[asveikau]

Any time people talk about cutting government spending, they are exploiting naivety of the audience. When you actually cut, nobody likes it. There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

[Jtsummers]

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

There's actually a lot of waste. DOGE just didn't go after it. Check out DOD and all the 9- and 10-figure programs that get canceled without delivering anything, and whose work is often useless for follow-on work. OCX is a recent example, costing around $6 billion and took so long that the program it was supposed to replace ended up just doing the work instead. Essentially nothing of OCX will be retained. This isn't really unusual in the DOD.

[SubiculumCode]

That's the thing. The waste isn't in Federal beuracracy, it's in Federal contracts to private industry without strong self-interested oversight. The privatization trend takes a highly motivated group (companies) to milk money from an inefficient overseer.

[icedchai]

Yep. I’ve worked on some federal contracts and all the waste is in private contractors, not the government itself. There are structural issues with subcontractors many layers deep, each middleman taking a cut for doing little to nothing. It’s sick.

[CobrastanJorji]

Heck, even before they do anything, there is a sizable industry (with just a few players) focused entirely on the incredibly byzantine (but originally well meaning) process of bidding for government contracts (and also the politicking of acquiring no-bid contracts).

[parineum]

And who is responsible for making sure federal contracts don't go to wasteful contractors?

[sarchertech]

Yeah but that’s a process issue that would require deep familiarity and probably acts of Congress to fix. That’s not something a few 25 year olds with no relevant experience can come in and fix in 100 days.

[parineum]

Sure but this whole thread reads like it's absolving the government giving these contracts and blaming private companies.

It's the frog and the scorpion fable.

[lern_too_spel]

It's why smart government created USDS, to clean up the mess left by contractors who set up the original healthcare.gov by having competent people work directly for the federal government. USDS was replaced with the incompetent DOGE (now US DOGE Service) and then completely shut down due to the new organization's incompetence.

[kotaKat]

This. Why the hell are we propping up private "veteran owned" companies that repackage a few things into a Pelican case and call it a revolutionary new product and sell it for tens of thousands over MSRP?

(I've seen one too many local 'defense contractors' building 'enabler kits' which are literally just a couple laptops in a Pelican case for way too much money.)

I keep seeing this with little tiny IT companies in the fed landscape and it slightly irks me. This is just the modern form of the $400 hammer...

[ThinkingGuy]

While your point is perfectly valid, there's a little more nuance to the $400 (or $600) hammer story:

https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...

[alistairSH]

This.

I live outside DC, lots of friends who are contractors in IT/software. More than a few have been on the same contract, doing the same work, for years or decades. It's effectively a full-time permanent position, or could be. Not sure how there's any efficiency there when the contracting firm's owners need to make a cut.

[sedawkgrep]

My spouse works in the DOI and while there maybe some inefficiencies, particularly in process, it isn't the people themselves which are the problem. Her group operates on razor-thin budgets and personnel constraints. They suffer the frustrations because they believe in the work.

[mothballed]

Government doesn't turn a profit, so the main way for middle management to gain influence and seniority is to have more employees. Thus you have the interesting situation that they always have razor-thin budgets for employees in order to maximize the employee count under them and they spend a huge portion of time doing inefficient processes.

[monknomo]

hang on, isn't that true in private for profit companies too? Is not the path to VP from director typically grabbing more teams that report to you?

[mothballed]

Depends on the company, but there is another possibility, to produce more profit rather than more reports.

[sedawkgrep]

This is a profoundly dismissive and even circular take...or at least an intentional misrepresentation of what I said.

When I say personnel constraints, I mean there are almost not enough people to do the work that needs to be done.

When I say budget constraints, I mean the budgets and projects are funded so lean, that they're always having to cut sections out of projects to get what they can done with the budget they're given.

I have no idea where you've gotten this idea that the waste in government is from employing too many people, but in the areas I am familiar with, it's nowhere close to an accurate read.

[mothballed]

I'm referring to things like the DOI rescinding the 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule that allowed private ecologically minded conservation groups to restore and preserve land through leases -- something exploitive resource extracting private entities were already able to do.

