GSA Eliminates 18F - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221549
18F GitHub Repositories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43222842
Just today on the All In podcast I heard Jason Calcanis suggest that the USPS go down to one delivery day per week because no one uses it? The unbelievable part is he was genuine and thought it was an intelligent thing to say. For reference the USPS delivers over 100B, yes billion, parcels per year.
The disconnect between the people who are running the show, and those who are in the ear's of those running the show is scary.
The goal is to destroy the US government, so it can be privatized and sold off. Same as what happened in Russia.
What we have now is an undemocratic regime where the executive branch is permanently controlled by a city that voted 91-6 for the losing candidate. It’s like those crosswalk buttons that aren’t connected to anything. No matter how people vote, the government just gives us more immigration and more globalism.
E.g. No presidential candidate has ever run on a platform of more immigration. Support for increasing immigration hasn’t topped 35% in decades. Yet the foreign born population has grown from 5% to 15% since 1970. Nobody voted for that. Who did it?
I don't think a presidential candidate has ever run on adding more debt either, but that has increased at an even higher rate. How about birth rate? I don't think any candidate has campaigned on lowering the birthrate either, but that has dropped from 17.6 per thousand in 1970 to 12 per thousand in 2020.
I would really like to understand why you believe that the executive branch doesn't have the ability to govern because people that would be carrying out the laws must also be politically aligned with the laws. I also would like to hear why you think that just because something wasn't part of any presidential campaign it somehow supports your opinion that the people who carrying out the instructions in the laws - is an explanation for how the president and cabinet don't have any real power.
There are almost 700,000 federal employees in DC and its suburbs. The President appoints only about 4,000 people. Many of those people are the ones in agencies making rules that have the force of law.
> I don't think a presidential candidate has ever run on adding more debt either, but that has increased at an even higher rate.
They have—they all run on cutting taxes.
> How about birth rate? I don't think any candidate has campaigned on lowering the birthrate either, but that has dropped from 17.6 per thousand in 1970 to 12 per thousand in 2020.
The federal government directly controls the immigration rate, unlike the birth rate.
> I would really like to understand why you believe that the executive branch doesn't have the ability to govern because people that would be carrying out the laws must also be politically aligned with the laws.
Because politics has become polarized along moral dimensions. E.g. people don’t think immigration is merely a knob to turn, but instead is a moral issue, with a more “diverse” country being a moral good in and of itself. You can’t trust those people to work hard carrying out mass deportations when the public votes for the guy promising to do that.
> I also would like to hear why you think that just because something wasn't part of any presidential campaign it somehow supports your opinion that the people who carrying out the instructions in the laws - is an explanation for how the president and cabinet don't have any real power.
The knobs that control the immigration rate are turned by people who as a matter of ideology believe diversifying the country is a moral good in and of itself. So they simply ignore what the public thinks and continue to turn the knob in favor of increased immigration.
>They have—they all run on cutting taxes.
That's never how they market it though.
By the same logic, they run on "creating new jobs", but businesses love to prioritize those who can pay below minimum. I don't think Immigration is th end-all be-all problem that we should be looking this deeply into right now. Even H1b's and offshoring impact skilled labor more than that.
My comment was more general.
> What we have now is an undemocratic regime where the executive branch is permanently controlled by a city that voted 91-6 for the losing candidate.
The alternative will be an undemocratic regime where the executive "branch" controls all the other ones in perpetuity.
EDIT: Sigh... To me, this is obvious, as I've personally witnessed it happen in several different countries, not to mention historical examples. Worrying about H1B and similar right now is like worrying about hanging the family portrait in the best way possible while the house is on fire.
Note: I would be happy to be proven wrong and I hope you revisit these threads in a few years to see if you have changed your opinion about MAGA (I will surely do).
He appears to be a proponent of Unitary Executive Theory.
Articles I, II, and III, have nearly identical clauses vesting the legislative, judicial, and executive power, respectively, in Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court.
Does anyone think Congress can create a law that enables the legislative or judicial powers to be exercised by employees independent of the control of the constitutional actors in which those powers are vested? It would be madness to say that Congress can create a law creating an entity in the judicial branch that can adjudicate cases without oversight from an Article III judge. Nobody thinks that’s true.
Yes.
Apart from the specific enumerated executive powers in Article II, Sections 2 and 3, the "executive power of the United States" is whatever the Congress says it is. If Article II Section 1 had been intended as a preemptive, unitary-executive grant, there'd have been no reason to enumerate specific powers.
As has been remarked, there's a reason Article I (concerning Congress) comes first.
In Commonwealth Nations "the Crown" has ultimate deciding power, however "the Crown" simultaneously refers to functions of the executive, legislative (parliament), and judicial (Supreme Court and others), governance and the civil service. A Crown Prosecutor is equally known as "the Crown", as the monarch. Both are two very different individuals, but possess the same power, and use "the" nomenclature.
In your construction, all the work is being done by your use of the word “available.” But the constitution doesn’t say “the executive power is available to the President.” It says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The word “vested” means “secured in the possession of or assigned to a person.” So the executive power isn’t merely available to the President. It’s assigned to and given to the possession of the President.
Your Crown example actually proves the opposite of your point. That phraseology reflects the traditional british notion that all executive power is vested in the king, who is the chief prosecutor but may act through delegates: https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/con... (p. 1707).
In your construction, all the work is being done by "the." OK, let's play the same game, this time with the word executive: Suppose that Congress, using its authority under the Necessary and Proper Clause, creates separate governmental agencies — not subject to plenary presidential supervision — and gives those agencies the power to carry out specified tasks. You're complaining that this falls within the definition of "executive" power and thus must be presidentially supervised. The obvious response is: OK, we won't call it "executive" power, we'll call it something else. Word games? Sure, but that's what you're doing.
But, someone might respond, the term "executive power" must be interpreted today as it supposedly was understood by the Framers in 1787. That ipse-dixit contention is purely a matter of what Justice White aptly referred to in Roe as "raw judicial power" — and recall that after Dred Scott, a more-extreme version of such a contention was finally resolved at Appomattox as the culmination of four years of bloody civil war.
The Crown example still works as the Parliament is not selected by the monarch. It is not elected by the monarch. The monarch does not possess the power to reject them. Yet, the Parliament are still referred to as "the Crown", and possesses the executive power of the Crown.
Equally so, the Governor General of any Commonwealth Nation is free to reject the orders of the monarch, as they possess the executive power of the Crown. The monarch is also free to fire them for doing so, as the monarch also has the power of the Crown. Both are on equal footing. In the words of Whitlam "Well may we say God save the Queen, because nothing will save the governor-general."
Multiple people have possession of the executive power in such systems, even though the word "the" is used to refer to it. That alone is not enough to indicate that a singular individual controls it.
Article I and Article III have nearly identical language. Nobody thinks Congressional staffers or judicial law clerks impose “checks and balances” on the elected or appointed officials that hold the constitutional office. Why is the President any different?
