DOGE isn't about efficiency, it is about removing checks and balances. Those are there to prevent malware like the GOP to take over the system.
I hope the people behind the submission get their message across. But you shouldn't have the conversation about efficiency. That is entirely the distraction.
Don't talk me about efficient governance of autocracy. It always ends in burning down the land on which it feasts.
> Don't talk me about efficient governance of autocracy.
Autocracies are not efficient at all. There's corruption everywhere.
The larger the state, the more opportunities for corruption. Of course, dismantling the fat state will anger many - those who are fed by it. Unfortunately some "false positives" are part of the process. All the rest is poetry.
We are so way beyond any reasonable "you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette" arguments, and those are cheap talking points that I could have gotten on fox news that you are mindlessly repeating. You are tossing the baby out with the bathwater destroying all checks and balances as you go. This is the death of reason and nuance. This is how autocracy gets a foot in the door. This is the beginning of the end of democracy. And you're cheering on the autocrats.
You should be afraid of one thing. The sane-looking replacement of Trump.
When the fascists conclude the take-over is complete, they will prop up someone with a more acceptable appearance, and the public will be relieved. The media will keep a narrow focus on just the drama of actualities.
But still, a tyranny installed, democracy gone. And people will accept it as the new normal. Everyone will keep normalizing everything, the rituals of democracy as a smokescreen for the powerful.
Fake symbols. Fake titles. For the eyes that want to be blinded.
You act like our institutions haven't already been ineffectual smokescreens for power to work behind the scenes. Trump's election is the most democratic thing to happen in decades. People are just shocked to find out that an elected representative actually has the power to do things other than sitting there like a puppet.
My friend, the world is not binary. It is not Dems vs Reps. It is not a matter of perfect democracy, and fascist tyranny, with nothing in between.
The goal is the latter though. The super wealthy and powerful head to an era where they decide what happens, they do not want the rules and the law apply to them.
----------------------------
Angry about a transgender you have never seen? Good, very good.
They want your power.
It is kind of funny that you accuse me of adhering to a democratic-republican binary when it comes to my world view before immediately also accusing me of only holding the beliefs that I do because of trans people.
The efficiency comparison is interesting, since it starts relatively evenly but quickly dismisses the value of the DOGE approach. Everyone I know who worked at USDS has been talented and well-meaning, but I can't help but feel they've been hamstrung specifically by
1. Methodical improvements mostly work to improve processes as they are. They don't delete processes that shouldn't exist.
2. Agency "empowerment" often means working with a lot of incumbent teams that are simply not suited to digital work and sinks way too much time/energy into stakeholder management.
USDS has done good work, but could have done a lot more if they were actually empowered.
This is true based on the conversations I’ve had with my USDS friends too, but I’m under no illusion that DOGE will actually empower people to do the right things.
Like, as someone who is generally fairly process averse, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a huge middle ground between too much process that hampers getting things done and no process that leads to decisions that either break things, or worse, set disastrous acts in motion because basic checks or conversations with people who have more context didn’t happen.
I think if there was a good-faith attempt from the DOGE folks to audit and understand certain systems and processes, instead of gleefully dismantling and freezing programs, firing people, gleefully announcing how much money was “saved” (and often with incorrect amounts) and reflexively ripping on how terrible everything is, you’d probably get some cooperation from the people who have had to deal with bullshit bureaucracy. But that isn’t what happened.
What’s happened is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water, all real security issues being completely ignored, under the guise that 19 year old crypto bros have the work experience, social skills, or common sense to foresee what is happening.
Governments are inefficient. That’s as much a feature as it is a bug. But with USDS in particular, you had people who left high paying jobs to work for the government because they wanted to make things better for democracy and the country. That is decidedly not the goal of DOGE employees, who want to out McKinsey McKinsey when it comes to just slashing and burning.
Unfortunately nuance is dead. I too wish Musk had tried to empower USDS instead of immediately alienating many of the people best positioned to improve things.
But DoGE is more like a PE firm that fires a bunch of people. It is less like a careful founder who hand crafts tough microdecisions that make everyone more efficient. DoGE cares about the balance sheet not the operations.
Yeah I’d say it is PE crossed with the worst management consultants. The actual health of the programs and the food to humanity doesn’t matter. It’s all about some perceived balance sheet as you say with zero care about the fallout from those decisions.
It’s easy to be efficient when you’re no longer providing any programs or services.
Are sweeping layoffs without any serious attempt to retain critical talent going to empower the remaining staff to do their best work? We've seen lots of examples of DOGE cutting loose important people and then flailing to hire them back. What happens when that one person who makes the whole team able to do their jobs gets cut loose? Are you empowered and productive then suddenly?
If DOGE were serious about increasing efficiency they'd be focused on process reforms. Instead they're randomly cancelling contracts, cancelling leases, and letting people go without doing the hard work of analyzing processes or analyzing organizations to figure out where the problems actually are.
It's like their philosophy is "if we cut one of the dog's legs off it'll suddenly become a more efficient runner".
I'm not here to defend DOGE, but you're making the same mistake as the article of assuming the DOGE approach has no merit.
Deleting processes somewhat randomly, then listening for the pain, is a pretty well-known technique for understanding and cleaning up legacy systems. Of course, it should only be used on systems where (temporary) failures are tolerable.
There are parts of the government where that is true, and parts where it is dangerous. The problem on both sides is assuming the same techniques should be applied across the entire government, when some services are indeed life-and-death and others absolutely should be deleted.
The pain you're listening for here is dead veterans, dead trans kids, dead disabled people, starving seniors, people dying from preventable viruses because of vaccine program cuts. The pain you're listening for here is toxic water and food-borne illnesses.
We know we need most of these programs and services! You can make them more efficient, you can identify and cut waste. You don't do that by just making blanket, massive cuts to staff and services and then trying to cobble the pieces back together over the next few years. It doesn't make sense. No sensible person would run a business that way.
Not everyone believes that some amount of human death is acceptable collateral, but essentially everyone behaves as if that were true.
We could save ~47,000 deaths in the next year if we banned cars. Do you think that the deaths of innocent children is an acceptable trade-off for your right to drive? You might not like to think of it that way, but it's just objectively true that this is the trade-off we choose.
If we really care about human lives, why isn't the entire federal budget redirected towards healthcare and medical research? Do you think it's OK to watch children die of cancer just to fund national parks and space probes? If we care about all lives, why don't we spend the entire federal budget on humanitarian aid? What kind of heartless monster would watch children in Africa starve to death just to make their kid's school slightly nicer? If we care about all future lives, why are we squandering resources on consumption now, when compounding returns over centuries could allow those resources to provide vastly greater utility in future?
Everything has an opportunity cost and everything is a tradeoff. We pretend that the status quo has no ugly tradeoffs to protect our sanity, but that's obviously untrue. People die every day because of things we take completely for granted. They die for reasons that are often directly contradictory - I die for want of a regulation that would have prevented a medical accident, you die because of regulatory burdens that hinder the development or dissemination of new medical technology.
Musk might be a mindless vandal or a maverick genius; I am absolutely not intelligent enough to argue that point either way. What I do know is that it would be a miraculous coincidence if the federal government's priorities circa 2024 were so close to perfect that any radical change is prima facie wrong. I have to at least entertain the possibility that we have been stuck in a local maximum and have been squandering massive amounts of potential. A handful of deaths is, in the context of the US economy, actually a very cheap price to pay if you genuinely believe that you can find a fraction of a percentage point of GDP growth.
This is absolutely true, and I think something that a lot of bleeding heart liberals don't fully understand.
You might be against the death penalty, for example, because you can't bear the thought that the government would put innocent people to death. But some people believe that these are acceptable losses for the gain.
Likewise, you might think that a program that helps prevent violence against a certain minority group would be beneficial. But some people feel that this is a waste of money since it doesn't actually benefit the most people. If you spend money, after all, wouldn't you want to positively affect the most people you could? Everybody else--they are acceptable losses.
If you observed that your argument needs to rest on a false binary choice in an us-vs-others (identity "I am not a liberal") you should take time to step up to meta-thinking. Maybe we have been to long in the culture war?
Some people want us to ridicule compassion. But Why? For Who? For What?
Liberals also support the death penalty but in scenarios where it is less likely to happen. For example if someone doesn’t pay their parking fine it’s possible the situation escalates to a point where an armed government official will kill the person refusing to pay for resisting their lawful commands. This situation might be more unlikely than death penalty for murder or the ‘victim’ might be more responsible for the situation but I think having a hard block against the death penalty because it involves death or is irreversible is hard to defend. I think if you have a sovereign you ultimately have to be comfortable with killing people who oppose the sovereign.
These are some extremely serious claims that I'm going to need to see sources to believe. I'm by no means here to defend DOGE, but what have they done to put the lives of trans kids at serious risk?
Twitter is losing users and is resorting to mob protection racket techniques to get more advertising spend.
Tesla is constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons. FSD fuckups, the absolute disaster of quality control that is the Cybertruck, service delays, parts delays, safety recalls...
SpaceX reportedly has layers of management to protect the actual people who get shit done from Musk's interference. This being the most successful of the companies may possibly be a result of that. https://x.com/yoloption/status/1595213678147764224
Most of his businesses are failures. He has two enormous successes. Unsuccessful businesses eventually fold and go away. That's not an acceptable option for the federal government.
Governments aren’t businesses. They have different incentives and goals. You’re very naive to think otherwise and falling for a pretty common conservative trap.
> Elon's businesses are highly successful running exactly this algorithm.
Oh how nice, but we don't rely on Twitter to look after nuclear weapon stockpiles, warn us about E. coli in food, or fund vaccine development. So it's not really the same is it?
No, that is definitely not well known or time tested technique in anything that actually affects things that matter. You do that when you don't care about consequences. And in this context, not caring about consequences is sociopaths.
Second, you can't just turn on institutions or checks and balances again. Which is who DOGE does it - to cause permanent destruction they will blame on someone else and to cement oligarchy power.
I sincerely don't understand what this proves. You're citing an example of them making a bad cut and having to reverse it. What part of that is an improvement?
To me, what's happening in the US now looks very much like the wave of
hostile-takeovers that destroyed British industry through the 70s and
80s. Adam Curtis "Mayfair Set" documents it well [0].
"Efficiency", which is an empty and practically meaningless word if
you really examine it [1], was the cause celebre then too. And many
of the perpetrators were charismatic and quite loved (Stirling was an
archetypal British hero) up until the damage had been done and the
trickery exposed.
> In short, the idea is to spend time on the floor with your returns team, observing the current process and asking questions to map exactly how you handle returns today. The result is a process map of how you handle different types of returns from end to end.
> 2. Delete any part or process you can
> So look at all the actions you take, question each of them: Question every step: can we remove this? What would happen if we removed this? Would the outcome still be the same? What would be the impact on our KPIs (e.g. customer satisfaction, handling time, and profits)?
I only got as far as step 2 and it's pretty clear DOGE isn't following the steps.
