possible.
But surely that’s the only way out? Figure out some sane taper scheme by age or something. Social security was created when the old people population was a tiny fraction of what it is now, no way it would have ever passed it with today’s numbers. We’ll have to rip off the bandaid or face the consequences.
Sure..and all hidden waste projects can be fit into those 3 categories. Things like federal funding on hotels for illegal immigrants, including many millions on unused hotel rooms. ~$400 per person per night for illegal aliens. ~$80+ million USD in a few months.
> DOGE is BS.
Basically DOGE is only BS if you think fraud and waste are not BS. Why don't you actually look at the large number of waste projects on https://x.com/DOGE before saying it is BS ?
NIH funding on addiction research seems pretty relevant given what's going on in the US?
But the way they write it it's "injecting dogs with cocaine" or "giving cocaine to lonely mice". Very funny I guess?
Eighty million dollars isn’t even sufficient to count as a rounding error in that context.