Not to say that I think this good policy or constitution design – it grants the President an essentially monarchical position. As The Knoxville Journal once said (9 February 1896), "Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king". I think the more collegial form of executive branch leadership found in the Westminster system – in which a Prime Minister has to continually keep the confidence of their party, since they can be removed at any time for any reason (no allegations of misconduct required); in which Cabinet makes decisions by majority vote (and the PM sometimes loses the vote), unlike the US Cabinet where no votes are taken – leads to better governance.
Maybe, one day, "Prime Minister of the United States" will be a real job title
The check and balance within every branch is the law, one which many state AG and court officials believe or have ruled is being violated.
The law is quite literally a limit on arbitrary uses of power. It is a check on concentrated power, and balances competing interests.
> Who did it?
Oligarchs.
H1B visa/undocumented labor are an anti labor power policy. Not only does it increase the supply of the workforce suppressing wages, but it gives companies coercive power over foreign laborers, preventing them from ever going on strike or asking for rights. Worse, when things start going poorly, oligarchs blame these people who just wanted a better life and then use the oligarchy controlled media to deflect people's rage away from the people hoarding wealth and power onto someone weaker than them, which gives them a sense of agency.
“The law” is it enforced and interpreted by humans. And the fundamental axiom of the constitution is that nobody can be trusted. Do you think the framers went to all that trouble to create this tripartite system, and then assume that all three branches would be checked by unelected prosecutors? If what you said was true, why does the constitution not mention an attorney general that could enforce “the law?”
All of this stuff is directly out of Russia's playbook. It's also Trump's, but Trump is too much of an idiot to accomplish this himself. He knows almost nothing about anything. I can near guarantee that he is being coached.
"Russian state media enters Oval Office during Zelenskyy meeting": https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/28/tass-oval-office-tr...
> According to the White House, the Russian reporter’s presence was unplanned.
> “TASS was not on the approved list of media for today’s pool,” a White House official said. “As soon as it came to the attention of press office staff that he was in the Oval, he was escorted out by the Press Secretary."
> The White House did not address how the unapproved reporter was able to gain access to the Oval Office.
And yes, something like nearly every branch of Federal government with regulatory power is (well, was) investigating him.
Transportation, Justice, Labor, Interior, and Agriculture departments, as well as the National Labor Relations Board, EEOC, EPA, SEC, FCC, FTC.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/us/politics/elon-musk-fed... or https://archive.is/x7chR
I seem to recall that Tesla alone has set the record for the largest number of active investigations with the NLRB and EEOC. The sheer number of incidents of blatant racism alone are shocking. At one point Telsa factory employees were spraying racial slurs on the walls and management ignored it.
Do I think the ripping apart of the federal government will further entrench the Oligarch class? Yeah. But honestly Musk seems to just be doing this because he's just getting vengeance on all the departments and people who he thinks won't let him be his very best genius self.
If you have Transportation, Justice, Labor, Interior, and Agriculture departments, as well as the National Labor Relations Board, EEOC, EPA, SEC, FCC, FTC to answer to, how do you do it?
How do you start a business in the US?
That fucking pisses me off. I know that's not the intent of your post, but that really does piss me the fuck off.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/business-programs/business-entities/s...
Otherwise, wait until fascists complete their takeover, it will certainly be much easier then.
My insisting you lose weight in your GUT is not the same as losing weight in your SKULL. Where, when, how fast determines whether fitness, torture, or murder.
BE MORE DISCERNING
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Now when you do that while sucking up hundreds of billions of contracts... yeah, your contractor is gonna start asking questions.
Nope, it's simply impossible. Look at all the failures like Tesla, SpaceX, Meta, Rivian, Bluesky, etc.
Someone think of the CEOs!
There are no real checks and balances when it comes to launching investigations into your political rivals for political purposes.
Considering the barrage of regulatory, reputational and legal attacks Musk faced, it shouldn't be surprising that he seeks to neuter the ability of the bureaucracy to weaponise the government again in future.
Having presented no hard evidence for your claims, I can only assume the standard you demand is the scrupulous separation of interests, conflicts, and bias to demonstrate the absence of bias beyond a reasonable doubt which is a laudable standard.
Yet, you applaud to the clear, unabashed, unapologetic, intentionally biased application of the law to further individual interests. By an entity whose interests, conflicts, and bias are so thoroughly intertwined that the presence of bias is beyond a reasonable doubt.
Can you please explain why you apply diametrically opposed standards of evidence based on their alignment to your in-group?
In Elon's case, he is not a truthful person. He was recently caught lying and cheating about being good at video games of all things. Just for cred. Imagine what he's capable when the stakes were higher.
'Lawfare' is just a way for the out-of-power party to cry victim even when they fully and absolutely did the crime. It means that when they get back in power they not only get a free pass but also an excuse to crush anyone who had the gal to even try and hold them accountable.
Innocent people can be genuine victims of lawfare, just as easily as guilty people can claim to be victims of lawfare.
The previous administration is widely regarded to have engaged in lawfare, so I would prefer to assume that their political rivals are innocent until proven otherwise, rather than guilty by default.
Widely regarded? You're already dealing with a goofy subset of humanity when you're using words like "lawfare."
And for a hypothetical, if he was in fact guilty and the investigations were warranted. And then he used his presidential power to punish and fire everyone remotely associated with those cases. Would this be a good or bad thing in your opinion?
No, it wasn’t. That was claimed by a specific subset of people who wanted to evade consequences for the crimes they committed, but that wasn’t backed up by even a cursory review of the facts.
You can see a similar example with claims that Eric Adams suffered from “lawfare”, which might be an effective political tactic but are clearly contradicted by the evidence against him. Lots of criminals claim they’re innocent but that doesn’t mean they’re right.
On the scale of US government reforms it doesn't seem like anything particularly notable has happened so far. Executive policy doesn't have a lot of staying power.
They are trying to shrink it with a sledgehammer. In my head the ends do not in fact justify the means. It's like solving famine by killing half the population. It would indeed work and give more resources to the remainder.
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 because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
Most regulations come about due to agency rulemaking under vague or broad statutes, so this implicit assumption is likely generally true.
Given that power, it doesn't surprise me that Republicans would be uncomfortable with organisations like 18F that had zero ideological diversity, in much the same way that I would expect Democrats to be uncomfortable inheriting an agency composed entirely of MAGA types.
Regardless of their technical prowess, as a government organisation, they should have taken more care to avoid becoming completely partisan, and shouldn't be surprised at this outcome.
Ideological diversity within the federal bureaucracy is exactly what the war against the permanent civil service is directed against, in favor of partisan patronage and Führerprinzip.
The best of the best that actually want to take part in making effective change for the better within goverment services will tend to have a progressive outlook.
I've known this was true forever but it's interesting seeing it said out loud now.
Particularly if the tent is broadened to include traditional pre-Trumpian conservatives.
In theory DOGE could be diverse. In practice, at this specific time there's no real indication they're age diverse, gender diverse, or even messiah diverse.
> W̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ m̶e̶n̶ DOGE can't be ideologically diverse?
where I "quoted" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43228120 which "quoted" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225916 by performing s/ DOGE / White men / and I returned by performing s/ White men / DOGE / ?