For shakeups, the Deming (14 point) [0] approach that starts with
"watch and learn" (system analysis) has always seemed more mature to
me than "slash and burn" (and see what grows out of the ashes). Musk
is almost the opposite of Deming. Fear and to some extent capricious
randomness seem part of the DOGE formula. There's simply no way even
cursory investigation can have occurred in the time-frame. To me, any
claim that that the programme is evidence-based or rational is
specious. I think the effects are designed to be discombobulating and
foment fear, and that it's purely political.
They should add Secure Drop support [0] - it's what Bloomberg, NYT, Washington Post, Politico, NOYB, etc use for anonymous tips.
Email runs the risk of de-anonymization, as most people don't know about Proton, and this very much falls close to whistleblowing.
Also, anyone who seriously wishes to say anything should probably NOT respond via IG or even follow the page. If you are whistleblowing, maintaining anonymity is critical.
> Email runs the risk of de-anonymization, as most people don't know about Proton
Proton is not perfect. They have surrendered recovery email addresses to law enforcement [1] and endorse Republicans through their official social media accounts [2].
This is interesting but very much lacking in details, it needs exact examples. I really feel for the workers at USDS. I was an engineer during the Elon Twitter acquisition and saw the thoughtless destruction first-hand.
However, the burn-it-all down approach does have some merit that critics of Elon/DOGE never admit to. How do they propose you carefully untangle the knots of fractal bureaucracy at speed and produce results if not by just cutting them off? The previous approaches of a special committee etc. just add a another fractal and yet another process.
Sometimes I feel the critics would be content if nothing was ever accomplished, if nothing ever changed, as long as thoughtful meetings were conducted and stakeholders were consulted. There is a very real layer of inertia that needs to be punched through, velocity has merit all its own.
I am very concerned about the possible outcomes of DOGE overall but business as usual just means the US goes bankrupt slowly with all the correct protocols observed. I am glad the inertia is being punctured.
Prolonged deficit spending is by definition not sustainable.
We have been doing that for about 25 years but can’t continue indefinitely. Especially not with higher interest rates.
Government has objectively gotten worse despite massive tax revenue and is involved in a lot of endeavors that are well outside its scope IMO.
As just one of many examples: Just try to build a house pretty much anywhere and you will encounter fractal bureaucracy. This is during a nationwide housing shortage and many societal ills can be directly linked to housing costs!
I was going to say 40 years, which is roughly when the Reagan administration gave up on promising to control the size of government. There's a question of when unsustainability has gone on for long enough to be regarded as perpetual.
The housing supply in my locale exploded during the run-up to the 2008 crash. Acres and acres of land got turned into spec neighborhoods. There were multiple hi-rise condominium towers going up within eyeshot of my house. In fact, my dad remarked presciently: "Condominium construction is a traditional indicator of the end of a housing cycle."
I was thinking back to when Clinton balanced the budget.
And yes I directionally propose that we should build houses until property prices fall and then build some more.
The housing crash was funded primarily by the govt. Loans were being made because of govt policies that never should have or would have been made otherwise!
2008 was devastating because it made us stop building housing due to speculative price manipulation of securities and again the govt being in a business it should not have!
Federal agencies and civil servants didn’t create the deficits. Federal agencies don’t pass laws, they interpret the laws and set policies to meet the requirements of the implementation of the laws.
If you want to change how the government works, you need to change laws. Yes, government can be more efficient and effective, but blaming and firing civil servants is just scapegoating.
It would be like blaming contractors because you can’t build a house where you want, or hate the architect’s design or feel limited by zoning laws or construction codes.
The problems you identify are with the lawmakers, not the law implementers.
> I was an engineer during the Elon Twitter acquisition and saw the thoughtless destruction first-hand.
I don't know. I'm not a fan of Elon, and never really used Twitter. The popular opinion was that firing most of the workforce, Twitter would go down. That it needed god knows how many SREs to keep running.
Then Elon fired everyone and Twitter didn't go down. What was destroyed?
Budgets are defined by the president and approved by congress; both are republicans controled. Why not turn off the tap in the traditional way instead of all this chaos?
They should be able to tell the departments their budgets getting cut and let the distributed leaders and experts evaluate the detailed logistics of how to manage the resulting budget in their own department. Elon going like by line in the US budget is like my CFO looking at my micro-service’s memory allocation, just seems silly.
Leaders should be setting high level goals and budgets and those on the ground can make the necessary adjustments to make them match.
I’ve been in government contracts. Been on the teams that built the websites or whatever. It’s always some massive Fortune 500 company with a VP that was college roommates with a politician or went to West Point with a general. Of course when government guys give big congrats they immediately get booked as a very well paid speaker at some useless conference.
In defense of this process is the government needs to work with stable companies that are highly likely to be in business in 10-15 years. That rules out a lot of startups.
Networks matter and trust matters, they should prefer to do business with people they know!
That doesn't mean there shouldn't be accountability and investigations into cushy speaking gigs. But the government should absolutely work with established companies run by executives they know.
The best example I can think of was the healthcare portal. It was given to a company that had no experience over Intuit who had pas performed that included Turbo Tax. The company that won the contract had a board member who was classmates with the First Lady. This is so common it’s not even news. Government tech work is all done by contractors whose connections have nothing to do with past performance or quality.
That should definitely be looked into. Also I would be surprised if a significant company was MORE than one relationship away from the White House or an influential senator. These networks are small at the top.
Would be nice to have anti corruption measures to prevent this kind of decentralized corruption.
But I don't think dismantling the government and giving the pieces to Musk is the solution to corruption. That just sounds like more centralized corruption.
How, exactly, do you excise entrenched corruption smoothly? The corrupt people are going to do everything they can to stop you and protest loudly in the process.
The current problem is corruption but the real problem is that corruption will always happen when the power is there. The only way to prevent it is to not place the power at that level in the first place.
Limited power is the only anti-corruption tool that works.
Limiting the scope of the government restricts the scope of possible government corruption.
But there's still corporate corruption. Corruption among charities. Corruption among churches. Etc.
There are trade offs everywhere. If you make your government too small to bust monopolies, then you end up with a country beholden to giant corrupt monopolies.
Only worked in smaller countries, ie states. Limit the power of federal government and you can get pretty nice states, and you wouldn't have to worry about someone like Trump.
Increased transparency might help, together with empowering voters to get rid of corrupt politicians.
Unfortunately right now the opposite seems to be happening, Trump funneled US taxpayer money (and foreign government money) into Mar-a-Lago his whole first term and still got reelected.
“… in practice it's more likely to just end up broken, or so fragile that it breaks later…”
But that’s the entire point. Every time GOP finds anything in the government that’s anywhere near productive, they intentionally destroy it. They can’t be bothered to continue improving it. The government can’t possibly be good at anything so let’s come in and make sure everyone knows that!
> There is a fundamental truth motivating the U.S. Digital Service that sets it apart from many other government agencies: You cannot build an app the same way you build a boat.
In my time in government contracting almost nobody understood or wanted to acknowledge this (at least in the Navy). You could practically play bingo with non-technical PMs talking about "increments" and "milestones" on the way to "fielding a complete capability" as though it was a weapons system that'd be stuck in the field for 30 years instead of the CRUD app that it _actually_ was. Any attempt to expediently deploy a thoughtfully-engineered vertical slice to iterate upon was stymied by year-long compliance processes and deployment procedures rooted in the year 2004. The culture is used to building tangible physical products (airplanes) and fails to comprehend that software is just bits and bytes that can be changed at will and automated. Even worse, any attempt to introduce a more sane process resulted in something that strongly resembled the status quo being repackaged and disingenuously branded "Agile" or "SecDevOps" or some other buzzword.
I'm certainly not in the "move fast and break things" npm/Xitter/Google camp but it shouldn't take 18 months to get a web app in front of beta testers. It's a real shame that the USDS is being gutted because I was very impressed with what I saw of their work and think that it's the path forward to cost savings in government software development.
I'm not a USDS employee, but I'm a federal contractor working alongside USDS employees, some of which I count as friends, and some of which have been fired. My views are my own, and take them with a grain of salt; I'm kind of an idiot.
The USDS is wonderful. Unfortunately, there are a couple factors that might have impacted its lifespan. I think the USDS has been a bit quiet about its accomplishments. One reason for that is the common public view of the government agencies as ossified and of government employees as slothful, ineffectual, and arrogant (which has not been my general experience). I think the USDS has been very willing to give its partner agencies the lion's share of the credit in order to assure future cooperation and avoid any public controversy, to refuse to play into that narrative.
Unfortunately, without a lot of publicity, I think there has been a faintness in the public perception of what the USDS does, and how well it does that.
Ages ago I worked at a DoD contractor. I was in a special projects department.
The overall company was broken up into divisions, essentially the west coast facility was its own division, the midwest, east coast had its own division. They are reasonably independent, with their own facilities, own profit and cost centers, etc.
What was telling was that they also had a "Data" division. This was a branch that had its own division level autonomy, but was installed in each of the other divisions. The Data division managed the mainframes at the time. If one of the divisions needed computing facilities, they contracted with the Data division. Considering the expense of setting up and maintaining the mainframes of the time, it made sense.
But that's where my special project group came in.
We offered internal computing services, without the Data division, for our group. We ran on mini computers and the exploding PC and workstation machines. Our boss had sales reps from everywhere dropping off new gear to evaluate.
Typically, we've all heard it before, that our group of college level "kids" was much more nimble and responsive to the needs of our group than the Data division ever could be. We were a sunk cost that could be spent on anything rather than bound by contracts and such. Specs were delivered over coffee and recorded on post it notes. Then we'd just get to work and iterate.
It seems this concept had to be continually reinvented, and rise again, and again, and again, from the ashes. Maybe its a software thing. We all know how it always seems faster to burn the old, reinvent and rewrite the new. How the "best" way to lose technical debt is to `rm -rf /` and start again. "Do it right, this time." -- again, and again.
You'd like to think there's a middle ground, but I think it's just the institutional nature of the business and the practice. Obviously, nowadays we do have some substantial, long term, long lived systems. But they're more rare than not, they're imperfect and still suffer from issues, new and old, as they evolve.
I don't know if it is AI generated, but the formatting (lists with bold text, unnecessary headers, lots of en and em dashes) is setting off my spidey senses.
I keep hearing this about em dashes. Why do people think only AI bots write with em dashes? I use them. In fact, a lot of people do. That's probably _why_ the AI bots use them. Because the training material does.
This is an initiative I want to support, but after reading both stories - you're making the mistake of having a good-faith argument with bad faith actors, comparing approaches as if you are chasing the same objective from different principles.
DOGE is not trying to find efficiency. DOGE is trying to funnel money from the people to the powerful. DOGE is actively part of a project to destroy the government. DOGE does not give a damn.
I don't think they are trying to have a good-faith argument with DOGE -- I think they are trying to appeal to the hopefully-still-extant, sane, slight majority of Americans.
