The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.
This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen end up also not getting any credit to the institutions and regulators, so on the budget it feels (to uninformed voters) that these departments are simply wasting taxpayer money.
> This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
> On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen […]
Michael Lewis (of The Big Short fame) has two books on the things that government(s) do that no one else (often) can, either because they're too big, too expensive/unprofitable, or a co-ordination problem where it effects many actors simultaneously:
I haven't read _Who is Government_ yet (in spite of the fact that it has a better title!) but _The Fifth Risk_ was a fantastically illuminating paradigm-shifting read for me.
"What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?"
> This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
This is one of the more frustrating things working in SRE/ops/infra. Yes, if you have really good metrics and monitoring you can show to some egghead exec that might care that your numbers are improving - but lots of times that visibility doesn't exist, or no one cares very much. I've been advised more than once in my career to just "let it break" so when I come to fix it after I had warned about it breaking, it makes me more visible, when I easily could have prevented it in the first place. This mindset is rampant, in my own career anyway. I think it's really idiotic.
They fired a lot of people at the FDA and also deliberately made it harder for the FDA to regulate. That is likely to cause problems for our food and medicine supply, the FDA has been the world standard for a long time.
> The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
> I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
It's a problem with libertarian thinking, generally. Most of the things libertarians rail against exist for good reason, and the libertarian "solution" is actually the thing that already failed in the past.
Your typical libertarian becomes one by reading a ~300 page propaganda book as a teenager or young adult that outlines the problems with Soviet central planning, adds in some legitimate gripes about present-day government rough edges, then lays out a compellingly-neat libertarian free-market fantasy. It's very black and white, offering a stark, false choice between Soviet central planning or minimal government libertarianism.
It doesn't prompt anyone to think about history before the complained about government functions arose: e.g. how was food and drug safety before the FDA? How did that work out for the people then? Were people really better off being able to buy radium water to try to cure what ails them?
It's also very selective. I've never seen any libertarian advocate the abolition of all the government bureaucracy and regulation that protect property rights.
Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. And to set a price floor for agricultural products.
It's quite likely that, sprinkled in among the idealistic helpers of the third world, were some number of CIA agents. For good or ill.
(the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)
It's also quite likely that the reincarnations of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Jesus are sprinkled among the same idealistic helpers.
> the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of...
...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you.
Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).
The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman.
Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.
"politically impossible" is giving up on Americans ability to perceive the national advantage as well as the moral good.
Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side.
This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.
The most compelling explanation for US soft power is balance of threat theory[0]. Soft power comes from you not being seen as a threat, and you being seen as a way to prevent other threats. Because above all, countries prioritize security.
The status quo in US foreign policy was that as long as you're pliable to US interests, then the US was nice to you. You get democracy and get bounded autonomy, more autonomy than was afforded to subjects under any previous empire, to the extent that people would question whether the US even was an empire. Despite US being incredibly powerful militarily, the US was seen as non-threatening to friendly countries. That was an incredible magic trick, since those two things are usually correlated. This drew countries into its orbit and expanded its influence.
Countries could see the contrast to being in the Soviet Union's orbit and having your grain stolen, your people getting kicked out (Crimea) or being put into a camp.
This theory is a way to conceptualize the problem with Trump's bellicose and volatile attitudes towards Canada and European countries. If everyone sees you as a threat, this theory predicts that they will balance against you. In concrete terms, this theory predicts that countries who aren't threatened by China (due to being far away) will become closer to China if they feel threatened by the US.
Very well put. As a Canadian, what I see is Trump's attitude gave the green card for Canadian politicians to take a stand, sacrifice short term goals for long terms strategies, and indeed, we end up seeing China as less dangerous comparatively, it being true or not. Trump made overt what was happening covertly (and also objectively hurt allied relationships).
> An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible.
I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.
Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.
> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.
Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.
> Another problem is the US is broke.
USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.
I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective. The justification outlined for USAID is that it was "softpower". While this is true, we have to admit it's limitations. As you said, it was only 45B. You don't shape the world with such small amount of money. So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID.
> I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective
By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?
> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID
That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.
It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.
The Belt and Road Initiative is reputed to be 7 times bigger than the Marshall plan in today's dollar. It's getting hard for the US to compete with that.
> It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.
So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?
Pretty much every example of flagrant waste I've seen brought up by DOGE -- regardless of how insane the line item sounded -- actually ended up reading as more and more valuable the more I read about it.
Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.
Government spending and the deficit has increased by approximately $800 billion since Trump came into office. It certainly hasn't gone down. Weird that none of the DOGE apologists seem to care anymore. Trump adding billions of dollars to the deficit in increased military spending in 2026? Not a peep.
Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless.
But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink.
The whole thing is a sham. The real purpose of DOGE is to enact radical ideological changes that Congress has been unwilling to implement, by strategically sabotaging parts of the executive branch that the Heritage Foundation has a problem with.
Taking those line items at face value is just a bunch of Dunning-Kruger. The government isn't like a tech company with a single product that can be understood well by one person. It produces many thousands of different specialized products and services.
When the National Partnership for Reinventing Government successfully cut spending in the 90s, they took 5 years to carefully evaluate what the government was doing and why, followed legal processes to propose improvements, and saved a lot of money simply by finding ways to streamline processes and procedures.
