Consequently, Science is slowing down (and that is outside of other shenanigans). What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.
For the many medical research Institutions where the dominant system for professors is soft money (no or partial tenure, salary is provided by research grants), there is a real crisis.
To try to make up the shortfall,we are submitting any more grants, doing less actual sciencee are submitting even more grants, and exacerbating the staffing issue at NIH.
DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government, doing what was lawfully passed legislation asked, and destroyed it anyway (instead of passing legislation to remove programs, the lawful way).
Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.
Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).
Don't you miss the simpler times when people could just frantically applaud Musk's genius and not be inconvenienced by the truth of how big of a role deception, grifting, and outright fraud played in his success?
Yep. You used to apply for a few relevant grants ahead of time, wait for your talented grad student to wait a few months whilst they continue their summer project, and you'd have an answer on whether or not you can take them on right as they finish.
Now? You apply continuously for a whole host of different grants, some of which are tentatively related to your field, at least a year in advance and hope that at least one of them pans out so that you can hire a potential grad student who might just wait around enough for the funding to come through.
The competition for funding is fierce, and I'm seeing a depressing pattern of profs taking on post docs who secured their own funding and needed a complimentary signature, to then take it from them and kick them out as soon as the money comes through
Case in point i know someone at the NIH who in March 2025 wasn't fired with his hordes of colleagues who were. Yet, fast forward a year later he gets a notice saying something like we are sorry but you should've been fired last year so be prepared to be let go at the end of June (2026).
Thankfully i just saw my friend last week as the end of June has passed and now he says they might keep him. Talk about batsh!t insanity for him and his life.
I'm impressed we managed to arrive on an idea more detached from the fundamentals of public governance and less worthy of trust than running government "as a business." It takes real, concerted effort to be that thoughtless and shallow.
This is doubly-bad when the guy at the top's "business" has a nearly 1:1 mapping to the governance of North Korea: An unaccountable dictatorship where the head directly owns everything and cannot be fired for incompetence, he executes/fires people on a whim, and meanwhile relatives and courtiers spend most the time sucking-up and backstabbing to end up with the power when he dies.
Why would any American patriot want to adopt that style? Even the people who sincerely advocate for "government like a business" draw upon a completely different type, one where the CEO is answerable to a board, the board answerable to a shareholders, and most of the shares are publicly circulating.
P.S. We're not even touching whether the business-person sucked at business, which in this case is also quite damning.
None of this is applicable to a government- unless any American wants to find out what it means to be a refugee at the Canadian border.
I also of a guy who showed in in Paraguay, renounced his citizenship to become stateless, and then they just offered him citizenship because they didn't know what to do with him.
Historical examples in Europe circa 1933-1940 are not encouraging.
However, many who claim to want this better stewardship have no idea how wasteful businesses are. And the idea that government should profit off its services sounds good to the (capitalist trained) mind, at least on the surface. Dig an inch deep however, and it should be obvious that the government is managing cost centers by definition, and expecting a profit is asinine. The goal of being business-like quickly degrades under scrutiny. Digging an inch deeper is seemingly impossible for many.
Yeah, the idea of running it like a business should die. But I think most who say it acknowledge there are differences and what they are really wanting is stewardship.
But how do you fix it? These thousands of people have these jobs that their families depend on for survival. It's not their fault that the government severely messed up their hiring pipelines. If you cut the fat and leave those people out to dry, they certainly are not going to find work anywhere else. It's a lose lose situation.
Surely this is easy to prove, right?
Not only are they highly skilled, they are completely dedicated. They are straining to meed the needs of researchers right now, with staff volunteering on the weekends, against policy, to help out where they can, because they believe in their mission and are highly motivated and competent at doing it.
But from another perspective, the reviewers: an idiot and google is a very dangerous combination.
If authorities ask me: No, I know nothing, I just wanted to look important on Hackernews. All a joke, I have no inside information.
Lol.
The bottom line is very easy: I am not looking for problems.
Really? From what I've heard, DOGE was completely incompetent. Are you claiming they were actually extremely competent and simply couldn't find the waste?
So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place.
What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?