Why this illusion, and how, you may ask? I can tell you why and how! It's because people are far more likely to notice the data points they dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Not only that, but the dislikeables make a stronger impression when you do notice them. This is why people with strong feelings on a topic always feel like the site is going to the dogs—they're unintentionally blotting out the other data.
---
Edit: here are more recent examples in case helpful (what can I say, it's a hobby)
I've got just as many pointing the other way, of course, but the valuable examples point opposite to the illusion. That is, if I were replying to one of these (^^^^) commenters, I'd point them to your post instead!
It's not an illusion. I've been on HN across various accounts for over a decade. There is a hard liberal-progressive tilt to comments and post flagging which has been documented and remarked upon by others on sites where such comments don't get flagged and removed. Your own bias is also quite obvious, as is that of pg, who is now known on Twitter as a block-happy liberal lolcow. But thanks for posting all that, I'm glad Bolsheviks seething at Mensheviks haven't escaped your attention.
You and others on the right, as a group in 2025, only argue for freedom of speech when it suits you. Yes, the left does this too, and it's just as despicable.
I wouldn't bother engaging with this kind of comment. Hackernews is not the place for back and forth personal slinging. Just flag it and move on, we should try to keep things civil.
I get the position that someone in government or in such special advisor or whatever position he has probably shouldn't be able to own a major newspaper, TV channel or major social media platform. I agree to that. But didn't he buy it much earlier? In these cases I guess they could be forced to have someone else run it sort of like a blind trust but I'm not sure how well that works in practice.
The trust would have to divest and reinvest everything. Otherwise it’s not blind. Simpler to just have people like that not qualify for office when they have clear conflicts of interest.
when he bought Twitter it was clear (to me at least) that his motivation was he wanted Trump to win the election. That was rather predictable from the timing.
So Im sure this topic would be contentious in the extreme, but Im legitimately curious about how the HN community is split in regards to DOGE. Seems like a very polarizing topic, and from reading comments I have no idea how the community at large feels.
And, by definition, DOGE is a massive conflict of interest for Elon.
You don’t put someone who stands to make billions from reduced regulations on his personal companies in charge of firing said regulators. This is “how to avoid corruption 101.”
Even if you love doge, there is zero chance Elon exclusively makes decisions that are completely impartial. It’s practically impossible when he can strike fear in any random federal employee, and only hires extremely loyal people. Anyone in that position has so much power.
As a result, you have to hire people for this position who have no conflicts of interest, and who have a strong track record of thoughtful, data-driven decision making, who invite disagreement, and who try to understand problems before pressing the delete button.
You cannot tell me with a straight face that Elon is a good fit for this position without divesting from his personal interests.
>> DOGE is not a legal entity that has any authority to do what it is trying to do
100% false.
DOGE is a legal entity that has authority to do what it is trying to do.
Specifically, DOGE is the Department of Government Efficiency, which is a legal entity created by your President inside the USDS. The USDS is a government agency created by President Obama as the "United States Digital Service" and renamed by President Trump as the "United States DOGE Service".
He is allowed to increase efficiency by the means available within the law (including, where a change in law would make things more efficient, presenting a proposal for such a change to Congress.)
And the judicial branch hasn't okayed what he has tried to do, which is why there have been multiple orders issued by multiple courts against his stopping of payments.
- This ruling doesn't say the government isn't breaking the law, it says the people suing didn't go through the right channels.
- This ruling is not the government winning the case, or the plaintiffs losing the case. Plaintiffs asked for a restraining order and didn't get one.
- There are about 80 different lawsuits against Elon/DOGE right now, for various actions. Multiple judges have granted restraining orders against the government because they think the plaintiffs are likely to prevail in their claim.
It's the same situation with Rust in the Linux kernel. People keep upvoting the outrage wanting more Rust, but if you look at any other non-kernel related Rust discourse it's just a giant mixed bag.
To give you an example, DOGE killed the IRS Direct File program that allowed people to avoid using expensive proprietary tax filing software. It's still going to be available for this season, but likely not after.
And this is literally an example of government efficiency, a simple cost-effective solution that benefits actual people. The kind of things that DOGE is supposed to supercharge.
This actually is not the worst possibility. Sure, you'll pay more for the stuff that used to be free or cheap (e.g. Interstates, National Parks). This can be eventually reversed or at least regulated.
It's far worse if things are just left to decay and disappear. NIH research is an example. It can just disappear and never recover. And the worst thing, people won't even know about that. We'll just be getting fewer new drugs and treatments.
I applaud the idea of DOGE - we have this issue in government where once you create something (a process, organization, law, etc.), it's exceedingly difficult to get rid of it. That's really bad! Even if something proves to be obviously very stupid once it's implemented, it stays around forever and creates an ongoing tax on society.
California's Prop 65 is the perfect example of this. It seemed like a good idea at the time (put a label on anything that could cause cancer), but it turns out when implemented that you have to label so many things that people just completely ignore it. Businesses are still required to put on these labels that serve absolutely no purpose, though. It should be deleted, but we'll probably be stuck with it forever.
At the federal level, I'm incredibly supportive of killing NEPA. Good idea, but in the end more detrimental to the environment (by slowing/blocking/increasing the cost of good projects) than helpful to it. Ideally they'd take the lessons learned from what went wrong and craft something better, but given the choice between keeping NEPA and killing it, I think killing it is right.
That said, DOGE's execution has been very poor. Just look at the people they've fired (nuclear safety, people actively working on the bird flu epidemic, etc.) and then rehired. That is clearly incompetent execution.
Also, Musk's approach of cut, cut, cut and then add back when you realize you cut too much clearly has problems when applied to government. Cutting all the various science funding meant that research had to be stopped, and even if it's restarted later, there will be damage from stopping that can't be recovered.
So yeah, as with all things from this administration I am attempting to think positively (largely for my own mental health). There is probably tremendous value to getting rid of a lot of the bureaucracy that has built up over the last 250 years, and I greatly hope that value exceeds the damage that's done with the ham-fisted execution.
It's illegal, it doesn't matter if you think it's a good idea.
The executive branch cannot "kill NEPA". It's a law. Congress has to repeal it. Vote for congressional candidates who support your position.
Laws exist for a reason. It's incredibly dispiriting that so many people seem not to understand or care about the division of power made absolutely clear in the Constitution.
The post I was responding to was asking about how the HN community feels about DOGE, not for a legal analysis. So yes, it does matter whether I think it's a good idea - that is what the question I was responding to was asking.
I certainly understand the Constitutional division of powers - you shouldn't accuse people of not understanding things simply because they don't address them in a question that doesn't ask about them.
There is probably tremendous value to getting rid of a lot of the bureaucracy that has built up over the last 250 years.
Only when you have competent and highly qualified people making the decisions at lower levels. If those people are fired and/or swayed to avoid government jobs then you just end up with incompetence with no oversight.
This whole operation is to dismantle government programs so corporations can swoop in and fill the void.
I agree with you on this (thus my comments about the ham-fisted execution), with the caveat that in a lot of cases it's a very difficult thing to find people that are really good at making these decisions - they'd need to be well-informed but also apolitical and removed from the bureaucracy they're making decisions about. You can't really trust the decisions to the people in the organizations, because of course they have a huge bias towards protecting the status quo.
Ideally you'd get people who have some experience in them but are far removed. Like I've heard Casey Handmer talk about his time at NASA (I think it was NASA, at least) and how the organizational cruft made it hard to get anything done. I'd love to get him in there to make some change, but he's otherwise occupied. I am optimistic about Jared Isaacman, though.
In terms of corporations swooping in, that might happen, but in practice what I expect will happen is that the Democrats will return to power and will rebuild a lot of regulation. It seems to me like that's sort of the ideal cycle - add regulations and add regulations and add regulations, then do a cycle of cutting things, then return to adding regulations, ideally informed by the failure of past regulations.
DOGE = Curtis Yarvin's RAGE from his butterfly revolution blog post. Curtis Yarvin is socially relevant to Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen among others in the tech world.
I'd implore readers to catch up what Yarvin's ideals are because it helps frame what's happening and the ultimate goal in plain terms rather than making us work backwards divine intentions from the news.
“DOGE = Curtis Yarvin's RAGE from his butterfly revolution blog post.”
I rarely have the patience or temperament to read Yarvin, so I can’t say whether you are right or not. But I can say that his critique of progressive institutions has resonated with a much larger share of the right than his positive vision of politics.
And this makes sense! It’s entirely possible to have insight into the problems your side is facing while being off base about the solutions. That’s pretty common to intelligent, eccentric thinkers across the political spectrum.
I'm honestly baffled by how there's even a debate. A private citizen and his geek squad accessing and interfering with government systems regardless to what end or for what reason, because he donated a quarter of a billion to an election is banana republic stuff.
It shouldn't even be a politized topic in the sense that the consensus in a democratic Republic should be that private entities cannot usurp the institutions of the state.
I agree with you, many of these discussions take a very strong us vs them turn very quickly, even here on HN where it's usually better than elsewhere. Perhaps this shift is easier to notice when you don't directly have a horse in the race? But then again, US politics affects pretty much every country to some extent.
Regardless of how anyone feels about it, it's factually accurate to state that it's illegal. The executive branch cannot abrogate Congress's constitutional role. The president is a citizen, not a king.
It's also unnecessary. This rushing to the endgame is extremely counterproductive if you support their goals. They have both houses of Congress, both of which are filled to the brim with eager knuckle-draggers. They can pass anything they want through actual legislation, and it would be a lot harder to undo in the future if they did.
At this rate, even this Congress is going to have to push back hard to preserve their own jobs.
To anyone who supports this: if Harris had won and brought in Bill Gates and George Soros and gave them root on the entire US government with dubious to nonexistent congressional approval, would that be legal and appropriate?
DOGE is one of those things where the stated concept sounds good, but is almost impossible to pull off in a hurry, and the way they're going about it looks very disingenuous.
It's suspicious of the highest order that DOGE is prioritising programs and agencies that Musk personally ideologically opposes. He has had a falling out with a trans daughter that no longer speaks to him, and he's had personal issues with DEI because he would much prefer to hire white men than be "told" that that is racist and sexist by outsiders.
Allowing billionaires to be in charge of the government is insane when its the government's job to keep them in check. It's like letting criminals run the police department.
Of course, the guy with the $2M Lamborghini is going to get rid of all speed cameras the instant they get to be the head of the department of transportation! Of course they're going to go on TV and justify their self-interest with some bullshit made-up story about speed cameras.
Look.
You can make a legitimate argument that speed cameras are merely a revenue-collection device and not a safety device. You can make arguments that speed cameras in some locations can increase accidents because drivers look at the speedometer more than the road. You can do studies, run A/B experiments with and without speed cameras, etc...
But if the repeat-offender caught doing 150 in a 60 zone that has racked up tens of thousands in fines they haven't paid bribes their way into power and immediately fires everyone in the fine collection agency and the speed camera maintenance department, it can't be thought of as anything other than naked self-interest. It's doubly suspicious if they have no plan to replace the lost revenue, they just want to get rid of the cameras, and then... there's no "and then".