You would first have to ask scarab92, dragonwriter, and hypothesis if they ' really mean "ideologically" ' and then address the question of why did you substitute DOGE with White men .. which is all getting a tad meta for me.
As for that part of "there" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43228187 ) which is all me .. I very much meant that the DOGE operatives do not appear to suffer from any form of diversity by any metric.
Perhaps they differ by meme coin preference?
On the whole. Yes. Given the lengths of careers, the structure of the civil service system (both the formal structure and the way it has, until last month, been applied in practice), and the different and (in some areas more than others regional and occupational-area biases in who is attracted to it, that would be hard to avoid.
> There were no conservatives at 18F.
Even if that were true, the mass firings of federal civil servants haven't been limited to 18F.
If Republicans are unhappy about how agencies use rulemaking power, they have had many opportunities over the past few decades to pass bills more clearly defining the powers of those agencies.
If that sounds like conspiracy level crazy, it’s because it is.
Just a super compassionate person who really embodies the spirit of The New Colossus.
Stating the facts of this situation makes one sound like a conspiracy nut, which is strategic. It's part of the fascist project of reshaping the perception of reality. We're all supposed to (and over time we will, if it's left unchecked) question our own lying eyes and begin believing it when they say things like "the sky isn't blue in fact it's green".
Don’t forget it. He’s just getting started.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/who-is-russe...
The older I get, the more I see through this awful behavior.
Also US national debt is literally on live billboards, get your numbers right if you're going to be a troll.
DOGE will do worse, in service of bringing about the oligarchy.
DOGE is about conducting an ideological party purge of the government bureaucracy. Overall I predict it will cost money, since it'll cause a lot of things to break and/or be replaced by more expensive contractors.
Completely coincidentally, Andreessen stands to make billion from AI.
He is a deeply unserious person not worth listening to.
Idealists can run into implementation difficulties, but having listened to his interview, I don't recall anything that would be impossible to implement given the current make up of the three branches.
Can you elaborate on a proposal of his that you think is unworkable?
They are working to secure the conditions for themselves that the French royalty and elite had in 1788, while preventing the masses from reacting how they did in France.
So, no, I don't believe that they're intellectually deficient. They're just liars.
He recently admitted he stopped listening 6 months ago due to how out of touch they were...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Democracy is not an end in itself. We’re better off with more power in the hands of the bureaucracy and less in the hands of populist politicians.
Democracy is only democracy when we hold the power. Otherwise, it is populism.
Like I said. Very revealing.
Ideally, the most efficient means is a benevolent dictator, but human nature rarely draws such people. Hence, beauracracy.
How is it dishonest? Parent says "beauracracy" is better, but this is not what the system is set up for and not how it is designed. The reason for current preference for "beauracracy" as 'better' is partisan at best, hence my reading is not only not dishonest, but disturbingly accurate. And this is all before we get to the part of how we got here and the more interesting part of previous federal workforce purges ( and the resulting rise of "beauracracy" ).
Give me some credit man.
What more evidence do you need than a WaPo article talking about federal workers that declared they would resist Trump’s policies?
> Your link is an article about people taking Project 2025 and Trump at their word and trying to plan accordingly.
The article is from February 2017. And “trying to plan” what?
> You have no objecticity. Your logic is horribly flawed. You are the problem
Let me ask you a question. You agree that, since Trump won the election, federal employees should work just as hard implementing Project 2025 as they did for Biden, including coming up with creative legal theories like Biden did for student loan forgiveness. Right?
A single article is evidence enough for you. And some people think you are a brilliant lawyer.
I'm still waiting for your response given that you seem to be keen of accusing others of going mask off.
That's because the actual goals are not the stated goals; the whole thing is part of a well-documented plan to destroy the federal civil service and much of the government so it can be rebuilt as a partisan patronage operation.
Because of this, suggesting a single delivery day doesn't scale at all, even if you regionalize these days, unless USPS moves to delivery hubs, which would further erode quality of life for rural people (many of whom have limited mail service as it is) and probably make deliveries to really remote locations (some parts of Alaska; mountainous areas; etc.) impossible.
If he suggested this to make it easier for his FDX and UPS stonks to go up, he probably isn't aware that these carriers often use USPS for last-mile delivery because they are the ONLY carrier that have the infra to deliver to the aforementioned destinations. No private company will attempt to replicate this infra, as doing so would require billions of dollars of investment for very little ROI, and why spend big money improving the lives of citizens when the AI furnace needs more fuel?
USPS is fucking incredible for the value, and it sucks that conservatives are so invested in destroying it.
By looking at Musk's tweets about it being a "far-left" group (plus his two Nazi salutes) and DOGE's emphasis on cutting DEI/sexual and racial minority programs, the unstated goals are clear and loud. If you don't look for the unstated goals and only listen to people's words rather than their actions, you're going to be blindsided by a lot more cruelty and not see it coming.
And now gutting the agency that enforced basic employment laws.
Say goodbye to the 40-hour work week.
Oligarchic societies do not try to maximize the overall economy. They try to maximize the wealth the elites can extract. If there is an alternative where the overall economy is 2x bigger but the elites receive 10% less in absolute terms, it's clearly a worse outcome from their perspective.
From that perspective, government services should not be evaluated based on their outputs or their impact on government efficiency or economic growth. They should be evaluated based on their impact on the elites. If they don't benefit the elites, they are overhead that can be cut if necessary.
Oligarchs do not care about the economy in the sense it is traditionally understood in the West.
It seems like there are two possible reasons he could've made a statement like this:
- He is utterly detached from reality and how the world works, shocking for someone who is at such an elevated position in industry. Borderline disabled.
- He is stating this dishonestly, not because he believes it but to signal to other right-wing reactionary zealots in his peer group that he would support dismantling the most critical institutions in his society in order to enrich members of his tiny class at the expense of everyone else.
I'm inclined to believe it's the latter.
Its almost like to exist in the tech space is to cultivate an intentional naivety about how power works and who has it that is being exploited to run cover as truly bad actors accomplish their goals.
This must be pieces of mail per year? To me "parcel" means more like a package.
Some web searching confirms this and also says a little over half of that is marketing mail. 60B pieces of spam per year. And I don't know about you, but excluding marketing mail, I'd say about 90% of the remainder still goes directly in the bin for me. And even though I open probably less than 5% of what is sent to me, maybe less than 1%, STILL much of that could have been an email.
I don't doubt the USPS provides a whole lot of value and I don't want them to go down to 1 day per week or anything. But that 100B number looks like it includes a whole lot of negative, zero, or low value items.
Clearly not an American, or an adult, or he would have needed the mail for things like:
- Receive unemployment tax statements from the state
- Life insurance forms. Especially converting a group policy into an individual policy.
- IRS notices
- Utility company refunds
- Receive insurance policy documents
- Receive notice of security breach at hospital
- Receive bills for unexpected services like ambulance and medical
- Receive license plates
- Receive vehicle registration
- Auto and homeowners insurance policy documents
- Receive checks for credits from utilities after you move
- My company got a check for $95 million in the mail from the IRS
- Reimbursement checks from insurance companies
- Certain correspondence with the I.R.S. can only be done by letter. No phone calls. No online.