But this is what I mean, people are claiming that the government as a whole is efficient. I think that’s trivially false, and saying “doge didn’t find waste in research grants therefore the government is efficient, also doge is incompetent” is completely faulty logic.
It's almost like a bunch of kids with no experience in government (and little in life) were sent to every department with a mandate to make a certain amount of cuts by their boss, and then delivered on what they were told to do without feeling like they'd be held accountable for the effectiveness of their work...
Elon's goons are mostly a pack of bumbling morons sent on a mission to steal data for private purposes.
Let's not fall for the transparent narrative of post-hoc branding DOGE "Elon's thing" so that when there are inevitably Congressional hearing the real architects go uncalled.
For anyone that has worked on either side of government procurement it is obvious that this is not true.
It's quite common for contracts to no longer make sense yet neither side wants to cancel them due to the paperwork involved. "Just put the money towards something else similar"
Plus the many high profile examples like high-speed rail, rent subsidies.
And repossessing the fruits of successful Obama era industrial policy (Tesla & SpaceX) for the American people who paid for them too, of course.
Worse still, the lack of significant savings DOGE, indicate that the government was generally efficient.
This means that while specific cases may exist, the vigilance of the public and the set up of the US system had kept average performance in bounds.
Wish we could see the evidence for that.
If your mandate is to identify fraud or optimize a system, wouldn’t your success or failure be determined by the number of fraudulent cases you successfully prosecuted and won, as well as the amount of money you were able to recover?
Their god "genius" and leader promised[1] $2 trillion in cuts, if they haven't been achieve their stated goal, does that not mean that majority of the $2 trillion was being put to good use?
Running a government is nothing like running a company, because governments have multiple arms that aren't revenue generating (example the military, food stamps, farmer subsidies) but are key to the successful operation of the government.
This is why it is often a terrible idea to have former CEOs ( who only care about revenue and profits) run governments or government arms
True, very true. I don't want my government turning a profit, but I do want my government being accountable and efficient on how it spends my taxes and what it gives me back for them. If I keep paying more and more but get less and less quality, I want some audits and changes to be done to fix this. "Government not being revenue generating" is not the answer here.
DOGE was a total non-starter for anyone who knows how the US government works. They tried to replace something that already existed(GAO) and made things even worse.
"One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired."
> "The public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible," he continued. "In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions."
He also only very briefly worked with a single agency (VA), and his positives comments were about how the VA already had some open source Github repos and had a previous project to 'reduce claim times from "133 days to under a week"'. He was also critical of how they don't fire people with seniority, regardless of performance (which is enshrined in a reduction-in-force law from 1944) which explains why new and probationary employees were the ones let go when Trump's people took over. https://sahillavingia.com/doge
It should have been something that they pushed congress to establish as a new agency or heavily expand the OMB with a wider purpose/budget. That way it would have included careful public monitoring under existing rules and been able to take on DoD/education/healthcare spending which is where 90% of it goes.
But everyone knows Congress doesn't want any more people questioning where the money is going. Half their job is gaming the system to push federal money into their states. So DOGE was left with fake data collection jobs while feds fired probationary workers to pretend it saves money.
So I deleted them, and saved a few megs overall. Win win. Everything worked just fine... Until I restarted. That's doge.
I remember they were HP Bobcats. We had two of them in a student lab and user directories weren't on a separate partition... so things filled up. And they kept getting filled up.
One of the people who ran the lab found that he could get back a couple of hundred kilobytes by running strip on all of the various things he wrote.
find . -type f -executable -exec strip {} \;
So he ran it in the root directory too and was pleased to find many megabytes more of space was available.
... Did you know that .so files are executable? ... And the kernel too?
Things that were statically compiled worked. But anything that was dynamically compiled failed. And when the machine was rebooted... it was really unhappy with being unable to find the linking information for the kernel.
Had to go beg a tape reinstall of the OS to get it working again.
(and then there was the story of the guy who bought a NeXT and thought that the "bin" guy was taking up too much space)
"That takes up so much space!"
Worked until reboot. And thats the start of my dive into IT
I've also often be irritated by the slow and sometimes absurd processes of French administration, and I am pretty sure the whole thing is far from running as efficiently as it could.
That said, I gave way too much credence to Musk and his clique, turned out the efficiency theatre was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a different style of operation.