DOGE has taken a completely different approach, slashing and burning without understanding the consequences of their actions (or potentially, not caring), and intentionally doing it without involving other stakeholders. Many of the things they've cut that they thought were stupid were immediately found to be important and reversed. Some of the other things they’ve cut we’ll be finding were important for decades to come.
1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.
2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget
3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.
4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.
>1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.
So? Let's not pretend like DOGE actually cared about that.
Whether DOGE's motivations were reform, political theater, or budget slashing is irrelevant to whether the underlying problem – IC integration into civilian development infrastructure – is a legitimate issue worth addressing.
For people with operational experience, the concern is real and predates DOGE by decades – USAID cover compromised actual development workers, created force protection problems, and poisoned the well for legitimate civilian programs.
> 1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.
That's... pretty much a good definition of soft power, and frankly not even a cynical one. Your argument presupposes a world where "clandestine infra" and whatnot simply wouldn't happen if we didn't do it. But obviously it would, it would just serve someone else's interests.
And fine, you think the cold war US was bad, clearly. And maybe it was, but it was better (for the US, but also for the world as a whole) than the alternatives at the time, and it remains so today. China's international aspirations are significantly more impactful (c.f. Taiwan policy, shipping zone violations throughout the pacific rim, denial of access to internal markets, straight up literal genocide in at least one instance) and constrained now only by US "soft power".
The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S., just a highly visible one.
Besides security guarantees/defense aegis, the heaviest lifters in U.S. soft power projection are structural and cultural forces that operate largely independent of government:
I'm somewhat ignorant on this subject (by design, my mental health cannot afford too much pondering on that which I cannot control)
but in this instance I can't help but wonder from a game theory standpoint, is there anything GAINED by affecting USAID in a way in which we clearly lose some (relatively small per your comment) amount of soft power?
That is to say, a perfectly played game would involve not making any sacrifices unless it was to gain some value or reduce some loss. What is gained (or not lost) here?
Domestic 'gain' is fiscal + political + transparency. USAID was pass-through where taxpayer dollars flowed to NGOs and contractors whose missions aligned with whatever administration or congressional bloc was in power – but with enough layers of separation to obscure the nature of the spending.
Foreign 'gain' is a move away from liberal internationalism to transactional bilateralism/resetting expectations wrt American largesse. We were being outbid everywhere anyway, and the org was ineffectively doing something DoS should be doing.
Local producers cant compete with the aid (nor in trade). The same scheme China runs in the west. On the receiving end you not just stop development but you actively shut down what you had and forget how to do it.
>> The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
> USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S.
And the goalposts move again. Your original point was that soft power was bad. After pushback, now it's "soft power is good but USAID was inefficient".
I submit that neither of these arguments was presented in good faith and that your real goal is just defense of DOGE.
Yes, USAID was only one part of US soft power. Everything else you have listed though, the destructionists have done effective jobs of trashing those as well!
In a thread about USAID it makes sense to talk about the damage to USAID. If these other pillars of soft power matter more to you, then try writing productive comments lamenting their destruction rather than downplaying in this discussion.
There's clearly a difference between "what about" as a distraction technique (introducing an unrelated argument to avoid having to defend the original) and pointing out the existence of a clearly related issue. This is "youforgotaboutism", if you must label it.
Basically: analysis of international relations and influence techniques can only be correct when it treats with the influence of all parties, and not just the US. You agree with that framing, right?
This is all debatably valid, except for the fact that the entrenched system produced massive fraud, money laundering, wagging-the-dog and worst of all, a decade of domestic propaganda and anti-democratic schemes in an attempt to protect the machine from widespread exposure.
If anyone believes that USAID was primarily foreign aid, then they have fallen for the lie.
If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.
Was the statement that over 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?
It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.
add the recent public meeting with CA Gov's office in San Francisco, delivering 9 figures of new money to the homeless situation in CA.. with Democrat figures emphatically and pointedly declaring all the money legitimate and accountable.. at the very same moment that news headlines are showing court documents of the opposite at a large scale in multiple jurisdictions .. mostly Los Angeles to be clear
#--
Governor Gavin Newsom met with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on January 16, 2026, to announce over $419 million in new state funding for homelessness and mental health efforts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The funding comes from the sixth round of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program and includes $39.9 million for San Francisco to support shelter operations, navigation centers, and services through June 2029.
> 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?
Yes, in as much as that is a nonsense phrase meant to sound bad. If USAID buys wheat from American farmers, the money stays in the US and the wheat is exported.
>All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives.
You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor.
It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot.
It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.
Basic knowledge of civic history and political science makes this point very salient. Anyone with a clue would know this from the beginning - that's why it was so terrifying to see what actually was motivating people, feels like the ultimate recipe for unchecked power and disaster with bad actors employing fools to do their bidding.
Yep. Governments, by virtue of being the functional backstop on all possible negative outcomes, necessarily runs with enormous slack. The ones that do not simply break under stress and they're replaced over and over until a government emerges that figures out that extreme efficiency is a liability.
Not to mention the US government in particular was quite literally deliberately designed to be inefficient as a way to safeguard personal liberties as well.
Not to say we shouldn't cut inefficiencies where we can, but the early DOGE promises were obviously made from a place of profound ignorance and (worse) lack of curiosity.
Absolutely it can be done, but this kind of slash and burn cuts from people who come in from outside and have no understanding of how anything works are always going to be counterproductive.
Yeah, I didn't mean them. They were not doing this.
Typically those that take the slash and burn approach are trying to break things yes - in the UK is has generally come from those with a small government agenda who want to break things to justify privatizing them or scrapping them altogether.