- Get hurt at work? Paperwork from insurance and from the state comes in paper form, not TikTok.
this is how government should work, we get one person’s opinion on how they operate and how they use said utility and that ought to do it - problem solved
>Clearly not an American, or an adult, or he would have needed the mail for things like:
is bullshit.
I haven't seen any indication that it's a lie. Please post a link to the proof.
Is not a lie simply because it doesn't align with your political view.
Note that what you consider junk mail, other people may find valuable. I know someone who digs those ValPack coupons.
Someone else posted some links in this thread already. But OK here: https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2024-09/...
No, and nothing I've said implies any agreement with the person whose nonsense you were countering. But you were countering it with more nonsense.
Parcels is 6-7B: https://www.pitneybowes.com/content/dam/pitneybowes/us/en/sh...
Put another way, if you kill the USPS, don’t you think that junk mail will still find a way to get to you?
Which indirectly shows the efficiency and value of the USPS. The fact that they can get stuff to people so cheaply is something nobody else can replicate.
And then you can block marketing mail thats sent to you, and the USPS can encrypt the images that are sent to you...
But you still need to receive things that are physical (like credit cards)
There used to be mail services that people could have their mail routed to...
But yeah, we still need mail - but we need "Mail+Pro" Subscription - And now the "You have mail" guy can be replaced by AI...
What percentage of those are things people wanted or needed?
The USPS is a valuable service, but it is largely funded by spam. 99% of mail goes directly into the trash.
Shipping and packages account for 41% and First-Class mail is about 32%.
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2024/1114-...
Feel free to reply with your sources.
This is tremendously wasteful.
Once the postcards stop appearing, you know you're on the way to the message becoming true.
While spam funds a lot of the postal service, it allows it to price mail lower than the true cost of delivering mail across the country.
90% of my mail lately is spam coupons and credit card offers.
Until 2006, the Postal Service was entirely self sufficient, with no debt and no need for taxpayer funding.
However, in 2006 Congress passed a law requiring the Postal Service to prefund future retiree's health benefits (75 years in advance), which costs $5.6 billion per year. By 2012, the Postal Service hit its $15 billion debt limit, directly because of this.
The Postal Service itself does not lose money, and does not require funding, because it sells postage-- mailing is not free. The insane policy that Congress has foisted on it does lose taxpayer money, by requiring it to do something as far as I know no other organization does or is required to do.
If you want to fix the budget deficit at the Post Office, simply get that law repealed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Service_Reform_Act_of_2...
And it’s a service! It’s not supposed to make money. The government is not an investment firm for taxpayers. You might as well ask when we’re going to scale back the military. We hardly use it and it’s running at a loss!
The same is true for my company. In fact I'm not sure we received one piece of physical mail in the past year of any consequence.
Obviously this isn't true for everyone, but some reduction in frequency of delivery could save a lot of money. Either that or raise the cost and kill junk mail.
I suspect it's because you do receive "one or two important" pieces per year and because you cannot anticipate when someone will send them to you. That's the value provided to all Americans by this beautiful system.
Junk mail is bad.
Full stop.
If you get lots of important items 6 days a week via first-class mail then I can see you having the perspective of junk mail is actually subsidizing this important service.
However, my guess is that most people don't. This is based on my own lived personal experiences and those of the extended network of people in my social circle. It's not made in a vacuum. Therefore common sense is that we're subsidizing an errand of cleaning trash out of our mailboxes several times a week.
I get that people are sensitive to government services under the current political climate but there is no reason we couldn't cut back service to say 5 days a week instead of 6.
[0]https://stateimpact.npr.org/new-hampshire/2011/09/27/how-jun...
This is not intuitive. We're maintaining a service because we have made a democratic decision to provide that service. The junk mail is subsidizing that service. I hate junk mail too, but we don't get to claim that the sky is "down" just because we're standing on our heads.
We could make a decision to cut back service if we want, but we haven't. I strongly suspect that part of the reason we haven't decided to cut back the postal service is that many voters are elderly and find the postal service vastly more essential than young technical people on HN do. I'm not in a position to tell society that it's wrong.
(And frankly, given that we barely have a working electronic payment infrastructure in this country that can serve that audience, I'm not sure we're ready to do that.)
Your experience is not the only experience.
There are another 300 million Americans with different needs than yours. And it's hubris to pretend that your way and your life is superior to everyone else.
The only reason I can this being downvoted is people see this as a political discussion. It really isn't. As people have turned to email and bills get delivered online, we're subsidizing junk mail in a sense because the USPS operates at a loss.
It feels like we're setting the clock back a decade at a time when trust in institutions is already at a nadir and we're facing global threats that only the federal government has the capacity to tackle. I can only hope civil society is able to pick up the slack in the short term and future administrations are able to execute better.
I'm still sticking to the comment, even in awareness of history and having entertained the comparison. Let's hope I'm not proven wrong.
Bumbling fool seems apt to me.
The information era works for and against us here in showing the truth but also efficiently spreading misinfroamtion. But moments of seeing them objectively on camera will eventually shine the truth.
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 because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M
18F are the bureaucrats they want to traumatize.
I'm also aware of at least a handful of hacker new members, and people I've followed, who took time out of their carriers to do a "tour of duty" at 18f.
I feel for all today, you were doing good work!
1. Defund and cripple gov. services
2. Point to those, and say "See? it doesn't work. We should get private sector to provide those services, as the private sector is much cheaper and more efficient."
3. Hand out contracts to your buddies.
4. Years later, down the road, another sitting government will revert back to the original state - due to the private contracts turning out to be much more expensive than anticipated, and delivering sub-par service.
5. Next pro-privatization government is elected, goto step (1).
The end game seems to be a state of permanent competitive insecurity for most of the population, with fatal consequences for dissent/bad luck/mistakes, while everything is owned and run for the benefit of a handful of aristocrats who exist in vapid self-indulgent splendour.
If this seems exaggerated, consider that most people are already only a few pay checks and/or a major health crisis away from homelessness, bankruptcy, and starvation.
I don't know how to smoothly transition that. it relies on a properly educated citizenship who knows their rights. But again, those very rich men spent decades decimating that.
1. Reduce funding and investment in public education.
2. Claim that our educational system is broken and we need to privatize.
3. Fund charter and private schools with vouchers while continuing to defund public schools.
Unfortunately, I have yet to see steps 4 and 5 where we return to well-support education for all.
Probably? Government jobs pay below market and was like that way before the current president and the company.
> 3. Hand out contracts to your buddies.
I mean, Microsoft is getting about 15B from US government alone. Is Microsoft 'buddies'?
I agree in general that those tricks are old. The only difference I see today that they are done is less elegant way.