In the case of DOGE and Trump's general policy, it looks an awful lot like a bunch of very right-wing politicians have been itching to use states' rights to enforce their Christian vision for America, but have been blocked by federal government agencies. They now have their chance to gut those agencies so that they can ban abortion, teach "Christian values" in their public schools, and put women and gays back in their place. Add to that some capitalists that can finally get rid of the EPA, OSHA, and the like so that they can profit in peace, unbothered by pesky little matters such as the environment and workers limbs not being cut off on a regular basis.
The problem, in the court of public opinion, is that the people that don't like the speed cameras vote more than the people that like them, so while DoGE goes around defunding programs that will lead to people dying, the fact that King Trump brought back plastic straws is going to matter far more to them than the cruelty inflicted on downtrodden.
If they didn't want to be downtrodden, they should have chosen better parents.
Genuinely curious what makes you see those sets as disjoint? YMMV but
as an older person I've always associated socially and politically
advanced thinking with the mindset of the "original" pioneers in
tech. Shallow money-grubbing, fame obsession, fragile egos... that
archetype came much later.
Your intuition is right--the overlap between the "OG tech nerd" and hacker spirit and what the right has recently taken to decry as "woke" is high. Just head to any actual OG tech nerd / hacker event and check how popular Elon & co are with them.
Cheers, ok, but I couldn't locate a link between generation and
outlook that satisfied me. The essay is a nice blast of pop psychology
about "types of people", a worthy attack on political persecution,
rabid ideology and hive-minds, intolerance, and a weaker attack on the
idea of "performativeness" (so avoiding a frontal attack on "social
justice"). But in this way Graham divides "wokeness" from the virtues
of thoughtful system-theorists and original tech-optimists I
mentioned, bracketing out "woke" as mere despicables and rebels
without a cause. Any admirable social justice aims just evaporate in
this treatment. But isn't this what we're in now, just with a pendulum
swing? All the new-breed technofascists just want to "make the world a
better place", right?
I think there is just more viewpoints tolerated here as long as they're not clearly inflammatory, at least when you compare it against other social media websites like reddit. It might seem over-represented since a lot of viewpoints are suppressed elsewhere.
It's not an official government website. The TLD is .org, not .gov, so there's not really anything they can do to take it down (short of legal action).
Got examples of fraud and waste DOGE got rid of to cite? Like, actual examples? I've been paying attention and I haven't seen anything vetted and verified yet, but I've seen lots of examples of them firing critical people - like from that one nuclear management agency, or the bird flu people they're trying to hire back - or cancelling contracts that are actually needed, like canning a Thomson Reuters Westlaw deal because they hate Reuters [1]. Or misreading a $8m deal and calling it 8 billion dollars of fraud/waste because they (or the AI they're using) can't count zeroes or tell the difference between a decimal point and a comma [2]...
At this rate they're going to need to find a whole lot of fraud and waste to make up for the havoc they've created.
EDIT: Added a couple links for the harder to find examples.
How about 226M for DEI bullshit that's just incomprehensible word salad: https://x.com/doge/status/1892350446456500349. Just for starters. Is that "building" or "fraud" in your opinion?
DOGE saying "we saved 226m by cutting 18 contracts" isn't very convincing given the 8 billion example I provided. I'd love to see someone dig into those contracts they cut - or even exactly one of them - and explain what it was for and why it's wasteful.
Because what I've seen is a lot of keyword searches that cut stuff that's actually important.
For example, "transition care" for disabled kids getting cut because it contains a naughty transgender keyword. Or the word "inclusion" getting grants or contracts cut even though it's regular-ass english used in areas that have nothing to do with DEI.
I want to see actual rigor and substance, not Elon Musk or one of his reports coming out on stage and telling me they saved 50 billion dollars and that I'm going to get a $5000 check any day now. The guy's been saying robotaxis are a few years away for over a decade now, hasn't he? Why should I take him at his word?
Your experience is irrelevant if you make nonsensical points.
No one has been working on the USDS for a long time. It was created in 2014 to _improve archaic systems_. That was its mandate, and it came from the top.
Elon's not doing anything special or respectable. Decisive action and moronic flailing are not mutually exclusive.
And I'm not an expert, and maybe you're not in England, but NHS England has supported online appointment booking for about a decade. Can't imagine it's that different elsewhere in the UK based on a quick search.
Not only was it created in 2014, but it allows for a max of a 4 year tour. You know to keep bringing in fresh outsiders like the parent comment wanted.
> Obviously there were techy people in the NHS that knew that, but nobody was asking them.
Obviously someone did since there was "Choose and Book"[0] which was supposed to be live in 2005[1]. But, as anyone could have predicted, farming the contract out to consultants did not (and has continued to not!) work.
Also pharmacists were calling for themselves being able to electronically book GP appointments for (patients? customers?)[2]
An ICO report[3] also implies there were plans for online appointment bookings in 2006.
[0] Ok, not strictly GP appointments but NHS appointments nonetheless.
> I booked my first doctors appointment online this week.. blah blah blah stupid selfish rant
You asked yourself how would the system work best for you. Not how would the system work best for everyone. Elderly people make up a large proportion of GP appointments. 20 years ago they weren’t going to be booking anything online. Even today there are many that won’t.
Not if all the slots are booked up online. Look at what happened with driving tests. They moved it online and all the tests are booked by bots and sold to the highest bidder.
Are you kidding me? Instagram is part of the tech bro cult that is supporting the authoritarian shift. Why would a tech savvy team make this choice? Crazy.
DOGE isn't about efficiency, it is about removing checks and balances. Those are there to prevent malware like the GOP to take over the system.
I hope the people behind the submission get their message across. But you shouldn't have the conversation about efficiency. That is entirely the distraction.
Don't talk me about efficient governance of autocracy. It always ends in burning down the land on which it feasts.
> Don't talk me about efficient governance of autocracy.
Autocracies are not efficient at all. There's corruption everywhere.
The larger the state, the more opportunities for corruption. Of course, dismantling the fat state will anger many - those who are fed by it. Unfortunately some "false positives" are part of the process. All the rest is poetry.
We are so way beyond any reasonable "you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette" arguments, and those are cheap talking points that I could have gotten on fox news that you are mindlessly repeating. You are tossing the baby out with the bathwater destroying all checks and balances as you go. This is the death of reason and nuance. This is how autocracy gets a foot in the door. This is the beginning of the end of democracy. And you're cheering on the autocrats.
You should be afraid of one thing. The sane-looking replacement of Trump.
When the fascists conclude the take-over is complete, they will prop up someone with a more acceptable appearance, and the public will be relieved. The media will keep a narrow focus on just the drama of actualities. But still, a tyranny installed, democracy gone. And people will accept it as the new normal. Everyone will keep normalizing everything, the rituals of democracy as a smokescreen for the powerful.
You act like our institutions haven't already been ineffectual smokescreens for power to work behind the scenes. Trump's election is the most democratic thing to happen in decades. People are just shocked to find out that an elected representative actually has the power to do things other than sitting there like a puppet.
This is the work of decades long degradation, of pushing narratives, of selecting people into positions.
Yes it has been a slippery slope. And now an avalanche, like planned.
The work is you. You should be fed with so many distractions, so many logical fallacies, such that in the end you will say
They are the few. You are the numerous. So you should excuse them for what they do. You just did.I can easily just turn around and say something like:
"The work is you. You should be fed with so many distractions, so many logical fallacies, such that in the end you will say
> Trump's presidency is the beginning of a fascist coup to destroy Democracy"
At this point, this is not a struggle over reality-consensus, it is just a battle of who's propaganda is more convincing.
My friend, the world is not binary. It is not Dems vs Reps. It is not a matter of perfect democracy, and fascist tyranny, with nothing in between.
The goal is the latter though. The super wealthy and powerful head to an era where they decide what happens, they do not want the rules and the law apply to them.
----------------------------
Angry about a transgender you have never seen? Good, very good. They want your power.
It is you or them.
It is kind of funny that you accuse me of adhering to a democratic-republican binary when it comes to my world view before immediately also accusing me of only holding the beliefs that I do because of trans people.
The efficiency comparison is interesting, since it starts relatively evenly but quickly dismisses the value of the DOGE approach. Everyone I know who worked at USDS has been talented and well-meaning, but I can't help but feel they've been hamstrung specifically by
1. Methodical improvements mostly work to improve processes as they are. They don't delete processes that shouldn't exist.
2. Agency "empowerment" often means working with a lot of incumbent teams that are simply not suited to digital work and sinks way too much time/energy into stakeholder management.
USDS has done good work, but could have done a lot more if they were actually empowered.
[1] https://www.wethebuilders.org/posts/a-tale-of-two-effiencies...
This is true based on the conversations I’ve had with my USDS friends too, but I’m under no illusion that DOGE will actually empower people to do the right things.
Like, as someone who is generally fairly process averse, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a huge middle ground between too much process that hampers getting things done and no process that leads to decisions that either break things, or worse, set disastrous acts in motion because basic checks or conversations with people who have more context didn’t happen.
I think if there was a good-faith attempt from the DOGE folks to audit and understand certain systems and processes, instead of gleefully dismantling and freezing programs, firing people, gleefully announcing how much money was “saved” (and often with incorrect amounts) and reflexively ripping on how terrible everything is, you’d probably get some cooperation from the people who have had to deal with bullshit bureaucracy. But that isn’t what happened.
What’s happened is akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water, all real security issues being completely ignored, under the guise that 19 year old crypto bros have the work experience, social skills, or common sense to foresee what is happening.
Governments are inefficient. That’s as much a feature as it is a bug. But with USDS in particular, you had people who left high paying jobs to work for the government because they wanted to make things better for democracy and the country. That is decidedly not the goal of DOGE employees, who want to out McKinsey McKinsey when it comes to just slashing and burning.
Unfortunately nuance is dead. I too wish Musk had tried to empower USDS instead of immediately alienating many of the people best positioned to improve things.
It is not a lack of nuance. You are assigning goals that are not this administration's goals. They have said as such.
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
A lot of budgets were canceled because diversity or transition is included in the title.
> out McKinsey McKinsey when it comes to just slashing and burning
That's more of a Bain & Co speciality.
You bring in Bain to layoff the BUs McKinsey recommended your company build /s (kinda)
But DoGE is more like a PE firm that fires a bunch of people. It is less like a careful founder who hand crafts tough microdecisions that make everyone more efficient. DoGE cares about the balance sheet not the operations.
Yeah I’d say it is PE crossed with the worst management consultants. The actual health of the programs and the food to humanity doesn’t matter. It’s all about some perceived balance sheet as you say with zero care about the fallout from those decisions.
It’s easy to be efficient when you’re no longer providing any programs or services.
PE firm, crossed with the worst management consultants, crossed with an attention-seeking coked-up narcissist?
This is not what they are doing and you know it because they have vocally expressed their goals. None of them include improving government.