Instead the DOI declared their "lean" and "constrained" force would revoke letting private entities lease for conservation. Something at odds with lean employees trying to maximize conservation ROI. Why would they be begging to rip away conservation from private hands into unavailable public hands if they didn't already have the manpower, unless they're playing a political fuck-fuck game?

That reveals the true fuck-fuck game. DOI employees claim they are lean, out of employees, etc while actively pursuing actions that are counter to how those acting in such circumstances are in the interest of acting. But actually their management are rescinding rules that help offload conservation to private actors happy to do it, instead diluting the ability of the DOI to preserve resources by instead tossing additional tasks on already overloaded employees at which point they'll have their spouses on forums complaining and stirring up the voters to try and bring more employees under their grasp. Presuming they're successful, they will then again swamp said employees, and the cycle starts anew.

Which brings me back to my assertion:

>. Thus you have the interesting situation that they always have razor-thin budgets for employees in order to maximize the employee count under them and they spend a huge portion of time doing inefficient processes.

If they were actually trying to unload tasks from employees they'd be happy that environmental groups were trying to take the load off DOI employees and paying them leasing fees to do it, but that's not in the interest of management, as that could reduce their headcount and ability to beg for more money. Thus you can witness from actual acts of the DOI, it doesn't matter how many resources and people they get, their management are acting in ways it will appear to employees like they're broke and thin on people because they're run on ragged edges (something not unique, seen in many other areas of government, that will keep expanding task for current employees to the point they always seem broke and stretched out and then those associated with the organization will beg for more to start the cycle over again).

[sedawkgrep]

I’m not sure at all why you’re pointing at a rule established in 2024 and promptly rescinded in 2025 as a way to point out govt. waste.

[verall]

It was the post-DOGE DOI that rescinded the rule, after the "fat and waste" had been cut.

[asveikau]

I had an edit in my comment about military spending being an exception but I decided to leave it out to not distract from the core idea.

Though there is nuance there too, as some wasteful military spending seems to be more of a jobs program for specific congressional districts.

[lesuorac]

I guess it depends on what you see as waste.

As a programmer I see waste all the time where people are doing work that could be clearly computerized for better speed and accuracy.

[ajmurmann]

You are correct and DOD contracts also have been coopted by the political system to fill other needs like funneling money to senators' districts.

[EthanHeilman]

Those jobs protects aren't necessarily wasteful in that they stimulate the economy and cutting them would have serious impacts for those states. The essential question is, could that subsidy to a state have more impact. For instance, rather than building tanks the military does not want or need, fund and hire more teachers, build things the military actually does need like ships, fund startups, fund science projects in those states, etc...

[Spooky23]

You’re confused becuase they set out to confuse you.

The waste isn’t in employees doing their jobs, it’s what they are doing.

IRS enforcement is a great example. Enforcement is the most expensive way to get tax compliance. The IRS spends lots and lots of money collecting small amounts of money from people with no political clout and limited value. But, because the congressional budget says so, they ignore really obvious and common tax avoidance, which encourages the behavior and drives more losses.

DOGE fired more people and made it worse. I’m running an estate waiting for a determination from them to close out tax obligations, a pretty significant amount. I escalated the issue with my US Senator’s office. I was told they have 2 staff capable of working the issue nationally, and to expect a 2-3 year wait after it being escalated. According to my attorney, these issues took 6-8 months previously.

[devin]

There is a general misunderstanding about "waste" in firms, organizations, and governments. Perfect efficiency DOES NOT EXIST and even if it did, it is NOT EVEN A DESIRABLE STATE for these entities. Sometimes when you see "waste", and you relentlessly try to drive efficiency, you destroy the _system_ that makes the desirable parts possible in the first place.

[kridsdale1]

Big Tech is just as guilty of this. It’s just not the public’s money.

[pocksuppet]

It kind of is, where do you think Big Tech gets its money from? essential products and services are more expensive because of the waste. Like a can of Coke (or packet of rice) is more expensive because they buy ads through Google and Google wastes that money.

[gowld]

Consent matters.