But essentially creating self-fulfilling prophecies or moving goalposts is one of the oldest tricks in the book by dishonest folks of any ideological alignment. In an alternate universe where socialism / central planning is the default ideology if we wanted to make as unfair of a comparison demonizing private sector we'd have asked half of Silicon Valley companies to forego VC funding, not allow them to do M&A, demand that they be able to serve the general public for even the most obscure of problems, and so forth. That sets them up for failure out of the gate by measuring them against the criteria of the status quo and eliminates any of their advantages over a centralized planning system. And in fact, a large part of these ridiculous restrictions is exactly why NGOs are structured to fail to make much progress on any of the important societal problems they work on.
And its' happening right now. House passed a 900b dollar cut to Medicaid to fund the latest cuts. If you want to pay off deficits you need your biggest contributors to pay their share. But no one who harps about the deficit seems to want to talk about that.
At what point will I stop going to your job, if you have one, and take to the streets instead? What has to happen for you to do that?
Come up with a serious answer. Write down the answer. Put it on an index card or other prominent place so you will be constantly reminded of it.
Now read the news every day. If the thing on your index card happens, take to the streets. Even if you are the only one, do it anyway.
>Even if you are the only one, do it anyway.
It'd be useless. What we lack in power we have in numbers. Protests only work as a collective action.a collective action that can kick out bad reps and replace them with ones who will do their jobs.
It's not as if they're starting where the obvious bloat is (defence, fossil fuel subsidies...) and working back to the rounding errors.
It's entirely predictable supremacism - the doctrine that wealth and skin colour define virtue, and government in the public interest, which interferes with the "freedom" to abuse and exploit inferiors for profit, is an unnatural abomination.
I am well aware.
> What evidence does the parent have for intentions to harm
Just watch/read the news since 2016. Too much to list.
In addition Elon is seen as a captain of industry. PayPal. Tesla. Space X. So it can be that Elon is inept.
Their own words:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/who-is-russe...
Is it possible that they have some other, important objective which can only be achieved by degrading the quality of government technology? In principle. But I haven't seen any explanation of what that objective could possibly be, and I have seen people with arguments for why they think it should not be easy to get access to NOAA weather data and it should not be easy to file your taxes with the IRS.
To wit, we already had a word for this: this is a purge.
But alas, the propagandists have been too effective at capturing that term to mean destroying the “deep state” (whatever that means at any given moment).
Provided people understand just why these are bad ideas that increase flood damage, savagely reduce biodiversity, remove buffers against storm surges, destroy filters that capture wastes and toxins.
In general these are stupid decisions.
I think this answers the question of "why".
Expecting to see more RIFs within TTS.
Then we have the first patent board established in 1790.
Then all of the federal courts could use the SSO if they wanted. What about when you want to login to request a tour of the capitol, access the library of congress, or book an appointment with your representative.
We have over 300 million people so there will probably be separate offices within some of the departments to handle some of the more common requests. There’s probably going to be a passport office and separate office to handle immigration and visas. Treasury will probably have separate offices to handle accounts payable and tax collection.
Add in miscellaneous things like logins to handle freedom of information requests. Logins to register homestead claims and mining claims in US territories.
My point is that even in the most minimal government only possible in a libertarian’s wet dream, there’s gonna be enough delegate logins that SSO is a good idea.
Just one example. In a country of 3 million people you can probably get away with having one office that handles visa applications and passport applications.
In a country 100x larger, you’d need to hire so many employees for both that each sub department will grow so large that they are effectively independent from each other and have separate physical infrastructure, separate digital infrastructure etc…
Then once you have all these separate sub departments you have sub departments that pop up just to service other sub departments.
It’s just an extension of graph theory. The number of connections between nodes grows non linearly with the number of nodes.
Take any organization. The percentage of support staff vs direct revenue generators increases with the size of the company.
The number of support staff vs front line fighters grows non linearly with the size of the army.
Remember that the Trump administration still has large support from the people! If you want a civil war, you need people inside the country who disagree. For some reason they don't (yet), and at the time they do who knows how much damage will have been done.
And he's rapidly losing support within his own base, from people who didn't expect him to go as far as he has, or didn't expect the ramifications to apply to them.
I didn't say "most americans", did I?
> And he's rapidly losing support within his own base
Weeks (and 3 nazi salutes) after he started, polls were showing that he would probably still be elected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43206757.
I don't feel like I'm spreading propaganda by saying that the US don't seem very close to a civil war. A majority of the voters elected this government and apparently won't change their mind unless they are impacted personally.
> And he's rapidly losing support within his own base
That depends a lot on what you mean by "rapidly". Relative to how quickly he has destroyed the image of the US abroad, and to the damage he is making inside the country, I wouldn't say that some people from his own base finding that he is going slightly too far counts as "rapidly losing support within his own base".
You need a lot of very unhappy people to get to civil war. And right now it doesn't seem like the US people is that unhappy. Right now the US is mostly hurting the rest of the West.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies%2C_damned_lies%2C_and_sta...
Trump has more support now than he did in his first term. His support is durable and lasting.
It's difficult to imagine what might cause his supporters to change their options of him. If the election were held again, today, he would still win.
It would be helpful if people had more alternatives to vote for, not just one other party that stands for the opposite.
And those are only two examples out of many. You can put as much nuance as you want, fascism is fascism.
> US intel shows Russia and China are attempting to recruit disgruntled federal employees, sources say
> Foreign adversaries including Russia and China have recently directed their intelligence services to ramp up recruiting of US federal employees working in national security, targeting those who have been fired or feel they could be soon, according to four people familiar with recent US intelligence on the issue and a document reviewed by CNN.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/politics/us-intel-russia-...
Make employee feel job insecurity.
???
Profit?
Why, Trump doesn't follow orders well enough?
In other words, the federal government will have to raise wages to get qualified candidates in competition with private-sector jobs, probably costing more money in the long term.
I just listened to Trump say, "You're playing cards with the lives of millions of people. You're playing cards with WWIII. I am forcing you to play cards because you made a campaign appearance for a different candidate." I was dumbfounded. Then I looked around at all the people nodding their heads and saying, "Right on!"
Some people think that "reality" TV is reality. And some people think that reality is just another TV show. What a world when you put the word "real" in front of the word "reality" to try to differentiate it: real reality. The spinning top trick doesn't work.
The aims of the people and the state are quite different.
Almost none of the handwringing since the inauguration has been important.
Too much stock is being put into the value of the global opinion. Not enough people are appreciating the return to the golden age of smartphone tariffs and regressive income tax.
Thank you to both 18F and USDS for your service.
I'm cloning USDS and 18F repos as we speak. It may be wise for several people to do so. I am not sure anything in git lfs was captured, but I hope it was.
USDS, 4.2GB, 54 repos:
gh repo list usds --limit 9999 --json sshUrl | jq -r '.[].sshUrl' | xargs -n1 git clone
gh repo list 18F --limit 9999 --json sshUrl | jq -r '.[].sshUrl' | xargs -n1 git clone
4175 73812536+upptime-bot@users.noreply.github.com
2131 gertjan@west.nl
1084 mara@west.nl
955 vassil.iordanov@gmail.com
814 hunter@dds.mil
789 nick@dds.mil
770 vassil.iordanov@ncia.nato.int
718 91492387+amwhitty@users.noreply.github.com
692 cf-buildpacks-eng@pivotal.io
563 wslack@users.noreply.github.com
13266 bruce@momjian.us
12157 tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
6395 william.hamilton@gsa.gov
5413 shawn.allen@gsa.gov
4711 robin.ward@gmail.com
4590 41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com
4546 sam.saffron@gmail.com
4010 aidan.feldman@gsa.gov
3953 laura.gerhardt@gsa.gov
3802 lindsayn.young@gsa.govyou are under attack from your own government.