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
Are sweeping layoffs without any serious attempt to retain critical talent going to empower the remaining staff to do their best work? We've seen lots of examples of DOGE cutting loose important people and then flailing to hire them back. What happens when that one person who makes the whole team able to do their jobs gets cut loose? Are you empowered and productive then suddenly?
If DOGE were serious about increasing efficiency they'd be focused on process reforms. Instead they're randomly cancelling contracts, cancelling leases, and letting people go without doing the hard work of analyzing processes or analyzing organizations to figure out where the problems actually are.
It's like their philosophy is "if we cut one of the dog's legs off it'll suddenly become a more efficient runner".
I'm not here to defend DOGE, but you're making the same mistake as the article of assuming the DOGE approach has no merit.
Deleting processes somewhat randomly, then listening for the pain, is a pretty well-known technique for understanding and cleaning up legacy systems. Of course, it should only be used on systems where (temporary) failures are tolerable.
There are parts of the government where that is true, and parts where it is dangerous. The problem on both sides is assuming the same techniques should be applied across the entire government, when some services are indeed life-and-death and others absolutely should be deleted.
The pain you're listening for here is dead veterans, dead trans kids, dead disabled people, starving seniors, people dying from preventable viruses because of vaccine program cuts. The pain you're listening for here is toxic water and food-borne illnesses.
We know we need most of these programs and services! You can make them more efficient, you can identify and cut waste. You don't do that by just making blanket, massive cuts to staff and services and then trying to cobble the pieces back together over the next few years. It doesn't make sense. No sensible person would run a business that way.
These people genuinely believe that some amount of human death is acceptable collateral.
Not everyone believes that some amount of human death is acceptable collateral, but essentially everyone behaves as if that were true.
We could save ~47,000 deaths in the next year if we banned cars. Do you think that the deaths of innocent children is an acceptable trade-off for your right to drive? You might not like to think of it that way, but it's just objectively true that this is the trade-off we choose.
If we really care about human lives, why isn't the entire federal budget redirected towards healthcare and medical research? Do you think it's OK to watch children die of cancer just to fund national parks and space probes? If we care about all lives, why don't we spend the entire federal budget on humanitarian aid? What kind of heartless monster would watch children in Africa starve to death just to make their kid's school slightly nicer? If we care about all future lives, why are we squandering resources on consumption now, when compounding returns over centuries could allow those resources to provide vastly greater utility in future?
Everything has an opportunity cost and everything is a tradeoff. We pretend that the status quo has no ugly tradeoffs to protect our sanity, but that's obviously untrue. People die every day because of things we take completely for granted. They die for reasons that are often directly contradictory - I die for want of a regulation that would have prevented a medical accident, you die because of regulatory burdens that hinder the development or dissemination of new medical technology.
Musk might be a mindless vandal or a maverick genius; I am absolutely not intelligent enough to argue that point either way. What I do know is that it would be a miraculous coincidence if the federal government's priorities circa 2024 were so close to perfect that any radical change is prima facie wrong. I have to at least entertain the possibility that we have been stuck in a local maximum and have been squandering massive amounts of potential. A handful of deaths is, in the context of the US economy, actually a very cheap price to pay if you genuinely believe that you can find a fraction of a percentage point of GDP growth.
All this to say "yeah murder more people its good because I can't tell what is good or bad", an absolutely crazy take.
This is absolutely true, and I think something that a lot of bleeding heart liberals don't fully understand.
You might be against the death penalty, for example, because you can't bear the thought that the government would put innocent people to death. But some people believe that these are acceptable losses for the gain.
Likewise, you might think that a program that helps prevent violence against a certain minority group would be beneficial. But some people feel that this is a waste of money since it doesn't actually benefit the most people. If you spend money, after all, wouldn't you want to positively affect the most people you could? Everybody else--they are acceptable losses.
If you observed that your argument needs to rest on a false binary choice in an us-vs-others (identity "I am not a liberal") you should take time to step up to meta-thinking. Maybe we have been to long in the culture war?
Some people want us to ridicule compassion. But Why? For Who? For What?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1NJwz5SCl4
(edited, maybe you personally already understood)
Liberals also support the death penalty but in scenarios where it is less likely to happen. For example if someone doesn’t pay their parking fine it’s possible the situation escalates to a point where an armed government official will kill the person refusing to pay for resisting their lawful commands. This situation might be more unlikely than death penalty for murder or the ‘victim’ might be more responsible for the situation but I think having a hard block against the death penalty because it involves death or is irreversible is hard to defend. I think if you have a sovereign you ultimately have to be comfortable with killing people who oppose the sovereign.
These are some extremely serious claims that I'm going to need to see sources to believe. I'm by no means here to defend DOGE, but what have they done to put the lives of trans kids at serious risk?
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Twitter is losing users and is resorting to mob protection racket techniques to get more advertising spend.
Tesla is constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons. FSD fuckups, the absolute disaster of quality control that is the Cybertruck, service delays, parts delays, safety recalls...
SpaceX reportedly has layers of management to protect the actual people who get shit done from Musk's interference. This being the most successful of the companies may possibly be a result of that. https://x.com/yoloption/status/1595213678147764224
Take away all of Elon's government subsidies and how successful are any of his businesses in terms of actual lifetime profit vs loss?
He's the living corporate embodiment of what old school Reagan Republicans decry as a welfare queen, even down to the drug addiction.
Most of his businesses are failures. He has two enormous successes. Unsuccessful businesses eventually fold and go away. That's not an acceptable option for the federal government.
Governments aren’t businesses. They have different incentives and goals. You’re very naive to think otherwise and falling for a pretty common conservative trap.
> Elon's businesses are highly successful running exactly this algorithm.
Oh how nice, but we don't rely on Twitter to look after nuclear weapon stockpiles, warn us about E. coli in food, or fund vaccine development. So it's not really the same is it?
No, that is definitely not well known or time tested technique in anything that actually affects things that matter. You do that when you don't care about consequences. And in this context, not caring about consequences is sociopaths.
Second, you can't just turn on institutions or checks and balances again. Which is who DOGE does it - to cause permanent destruction they will blame on someone else and to cement oligarchy power.
> It's like their philosophy is "if we cut one of the dog's legs off it'll suddenly become a more efficient runner".
I think their philosophy is to replace the dog's legs with ones that run (only) where they want it to run.
No replacement has happened yet. No improvement has happened yet. They're just firing people, cancelling contracts, and cancelling leases.
That's not true.
Look at USAID: they canceled everything, but there was a significant outcry about PEPFAR specifically. Now PEPFAR is back, and likely to stay.
I sincerely don't understand what this proves. You're citing an example of them making a bad cut and having to reverse it. What part of that is an improvement?
we get the whole US AID budget back, aside from PEPFAR. it's a good example of a case where they cut too much and undid some cuts.
To me, what's happening in the US now looks very much like the wave of hostile-takeovers that destroyed British industry through the 70s and 80s. Adam Curtis "Mayfair Set" documents it well [0].
"Efficiency", which is an empty and practically meaningless word if you really examine it [1], was the cause celebre then too. And many of the perpetrators were charismatic and quite loved (Stirling was an archetypal British hero) up until the damage had been done and the trickery exposed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayfair_Set
[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/efficiency/
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> 1. Question every requirement:
> In short, the idea is to spend time on the floor with your returns team, observing the current process and asking questions to map exactly how you handle returns today. The result is a process map of how you handle different types of returns from end to end.
> 2. Delete any part or process you can
> So look at all the actions you take, question each of them: Question every step: can we remove this? What would happen if we removed this? Would the outcome still be the same? What would be the impact on our KPIs (e.g. customer satisfaction, handling time, and profits)?
I only got as far as step 2 and it's pretty clear DOGE isn't following the steps.
For shakeups, the Deming (14 point) [0] approach that starts with "watch and learn" (system analysis) has always seemed more mature to me than "slash and burn" (and see what grows out of the ashes). Musk is almost the opposite of Deming. Fear and to some extent capricious randomness seem part of the DOGE formula. There's simply no way even cursory investigation can have occurred in the time-frame. To me, any claim that that the programme is evidence-based or rational is specious. I think the effects are designed to be discombobulating and foment fear, and that it's purely political.
[0] https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/
They should add Secure Drop support [0] - it's what Bloomberg, NYT, Washington Post, Politico, NOYB, etc use for anonymous tips.
Email runs the risk of de-anonymization, as most people don't know about Proton, and this very much falls close to whistleblowing.
Also, anyone who seriously wishes to say anything should probably NOT respond via IG or even follow the page. If you are whistleblowing, maintaining anonymity is critical.
[0] - https://github.com/freedomofpress
> Email runs the risk of de-anonymization, as most people don't know about Proton
Proton is not perfect. They have surrendered recovery email addresses to law enforcement [1] and endorse Republicans through their official social media accounts [2].
[1] https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-s...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...
Yes, and... How do you know who "they" are?
(Just a little infosec devil's advocate.)
Very good question that should be asked.
This is interesting but very much lacking in details, it needs exact examples. I really feel for the workers at USDS. I was an engineer during the Elon Twitter acquisition and saw the thoughtless destruction first-hand.
However, the burn-it-all down approach does have some merit that critics of Elon/DOGE never admit to. How do they propose you carefully untangle the knots of fractal bureaucracy at speed and produce results if not by just cutting them off? The previous approaches of a special committee etc. just add a another fractal and yet another process.
Sometimes I feel the critics would be content if nothing was ever accomplished, if nothing ever changed, as long as thoughtful meetings were conducted and stakeholders were consulted. There is a very real layer of inertia that needs to be punched through, velocity has merit all its own.
I am very concerned about the possible outcomes of DOGE overall but business as usual just means the US goes bankrupt slowly with all the correct protocols observed. I am glad the inertia is being punctured.
>>>> the knots of fractal bureaucracy
Just being triggered by this phrase, the ideas that business as usual is unsustainable, and that the bureaucracy is unworkable, are articles of faith.
Prolonged deficit spending is by definition not sustainable.
We have been doing that for about 25 years but can’t continue indefinitely. Especially not with higher interest rates.
Government has objectively gotten worse despite massive tax revenue and is involved in a lot of endeavors that are well outside its scope IMO.
As just one of many examples: Just try to build a house pretty much anywhere and you will encounter fractal bureaucracy. This is during a nationwide housing shortage and many societal ills can be directly linked to housing costs!
Our national debt looks like a hockey-stick: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
And we spend about as much money on the debt as our entire bloated defense budget!
I was going to say 40 years, which is roughly when the Reagan administration gave up on promising to control the size of government. There's a question of when unsustainability has gone on for long enough to be regarded as perpetual.
The housing supply in my locale exploded during the run-up to the 2008 crash. Acres and acres of land got turned into spec neighborhoods. There were multiple hi-rise condominium towers going up within eyeshot of my house. In fact, my dad remarked presciently: "Condominium construction is a traditional indicator of the end of a housing cycle."
I was thinking back to when Clinton balanced the budget.
And yes I directionally propose that we should build houses until property prices fall and then build some more.
