[gjsman-1000]

The idea behind DOGE made a mountain of sense, even if the execution was all over the place.

Americans get sympathetic when they hear about the Air Force $1280 coffee mug. They don't forget that, even half a decade later, when they hear the word "waste." Apple's monitor stand has better build quality than what it's known for.

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/10/23...

[Jtsummers]

That's not even the real waste in DOD. The real waste is mostly in failed projects. Projects that either never deliver, or deliver years late and millions or billions over budget, typically with reduced features. They'd have to buy a million of those hot cups to come close to the waste that occurs due to these failed projects.

DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.

[ACCount37]

If you don't have failed projects, are you really trying hard enough?

[datadrivenangel]

If you change requirements all the time and never deliver, then no, you're not trying hard enough. Plan, Build, Evaluate, Learn.

[potato3732842]

>DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem.

They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there.

[snowwrestler]

The general sense in DC was that DOGE was never going to make it to DoD because

a) many of the individual people leading DOGE benefit personally from DoD spending (which is not true of IRS, HHS, USAID, etc), and

b) most civilian policy leaders in this administration have built their political brand around boosting the military, and dramatic cuts don’t align with that.

[btreecat]

> >DOGE never seriously tried, or even discussed, tackling that problem. > > They got shut down and the Trump-Musk thing flared up more or less the nanosecond they looked at the DOD. Sad, but they never had the political capital to win that fight. They probably could've done some good slashing around in there.

What "good slashing" did they actually do anywhere to assume they would have done good there?

[potato3732842]

All I said was they probably could've done some good slashing around in the DOD. Nothing more, nothing lesee. Take your strawman and get lost.

[scott_w]

There’s no straw man in the question. You’re being asked to substantiate your belief by showing where the people who would be responsible for “good slashing” demonstrated their ability to do some “good slashing” elsewhere.

[gjsman-1000]

I'm not disputing it; but the downvoters missed my point.

My point is that voters know that if a mere coffee mug costs that much, who knows what else stupid is going on. It's a smoke signal saying there's waste of unprecedented amounts everywhere.

[bdamm]

It is even deeper than that. The problem is that voters do not have faith in the organizations created to oversee and regulate government waste. Perhaps there isn't enough visibility. Or maybe the typical shenanigans that commenters love to harp on hides the actual good work that public servants sometimes do in managing the public purse.

So as with most political challenges, it all comes down to trust, and a failure to garner it.

The lack of trust then creates the vaccuum into which silly notions of thinking a coffee cup is worth a grand, or an ashtray is tens of thousands of dollars, or the magic hammer that is the same as a normal hammer but costs 100x, or whatever.

[potato3732842]

Of they just don't fundamentally trust the institutions.

I bet there isn't a single person in this country that can't pick a subject they care a lot about on which the government actively gaslit them in the last ~5yr.

That kind of tarnishes what the .gov has to say on every other subject.

[bdamm]

I'm not saying people should implicitly trust the government.

I'm saying that lack of trust, and lack of the ability of people and government to meet in a way that develops trust, is the issue that underlies people holding up a "$1280 coffee mug" as an example of government waste.

The ideal is that representatives you do trust would be evaluating the government for you, and so you would be building trust by experiencing trust with one or more of your representatives. But the scale of the federal government has resulted in few people actually trusting their representatives, and the experience of having a trust test with a representative doesn't scale. This is the fundamental issue.

To be totally clear, I am implying that a change to the system needs to proceed towards improvements in accountability and visibility, so that people can experience more legitimate trust in their government.

[potato3732842]

People shouldn't need to trust. If you architect the system around it then it will attract people who want to abuse that trust. The system needs to be designed so that no trust is needed, the "correct" thing to do for any given cog in it is also the "correct" thing overall.

[dangus]

The idea never made sense, the government isn't particularly wasteful, and the entire premise is based on bad math that misunderstands how much money the federal government actually spends on things, especially salaries.

On top of that, the premise was based on defying congressional appropriations. Congress decides how money is spent. When the Clinton administration undertook this, they went through Congress to enact legitimate and lasting reform. [1]

The federal government has a much lower employee to citizen ratio than it used to have, it's quite efficient.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/1237991516/planet-money-doge-...

[parineum]

The issue now is that, at the time, the Clinton admin was looking at a political reality of cuts happening in a Republican congress and chose to work with them to make those cuts align more with his party's agenda than it would have before.

That reality isn't something either party seems to be willing to deal with today. The only time changes happen in the federal government are when one party controls the whole thing. Which is why there's such a fight for these mid-terms. If Republicans lose either house of congress, the last 2 years of the Trump admin will be stalemate.

[dangus]

I don’t think it’s party willingness to deal with government efficiency, I think it is more accurate to say that neither party thinks that government efficiency is a significant problem.