There is a lot of philosophical manoeuvring here but a common argument is that governments aren't supposed to be so much efficient as effective. It's not about maximising use of resources, but maximising outcomes. Companies already provide the efficiency angle in society, governments are there to provide a counter-balance. If we try to run governments as companies then we might as well not have governments at all.
So we shouldn’t try? Just let the budget expand forever?
If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts (without stopping with the yearly increases they already get). That would make it similar to many businesses, and force the management at the agencies to actually figure out how to do things efficiently.
Of course, people would whine incessantly as we saw with DOGE the second those cuts hit a program where the media can cause an uproar about hungry children or health programs or whatever.
The federal workforce shrunk by 20% under Clinton and it wasn't a clusterfuck like doge. Just like the tariffs situation this administration only hires incompetent sycophants and clowns and are unable to do anything anything correctly.
> If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts
It'd be better to audit them to make sure that the money was being used smartly and that those agencies were accomplishing what there were created for. Arbitrary cuts would mean that agencies that were well functioning and lean would be suddenly unable to do the job we've been paying them for and it could encourage them to push for more funding than they need just so that they can survive the random cuts every 5-10 years.
We don't need to intentionally cause a crisis that will impact the lives of Americans who depend on the services their taxes fund. There are smarter ways to identify waste and hold accountable any people mismanaging funds. Government shouldn't be run like business, but honestly I'd also question the wisdom of companies who acted that way.
But needs some overall graphic, some charts or something, to tell a story. Something like dollars spent versus saved, to show how this whole effort was in-efficient.
And. I'd like to see something similar for Project 2025.
The problem with Doge was not that it was inefficient.... It's that it damaged a whole lot of essential infrastructure, exfiltrated a bunch of data, and generally destabilized a lot of essential systems.
Doing so but more efficiently would not have improved it.
It's probably just sourcing data from doge.gov which already lists every single thing doge is cutting. This "tracking" website is just a way to add a democrat slant toa republican led project. This version literally starts with "tracking the damage" as their sub-header slogan.
Isn't that the point? That the oversight of DOGE is so bad that the only way to get information about its operations is through online news? Banana republic level of state behavior.
I think it is really important from time to time to shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives and form a somewhat subjective overpromise/underdeliver judgement (also looking at where, why and how they succeeded or failed).
To me, the whole Doge initiative scores quite poorly in this regard:
Initial promises appear not realistic (or even worse: deceptive), while the (preliminary) results are lackluster, too.
My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
I think promises along that exact line deserve extreme skepticism: "Simply" slashing regulations/public budget for "easy gains" is just not credible, and if anyone is gonna bring up the same arguments in favor of nuclear power or similar things I'm just gonna label them "liar/idiot" and watch reality endorse my view...
If you wanted to do this for real, your would double the size of 18F (which was doing extraordinary work), and given the Inspectors General a blank check to eliminate fraud. These are both apolitical entities. Frankly the only people this would upset is the legacy government contractors.
So obviously they eliminated one and gutted the other.
Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization
I don't know how into building organizations you are, but 18f succeeded. they had a small footprint, and outsized impact, and really good relationships with the rest of the government. That kind of effectiveness is really difficult to grow in a massive bureaucracy. If your goal is efficiency you try to nurture that success.
throwing it away and starting over for purely political reasons is a completely negative outcome. the best you could hope for is to replicate what it was, but odds are against you.
18F was founded during the Obama administration, so absolutely no one in MAGA-world will ever have considered it apolitical.
One of the many fired IGs last year was investigating Neurolink - so noone in Musk-world will have considered them apolitical either.
Nothing government-related or government-adjacent will ever be broadly accepted as apolitical again in the US, regardless of intent or truth. Its very depressing.
If you did that at all Trump would never have been elected much less re-elected.
The Doge thing was just a big fuck you to everyone that they didn't like, a way to steal information and start violating laws with impunity to support their very dumb egos. There's no policy or objective besides harm, its too obvious that it would never work to literally anyone on the street and they went ahead with it anyway.
> shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives
You could take a good will attitude to DOGE then. I think many (including Elon) genuinely believed they could cut fraud and waste. But by their own admission, they were only mostly an advisory committee.
You can only do so much. Congress still has authority, and that's how it works, that's how the system is intended. And the reason DOGE hasn't done much is exactly because congress isn't willing to cut spending. It NEVER will. It didn't under any president including Reagan.
So basically you have an ever increasing deficit and spending because the way the political system is setup drives this. In fact, it happens in basically every democracy, so maybe it's just something that happens in democracies.
So - you could call the promise of DOGE lies, but I think they were a lie from Trump and not Elon. I think Trump promised Elon cuts, to get his help in the election, then backtracked, and that's exactly why Elon stormed out, he didn't get what he wanted.
And the US government is still massively overspending. Trump didn't really cut anything.
> My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
That doesn’t seem inferior at all. There’s very little to be gained by doing everything the same but with less money; the only way to make an actual difference is to quit doing the stupid shit that’s expensive. That’s what 90% of the world means by efficiency, i.e. don’t do the things that don’t need done.
The complete lack of wanting to rein in federal spending by some people is mind boggling to me. The number of employees in some departments of the government almost doubled in 5 years, with nothing to show except a huge budget.
You've set up a strawman, or are arguing against a position that's not relevant here. One can absolutely believe that spending should be made more efficient AND DOGE was a destructive and harmful disruption to essential spending.
