[morgante]

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...

[filmgirlcw]

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.

[morgante]

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.

[_DeadFred_]

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...

[melagonster]

A lot of budgets were canceled because diversity or transition is included in the title.

[alephnerd]

> 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)

[kevingadd]

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".

[morgante]

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.

[kevingadd]

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.

[sho_hn]

These people genuinely believe that some amount of human death is acceptable collateral.

[jdietrich]

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.

[hobs]

All this to say "yeah murder more people its good because I can't tell what is good or bad", an absolutely crazy take.

[beej71]

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.

[exceptione]

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)

[benmmurphy]

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.

[CivBase]

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?

[watwut]

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.

[LoganDark]

> 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.

[kevingadd]

No replacement has happened yet. No improvement has happened yet. They're just firing people, cancelling contracts, and cancelling leases.

[morgante]

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.

[kevingadd]

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?

[glitch003]

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.

[incidentist]

As far as I can tell, they made an exception for pepfar but its funds are still frozen, due either to malice or incompetence. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/health/trump-usaid-pepfar...

[aqueueaqueue]

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.

[filmgirlcw]

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.

[neilv]

PE firm, crossed with the worst management consultants, crossed with an attention-seeking coked-up narcissist?

[nonrandomstring]

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/

[_DeadFred_]

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...