[TSiege]

The DOD might be the one exception to federal waste in spending precisely because they cannot be audited. Every single other federal agency is audited nonstop. The DOD due to military and security reasons is not

[boscillator]

Even here, it can be hard to know what to cut. OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's purview, and sometimes you need to update legacy systems. Obviously, OCX was still a disaster, and we still don't have a modern ground segment, but the answer isn't necessarily cutting programs, it's spending the money in those programs more wisely, and empowering civil servants to stop obvious contractor grift. Actually doing that is difficult and may require more money in the short term.

*edit: spelling

[Jtsummers]

> OCX kept getting funding because running a GPS ground segment is in the government's preview

I 100% agree (purview, by the way, not preview).

> sometimes you need to update legacy systems

I also agree, 100%. The problem with OCX and many similar systems is that they didn't try to update a legacy system, they tried to replace the legacy system. This is a very important distinction. Upgrading should be an in-place thing (edit: for large, complex systems), and is often deliberately incremental (think "strangler fig pattern" or Ship of Theseus). Replacing may or may not be incremental, but as the OCX effort was conducted, it was decidedly not in-place and that's largely why it failed.

It was a large system that tried to deliver everything in a big bang, instead of aiming for either a side-by-side (with the prior system) series of incremental releases to prove itself out or upgrade-in-place (possibly with subsystems done in a side-by-side release fashion, or just replaced). That big bang was always going to fail and the DOD loves to put out these contracts. Unsurprisingly, the DOD has not done any effective large scale IT replacement projects that did not either outright fail (like OCX) or significantly grow in their cost and timelines (as OCX did before it failed) even if they eventually succeeded in delivering a replacement.

[boscillator]

Oops, thanks. Stupid dyslexia.

Yah, the government has a big problem with trying to do big upgrades when a ship-of-theseus would work. I suspect this can be traced all the way up to how congressional appropriations work and the acquisitions/sustainment distinction, in addition to usual resume-engineering and second-system-syndrome.

[TitaRusell]

None of the elected representatives have the balls to actually go after the DOD or the security apparatus. And that is assuming that they will actually get access to the budget anyway.

Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.

[jimt1234]

I agree with the sentiment here, however, back in the 90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a reduction in military spending. Military bases were closing; many of my friends/peers were discharged from service, and so on. And then 9/11 happened and military spending has skyrocketed ever since. Coincidence? Hmmm?

[TitaRusell]

Trump was famously elected as the big isolationist candidate and we know how that went...

[watwut]

He was pro-Russian, thus against help to Ukraine. That is literally the extend of his isolationism.

The claim he is pro peace was always transparent lie and people literally recognized it at the time.

[jimt1234]

But what about the Board of Peace? https://boardofpeace.org/ ... I love the quote: "...the war in Gaza is over." If people weren't dying, that would be hilarious!

[rlt]

“Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons“

It’s essentially self-evident that someone receiving money or benefits paid for by others considers those benefits to be “important.”

[tyjen]

"There isn't really much waste in federal spending."

That's debatable, because of all the pork programs that are snuck into large, omnibus spending bills. However, even that could be sold as, "one man's trash is another man's treasure" type of scenario; ergo, no waste!

I challenge anyone to read through the budget proposals and see what was authorized, it's interesting to say the least.

[lenerdenator]

At this point, spending isn't the only problem, either. We need to increase revenues.

It's thought that the IRS foregoes collecting hundreds of billions of dollars each year[0]. That's a significant chunk of the Federal government's discretionary spending each budget cycle.

People who say they want to run the government like a business seem to ignore the fact that no business has ever remained financially sound without steady revenues. It simply cannot be done.

[0]https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-forgoes-hundr...

[dfee]

this is non sequitor.

why isn't there really much waste in federal spending? because when you cut, nobody likes it.

well, no. there is pork.

a better example might be: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half" - John Wanamaker

[jchw]

Excellent quote. It's easy to draw conclusions one way or another, but the real challenge to fixing the budget is easily just as much trying to understand what the hell is going on with it.

I imagine it like if you were trying to clear hard disk space but QDirStat only gave obscure indications of what the files were and you had to go through a complex legal process to delete anything.