The vast majority of federal spending is tied to programs like social security, Medicare, and the DoD which DOGE didn’t cut.
DOGE actions appear to have been largely based on the chaotic whims of Elon in response to perceived slights and tweets sent to him and did not have any significant effect on the budget. They chased after ghosts previously investigated by IGs and found insignificant, such as dead people on the social security rolls.
Real budget reform proposals remain out there from CRFB and others, and perhaps some future administration will undertake them when social security becomes insolvent in a few years.
Right, and the vast majority of most people’s budgets are their mortgage/rent. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t cut out that streaming subscription they don’t need when they’re accruing debt every year. Every bit helps.
If their time and energy are limited, the highest impact actions would be reducing the mortgage/rent or increasing income. And it's questionable whether foreign aid is a "streaming subscription" or a "gym membership" expenditure. Assuming you regularly go to the gym maybe keeping it will help you get a better job.
Even that isn't what's happened here. If we continue the analogy it's more like stop paying for wifi, then later discover you need it for work so sign up again at and pay an extra fee.
There is so much conflation (maybe intentional, I dunno) between the goal of cutting spending and the method that DOGE employed. If DOGE went in methodically and actually cut waste and fraud I'd cheer them. What actually happened was a mixture of:
- Cutting things without knowing the details and then later having bring them back at extra cost (e.g. employees)
- Cutting things regardless of consequence based on ideological views (or just randomly?)
- Not actually saving anything and just lying about it
One thing that could really help your position would be to speak specifically about one that doubled and why you believe it was wasteful besides HC/Budget. Were they not delivering value proportional (or better) to their growth?
A man cuts back on his budget for vegetables and other healthy groceries to save money while also 10xing his spend on alcohol which he likes ice cold, surpassing the food budget by far.
Most people: “hey dude that’s a huge mistake for xy and z reasons”
There’s always one: “most Americans spend too much and save too little, we should applaud this guy!”
—-
Edit - to head off any nit picking, 10x is illustrative not exact - It’s 3x up to $28B for ice while the usaid spend was either $22B for pure usaid spend, or $35B with co-managed other state dept stuff as of 2024. So depending on accounting, ice either far surpassed it or at least countered all cuts since the spend wasn’t fully eliminated . (And that’s not even touching on the moral turpitude of simply letting hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medicine rot as a consequence of the cuts as warned by the relevant inspector general before I’m assuming they were fired)
Trump fired a bunch of people in his first term that’s why the numbers went back up under Biden. There seems to be a huge 4 year gap in peoples memories as well as no concept of what an acceptable number of government employees actually is. Just a whole bunch of “that’s a big number!”
The same thing happened with NY Times headline about spending $6B over 3 years on immigration services. Too much money! Now here we are $40B deep in one year for Dhs et al. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Trump’s spending on Dhs alone is expected to hit $480B by the end of his term. How’s that for reigning in spending?
We could have had healthcare, instead people chose hate, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
I can't believe anyone still believes DOGE was actually about cutting federal spending. The current party in power has spent the past year massively increasing the federal deficit and future debt. If they are serious about anything it certainly isn't balancing the federal budget.
Oh great, I was really hoping to get my blood boiling today. Reading about data breaches done in the light of day is appalling, infinitely more so when it's condoned by the government who's supposed to prevent such grift and violations of privacy. It will take a long time to recover from this insane timeline (if ever).
The true purpose of DOGE was to exfiltrate sensitive data from the IRS, SSA, Medicaid, and other agencies. We may never know what all they have done/are doing with it, but it's certainly playing a role in the current immigration crackdowns.
Long term it will affect us all, likely more than the cuts the news prefers to focus on (tragic though they may be).
Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending (especially spending viewed as ideological) doing far more harm than good?
> Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
I think this is obvious. It was one of many goals, that aligned under an umbrella of activities. Asking for specific data creates a paper trail and triggers regulation. Restricting access, taking outright possession of hardware, and firing people along the way, helps shield the activity.
> Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending
aka "Aww shucks, we were just doin our best."
No rational organization would take many of the actions that were taken, if one of their primary goals was accountability. It was a smash and grab (disorganized would be fair to say), with an ad-hoc rationalization that was never reasoned.
Government salaries are such a small percentage (less than 5% is what I'm seeing in cursory searches) of spending that it doesnt make a lot of sense to me that DOGE was a genuine attempt at cutting spending. I work in defense, and at least a few times a year, I see government contract money that could pay a dozen salaries wasted on equipment that never even gets installed. We have a government bought tool that cost $2million 8 years ago, and we plug it in when senators come tour our facility so we can pretend we use it. If anyone in the government cared about reducing costs, I don't think they would care too much about payroll. Its the equivalent of taking all the appliances out of your house because your electric bill was $200 when you take home $5k.
I won't pretend to know what the actual motives were, but financial "efficiency" seems suspect to me.
I was talking to an applications engineer one night at the bar in a restaurant. The company he works for makes equipment for mass producing the large armament shell cylinders. One of the clients that bought their equipment was a missile manufacturer. He went on site and found the machine had incorrect tolerance and was producing deformed products. They also lied about the thickness of the material they planed on using. Finally when the DOD general asked him point blank, "Will this help us produce X missiles a year?" he said no and why. Turns out the contractor directly lied about their capability and yet retained the contact because they are one of the few companies that produces missiles. He never got a call back from the company because they wanted him to lie to the general.