In other words, it’s just something Trump wanted to do. The GOP is very firmly under his control.

The other policy that’s like that is tariffs. Nobody in the GOP wants tariffs except for Trump. You could see the lack of cheers at the SOTU.

The other truth of the matter is that the Republican Party has become addicted to cutting taxes without replacing revenue. It seems to me that there’s a desire to create a debt crisis to justify cuts to social programs. In reality, social programs would be highly sustainable if taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals weren’t continually being reduced.

[parineum]

> I don’t think it’s party willingness to deal with government efficiency, I think it is more accurate to say that neither party thinks that government efficiency is a significant problem.

That wasn't the point I was making. The point I was making was that Bill Clinton was able to balance the budget _and_ keep the programs he wanted to not because it was something he originally wanted to do.

He did it because the Democrats lost power in the midterms to Republicans who ran on balancing the budget.

He was looking at either not being able to do anything he wanted and possibly vetoing a Republican agenda that the American people just voted for or changing his own agenda to more closely align with that and work with the Republicans to make sure programs that Democrats really wanted weren't cut but still balancing the budget. He did the latter and it's largely used as a point of pride for the democratic party but they ignore the fact that it was only achieved through compromise.

A more modern opportunity/example for this would have been if Biden, after the midterms, chose to work with yhe Republican congress on immigration reform and get something done that everyone could live with.

Instead he doubled down and made the situation worse, supercharging the issue in the next election leading to the election of Trump on largely that platform.

I'm not blaming just the Democrats for this, neither party would do it, it's just the example that came to mind.

> In reality, social programs would be highly sustainable if taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals weren’t continually being reduced.

There's not really a good example of this in practice. Healthy social programs in other countries are typically funded largely through pretty substantial middle class taxes.

There simply aren't enough rich people and corporations to yax to fund the rest of the country.

The desire to tax the other to fund my benefits is the problem. Instead of looking at poverty and wanted to do something about it, we look to other people and tell them they should do something about it.

[dangus]

I totally understand what you were saying with the Clinton era, I’m mainly saying that the Trump administration is making cuts that Congress didn’t ask for while Clinton was working with Congress to make cuts that hi Republican Congress already wanted and made it align with his own priorities as well.

Nobody in the GOP was asking Trump to make cuts at (e.g.) the FAA, that was just the incompetence of the administration at work.

As far as whether taxes can pay for social programs, I’m just going to go ahead and disagree with you on that. We know this because we have math to tell us that the tax cut and jobs act and the big beautiful bill added to the deficit while still making cuts to social programs and increasing tax burden for the poor/middle class.

In addition, Social security is not a wealth transfer program at all and has always been self-funded. Its funding issues could be resolved overnight with modest reforms.

Medicare is funded by the same people who use the program, it’s not a wealth transfer program either.

Social programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare are at their most cynical evaluation society’s pitchfork insurance. If you let people go hungry you will get societal and political instability, it is in any regime’s best interest to keep the poorest people in society fed.

[parineum]

> In addition, Social security is not a wealth transfer program at all and has always been self-funded. Its funding issues could be resolved overnight with modest reforms.

> Medicare is funded by the same people who use the program, it’s not a wealth transfer program either.

> Social programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare are at their most cynical evaluation society’s pitchfork insurance. If you let people go hungry you will get societal and political instability, it is in any regime’s best interest to keep the poorest people in society fed.

We're way off topic and really don't disagree much but I was mostly thinking of actual wealth transfer programs. The "social safety net" type programs you see in some European countries, and most iconically, Nordic countries.

Anyway, genuinely good chat but, seeing as we're so off topic, I'll probably not reply again (but I will read yours).

[rat87]

The idea behind DOGE was to

1. fire people who don't automatically support Trump regardless of the law/constitution/good of the nation 2. Fire people who Trump or maga dislike for some reason (LGBTQ, minorities, people who have ever criticized Trump) 3. Destroy government in general (from people on the ideological right who are willing to set aside any principles to work for Trump)

Reducing waste or making government efficient was never one of the goals. Otherwise they wouldn't have gotten rid of people doing actual oversight work for the government. They also wouldn't have fired so many people on whims (that they had to take back in many cases)

[theossuary]

Anyone who thinks DOGE was anything other than an ideological purge is incapable of critical thinking. Though, in all honestly, most who say it wasn't know it was, and are just lying to buy time till the project is complete.

[Tangurena2]

Additionally, the goal of DOGE was to dismantle every agency investigating Musk's businesses. Future James Bond type movies won't have SPECTRE or Blofeld as villains, they'll all be thinly disguised Musks.

[ants_everywhere]

It was also to justify increased government spending, namely the extension of the tax cuts

[MisterMower]

What are you talking about? Reducing government revenue does not increase government spending.