The housing crash was funded primarily by the govt. Loans were being made because of govt policies that never should have or would have been made otherwise!
2008 was devastating because it made us stop building housing due to speculative price manipulation of securities and again the govt being in a business it should not have!
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1880048376349356050.html
Federal agencies and civil servants didn’t create the deficits. Federal agencies don’t pass laws, they interpret the laws and set policies to meet the requirements of the implementation of the laws.
If you want to change how the government works, you need to change laws. Yes, government can be more efficient and effective, but blaming and firing civil servants is just scapegoating.
It would be like blaming contractors because you can’t build a house where you want, or hate the architect’s design or feel limited by zoning laws or construction codes.
The problems you identify are with the lawmakers, not the law implementers.
So why are Republicans pushing for tax cuts and increasing the debt ceiling by 4 trillion?
It’s not about the deficit.
> I was an engineer during the Elon Twitter acquisition and saw the thoughtless destruction first-hand.
I don't know. I'm not a fan of Elon, and never really used Twitter. The popular opinion was that firing most of the workforce, Twitter would go down. That it needed god knows how many SREs to keep running.
Then Elon fired everyone and Twitter didn't go down. What was destroyed?
Budgets are defined by the president and approved by congress; both are republicans controled. Why not turn off the tap in the traditional way instead of all this chaos?
They should be able to tell the departments their budgets getting cut and let the distributed leaders and experts evaluate the detailed logistics of how to manage the resulting budget in their own department. Elon going like by line in the US budget is like my CFO looking at my micro-service’s memory allocation, just seems silly.
Leaders should be setting high level goals and budgets and those on the ground can make the necessary adjustments to make them match.
I’ve been in government contracts. Been on the teams that built the websites or whatever. It’s always some massive Fortune 500 company with a VP that was college roommates with a politician or went to West Point with a general. Of course when government guys give big congrats they immediately get booked as a very well paid speaker at some useless conference.
In defense of this process is the government needs to work with stable companies that are highly likely to be in business in 10-15 years. That rules out a lot of startups.
Networks matter and trust matters, they should prefer to do business with people they know!
That doesn't mean there shouldn't be accountability and investigations into cushy speaking gigs. But the government should absolutely work with established companies run by executives they know.
The best example I can think of was the healthcare portal. It was given to a company that had no experience over Intuit who had pas performed that included Turbo Tax. The company that won the contract had a board member who was classmates with the First Lady. This is so common it’s not even news. Government tech work is all done by contractors whose connections have nothing to do with past performance or quality.
That should definitely be looked into. Also I would be surprised if a significant company was MORE than one relationship away from the White House or an influential senator. These networks are small at the top.
Would be nice to have anti corruption measures to prevent this kind of decentralized corruption.
But I don't think dismantling the government and giving the pieces to Musk is the solution to corruption. That just sounds like more centralized corruption.
How, exactly, do you excise entrenched corruption smoothly? The corrupt people are going to do everything they can to stop you and protest loudly in the process.
The current problem is corruption but the real problem is that corruption will always happen when the power is there. The only way to prevent it is to not place the power at that level in the first place.
Limited power is the only anti-corruption tool that works.
Limiting the power of the goverment also freqently involves corruption, companies bribing politicans to avoid popular safety and labor regulations
I think you are missing the point. Corruption is inevitable. Limiting the scope of the government restricts the scope of possible corruption.
Limiting the scope of the government restricts the scope of possible government corruption.
But there's still corporate corruption. Corruption among charities. Corruption among churches. Etc.
There are trade offs everywhere. If you make your government too small to bust monopolies, then you end up with a country beholden to giant corrupt monopolies.
Its not inevitable at least at scale. You can build a good goverment with transperancy and minimal corruption. Its just hard.
Only worked in smaller countries, ie states. Limit the power of federal government and you can get pretty nice states, and you wouldn't have to worry about someone like Trump.
Increased transparency might help, together with empowering voters to get rid of corrupt politicians.
Unfortunately right now the opposite seems to be happening, Trump funneled US taxpayer money (and foreign government money) into Mar-a-Lago his whole first term and still got reelected.
Musk is corruption. He does not want to solve it, he is literally trying to ensure it happens more and without any risk.
“… in practice it's more likely to just end up broken, or so fragile that it breaks later…”
But that’s the entire point. Every time GOP finds anything in the government that’s anywhere near productive, they intentionally destroy it. They can’t be bothered to continue improving it. The government can’t possibly be good at anything so let’s come in and make sure everyone knows that!
Absolutely amazed at how quickly this is dropping on HN. I am not on either side, but man that algo must really not like it.
> There is a fundamental truth motivating the U.S. Digital Service that sets it apart from many other government agencies: You cannot build an app the same way you build a boat.
In my time in government contracting almost nobody understood or wanted to acknowledge this (at least in the Navy). You could practically play bingo with non-technical PMs talking about "increments" and "milestones" on the way to "fielding a complete capability" as though it was a weapons system that'd be stuck in the field for 30 years instead of the CRUD app that it _actually_ was. Any attempt to expediently deploy a thoughtfully-engineered vertical slice to iterate upon was stymied by year-long compliance processes and deployment procedures rooted in the year 2004. The culture is used to building tangible physical products (airplanes) and fails to comprehend that software is just bits and bytes that can be changed at will and automated. Even worse, any attempt to introduce a more sane process resulted in something that strongly resembled the status quo being repackaged and disingenuously branded "Agile" or "SecDevOps" or some other buzzword.
I'm certainly not in the "move fast and break things" npm/Xitter/Google camp but it shouldn't take 18 months to get a web app in front of beta testers. It's a real shame that the USDS is being gutted because I was very impressed with what I saw of their work and think that it's the path forward to cost savings in government software development.
I'm not a USDS employee, but I'm a federal contractor working alongside USDS employees, some of which I count as friends, and some of which have been fired. My views are my own, and take them with a grain of salt; I'm kind of an idiot.
The USDS is wonderful. Unfortunately, there are a couple factors that might have impacted its lifespan. I think the USDS has been a bit quiet about its accomplishments. One reason for that is the common public view of the government agencies as ossified and of government employees as slothful, ineffectual, and arrogant (which has not been my general experience). I think the USDS has been very willing to give its partner agencies the lion's share of the credit in order to assure future cooperation and avoid any public controversy, to refuse to play into that narrative.
Unfortunately, without a lot of publicity, I think there has been a faintness in the public perception of what the USDS does, and how well it does that.
Ages ago I worked at a DoD contractor. I was in a special projects department.
The overall company was broken up into divisions, essentially the west coast facility was its own division, the midwest, east coast had its own division. They are reasonably independent, with their own facilities, own profit and cost centers, etc.
What was telling was that they also had a "Data" division. This was a branch that had its own division level autonomy, but was installed in each of the other divisions. The Data division managed the mainframes at the time. If one of the divisions needed computing facilities, they contracted with the Data division. Considering the expense of setting up and maintaining the mainframes of the time, it made sense.
But that's where my special project group came in.
We offered internal computing services, without the Data division, for our group. We ran on mini computers and the exploding PC and workstation machines. Our boss had sales reps from everywhere dropping off new gear to evaluate.
Typically, we've all heard it before, that our group of college level "kids" was much more nimble and responsive to the needs of our group than the Data division ever could be. We were a sunk cost that could be spent on anything rather than bound by contracts and such. Specs were delivered over coffee and recorded on post it notes. Then we'd just get to work and iterate.
It seems this concept had to be continually reinvented, and rise again, and again, and again, from the ashes. Maybe its a software thing. We all know how it always seems faster to burn the old, reinvent and rewrite the new. How the "best" way to lose technical debt is to `rm -rf /` and start again. "Do it right, this time." -- again, and again.
You'd like to think there's a middle ground, but I think it's just the institutional nature of the business and the practice. Obviously, nowadays we do have some substantial, long term, long lived systems. But they're more rare than not, they're imperfect and still suffer from issues, new and old, as they evolve.
Not long ago, I looked into joining USDS.
Today, I'd be kicking myself, if I'd moved to DC, only to have this insane rogue invasion of government happen.
What are the odds of the doggies axing this, or more likely cutting staff then mandating a new mission?
Edit: with apologies to puppies
Already done, USDS is what was renamed to DOGE.
it's still USDS, they just changed the "D" from digital to DOGE
Could be interesting once they have content but so far there is nothing there. The “Contact Us” page is a 404.
They have 2 articles posted that lay our their thesis quite well: https://www.wethebuilders.org/posts/what-is-us-digital-servi... https://www.wethebuilders.org/posts/a-tale-of-two-effiencies
I don't know if it is AI generated, but the formatting (lists with bold text, unnecessary headers, lots of en and em dashes) is setting off my spidey senses.
I keep hearing this about em dashes. Why do people think only AI bots write with em dashes? I use them. In fact, a lot of people do. That's probably _why_ the AI bots use them. Because the training material does.
I'd rather they generated the content than waste my tax dollars handcrafting artisinal html.
> The “Contact Us” page is a 404.
It's a mailto: link with a typo.
Lol that logo is so ridiculous and one of the reasons no one in labor takes the left seriously
So they've launched this site without providing a singular example?
Worked for Musk.
Looks like they messed up the Contact Us link.
Only a matter of time until NOAA's data will be inaccessible. It was great while it lasted.
This is an initiative I want to support, but after reading both stories - you're making the mistake of having a good-faith argument with bad faith actors, comparing approaches as if you are chasing the same objective from different principles.
DOGE is not trying to find efficiency. DOGE is trying to funnel money from the people to the powerful. DOGE is actively part of a project to destroy the government. DOGE does not give a damn.
I don't think they are trying to have a good-faith argument with DOGE -- I think they are trying to appeal to the hopefully-still-extant, sane, slight majority of Americans.
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This is an illusion - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 - the examples are old now, but the point hasn't changed.
Why this illusion, and how, you may ask? I can tell you why and how! It's because people are far more likely to notice the data points they dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Not only that, but the dislikeables make a stronger impression when you do notice them. This is why people with strong feelings on a topic always feel like the site is going to the dogs—they're unintentionally blotting out the other data.
---
Edit: here are more recent examples in case helpful (what can I say, it's a hobby)
The HN crowd is far right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41370117
libertarian tech bro site - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41674836
a haven for alt-right trolls and hateful abusers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799329
HN has also been taken over by fascists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42059688
techno-libertarian pseudo-intellectual fascists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42393303
HN has gone way to the authoritarian right - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42066014
tows the line when it comes to techno-fascism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781203
Hacker News is pretty much far right when it comes to politics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42618465
I've got just as many pointing the other way, of course, but the valuable examples point opposite to the illusion. That is, if I were replying to one of these (^^^^) commenters, I'd point them to your post instead!
See also
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110004 (Dec 2016)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25391526 (Dec 2020)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's not an illusion. I've been on HN across various accounts for over a decade. There is a hard liberal-progressive tilt to comments and post flagging which has been documented and remarked upon by others on sites where such comments don't get flagged and removed. Your own bias is also quite obvious, as is that of pg, who is now known on Twitter as a block-happy liberal lolcow. But thanks for posting all that, I'm glad Bolsheviks seething at Mensheviks haven't escaped your attention.