This is the actual waste that needs to be looked before the checks are even signed. No way in hell DOGE or anyone in the current administration will actually look at bad spending. Specially now this administration likes the name Department of War. These are the same companies that bribe ... I mean donate to politicians to retain this corrupt funding.
Doge did far more than cutting salaries, the salary cutting was almost entirely voluntary and actually a tiny fraction of what they were cutting. Mostly it actually is third party contracts being cut. You can see all the contracts being cut here: https://doge.gov/
Please don’t cite doge itself as if it’s a reliable source.
Citing doge as a source shows that your viewpoint is built on provenly bad info.
And Frankly it’s insulting to HN readers that it’s being cited given how well published it was that their estimates were grossly inflated, unreliable, and kept trying to claim credit for cutting things that were already ended.
Putting everything that DOGE has done, am I the only one who thinks that there is a teeny, tiny conflict of interest in Musk naming a department pretty much the same as one of the cryptocurrencies that he supports (Dogecoin)? Isn't that using the government for marketing?
Yes, when you set aside Musk buying Twitter and using it to platform white supremacists and extremists to help get Trump elected in exchange for benefits to his companies and direct control over private regulatory and financial data that allowed him to gain potential advantage over his competition and punish his enemies, naming your fake government office after your memecoin is also a problem.
People probably don't focus on that because it's the least worst aspect of any of this. Also the President of the United States rugpulled the public on two memecoins and wiped out $4 billion, and no one talks about that either.
Just today I ran into one of the very minor legacies of doge. When talking about conflict styles I used to have students take a survey on the US Institute of Peace's website. Doge shut it down. I guess that survey was taking up too much money to run... Now the only thing there is a press release stroking Trump's ego.
Doge.gov already has the most transparent listing of everything they are cutting. This other website that starts out its header with "Tracking The Damage" is clearly a biased attempt by democrats to discredit a program that was started by republicans. It's actually kind of sad people don't realize that the two-party system involves tribalism where no matter how good something is, the other side will call it bad if it wasn't their idea.
I haven’t looked at it in almost a year, but was that the site that was full of basic errors and misleading info that was clearly designed to expose “waste, fraud, and abuse” that actually wasn’t any of those things? Yeah, I don’t know why we wouldn’t trust them…
pjc50 | 8 hours ago
I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.
chii | 8 hours ago
On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen end up also not getting any credit to the institutions and regulators, so on the budget it feels (to uninformed voters) that these departments are simply wasting taxpayer money.
throw0101a | 7 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
> On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen […]
Michael Lewis (of The Big Short fame) has two books on the things that government(s) do that no one else (often) can, either because they're too big, too expensive/unprofitable, or a co-ordination problem where it effects many actors simultaneously:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Risk
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788713/who-is-govern...
wwweston | 6 hours ago
"What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?"
seba_dos1 | 7 hours ago
After all, Y2K came and nothing happened. What a hoax! /s
pjc50 | 7 hours ago
JohnMakin | 4 hours ago
This is one of the more frustrating things working in SRE/ops/infra. Yes, if you have really good metrics and monitoring you can show to some egghead exec that might care that your numbers are improving - but lots of times that visibility doesn't exist, or no one cares very much. I've been advised more than once in my career to just "let it break" so when I come to fix it after I had warned about it breaking, it makes me more visible, when I easily could have prevented it in the first place. This mindset is rampant, in my own career anyway. I think it's really idiotic.
drstewart | 5 hours ago
It's a neat trick to pull to say something is a terrible disaster but also that you won't show why and that's by design. Impossible to refute.
lukeschlather | 5 hours ago
drstewart | 5 hours ago
palmotea | 4 hours ago
> I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
It's a problem with libertarian thinking, generally. Most of the things libertarians rail against exist for good reason, and the libertarian "solution" is actually the thing that already failed in the past.
Your typical libertarian becomes one by reading a ~300 page propaganda book as a teenager or young adult that outlines the problems with Soviet central planning, adds in some legitimate gripes about present-day government rough edges, then lays out a compellingly-neat libertarian free-market fantasy. It's very black and white, offering a stark, false choice between Soviet central planning or minimal government libertarianism.
It doesn't prompt anyone to think about history before the complained about government functions arose: e.g. how was food and drug safety before the FDA? How did that work out for the people then? Were people really better off being able to buy radium water to try to cure what ails them?
It's also very selective. I've never seen any libertarian advocate the abolition of all the government bureaucracy and regulation that protect property rights.
yabones | 8 hours ago
pjc50 | 7 hours ago
(the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)
sedawkgrep | 7 hours ago
irl_zebra | 7 hours ago
ChrisMarshallNY | 7 hours ago
Tends to make them targets of suspicion.
Source: My father[0] was in the CIA, and worked at an NPO, in Africa.
[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm
heisgone | 6 hours ago
Your father was a great man.
ChrisMarshallNY | 6 hours ago
pjc50 | 7 hours ago
heisgone | 7 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR09YYX-3fg
ImPostingOnHN | 7 hours ago
> the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of...
...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you.
Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).
estearum | 7 hours ago
Given the timeline of the Musk family's arrival and departure... one might believe they viewed the end of Apartheid as a bit troublesome.
ourmandave | 6 hours ago
They actually did vaccinations until they found him and then quit, leaving a bunch of people with only the first dose.