[fluoridation]

I think your analogy is good, but misses the mark by millimeters. Optimizing is easy when you have a giant directory in the root of the drive named "delete this later". It's difficult when you have hundreds of thousands of directories, each with 100 files, of which you actually only need 75-85. You can't just delete any whole directory, because then things break; you have to go through each one and evaluate the purpose of each file, which is an expense in itself.

[jchw]

Fair point, although I get the feeling you may underestimate the state of disorganized chaos that my filesystems sometimes become.

[phil21]

Yeah. Anyone who has worked with government agencies (federal or state, doesn't matter) knows how much waste and grift there is. Not All Agencies(tm) of course, but many.

The issue is figuring out how to actually fix that. It's Chesteron's Fences all the way down. Someone smarter than I would need to figure out how to even start on the problem.

The big issue though is that everyday people get exposed to the obvious inefficiencies in their day to day interactions, and don't see much if any of the big picture. So in pop-culture the meme builds up that all government spending is inefficient wastefulness. No one really talks or thinks about the stuff that just works.

The same sort of problems are endemic in private industry too. As I came from a working class background and worked my way up I like to say "America is fraud from the bottom up" - since I was exposed to the lower rungs of it first. It was definitely a shock coming into the working world as a naive teenager.

It would take an entire cultural shift to get much traction, imo.

[izend]

Why did Bill Clinton execute the largest Federal cuts in the 90s and everyone said they were needed?

[asveikau]

Because Bill Clinton pushed Democrats rightwards with his electoral policy of "triangulation". That was the start of establishment Dems embracing Reaganomics.

[markhahn]

it wouldn't be a triangle if it meant embracing one of the poles.

[lesuorac]

Clinton benefited from an era where if a voter was going to hear how bad your idea was then he got a chance to defend it.

[yoyohello13]

His cuts were actually considered and targeted. He didn’t just hire a billionaire to take a chainsaw to ‘woke’ gov programs.

[gruez]

But the original claim was

>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.

It sounds like you're arguing for the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job, which implies that there actually is waste is government spending.

[bryanrasmussen]

>But the original claim was

>>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

And your response to the claim "there isn't really much waste in federal spending" is to say "what about 30 years ago, someone you probably liked got rid of a lot of things they said were wasteful"?

in short, if 30 years ago someone got rid of a lot of waste in federal spending it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste in federal spending.

[gruez]

>it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste in federal spending.

Was Clinton particularly thorough in eliminating waste? Is there reason to believe that no new waste materialized in 3 decades?

[bryanrasmussen]

I wouldn't know in one way or the other, I'm just following the age-old HN tradition of pointing out that the conclusion from observation does not necessarily follow. That is to say the person who said

>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

does not have to be actually making the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job.

[watwut]

Considering Clinton balanced budged and actually did worked on removing waste, yes he was as thorough as it gets.

Those are juat facts. No one on the right wont admit it, but that does not make it not right.

[yoyohello13]

Yeah, I don't agree with OP really. Cuts can be warranted, necessary and popular. It takes actual work to determine the best places to make cuts though. The DOGE cuts were completely vibes based and did basically nothing, especially since the big beautiful bill increased spending right after. Frankly, the main reason I hate the Trump admin is because they make policy 100% based on vibes, always choosing the most intellectually lazy way possible to implement their goals to 'fix' whatever problems they 'think' exist.

[esalman]

I think flying apache helicopters to salute a musician at his home or beachgoers on 4th of July counts as waste, and are not really important to anybody. So are the remodeling of reflecting pool and ballroom construction.

[breakwaterlabs]

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending

I do not believe anyone who has consulted in federal IT or worked on contracts is capable of making such a statement. All of the motivations for all parties are heavily bent towards waste, and in fact any attempt to make things more efficient (reduce headcount, for instance) would be recieved poorly by department heads and contractors.

As one example, a department head who reduces staff by 20% has just reduced their own next year's budget AND kneecapped their resume.

[lacy_tinpot]

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending

What makes the federal any different than any other organization?

[nananana9]

There's plenty of waste. It doesn't matter how much you pour at the top of a leaky pipeline, very little of it will make its way down to the desired recipients.

You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare for what can at best be described as mediocre outcomes. The Netherlands spends $6000 and is near the tops of the charts when it comes to quality. What's the ratio of effectiveness per dollar we're looking at here? 5 to 1?