[ants_everywhere]

That's really a matter of accounting.

Under some accounting systems if you have a financial obligation and that obligation is forgiven, then it's an expense (e.g. bad debt expense) for the forgiving party and income for the party that is forgiven.

A big tax cut like this is forgiving the dues everyone owes for living in a society. It's only really a pure loss of revenue if you believe that taxes aren't an inherent part of the social contract.

At least empirically I agree with Hobbes that life in the state of nature is nasty brutish and short and that there are no, for example, big tech companies in anarchies. So in both theory and practice taxes are conceptually subscription fees that arise with the social contract in exchange for protection, public services, and the protection of rights. In this sense they are debt and cancelling the debt is an expense.

Of course I recognize that in practice the government does not treat future tax revenue as receivables in terms of accounting. But there are sufficiently many games and white lies in the bill to make it appear budget neutral that I don't think anybody really believes the actual budget accounting is what's driving the bill. It's a political bill and politically I think it's reasonable to consider it an expense.

[Jensson]

> That's really a matter of accounting.

So increasing taxes can be said to reduce government spending? Do you think anyone really buys that argument?

[ants_everywhere]

No and yes I think a lot of people see the tax cuts as a lump sum transfer of wealth from the American public to private hands. In fact after you made this comment I found that the house.gov website says this explicitly.

The argument that taxes are part of the social contract was made by the same people who invented the concept of the social contract, of which the US constitution is famously an explicit example. So yes in general I think the people who founded the country bought the argument that creating a government required the payment of taxes necessarily as an obligation.

Do you think anyone really buys the idea that it's anything else?

[jiggawatts]

I've been the one selling the "$1,280 mug", not in America, and not to the military, but to state and federal governments all over the place.

It's always the same problem: They write "requirements" that end up being total nonsense, they have an unlimited budget, and they're terrified that they'll get "in trouble" for some slight oversight. This is a recipe for overspending, and is the bane of all such organisations everywhere.

The reason that DOGE had a snowball's chance in hell of fixing government overspend is that this can't possibly be achieved by merely cancelling a few hundred contracts out of millions!

The dynamic has to change, by realigning incentives and changing the rules, but DOGE did not have that power.

Not to mention that nobody knows how to do this at the scale of the US government! Nobody. I don't have the answers, Elon doesn't, neither does anyone else like Peter Thiel.

They keep talking about how the government is bad, but they don't have an alternative that wouldn't be subject to the exact same forces and produce an equally bad (or even identical) outcome.

[Jtsummers]

One thing that would help, but only help, not solve, is to train the people writing requirements. I've seen so much overfitting. "We developed on a Dell 1234ABC, so that's what we need 200 of when we deliver this to the field." That's not how computers work, but that's how they end up writing requirements. That can even make it into the TO for systems so now they have a drawing of the back of a Dell 1234ABC and the front, showing how it's installed at a desk and cabled up.

Once that happens, if the system lasts more than a year, they have to start sourcing Dell 1234ABCs with the same specs. However, that's an item that's no longer sold. So then they switch to maintaining the ones they have, which means a support contractor is hired to staff locations to handle these repairs (because the local IT staff is already responsible for a lot of things, and maintaining obsolete hardware is not their priority). When what's needed is any computer with X GB of RAM, X GB (or TB these days) of storage, and so on. Set the minimum specs, go acquire it from whatever vendor, and move on. It'd cost a fraction of the amount of that multi-million support contract whose entire job is to maintain obsolete computers.

[zbentley]

That would help a tiny amount. The bigger problem, which GP alluded to and which is very, very frustrating to entangle, is the incentives around accountability. Pahlka’s writing puts it better than I could:

https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/the-water-is-a-mirror

https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/

[jiggawatts]

Precisely right.

Adherence to internal procedure becomes ever more important as organisations grow larger, eventually becoming by far the most critical requirement for all work, internal or external. Cost, efficacy, customer happiness, etc... become distant secondary requirements, dwarfed by the mountains of procedure, policy, and paperwork.

[lmm]

We get the project management we pay for. You can outsource implementation but you can't outsource accountability; ultimately, the only way to get effective government is to build up project management expertise in-house, and to do that you need to be willing to match the pay and conditions (including but not limited to reliable long-term employment) that skilled project managers could obtain in private industry.

[malcolmgreaves]

Their goal wasn’t to make the government better. It was to destroy it and steal data so that Trump and Musk could get richer.

[stirfish]

Thanks for this link. I always assumed that things like $1280 coffee cups were like dad's "business trips", where we all know that's not really what's going on but we're all politely not talking about it.

Like a coffee cup might've been in the shipping manifest, but that wasn't all of it and we still needed to pay to ship it to [redacted]