And a complete distrust for Doctors Without Borders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...
mrguyorama | 4 hours ago
>The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden.
Your cite disagrees
ourmandave | 2 hours ago
heisgone | 7 hours ago
Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.
wwweston | 7 hours ago
Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side.
This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.
Schlagbohrer | 6 hours ago
energy123 | 7 hours ago
The status quo in US foreign policy was that as long as you're pliable to US interests, then the US was nice to you. You get democracy and get bounded autonomy, more autonomy than was afforded to subjects under any previous empire, to the extent that people would question whether the US even was an empire. Despite US being incredibly powerful militarily, the US was seen as non-threatening to friendly countries. That was an incredible magic trick, since those two things are usually correlated. This drew countries into its orbit and expanded its influence.
Countries could see the contrast to being in the Soviet Union's orbit and having your grain stolen, your people getting kicked out (Crimea) or being put into a camp.
This theory is a way to conceptualize the problem with Trump's bellicose and volatile attitudes towards Canada and European countries. If everyone sees you as a threat, this theory predicts that they will balance against you. In concrete terms, this theory predicts that countries who aren't threatened by China (due to being far away) will become closer to China if they feel threatened by the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_threat
heisgone | 6 hours ago
openasocket | 6 hours ago
I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.
Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.
> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.
Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.
> Another problem is the US is broke.
USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.
heisgone | 6 hours ago
openasocket | 4 hours ago
By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?
> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID
That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.
heisgone | 3 hours ago
The Belt and Road Initiative is reputed to be 7 times bigger than the Marshall plan in today's dollar. It's getting hard for the US to compete with that.
openasocket | an hour ago
So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?
What do you think is the moral thing to do here?
bjourne | 5 hours ago
onlyrealcuzzo | 6 hours ago
This isn't a problem if the money is well spent.
The problem is that a very small fraction of the money is being spent on anything that can reasonably be considered "an investment".
nxm | 7 hours ago
CursedSilicon | 7 hours ago
estearum | 7 hours ago
Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.
krapp | 4 hours ago
Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless.
But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink.
[0]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886840365329608708
estearum | 4 hours ago
DOGE was an exercise in vice signaling.
Which is a real shame because there was a real opportunity to inject a fresh set of eyes on what is surely a problem-rich environment.
It will unfortunately serve as discredit to all future efforts that look anything similar.
kube-system | 4 hours ago
autoexec | an hour ago
kube-system | 4 hours ago
When the National Partnership for Reinventing Government successfully cut spending in the 90s, they took 5 years to carefully evaluate what the government was doing and why, followed legal processes to propose improvements, and saved a lot of money simply by finding ways to streamline processes and procedures.
DOGE has taken a completely different approach, slashing and burning without understanding the consequences of their actions (or potentially, not caring), and intentionally doing it without involving other stakeholders. Many of the things they've cut that they thought were stupid were immediately found to be important and reversed. Some of the other things they’ve cut we’ll be finding were important for decades to come.
DOGE is just Chesterton’s Fence as a service.
Papazsazsa | 7 hours ago
2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget
3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.
4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.
freejazz | 7 hours ago
So? Let's not pretend like DOGE actually cared about that.
Papazsazsa | 6 hours ago
For people with operational experience, the concern is real and predates DOGE by decades – USAID cover compromised actual development workers, created force protection problems, and poisoned the well for legitimate civilian programs.
freejazz | 6 hours ago
Addressing it would be to provide the functions without the IC.
Papazsazsa | 4 hours ago
freejazz | 4 hours ago
Noaidi | 6 hours ago
oblio | 5 hours ago
But they lacked soft power and their allies were weak.
ajross | 6 hours ago
That's... pretty much a good definition of soft power, and frankly not even a cynical one. Your argument presupposes a world where "clandestine infra" and whatnot simply wouldn't happen if we didn't do it. But obviously it would, it would just serve someone else's interests.
And fine, you think the cold war US was bad, clearly. And maybe it was, but it was better (for the US, but also for the world as a whole) than the alternatives at the time, and it remains so today. China's international aspirations are significantly more impactful (c.f. Taiwan policy, shipping zone violations throughout the pacific rim, denial of access to internal markets, straight up literal genocide in at least one instance) and constrained now only by US "soft power".
The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
Papazsazsa | 5 hours ago
Besides security guarantees/defense aegis, the heaviest lifters in U.S. soft power projection are structural and cultural forces that operate largely independent of government:
- Dollar hegemony & financial infra
- Cultural exports
- Universities & research
- Private sector (including tech)
natpalmer1776 | 4 hours ago
but in this instance I can't help but wonder from a game theory standpoint, is there anything GAINED by affecting USAID in a way in which we clearly lose some (relatively small per your comment) amount of soft power?
That is to say, a perfectly played game would involve not making any sacrifices unless it was to gain some value or reduce some loss. What is gained (or not lost) here?
Papazsazsa | 4 hours ago
Domestic 'gain' is fiscal + political + transparency. USAID was pass-through where taxpayer dollars flowed to NGOs and contractors whose missions aligned with whatever administration or congressional bloc was in power – but with enough layers of separation to obscure the nature of the spending.
Foreign 'gain' is a move away from liberal internationalism to transactional bilateralism/resetting expectations wrt American largesse. We were being outbid everywhere anyway, and the org was ineffectively doing something DoS should be doing.
6510 | 2 hours ago
ajross | 4 hours ago
> USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S.