It doesn't matter whether or not people like it when you cut, you have to if your want your country to exist in 50 years. But just as importantly you have to get rid of the leeches in the middle of the pipe and make sure the money that's left is actually doing work for you.

[Aurornis]

> You're spending $15,000 per capita per year on healthcare

You’re using a number that includes private and public spending. There are problems with this topic, but it’s a different topic than federal government spending waste.

There are some real federal government spending inefficiencies, but you picked a topic that is predominantly private spend.

[benj111]

It's still $8000 per capita just for socialised healthcare. So still more than NL. The US has the worst of both worlds.

[brewdad]

The socialized segment of US healthcare is almost entirely the over 65 population and those too disabled to work any job. Obviously, the spending on those groups will be higher than the entire population as a whole.

That it is does nothing to prove inefficiency.

[benj111]

It kinda of does. Because you're still spending more than NL still have to worry about paying health insurance, still have to worry about how you're going to pay to give birth etc etc.

To be clear this is per capita, not per recipient.

[ivraatiems]

The spend is on private health insurance going to for-profit middlemen. It's not mostly on the government. People love to crow about Medicare and Medicaid (safety net government-run insurance) waste but the vast majority of "waste" is the record profits put up by private companies.

[Starman_Jones]

Through Medicare and Medicaid, the US spends more public money per capita on healthcare than any other country spends period. This is largely because Medicare/Medicaid were not allowed to negotiate pricing; they were legally required to accept whatever price companies wanted to set for a treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...

[kansface]

Insurance companies don't make much money, actually. Hospitals, physicians, and pharma are at the top of the list (60% or so of total spending). Total insurance overhead is perhaps between 10 and 20%.

[ivraatiems]

That's not true, and you were foolish to trust ChatGPT on this instead of researching it yourself. Also, if you are spending even 20% of a budget on things that are useless or net negative for the effort you are engaged in, you are wasting that 20%. "60% of the healthcare system's spending was on providing healthcare" is not a GOOD thing, that's an indictment!

In 2024, insurance was 31% of national health expenditure: https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...

That's a third of the whole system just spent on middlemen whose whole job is to make access to care harder. The single largest proportion of our expenditure was on the most useless part of the system.

Private health insurance costs more than physicians, hospitals, prescription drugs, or Medicare or Medicaid.

[retornam]

please cite your sources, we can't take your comment at face value without citations.

[kansface]

I asked ChatGPT of course, and the response roughly corresponded to my expectations so I went no further. Doctors make way more here than elsewhere (British doctors aren’t making 500-750k a year), pharma makes most of its money here, and hospitals charge an arm and a leg - it all checks out, no? Alternatively, if insurance were straight up responsible for doubling health care costs in any easily attributable way, we could easily get rid of it and would have done so by now. The only reason it can continue to exist is that it occupies a no-man’s land of utility.

[ivraatiems]

It doesn't check out, you were one Google away from correct information (which I cited above), and relying on ChatGPT to confirm your priors for you and then parroting what it (incorrectly) says is an insulting way to engage in this community. Please don't do it.

Also, the average doctor's salary is around $386k/year, and is heavily propped up by extremely rare specialties who make much more. The average primary care doctor makes around $240-280k/year. It's true that the US pays doctors much much more than the rest of the world, and is also facing a historic doctor shortage which drives up costs - but your numbers are still way, way off, probably because you eyeballed instead of doing research.

[jmull]

Isn’t healthcare is the prime example of government run programs being much more efficient and efficacious than privatized ones?

The US has a massive tangled hodgepodge of private companies, having poor coverage, very high prices, and quite poor outcomes. Meanwhile there are numerous European countries with public healthcare systems that are far cheaper and provide much better outcomes.

Here’s one of a million sources:

https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-the-us-healthcare-syst...

[IshKebab]

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

I don't know much about US spending but if it's anything like the UK I doubt that. There's plenty of waste. People only end up thinking there isn't, because it's extremely difficult to cut just the waste, so cuts are usually equally to waste and useful functions.