Even worse: it is doing so to the resounding cheers of a large fraction of our fellow citizens.
It seems to me the strategy for the other fraction is to maybe hope for the best and maybe wait for the next election.
I'm deeply impressed by the turnout in every state. It seems media coverage has been lagging in major outlets.
There's also a subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/50501/ and Discord. Thanks for helping. (:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Allegiance_%28United_S...
We'll decide for ourselves whether we're under attack or not. I voted for this admin, and while not perfect, I think it's much better than what we had.
This isn't a Democrat or Republican issue, this is a constitutional issue.
Unless they look into why Pentagon weapons programs are so suspiciously expensive they might actually be destroying an otherwise well working US Federal system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Vought?wprov=sfti1#
Vought is the architect. Trump is the useful moron and Ilan is having one of his ketamine-induced autistic moments..
This was their mistake.
[0] https://x.com/lukerosiak/status/1885530802898747888
[1] he said that of Google but I'm sure he'd say the same thing of 18F: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1770802773547770345
Thank you, 18F.
But would diversify a bit an not just sit on USD cash.
Trumps next genius deal idea could as well be to cancel out the US federal debt by some rampant inflation, when he suddenly wants to make everyone a millionaire. Seriously waiting for the Fort Knox stunt.
[1] no financial advice, just some gut feeling.
The brilliant use of AI to ignore all the conflicts of interest is very innovative too!
Truly the ability to so efficiently not provide any services is impressive, I think they were heavily inspired by https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode
If you look at financial disclosures of both democrats and republicans, tracked at quiverquant.com, you too might be skeptical of trusting either historical party.
Right now democrats are the only established group of people in the US with good western values and that are of sufficient size that can turn this shit around.
Democrats didn't lose the election due to anything Trump did. They alienated a large chunk of the voters all on their own.
Their original choice was Biden who had to step down because Democrat voters didnt want him so the Democrat leadership got a different candidate instead holding a primary.
The US just alienated almost all of its (former) allies and started a trade war.
Add the unemployed former federal staff, the huge breaks in the economy this will cause and you have the perfect storm.
But not to worry, Palantir and Musk will save the day.
Wait that’s just the democrats.
Because at the end of the day this is what you wanted. The ability to say "Dems won't be fixing this problem" is more important to you than fixing the problem.
Dems had their chance. They propped up a barely functioning, senile old man to respond to Republicans' threats, and he failed to do anything to stop what was coming (eg put Trump and the other Jan 6 ringleaders in jail, expand the Supreme Court, DC and PR statehood, literally anything).
Dems just aren't up to the task.
> Because at the end of the day this is what you wanted. The ability to say "Dems won't be fixing this problem" is more important to you than fixing the problem.
This is so far out of line, an appropriate reply would rightly get me removed from HN.
It's the same reason why people don't like Java. It's Old, verbose and stable, but who wants that. That's why people like Javascript, but at the end of the day, Java is the best.
Stable and boring and slow politics is the good politics. Not this shit that's happening right now.
That statement is tautological (literally everything happens because something didn't prevent it). It's also not consistent with your much less considered verbiage above that somehow this was "all (not partly) on Democrats".
I didn't say that. You should reply to what I am actually saying, not whatever quotes you made up.
> That statement is tautological (literally everything happens because something didn't prevent it).
One of the jobs of a politician is to protect the country from its enemies. Dems failed to do that, despite ample warning and opportunity. This demonstrates what I said: they are not up to the task of rescuing the US.
You actually aren't arguing that. You're just saying the first bit. You need to detail "something else", otherwise you're just throwing bombs with no value to anything except your ego.
To be clearer: a more radical approach is being taken. And some people on the left genuinely prefer the situation to a Harris administration. There was never a constituency for... whatever it is the current argument is demanding[1]. It wasn't on the menu, so the next best thing is humiliation for the other members of the coalition.
[1] The fact that the framing is "Biden bad" and not "Biden should have X" is telling!
And now majority of democrats are seeing their world turn upside down too. Maybe this will eventually unite and organize the left, maybe not. But Biden has done too much damage to democrats.
Not me. I'm a white tech liberal expecting a big tax cut. Maybe I'll just sit this one out. The hippies have done too much damage to Democrats.
See how that logic works? Make peace or don't, but in a democracy you can't demand conformity, you'll just lose.
Liz Truss effect.
Republicans in congress, many of whom lined up behind Trump, are pushing a budget increase.
But they will do it by passing tax cuts for the rich, and cutting services and other spending on the working class to the bone.
We're going to see a once-in-a-lifetime (or, luckily for us to date, even rarer) looting of the United States Treasury and our collective wealth, as well as that of our future generations. And, incredibly enough, we fucking voted for it!
Anyway, yes, they are going to cut spending, in ways that will damage and kill many people. And they'll do it while increasing the deficit.
With these projects, it's pretty easy to only count the victories, and not count the failures. They can say they saved "$10M saved on a canceled contract!!" but then happily omit the fact that they had to have a nearly identical contract a month later because it shouldn't have been canceled.
That's the only place that they'll make a dent in the spending side (since they won't touch military spending).
By stealing from the people, and killing old and infirm people, they'll save a little bit of money for sure.
Probably because the proposed budget plan will increase the deficit. Reducing revenue more than they're reducing spending, and reducing spending in areas that brought in more revenue than they cost.
And DOGE's savings (the ones that aren't just $0 savings) are targeted at things that won't actually improve anything. They amount to a drop in the bucket compared to where real savings could be had.
Monitoring of invasive species has been cut - how many new infections or local fisheries will suffer? Cuts to vaccine research. Supplying AIDS or TB medication. Are we losing food/drug/bridge inspectors as well?
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
The US has a tax problem with billionaires. We don't have a spending issue.
I'd warn you against trying to lump anyone in a party, or that generally votes for one party, under one big umbrella. I know republican voters that actually care about cutting the deficit. I also know republican voters that align that way for only one topic that matters most to them, abortion for example.
All republicans aren't the same just like all democrats aren't the same. For better or worse our system only really offers us two choices - that doesn't mean that there are only two types of Americans with one of only two specific set of views.
"Other than that Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
I think that might impact the tactics of the war, or how bloody it is, but I don't think it makes it less possible to happen.
It's dangerously possible, and it's a deep concern of mine that we're headed in that direction.
Also if you want a balanced budget then we should be protecting the actually effective parts of government instead. Lots of short sighted cuts and in the end we'll get even more debt anyway.
In the 90s we were able to make bipartisan cuts and turn a surplus but obviously they didn't do it by smashing things randomly.