And the goalposts move again. Your original point was that soft power was bad. After pushback, now it's "soft power is good but USAID was inefficient".
I submit that neither of these arguments was presented in good faith and that your real goal is just defense of DOGE.
mindslight | 2 hours ago
In a thread about USAID it makes sense to talk about the damage to USAID. If these other pillars of soft power matter more to you, then try writing productive comments lamenting their destruction rather than downplaying in this discussion.
orhmeh09 | 4 hours ago
If you believe this, why did you just go "well, what about China?"
ajross | 2 hours ago
Basically: analysis of international relations and influence techniques can only be correct when it treats with the influence of all parties, and not just the US. You agree with that framing, right?
CaptWillard | an hour ago
reenorap | 6 hours ago
If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.
Swenrekcah | 6 hours ago
ajross | 6 hours ago
Not on the menu. The question is do you want them controlled by the US or by China?
drstewart | 5 hours ago
A check of pretty much any UN vote shows that this was a completely and utterly ineffective method then.
Example: https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overw...
shrubble | 5 hours ago
It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.
mistrial9 | 5 hours ago
#-- Governor Gavin Newsom met with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on January 16, 2026, to announce over $419 million in new state funding for homelessness and mental health efforts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The funding comes from the sixth round of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program and includes $39.9 million for San Francisco to support shelter operations, navigation centers, and services through June 2029.
xnx | 5 hours ago
Yes, in as much as that is a nonsense phrase meant to sound bad. If USAID buys wheat from American farmers, the money stays in the US and the wheat is exported.
Isamu | 4 hours ago
You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor.
It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot.
It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.
aaa_aaa | 7 hours ago
irl_zebra | 7 hours ago
bfeynman | 7 hours ago
estearum | 6 hours ago
Not to mention the US government in particular was quite literally deliberately designed to be inefficient as a way to safeguard personal liberties as well.
Not to say we shouldn't cut inefficiencies where we can, but the early DOGE promises were obviously made from a place of profound ignorance and (worse) lack of curiosity.
lokar | 5 hours ago
Clinton left office with the budget in surplus.
Government can work if you pick good leaders.
badgersnake | 5 hours ago
lokar | 5 hours ago
They have contempt for government, they seek to degrade it with the hopes of further discrediting it in the eyes of the public.
badgersnake | 5 hours ago
Typically those that take the slash and burn approach are trying to break things yes - in the UK is has generally come from those with a small government agenda who want to break things to justify privatizing them or scrapping them altogether.
youknownothing | 5 hours ago
AuryGlenz | 4 hours ago
If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts (without stopping with the yearly increases they already get). That would make it similar to many businesses, and force the management at the agencies to actually figure out how to do things efficiently.
Of course, people would whine incessantly as we saw with DOGE the second those cuts hit a program where the media can cause an uproar about hungry children or health programs or whatever.
Hikikomori | 2 hours ago
autoexec | an hour ago
It'd be better to audit them to make sure that the money was being used smartly and that those agencies were accomplishing what there were created for. Arbitrary cuts would mean that agencies that were well functioning and lean would be suddenly unable to do the job we've been paying them for and it could encourage them to push for more funding than they need just so that they can survive the random cuts every 5-10 years.
We don't need to intentionally cause a crisis that will impact the lives of Americans who depend on the services their taxes fund. There are smarter ways to identify waste and hold accountable any people mismanaging funds. Government shouldn't be run like business, but honestly I'd also question the wisdom of companies who acted that way.
FrustratedMonky | 7 hours ago
But needs some overall graphic, some charts or something, to tell a story. Something like dollars spent versus saved, to show how this whole effort was in-efficient.
And. I'd like to see something similar for Project 2025.
ahhhhnoooo | 6 hours ago
Doing so but more efficiently would not have improved it.
twochillin | 6 hours ago
nobody9999 | 5 hours ago
https://www.project2025.observer/en
https://progressivereform.org/tracking-trump-2/project-2025-...
plasma_beam | 7 hours ago
Sparyjerry | 3 hours ago
wildrhythms | 2 hours ago
bjourne | 24 minutes ago
myrmidon | 7 hours ago
To me, the whole Doge initiative scores quite poorly in this regard: Initial promises appear not realistic (or even worse: deceptive), while the (preliminary) results are lackluster, too.
My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
I think promises along that exact line deserve extreme skepticism: "Simply" slashing regulations/public budget for "easy gains" is just not credible, and if anyone is gonna bring up the same arguments in favor of nuclear power or similar things I'm just gonna label them "liar/idiot" and watch reality endorse my view...
coffeefirst | 7 hours ago
So obviously they eliminated one and gutted the other.
jdross | 7 hours ago
convolvatron | 6 hours ago
throwing it away and starting over for purely political reasons is a completely negative outcome. the best you could hope for is to replicate what it was, but odds are against you.
myvoiceismypass | 4 hours ago
One of the many fired IGs last year was investigating Neurolink - so noone in Musk-world will have considered them apolitical either.
Nothing government-related or government-adjacent will ever be broadly accepted as apolitical again in the US, regardless of intent or truth. Its very depressing.
hobs | 7 hours ago
zpeti | 5 hours ago
You could take a good will attitude to DOGE then. I think many (including Elon) genuinely believed they could cut fraud and waste. But by their own admission, they were only mostly an advisory committee.
You can only do so much. Congress still has authority, and that's how it works, that's how the system is intended. And the reason DOGE hasn't done much is exactly because congress isn't willing to cut spending. It NEVER will. It didn't under any president including Reagan.