I still think my explanation is more convincing, but perhaps that's just me.
I'm curious why you asked "when did HN become this" if you're now telling us that it's been "this" for over a decade.
> which has been documented and remarked upon by others on sites
You should supply links so readers can make up their own minds about how convincing this documentation is.
When the right shifted the Overton window to include full-blown authoritarian fascism.
Yes, I and others on the right support full-blown authoritarian fascist positions like "freedom of speech"
You mean like this freedom of speech? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/elon-musk-to-fix...
You and others on the right, as a group in 2025, only argue for freedom of speech when it suits you. Yes, the left does this too, and it's just as despicable.
Explain to me in English why that statement is a progressive left statement.
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
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Could you also please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
DOGE is not the audience of this.
Can you explain to me why funneling US tax dollars to other nations is a bad thing?
This is not boasting, this is truthing.
DOGE in all forms of the name be it crypto or the "government agency" is a scam
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I wouldn't bother engaging with this kind of comment. Hackernews is not the place for back and forth personal slinging. Just flag it and move on, we should try to keep things civil.
> Follow us on Instagram
When Elon bought twitter, I didn't immediately see the conflict of interest. Now it's clear.
Feels like Bluesky would be a good home for an org like this
Agreed, that said, if you’re going for fast and wide reach that’s not Twitter, Instagram makes good sense.
I get the position that someone in government or in such special advisor or whatever position he has probably shouldn't be able to own a major newspaper, TV channel or major social media platform. I agree to that. But didn't he buy it much earlier? In these cases I guess they could be forced to have someone else run it sort of like a blind trust but I'm not sure how well that works in practice.
The trust would have to divest and reinvest everything. Otherwise it’s not blind. Simpler to just have people like that not qualify for office when they have clear conflicts of interest.
> But didn't he buy it much earlier?
Probably around the time when he came up with the idea of registering "United States of America Inc." and "Group America LLC"
The neat thing about oligarchy is, none of those decorums matter anymore. The oligarchs just do what they want.
Trump funneled US taxpayer money (and foreign government money) into Mar-a-Lago his whole first term and still got reelected.
when he bought Twitter it was clear (to me at least) that his motivation was he wanted Trump to win the election. That was rather predictable from the timing.
Straight up the biggest scam going on is Elon convincing Trump that he won him the election.
There was an incredible backlash against incumbents across the globe. Trump literally did not need any help from Elon to win.
So Im sure this topic would be contentious in the extreme, but Im legitimately curious about how the HN community is split in regards to DOGE. Seems like a very polarizing topic, and from reading comments I have no idea how the community at large feels.
DOGE is not a legal entity that has any authority to do what it is trying to do.
The cause may have merits but the method we should all agree is illegal and unconstitutional.
You may not like it but congress needs to make these decisions.
And, by definition, DOGE is a massive conflict of interest for Elon.
You don’t put someone who stands to make billions from reduced regulations on his personal companies in charge of firing said regulators. This is “how to avoid corruption 101.”
Even if you love doge, there is zero chance Elon exclusively makes decisions that are completely impartial. It’s practically impossible when he can strike fear in any random federal employee, and only hires extremely loyal people. Anyone in that position has so much power.
As a result, you have to hire people for this position who have no conflicts of interest, and who have a strong track record of thoughtful, data-driven decision making, who invite disagreement, and who try to understand problems before pressing the delete button.
You cannot tell me with a straight face that Elon is a good fit for this position without divesting from his personal interests.
>> DOGE is not a legal entity that has any authority to do what it is trying to do
100% false.
DOGE is a legal entity that has authority to do what it is trying to do.
Specifically, DOGE is the Department of Government Efficiency, which is a legal entity created by your President inside the USDS. The USDS is a government agency created by President Obama as the "United States Digital Service" and renamed by President Trump as the "United States DOGE Service".
It's authorized. Let's get on with it.
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He is allowed to increase efficiency by the means available within the law (including, where a change in law would make things more efficient, presenting a proposal for such a change to Congress.)
And the judicial branch hasn't okayed what he has tried to do, which is why there have been multiple orders issued by multiple courts against his stopping of payments.
Counterpoint - how can you have a functional democracy when citizens(?) have such a poor understanding of our system of government?
And by "the judicial branch has OK'd it", are you referring to the President's immunity from prosecution for official acts?
That is fundamentally different than "presidents have the power to do whatever they want".
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You do not know what you're talking about.
- This ruling doesn't say the government isn't breaking the law, it says the people suing didn't go through the right channels.
- This ruling is not the government winning the case, or the plaintiffs losing the case. Plaintiffs asked for a restraining order and didn't get one.
- There are about 80 different lawsuits against Elon/DOGE right now, for various actions. Multiple judges have granted restraining orders against the government because they think the plaintiffs are likely to prevail in their claim.
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"Also" being a dictator? You're the first to use that word.
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When did he promise that during the campaign trail?
I keep hearing all these things about how the voters voted for this and that but uh when did the candidate promise those items?
> he judicial branch has OKed it.
This is not true as evidenced by your own link below.
"How can you have a functional democracy without a king" is what you seem to be asking. Do you see the problem?
Did you miss the election?
Yes, and Trump wasn't elected King, he was elected to an office whose duty is to see to it that the laws are faithfully executed.
Trump has zero intrest in stopping waste or corruption.
He is firmly pro corruption
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fcpa-anti-bribery-law-exe...
HN can't even agree on if Rust is good, very good, insanely good, or overhyped.
Expecting them to agree on politics is a fool's errand.
It's the same situation with Rust in the Linux kernel. People keep upvoting the outrage wanting more Rust, but if you look at any other non-kernel related Rust discourse it's just a giant mixed bag.
But they agree that it should be used to replace all JS tooling.
And yet the drama is so spicy
Giving the richest person on earth unsupervised root access to the only remaining superpower's government, good or bad? I guess we'll never know.
To give you an example, DOGE killed the IRS Direct File program that allowed people to avoid using expensive proprietary tax filing software. It's still going to be available for this season, but likely not after.
And this is literally an example of government efficiency, a simple cost-effective solution that benefits actual people. The kind of things that DOGE is supposed to supercharge.
Repeating what I said above:
This whole operation is to dismantle government programs so corporations can swoop in and fill the void.
I'm not convinced that step three is going to happen. What if they just leave a void?
This actually is not the worst possibility. Sure, you'll pay more for the stuff that used to be free or cheap (e.g. Interstates, National Parks). This can be eventually reversed or at least regulated.
It's far worse if things are just left to decay and disappear. NIH research is an example. It can just disappear and never recover. And the worst thing, people won't even know about that. We'll just be getting fewer new drugs and treatments.
I applaud the idea of DOGE - we have this issue in government where once you create something (a process, organization, law, etc.), it's exceedingly difficult to get rid of it. That's really bad! Even if something proves to be obviously very stupid once it's implemented, it stays around forever and creates an ongoing tax on society.
California's Prop 65 is the perfect example of this. It seemed like a good idea at the time (put a label on anything that could cause cancer), but it turns out when implemented that you have to label so many things that people just completely ignore it. Businesses are still required to put on these labels that serve absolutely no purpose, though. It should be deleted, but we'll probably be stuck with it forever.
At the federal level, I'm incredibly supportive of killing NEPA. Good idea, but in the end more detrimental to the environment (by slowing/blocking/increasing the cost of good projects) than helpful to it. Ideally they'd take the lessons learned from what went wrong and craft something better, but given the choice between keeping NEPA and killing it, I think killing it is right.
That said, DOGE's execution has been very poor. Just look at the people they've fired (nuclear safety, people actively working on the bird flu epidemic, etc.) and then rehired. That is clearly incompetent execution.
Also, Musk's approach of cut, cut, cut and then add back when you realize you cut too much clearly has problems when applied to government. Cutting all the various science funding meant that research had to be stopped, and even if it's restarted later, there will be damage from stopping that can't be recovered.
So yeah, as with all things from this administration I am attempting to think positively (largely for my own mental health). There is probably tremendous value to getting rid of a lot of the bureaucracy that has built up over the last 250 years, and I greatly hope that value exceeds the damage that's done with the ham-fisted execution.
It's illegal, it doesn't matter if you think it's a good idea.
The executive branch cannot "kill NEPA". It's a law. Congress has to repeal it. Vote for congressional candidates who support your position.
Laws exist for a reason. It's incredibly dispiriting that so many people seem not to understand or care about the division of power made absolutely clear in the Constitution.
The post I was responding to was asking about how the HN community feels about DOGE, not for a legal analysis. So yes, it does matter whether I think it's a good idea - that is what the question I was responding to was asking.
I certainly understand the Constitutional division of powers - you shouldn't accuse people of not understanding things simply because they don't address them in a question that doesn't ask about them.
I said that people seem not to understand OR care about the separation of powers.
So sure, you might understand it, but you didn't include the legality of what DOGE is doing in your analysis of whether it's a good idea.
It doesn't seem to me like you care.
Legal rules are just "good ideas" that we've inherited from previous generations :)
I'm beginning to question whether or not it being illegal matters.
It matters, regardless of how bad things get. That's how to think about it.
This whole operation is to dismantle government programs so corporations can swoop in and fill the void.
I agree with you on this (thus my comments about the ham-fisted execution), with the caveat that in a lot of cases it's a very difficult thing to find people that are really good at making these decisions - they'd need to be well-informed but also apolitical and removed from the bureaucracy they're making decisions about. You can't really trust the decisions to the people in the organizations, because of course they have a huge bias towards protecting the status quo.
Ideally you'd get people who have some experience in them but are far removed. Like I've heard Casey Handmer talk about his time at NASA (I think it was NASA, at least) and how the organizational cruft made it hard to get anything done. I'd love to get him in there to make some change, but he's otherwise occupied. I am optimistic about Jared Isaacman, though.
In terms of corporations swooping in, that might happen, but in practice what I expect will happen is that the Democrats will return to power and will rebuild a lot of regulation. It seems to me like that's sort of the ideal cycle - add regulations and add regulations and add regulations, then do a cycle of cutting things, then return to adding regulations, ideally informed by the failure of past regulations.
DOGE = Curtis Yarvin's RAGE from his butterfly revolution blog post. Curtis Yarvin is socially relevant to Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen among others in the tech world.
I'd implore readers to catch up what Yarvin's ideals are because it helps frame what's happening and the ultimate goal in plain terms rather than making us work backwards divine intentions from the news.
“DOGE = Curtis Yarvin's RAGE from his butterfly revolution blog post.”
I rarely have the patience or temperament to read Yarvin, so I can’t say whether you are right or not. But I can say that his critique of progressive institutions has resonated with a much larger share of the right than his positive vision of politics.
And this makes sense! It’s entirely possible to have insight into the problems your side is facing while being off base about the solutions. That’s pretty common to intelligent, eccentric thinkers across the political spectrum.