But that doesn't mean there's no waste! The problem is to cut the waste you pretty much have to spend a ton of money hiring highly skilled and motivated employees, and then fight decades of accumulation of cultural acceptance of the waste. Basically impossible.

[dennis_jeeves2]

>When you actually cut, nobody likes it.

Yep, the section of people that lose out will make a noise.

>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

With *cumulative taxation (state+ fed) being in the region of 60% or about 2/3 of one's income where do I even start to untangle the huge mess of govt spending - waste or otherwise?

Cumulative= income tax Fed + State, inflation, payroll tax, Regulatory burden, Capital gains tax, tarrifs, sales tax, property tax, city tax, school tax etc.

[WalterBright]

The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all.

[retornam]

> The Department of Education has spent $3 trillion since its inception in 1980, and academic accomplishment has not advanced at all

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which administers research grants, is a division of the Department of Education. Given your point, how much of this funding was dedicated to research? Even if $500 million (its much more, but I digress) has been invested in research since 1980, this does not negate your point since the Department of Education does more than advancing academic achievement?

Each state has its own rules for education. The Department of Education mostly funds programs based on federal law, but they can only regulate state's activities they’re breaking federal law, you can't solely blame the department for failures of multiple state governments.

[WalterBright]

Is there any evidence that the education research has been of any benefit to educational results?

The dollars spent is not evidence of accomplishment.

[watwut]

Frankly, yes.

[WalterBright]

yes as in ... ?

[great_tankard]

Are you saying that the priorities of the Department of Education have been misplaced, or that it was a mistake to have a Department of Education at all?

"Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.

[WalterBright]

Pick your definition of academic accomplishment if you like.

What have we got to show for spending $3 trillion?

[jayGlow]

test scores have actually gone down in a number of states I don't think whatever the department of education is doing is actually working.

[retornam]

State governments administer education separately, the Department of Education's job is to make sure they are following federal law. The Department mainly administers federal programs that dish out funding to states.

Y'all really don't understand how education works in America and your comments make it clear for all to see.

[breakwaterlabs]

By what yardstick should we then measure the DoEd's performance-per-dollar, or determine whether it represents "waste"?

Because it seems to me that a chief indicator that waste likely exists is an inability to show ROI.

[WalterBright]

Waste exists when there is no incentive to eliminate it.

[baby]

You’re wrong. The execution failed because it was backed by (white supremacist) ideology. COGE is a new attempt at the idea taking place in New York, and much better orchestrated.

[WalterBright]

> There isn't really much waste in federal spending.

When there is no profit motive, there is no motive to be efficient.

[Jtsummers]

And when there is a profit motive, and no meaningful competition, there is also no motive to be efficient or effective. This is what you'll find in many of the large DOD contracts.

So it's a compounding effect. It's down to whether the overseers of the contracts care enough to rein in the contractors, or to do just enough to stay on this side of legal. And the contractors certainly aren't doing charity work, so they'll balloon the costs up to the point of significant pushback and then tighten it down a bit.

[WalterBright]

And when you get cost plus contracts, the incentive is to maximize costs.

With government agencies, the incentive is to spend 100% of the budget, otherwise their budget will get cut the next year.

Some years back, "Frontline" did an episode on dentist businesses. The government had a new program where they paid dentists who did dental surgery on poor people. There was a sudden drastic rise on dental surgeries on poor people, and little of it was medically justifiable. "Frontline" was shocked, shocked to see this happen. But of course, it was the obvious and inevitable result of how the government issued the payments.

[Rapzid]

The entire administration is. It's the most overtly wasteful and fraudulent admin of my lifetime anyway(so going back to Reagan).

They disgraced the People's House. Gilded it so the POTUS could feel like a king/emperor/tzar.

Destroyed the East Wing to build a ball room. Initially said it would be privately funded (which is itself a hugely corrupt act having individuals and corporations directly fund hundreds of millions to a vanity project for the POTUS). But then tried to raid the public coffers for it to the tune of over a billion dollars.

Accepted a plane from Qatar and spent millions rebuilding it. Now saying they are going to donate it to the Trump library(aka steal from the public).

All the contracts going to family and friends? The overt pay-to-play politics?

Yeah, of course DOGE was BS.