If your goal was to establish authoritarian system and/or oligarchy in the US within a year and without firing any bullets, what would you do differently to what's happening now? Honest question I've been thinking about lately. My current answer is that the diff is not that big.
Yes, there's much to be done about efficiency/productivity on the government part, but this is not what's being done.
I am not sure if Elon is deliberate (similar to how "X is about free speech", DOGE is about "government efficiency" i.e. fake ideology to push some agenda) or an useful idiot (believes that all he's doing is improving efficiency, without realizing the consequences of destroying the institutions), but that's not the main point. The point is that fundamental institutions are being destroyed very, very quickly, without real oversight. This has important and negative consequences to democracy.
Witness how “this type of work” is actually done. You’ve been claiming to “do this type of work,” yet even in this most earnest appeal “to the American people” you don’t bother to cite one single accomplishment that might make we the people sympathetic.
Thumb twiddling whiners. Good riddance.
While it might be political, it is also economic and directly relevant to the hacker/startup ecosystem.
In what way does working on the bleeding edge of technology qualify someone to make sweeping decisions in a completely unrelated problem domain? Especially when those decisions impact literally the entire world?
His strength is leading and believing people who do. Lately however, he’s shown he is not mentally fit for that role. He’s on a crusade more for personal reasons than altruism.
His past accomplishments have been seeing opportunities in failing products that seemed impossible. We're not talking about moonshot startups that really don’t affect a ton of people if they fail.
We’re talking about long established programs that are helping people or keeping people alive. He has ZERO experience with managing this.
I’m just as in favor of cutting bureaucracy as anyone else but I assure you the people making these decisions are not interested in cutting bureaucracy, they’re the ones who created it.
Not stupid. Evil.
The man took pleasure in gutting a major pillar in the world's fight against tuberculosis[1]. This is mass murder, and it's just one of the ways they're causing mass death, likely in the millions over the years to come.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," said Voltaire. Musk operated one of the biggest misinformation machines in history, got unchecked power of the US government, and now he's moved on to the atrocities phase.
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/tuberculosis/usaid-funding-freeze...
Really? My perception is that everything I've seen him do is on its face stupid, even though my perception was that he might do useful things.
Let's take just one data point: he stood up and smirked that he fired everyone working on Ebola response, and of course that was a mistake. Yet those people are still fired. Do you have any counterexamples where he did something not stupid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Betrayed
I have met many, many politicians in my day. 95% of them are feckless, spineless, covetous cretins. But the bureaucrats are worse.
How many times has a new executive been brought in, tells your team how important and great you all are, and then the entire team is fired a couple weeks later?
What could it be?
Possibilities:
- reorganization of labor in anticipation of the need to soon fight a coming, century-deciding war
- preparing for massive hire-back into some new agency with fresh national purpose
- making the country a less attractive invasion target by making it ungovernable by colonists, and creating a mass pool of expert free agents to staff the resistance
Sounds unlikely. Possible sure, but how probable? What if it really is just aggressive restructuring to make the government a viable going concern?
Presumably Elon will add back some of the “muscle” cut away with 18F unless there are unseen factors that make them an issue.
My historical curiosity question is: where are the labor unions in all this? A few counter judges will not stop the tide with their brooms.
But maybe the most important question to ask yourself is: why the urgency? Why the rush to get it done by mid next year?? Why is that date important? What is anticipated???
After all this I’m inclined to think it is just about the cutting-out-the-rot corporate restructuring. As Elon has said many times: they are going to cut more than they need, to find the limits, and put back what’s necessary.
something like it has to exist and it will likely reform as something else post-doge. what i think people need to appreciate is how pernicious bureaucracy is, and that doge is going to get one opportunity to reform it before it develops a new immune response.
18F showed themselves to be some of the most capable and resourceful people in public service doing some of the heaviest lifts, and they will all find private work faster than others. many will likely immediately respawn as consultants. it sounds like a hard change but as it comes to light how bad things were, i can see how 18F could be coopted into an opposition. that they were taken out first should be a point of honor.
We will be lucky if we, as a nation, survive the Trump administration without turning into a fascist, authoritarian state, with little to no scientific credibility, and a pariah state like North Korea.
I have noticed that a number of conservative organizations are starting to be affected by this and speaking up, although Congress and the Judiciary are clearly either afraid, or supportive of these actions. From what I can tell, the only remaining response is truly large scale, well-organized peaceful protest, which is risky because a small number of bad actors could mess up a peaceful protest and give Trump all the excuses he wants to bring out the US military for a violent response to innocent protestors.
Musk's reasoning is that we have to cut the deficit. Our deficit is around $2 Trillion. Assuming an average salary of $70,000 for the approximately 3 million federal employees (excluding military and postal workers), the annual payroll would be roughly $210 billion. Even if you lay off 25% of federal workers, the deficit will only be cut by 2.5%.
The right way to cut deficit is by raising taxes on Elon Musk and his fellow billionaires.
Elon Musk's strategy is to control the government operations through controlling its IT department.
The smart people of 18f stands in the way. By removing it and hiring his loyalists to run the government IT he gets to control the government's operations.
Pooling money and resources will always be greater in quality efficiency and quantity than individual or privatized effort. Think about how inefficient decentralized blockchain computations are.
gutting gov services for measly tax cuts is atrocious and an attack on American people.
His strategy is documented here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/us/politics/musk-federal-...
<quote> Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers. </quote>
By replacing all tech workers with his loyalists, Musk will have full control of the servers and its operations.
Nothing on the scale of the amazing work they did but would love to link up if possible.
If anyone hears of one, please post here.
It’s all intentional. Trump is just a useful moron for Vought. Remember Trump is very easy to manipulate. The right wing Christian nationalists played him like a fiddle and are getting what they wanted out of it. Kind of wild that one guy has so much influence, especially since he’s completely out of the limelight. Reminds me of Robert Moses and the destruction of Urban America in the 1950s.
If the United States had lost a world war with Russia & China coalition, this is exactly what the victorious powers would do to concentrate power into the hands of a few figureheads and oligarchs. This administration has saved them the trouble. This is what losing an economic & cultural conflict in the modern era looks like.
I learned the messy, unfiltered history of an imperfect country—one built on a Constitution that has kept it going and evolving for nearly 250 years.
That same Constitution, which originally allowed slavery, also provided the legal framework to end it and later secure civil rights. In the early 20th century, it was amended to guarantee women the right to vote.
I was never taught that the U.S. was always a just and noble nation, nor that the founders were infallible. But I also wasn’t taught that the country was irredeemable.
Our best feature has always been our willingness to redeem ourselves by continually remaking ourselves rather tethering ourselves to our past wrongs. The fact that our constitution has multiple provisions for doing exactly this has always been its most impressive feature.
A society that can’t learn and accept the good and the bad of its history is a society doomed to stagnation -- morally, intellectually, and economically.
Well for me personally it's because of empathy. The United States, as you rightly point out, was founded on slavery and genocide. I agree with you, and I would also add that the US is responsible for the deaths of millions globally in the past century (let's take Iraq and Vietnam, and I think you're already over a million). Generally a force for evil.