So basically you have an ever increasing deficit and spending because the way the political system is setup drives this. In fact, it happens in basically every democracy, so maybe it's just something that happens in democracies.
So - you could call the promise of DOGE lies, but I think they were a lie from Trump and not Elon. I think Trump promised Elon cuts, to get his help in the election, then backtracked, and that's exactly why Elon stormed out, he didn't get what he wanted.
And the US government is still massively overspending. Trump didn't really cut anything.
anthony_d | 4 hours ago
That doesn’t seem inferior at all. There’s very little to be gained by doing everything the same but with less money; the only way to make an actual difference is to quit doing the stupid shit that’s expensive. That’s what 90% of the world means by efficiency, i.e. don’t do the things that don’t need done.
reenorap | 6 hours ago
ahhhhnoooo | 6 hours ago
javagram | 6 hours ago
DOGE actions appear to have been largely based on the chaotic whims of Elon in response to perceived slights and tweets sent to him and did not have any significant effect on the budget. They chased after ghosts previously investigated by IGs and found insignificant, such as dead people on the social security rolls.
Real budget reform proposals remain out there from CRFB and others, and perhaps some future administration will undertake them when social security becomes insolvent in a few years.
AuryGlenz | 4 hours ago
triceratops | 3 hours ago
yibg | 3 hours ago
There is so much conflation (maybe intentional, I dunno) between the goal of cutting spending and the method that DOGE employed. If DOGE went in methodically and actually cut waste and fraud I'd cheer them. What actually happened was a mixture of:
- Cutting things without knowing the details and then later having bring them back at extra cost (e.g. employees)
- Cutting things regardless of consequence based on ideological views (or just randomly?)
- Not actually saving anything and just lying about it
maerF0x0 | 6 hours ago
triceratops | 6 hours ago
Which ones? By how many employees? If a department went from 2 to 4 people that isn't prima facie outrageous.
lawn | 6 hours ago
mint5 | 6 hours ago
Most people: “hey dude that’s a huge mistake for xy and z reasons”
There’s always one: “most Americans spend too much and save too little, we should applaud this guy!”
—- Edit - to head off any nit picking, 10x is illustrative not exact - It’s 3x up to $28B for ice while the usaid spend was either $22B for pure usaid spend, or $35B with co-managed other state dept stuff as of 2024. So depending on accounting, ice either far surpassed it or at least countered all cuts since the spend wasn’t fully eliminated . (And that’s not even touching on the moral turpitude of simply letting hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medicine rot as a consequence of the cuts as warned by the relevant inspector general before I’m assuming they were fired)
righthand | 5 hours ago
The same thing happened with NY Times headline about spending $6B over 3 years on immigration services. Too much money! Now here we are $40B deep in one year for Dhs et al. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Trump’s spending on Dhs alone is expected to hit $480B by the end of his term. How’s that for reigning in spending?
We could have had healthcare, instead people chose hate, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
rurp | 4 hours ago
baggachipz | 6 hours ago
hamdingers | 6 hours ago
Long term it will affect us all, likely more than the cuts the news prefers to focus on (tragic though they may be).
bluescrn | 6 hours ago
Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending (especially spending viewed as ideological) doing far more harm than good?
krapp | 6 hours ago
Maybe they were naive and useful idiots, but that doesn't just happen by accident.
PopAlongKid | 6 hours ago
To hide the true purpose behind a curtain of "aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending".
Supermancho | 6 hours ago
I think this is obvious. It was one of many goals, that aligned under an umbrella of activities. Asking for specific data creates a paper trail and triggers regulation. Restricting access, taking outright possession of hardware, and firing people along the way, helps shield the activity.
> Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending
aka "Aww shucks, we were just doin our best."
No rational organization would take many of the actions that were taken, if one of their primary goals was accountability. It was a smash and grab (disorganized would be fair to say), with an ad-hoc rationalization that was never reasoned.
unclad5968 | 5 hours ago
I won't pretend to know what the actual motives were, but financial "efficiency" seems suspect to me.
yndoendo | 5 hours ago
This is the actual waste that needs to be looked before the checks are even signed. No way in hell DOGE or anyone in the current administration will actually look at bad spending. Specially now this administration likes the name Department of War. These are the same companies that bribe ... I mean donate to politicians to retain this corrupt funding.
Sparyjerry | 3 hours ago
mint5 | an hour ago
Citing doge as a source shows that your viewpoint is built on provenly bad info.
And Frankly it’s insulting to HN readers that it’s being cited given how well published it was that their estimates were grossly inflated, unreliable, and kept trying to claim credit for cutting things that were already ended.
squeegmeister | 6 hours ago
youknownothing | 5 hours ago
mlnj | 5 hours ago
krapp | 4 hours ago
People probably don't focus on that because it's the least worst aspect of any of this. Also the President of the United States rugpulled the public on two memecoins and wiped out $4 billion, and no one talks about that either.
intermerda | 4 hours ago
mrguyorama | 3 hours ago
dlev_pika | 4 hours ago
I truly hope our future DSA gov takes this experience to heart.
jccalhoun | 4 hours ago
ikeashark | 3 hours ago
Sparyjerry | 3 hours ago
senordevnyc | 12 minutes ago
tencentshill | 2 hours ago
Justice will continue be served as more of these lawsuits make their way through the courts and their crimes are exposed.