Explained in a video essay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no.
Do you have an archive or something of his blog post? It seems he paywalled it.
I'm honestly baffled by how there's even a debate. A private citizen and his geek squad accessing and interfering with government systems regardless to what end or for what reason, because he donated a quarter of a billion to an election is banana republic stuff.
It shouldn't even be a politized topic in the sense that the consensus in a democratic Republic should be that private entities cannot usurp the institutions of the state.
It's certainly polarizing, the quality of discourse on Hacker News has plummeted in the past few weeks.
I agree with you, many of these discussions take a very strong us vs them turn very quickly, even here on HN where it's usually better than elsewhere. Perhaps this shift is easier to notice when you don't directly have a horse in the race? But then again, US politics affects pretty much every country to some extent.
Few months or years, and it's become political.
Regardless of how anyone feels about it, it's factually accurate to state that it's illegal. The executive branch cannot abrogate Congress's constitutional role. The president is a citizen, not a king.
It's also unnecessary. This rushing to the endgame is extremely counterproductive if you support their goals. They have both houses of Congress, both of which are filled to the brim with eager knuckle-draggers. They can pass anything they want through actual legislation, and it would be a lot harder to undo in the future if they did.
At this rate, even this Congress is going to have to push back hard to preserve their own jobs.
To anyone who supports this: if Harris had won and brought in Bill Gates and George Soros and gave them root on the entire US government with dubious to nonexistent congressional approval, would that be legal and appropriate?
(For the record IMHO it would not be okay.)
There is no single HN community, so you're asking for a bit much.
I am afraid having a civil discussion about this is not going to very likely at the moment.
lots of discussions to read, lots of flags to wonder at
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
My $0.02:
DOGE is one of those things where the stated concept sounds good, but is almost impossible to pull off in a hurry, and the way they're going about it looks very disingenuous.
It's suspicious of the highest order that DOGE is prioritising programs and agencies that Musk personally ideologically opposes. He has had a falling out with a trans daughter that no longer speaks to him, and he's had personal issues with DEI because he would much prefer to hire white men than be "told" that that is racist and sexist by outsiders.
Allowing billionaires to be in charge of the government is insane when its the government's job to keep them in check. It's like letting criminals run the police department.
Of course, the guy with the $2M Lamborghini is going to get rid of all speed cameras the instant they get to be the head of the department of transportation! Of course they're going to go on TV and justify their self-interest with some bullshit made-up story about speed cameras.
Look.
You can make a legitimate argument that speed cameras are merely a revenue-collection device and not a safety device. You can make arguments that speed cameras in some locations can increase accidents because drivers look at the speedometer more than the road. You can do studies, run A/B experiments with and without speed cameras, etc...
But if the repeat-offender caught doing 150 in a 60 zone that has racked up tens of thousands in fines they haven't paid bribes their way into power and immediately fires everyone in the fine collection agency and the speed camera maintenance department, it can't be thought of as anything other than naked self-interest. It's doubly suspicious if they have no plan to replace the lost revenue, they just want to get rid of the cameras, and then... there's no "and then".
In the case of DOGE and Trump's general policy, it looks an awful lot like a bunch of very right-wing politicians have been itching to use states' rights to enforce their Christian vision for America, but have been blocked by federal government agencies. They now have their chance to gut those agencies so that they can ban abortion, teach "Christian values" in their public schools, and put women and gays back in their place. Add to that some capitalists that can finally get rid of the EPA, OSHA, and the like so that they can profit in peace, unbothered by pesky little matters such as the environment and workers limbs not being cut off on a regular basis.
The problem, in the court of public opinion, is that the people that don't like the speed cameras vote more than the people that like them, so while DoGE goes around defunding programs that will lead to people dying, the fact that King Trump brought back plastic straws is going to matter far more to them than the cruelty inflicted on downtrodden.
If they didn't want to be downtrodden, they should have chosen better parents.
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Genuinely curious what makes you see those sets as disjoint? YMMV but as an older person I've always associated socially and politically advanced thinking with the mindset of the "original" pioneers in tech. Shallow money-grubbing, fame obsession, fragile egos... that archetype came much later.
Your intuition is right--the overlap between the "OG tech nerd" and hacker spirit and what the right has recently taken to decry as "woke" is high. Just head to any actual OG tech nerd / hacker event and check how popular Elon & co are with them.
If you are genuinely curious I would suggest reading Paul Graham's essay on wokeness.
Cheers, ok, but I couldn't locate a link between generation and outlook that satisfied me. The essay is a nice blast of pop psychology about "types of people", a worthy attack on political persecution, rabid ideology and hive-minds, intolerance, and a weaker attack on the idea of "performativeness" (so avoiding a frontal attack on "social justice"). But in this way Graham divides "wokeness" from the virtues of thoughtful system-theorists and original tech-optimists I mentioned, bracketing out "woke" as mere despicables and rebels without a cause. Any admirable social justice aims just evaporate in this treatment. But isn't this what we're in now, just with a pendulum swing? All the new-breed technofascists just want to "make the world a better place", right?
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Because HN is a software-focused social site. Software developers have always loved Elon because Randroids and Libertarians are over-represented here.
I think there is just more viewpoints tolerated here as long as they're not clearly inflammatory, at least when you compare it against other social media websites like reddit. It might seem over-represented since a lot of viewpoints are suppressed elsewhere.
How long will this stay up?
It's not an official government website. The TLD is .org, not .gov, so there's not really anything they can do to take it down (short of legal action).
I think OP means stay up on HN, the controversy catcher will probably be triggered by comments / flags soon.
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it's politics
I believe parent was referring to their own post, `this` refers to the current object.
reddit ass comment
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Got examples of fraud and waste DOGE got rid of to cite? Like, actual examples? I've been paying attention and I haven't seen anything vetted and verified yet, but I've seen lots of examples of them firing critical people - like from that one nuclear management agency, or the bird flu people they're trying to hire back - or cancelling contracts that are actually needed, like canning a Thomson Reuters Westlaw deal because they hate Reuters [1]. Or misreading a $8m deal and calling it 8 billion dollars of fraud/waste because they (or the AI they're using) can't count zeroes or tell the difference between a decimal point and a comma [2]...
At this rate they're going to need to find a whole lot of fraud and waste to make up for the havoc they've created.
EDIT: Added a couple links for the harder to find examples.
1: https://bsky.app/profile/bradheath.bsky.social/post/3lijt5eh...
2: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/19/politics/doge-canceled-contra...
How about 226M for DEI bullshit that's just incomprehensible word salad: https://x.com/doge/status/1892350446456500349. Just for starters. Is that "building" or "fraud" in your opinion?
"DEI bullshit" such as teaching kids English.
DOGE saying "we saved 226m by cutting 18 contracts" isn't very convincing given the 8 billion example I provided. I'd love to see someone dig into those contracts they cut - or even exactly one of them - and explain what it was for and why it's wasteful.
Because what I've seen is a lot of keyword searches that cut stuff that's actually important.
For example, "transition care" for disabled kids getting cut because it contains a naughty transgender keyword. Or the word "inclusion" getting grants or contracts cut even though it's regular-ass english used in areas that have nothing to do with DEI.
I want to see actual rigor and substance, not Elon Musk or one of his reports coming out on stage and telling me they saved 50 billion dollars and that I'm going to get a $5000 check any day now. The guy's been saying robotaxis are a few years away for over a decade now, hasn't he? Why should I take him at his word?
That's because your $8B figure itself is a lie as well: https://x.com/DOGE/status/1892318654827524297. It was never used when calculating the totals.
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Citation needed
Not Musk nor Trump nor anyone working for DOGE. Those want to make the goverment as ineffective as possible.
Elon works for the government.
What do you figure this Musk person is up to, then?
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Your experience is irrelevant if you make nonsensical points.
No one has been working on the USDS for a long time. It was created in 2014 to _improve archaic systems_. That was its mandate, and it came from the top.
Elon's not doing anything special or respectable. Decisive action and moronic flailing are not mutually exclusive.
And I'm not an expert, and maybe you're not in England, but NHS England has supported online appointment booking for about a decade. Can't imagine it's that different elsewhere in the UK based on a quick search.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/gp-online-services/about-the-prog...
Not only was it created in 2014, but it allows for a max of a 4 year tour. You know to keep bringing in fresh outsiders like the parent comment wanted.
> Obviously there were techy people in the NHS that knew that, but nobody was asking them.
Obviously someone did since there was "Choose and Book"[0] which was supposed to be live in 2005[1]. But, as anyone could have predicted, farming the contract out to consultants did not (and has continued to not!) work.
Also pharmacists were calling for themselves being able to electronically book GP appointments for (patients? customers?)[2]
An ICO report[3] also implies there were plans for online appointment bookings in 2006.
[0] Ok, not strictly GP appointments but NHS appointments nonetheless.
[1] https://www.digitalhealth.net/2005/01/e-booking-to-miss-its-...
[2] https://www.digitalhealth.net/2005/12/pharmacists-call-for-g...
[3] https://ico.org.uk/media/about-the-ico/documents/1042390/sur...
I hate to break it to, but this administration is not out to “fix all the obviously archaic systems in government” - they are there to destroy it.
Think stripping out the copper wiring rather than doing a remodeling.
> I booked my first doctors appointment online this week.. blah blah blah stupid selfish rant
You asked yourself how would the system work best for you. Not how would the system work best for everyone. Elderly people make up a large proportion of GP appointments. 20 years ago they weren’t going to be booking anything online. Even today there are many that won’t.
> Elderly people blah blah stupid dumb nonsense
Elderly people can still book over the phone. Use your brain.
Not if all the slots are booked up online. Look at what happened with driving tests. They moved it online and all the tests are booked by bots and sold to the highest bidder.
How exactly do I sell my GP appointment? This is such a dumb take. No wonder it took 20 years.
Not a good analogy or comparison to what is going on.
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> This sounds more like an attack on DOGE, otherwise where were these people up until 1 month ago?
They were building stuff.
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> more like an attack on DOGE
"More like" that than what? That's exactly, explicitly, what it is.
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> Follow us on Instagram: @alt_USDS
Are you kidding me? Instagram is part of the tech bro cult that is supporting the authoritarian shift. Why would a tech savvy team make this choice? Crazy.
It also happens to be where a lot of regular people are. Unlike whichever turbonerds-only alternative you're likely to suggest.
This tech savvy team, to their benefit, might also be culture savvy.
> Unlike whichever turbonerds-only alternative you're likely to suggest
Genuinely made me laugh.
turbonerds.com: registration page requires the applicant to reverse a linked list
Seems pretty clear to me.
The masses aren't on Bluesky, they're on instagram and twitter.
And while both are owned by "tech bro cult" people, only one is owned by the head of the department you see as a problem.
Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the (sound) reasoning here.
good way to shoot themselves in the foot. They want people to see this and share where a majority of Americans are.
purity tests just cede more control to those who don't care about being ethical.
Dont the founders of this very site show some bias for a certain party?