But a nation's citizens are not responsible for the actions of its government. They do not deserve to lose their homes in forest fires, have their children attend school hungry, go bankrupt on account of having cancer, be steeped in lifelong debt just to afford an education, lose their child in a school shooting, et cetera. What Elon Musk is doing will make those things much worse. That's why people are upset.
These are the same sort of people who fly planes into the twin towers in New York to kill civilians, (i'm not making any claim about this being restricted to any ethnicity or religion, just showing that such people do exist)
What i'm trying to argue for, is a softening of future messaging, that includes your warmth.
The gov is _always_ inefficient if you consider profit to be the only indicator of success. The government isn’t here to make a buck, it is here to help its populace. The free tax filing helped its populace, modernizing the passport application process helped the populace, and doing these things (and many more) in a way that is stable without interrupting the system is extremely impressive.
DOGE will not do anything useful, they aren’t adding, only removing. Elon hired children he could easily convince to do the dirty work, he will proceed to take credit for what they do (if it is good) and blame them for any bad outcomes. He knows nothing about AI other than what he’s read in pop-sci books, headlines, or sci-fi novels, so he won’t be iterating on 18f (or anything) with AI. If anything good happens, it will be in spite of this terrible person.
How he has managed to maintain his smart facade to you is beyond me. The tipping point for me was when he said ‘he knew more about manufacturing than anyone alive.’ Imagine, buying a car company, hiring smart people to run it, and then believing that their collective knowledge is somehow yours.
He is an insecure person who wants to look impressive and has never managed to find anything he is actually good at. He even cheats on his video games, refusing to be not at the top.
I am familiar with their direct file work (https://directfile.irs.gov/), which saves tax filers hundreds of dollars, keeps money out of massive rentseekers like TurboTax, and enables the IRS to function more effectively.
How is this a failure?
AI is not a replacement for engineering expertise and deep understanding of the actual user problems that you are trying to solve.
Any 19yo at DOGE can have Cursor pump out shitty web portals without regard for the problem context or actual end user.
But that’s not what engineering is about and it’s depressing to see people celebrate and advocate for that kind of mediocrity.
[1] https://www.nextgov.com/people/2025/03/gsa-eliminates-18f/40...
Musk's tweet saying 18F "has been deleted": https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886498750052327520
Was replying to ALX's tweet calling 18F "far left": https://x.com/alx/status/1886415751528972515
Which was in turn quoting Rosiak's tweet calling 18F "far left": https://x.com/lukerosiak/status/1885523747425399247
Rosiak's tweet wasn't talking about direct filing at all, it was talking about how 18F wrote a Slack bot to correct people for using non-inclusive language. That's what Rosiak was calling "far left"
So, reading ALX's tweet in context – it is pretty clear he was labelling 18F as "far left" because of stuff like their Slack bot, not solely because of direct filing. Many will argue it is an abuse of terminology to call stuff like that "far left", but it is a common colloquial pejorative among right-leaning individuals such as Musk and ALX and Rosiak
Now, maybe they'd call direct filing "far left" too, I don't know. But it is misrepresenting the thread if one presents the "far left" label as solely being due to 18F's work on direct filing
EDIT: I previously said "GitHub bot" above, on further investigation I realise now it was a Slack bot not a GitHub bot
I am also interested in the accusation of "viciously subverted Trump during his first term" and what that might be about. The fact that the Trump people went after them does lead some credence to it. Maybe it was some sort of big mistake though?
If it was not a mistake, and even if they were doing good work somehow, Federal employment is just not a place for political activism. That leads to a vicious money -> politics feedback system that destroys actual democracy.
Honest question. I’m really not sure if I’m just becoming too cynical.
But it isn't easy to tell the difference between that kind of no-time-to-check recklessness and actual malice, at least in any one instance. (You might be able to tell statistically, at the level of the whole government. Not with any one department, though.)
But it's just as destructive as actual malice, so maybe it doesn't matter whether it's malice or not.
It's also harder to speak out when you're a US government employee, but now that they've been fired ...
> Am I being too cynical if I read from this that they were fine with it until they got fired?
What is *it*? What exactly are you suggesting they were fine with? If you don't spell it out, you're asking a dishonest question because it's the type of vaguely defined question that dishonest people use to let peoples' imaginations run wild.
The people working at 18F were always about making government work better and more efficiently.
Absolutely nothing on the page suggests they were fine with the sledgehammering happening or granting access to systems that hold sensitive information. If anything, it suggests they wanted to be kept around to moderate what's happening and help lessen the damage.
The issue isn't whether you're becoming too cynical, it's that you've defaulted to a cynical theory, you've failed to examine your theory critically and you asked a question in a way that is indistinguishable from a dishonest question based on a dishonest premise.
I know you're upset and I am too. The United States is in a very embarrassing state right now and it's frustrating, right? Especially the amount of misinformation, disinformation, astroturfing and all that going on. I was fortunate to receive a number of helpful responses soon after my question, which helped guide discussion on the topic in other forums.
My point wasn’t that you should have known to trust the organization. I’d never ask you to trust anyone or anything.
My argument is that the question’s vague phrasing and misleading premise make it nearly impossible to answer while also inviting the reader’s imagination to spiral into meaningless speculation.
While it may not directly inject misinformation, it fosters the kind of speculation that often leads to it—because, believe it or not, grown adults can be surprisingly impressionable.
Civil servants are easy targets, unless you wear a uniform, except if you’re a woman.
But have you ever seen a new manager come in with a mandate to cut costs - a new manager who doesn't bother to listen, but who just starts cutting without knowing, learning, or listening? Have you ever seen that kind of a disaster? He (it's almost always a he) cuts the most expensive people, who turn out to be the most talented and the most knowledgeable, and you're left with the less talented and less experienced. He cuts the departments that have the most people, and those turn out to be critically related to revenue. And so on.
The issue isn't whether there need to be cuts. The issue is that Musk doesn't know enough to make the right cuts, and he isn't even trying to learn.
Even in weight loss surgery, I want an experienced surgeon, not the guy from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The cuts are painful, but we simply don't have the money. In fact we are way deep in the hole.
Engineers still think like engineers. Time to get political.
Almost makes you wonder if there's an agenda here. Good thing I don't think too hard about these things.
I know what devs do, QA folks do, product owners, scrum masters, UX specialists, etc. But what were these folks doing as “technologists?” I have my own understandings of the term that are, well… not biased in the direction of “valuable work.”
I’m all about calling out DOGE firings as problematic. But this particular post read as a lot of emotional language, but very specifically sparse specific details about what work they were doing and what they were being paid for it. And that’s, well… how you would actually demonstrate that it was problematic.
I get a vibe here of “politicians’ friends and family paid a lot to write how they think tech should work and wave their dicks around a bit,” to be honest, but really want to be wrong. Are there any substantive PRs to major GPL/MIT repos from 18F folks? Or more tactile explanations of their work? And some accounting of what they were paid for it?
If you want a sense of what 18F did, you can visit their Wikipedia page.
A technologist is proficient in more than one of those individual disciplines and is willing to make themselves skilled enough to cross across those disciplines in the name of better technology.