[tancop]

there are two big exceptions to this, the military and healthcare. playing world police is incredibly wasteful and so is funding a system based on submitting to the demands of big pharma and for-profit hospitals.

the problem is 50 years worth of propaganda convincing americans that all this is good and necessary and if you disagree that makes you a communist/welfare queen/terrorist supporter/woke activist. at least now with gen z even the far right agrees that foreign wars are a bad idea.

[johnrgrace]

The US has made an active policy decision for decades to be the world police, flowing from that policy spending on world policing isn't automatically waste unless it's highly inefficient.

[kridsdale1]

It’s money well spent if you view the cost of not doing it as another war that leaves half the world’s industrial capacity in literal ruins as happened several times before.

I’m not saying this is true, but it’s the motivation.

[rileymat2]

A war that was very good for what the US economic juggernaut has become. We may be significantly better off maintaining great relationships with our Western Hemisphere countries and let the oceans protect us.

[gowld]

There is an ocean in the middle of the "western hemisphere". Did you mean "Americas continent countries"?

[rileymat2]

Including South America too, yes. I'd not characterize it as the middle, it's mostly centered around the landmasses on most maps.

[Hikikomori]

MIC gets paid handsomely to make sure this gets perpetuated. But goes back to even Smedley Butlers time, using the military and intelligence services to ensure capitalists have cheap access to resources. Supercharged with the second Iraq war as mercenary companies took over military work and contractors "rebuilding" the country.

Trump is a continuation of this well played track, with the a large sprinkle of fascism, grifting and destruction of the federal government as a goal.

[gruez]

>and for-profit hospitals.

but only 36% are for-profit?

https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership

[gowld]

Medical services are for-profit, not the hospitals. The hospitals funnel money to for-profit vendors.

[tvh56r]

Depends on your definition of wasteful. Americans expect their government to be able to waves hands DO SOMEthing about various things in the world. Maintaining that capability is expensive.

I don't know if that desire is caused by intentional propaganda or if it's just who we are as a people because of our history.

Maybe it's not right, but it's what Americans expect from our government right now.

[watwut]

> playing world police

The most expensive are purely for oil, for hawks feeling manly bullshit wars.

[TheAceOfHearts]

It all started off as obvious bullshit: in 2024 Elon Musk was claiming that he could cut $2 trillion in waste, fraud, and abuse. He then walked that back to $1 trillion in cuts, but he didn't even get close.

[hnuser123456]

The 28th amendment was affirmed by Biden near the end of his term, which states that the "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." DEI programs that offer benefits only to women are unconstitutional.

[daheza]

They cut much more than DEI programs. They aggressively and ignorantly cut jobs and grants which could have benefited the planet and saved lives.

https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...

[yandie]

This government thinks bike lanes are DEI: https://newrepublic.com/post/212853/donald-trump-transportat...

They just slap DEI on any policy they disagree with.

[0xy]

NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan via grants issued to EcoHealth Alliance. Which, even if you do not think lab leak theory is likely, is extremely reckless and incompetent.

So, at best, they're funding illegal research. At worst, their research inadvertently led to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.

Exactly how many grants are necessary to make up for that, and why would you trust the agency issuing grants for illegal research to manage such a program?

[thunderfork]

>NIH funded gain-of-function research into coronaviruses in Wuhan

Even this assertion is heavily, heavily disputed:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210706065130/https://www.washi...

[0xy]

Disputed by the person who approved the funding and has a major conflict of interest? The research clearly qualifies as gain-of-function, as natural viruses' functions were modified.

>Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and a critic of gain-of-function research, told the Washington Post that the EcoHealth/Wuhan lab research “was — unequivocally — gain-of-function research.” He said it “met the definition for gain-of-function research of concern under the 2014 Pause.”.

[thunderfork]

From the article text of its conclusion:

"the EcoHealth funding was not related to the experiments, but the collection of samples."

Pretty cut and dry?

[throwawaypath]

>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons.

"[Pushing MAGA initiatives] is important to somebody for good reasons." Yes, zealots love pushing their ideology.

In about 15 seconds I found the following:

Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology

Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology

An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching

These are pure waste pushed by religious zealots.

https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...