[wedn3sday]

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.

[cyberax]

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.

[staplers]

Repeating what I said above:

This whole operation is to dismantle government programs so corporations can swoop in and fill the void.

[fragmede]

I'm not convinced that step three is going to happen. What if they just leave a void?

[cyberax]

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.

[extra88]

I used IRS Direct File and it worked really well for my simple tax situation.

Not using a commercial service to complete federal and state incomes taxes together, I thought I'd have to reenter my information on my state's income tax site. Thankfully, I didn't, the state site got the federal information (I don't recall the specifics of how that worked).

[sschueller]

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.

[anon7000]

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.

[rufus_foreman]

>> 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.

[gitfan86]

How can you have a functional democracy where the person who was elected to lead the executive branch and who also campaigned on increasing efficiency is not allowed to do that? Especially after the judicial branch has OKed it.

[mpalmer]

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".

[gitfan86]

There was a lawsuit to stop the firings. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it unconstitutional.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/federal-judge-wont-stop-tru...

[mpalmer]

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.

[gitfan86]

So when Biden lost lawsuits he was also being a dictator?

[dragonwriter]

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.

[KerrAvon]

"How can you have a functional democracy without a king" is what you seem to be asking. Do you see the problem?

[gitfan86]

Did you miss the election?

[dragonwriter]

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.

[lesuorac]

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?

[buttercraft]

> he judicial branch has OKed it.

This is not true as evidenced by your own link below.

[rat87]

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...

[bombcar]

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.

[CrimsonCape]

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.

[DustinBrett]

But they agree that it should be used to replace all JS tooling.

[chrishare]

And yet the drama is so spicy

[InsideOutSanta]

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.

[KerrAvon]

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.

[Barrin92]

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.

[idopmstuff]

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.

[mpalmer]

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.

[idopmstuff]

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.

[mpalmer]

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.

[medvezhenok]

Legal rules are just "good ideas" that we've inherited from previous generations :)

[beej71]

I'm beginning to question whether or not it being illegal matters.

[mpalmer]

It matters, regardless of how bad things get. That's how to think about it.

[staplers]

  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.

[idopmstuff]

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.

[kelseyfrog]

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.

[gdwatson]

“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.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

Explained in a video essay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no.

[gs17]

Do you have an archive or something of his blog post? It seems he paywalled it.

[api]

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.)

[cmrdporcupine]

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.

[indy]

It's certainly polarizing, the quality of discourse on Hacker News has plummeted in the past few weeks.

[Etheryte]

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.

[DustinBrett]

Few months or years, and it's become political.

[jiggawatts]

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.

[fragmede]

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.

[computerthings]

lots of discussions to read, lots of flags to wonder at

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[camilo2025]

Because HN is a software-focused social site. Software developers have always loved Elon because Randroids and Libertarians are over-represented here.

[least]

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.

[gitfan86]

HN has attracted a lot of Woke people over the years, but also still has a lot of OG tech nerds.

[nonrandomstring]

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.

[gitfan86]

If you are genuinely curious I would suggest reading Paul Graham's essay on wokeness.

[nonrandomstring]

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?

[gitfan86]

I can simply it for you.

In 2007 the average person on HN was considered progressive or left leaning because they generally felt that same sex marriage should be legal.

Those same people in 2025 are now considered "far right" by the left because they believe that women have a right to say they feel uncomfortable being exposed to penises in the locker room when playing college sports.