I am not sure they even tried to cut waste in a meaningful way, or if they had the competence to do so.
The stark difference is that THAT effort was handled with careful planning and through the proper channels. The way any mature, thoughtful, and responsible person would approach something like this.
One thing has been made very clear with Trump's terms - if there is no detailed plan on how they intend to do something, it's going to be a disaster. You can't just wing things and expect everything to work out.
Unless you just want to disrupt, punish, hurt, etc., in which case this is working as planned...which some may claim was the actual plan all along.
Also an honorable for bringing the screwworm to the US. Good job everyone, you guys did it!
[1] https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...
they are responsible because they took that responsibility. If I say to someone that I will sponsor them through collage, and than drop sponsorship without warning – I'll be an asshole too.
Also, everyone knows that USAid was a bargaining chip that bought USA ability to build military bases on a foreign land. It's not like USA just did it because they were great of heart.
Edit: Not to mention billions sent to ICE.
It doesn't matter what other countries do. We should want to step up and help. Leaders lead.
But just to engage with your numbers (which I don't agree are fully accurate and are definitely not at all a complete picture):
Getting the rate of starvation down from 33% to 20% in an already food-stressed region that has experienced 5x population growth could be presented as an accomplishment, yes. Flip your numbers around. In 1961 200m Africans were food-secure. Today 1200m are. A billion extra properly fed people, by your (possibly bad and definitely over-simplifed) numbers.
(though still far too many)
This is effectively what DOGE did by "feeding USAID into the woodchipper" rather than developing a plan to gradually taper aid. Thousands of people in the middle of medical treatment just died. Thousands of children relying on USAID food and supplies just died. There are plenty of articles with first-hand accounts of this.
Worst part is, Musk and his boys did it this way for shits and giggles, or maybe for the adrenaline rush. Monsters.
Regardless, even if your amoral nihilism were correct rather than the hallmark of a morally repulsive psychopath with the imaginative capacity of a tapeworm, there were two things DOGE did wrong. First, much of the actual damage they caused was not from the US cutting aid per se, but rather how quickly and with such little warning they cut aid. DOGE denied aid recipients that were relying on the US to keep people alive with life saving medicine and food a reasonable opportunity to make alternative arrangements. People are dying not because the rest of the world is incapable of supplying ARVs to HIV patients in Africa, but because we took those critical life saving drugs away in a manner that made it impossible for the people depending on us to adapt. We killed many those people. You can't just stop taking ARVs and be OK, and someone make a few hundred dollars per year in rural Africa is not well positioned to find alternative suppliers. Many thousands of HIV positive pregnant women who would otherwise have been able to give birth to a child without the child contracting HIV now have to figure out how to survive HIV themselves and how to care for a child needlessly infected with HIV. Many of these people are now dead because of our negligence, arrogance, and stupidity. Because of your negligence, arrogance, and stupidity.
And it didn't even save us any money to do it that way, it was nothing less than abject cruelty and racism. DOGE let perfectly good drugs and food we had already paid for go to waste in warehouses rather than allow it to be delivered. For literally no reason, it saved us not a single penny and instead deprived many innocent people.
Above all, cutting aid like this was unbelievably stupid and self-defeating. Because even if psychopaths like you are objectively correct about reality (you aren't), when the world's richest man and the world's richest country murder millions of the world's poorest people for literally no reason, that makes us look really bad to the rest of the world. And then they do not cooperate with us. See, e.g., Trump begging the Europeans he so frequently attempts to bully for help with Iran. Idiots like you and Musk have trashed America's hard-earned reputation as benevolent superpower. That will cost us trade deals. It will force our allies to hedge against us by making trade deals with China instead as a counterbalance, as Canada has begun to do. The US is so phenomenally wealthy we can afford to be sociopathic assholes to the rest of the world for a little while at least, but it is difficult to overstate just how naive, ignorant, and outright moronic you are if you think that doesn't come at a price to American interests that far outweighs the negligible amounts of foreign aid spending DOGE illegally cut.
And I won't even get into the illegality of an unelected jackass impounding congressionally authorized spending because you do not seem like the sort of person who has any concept whatsoever of the value or importance of the rule of law and respect for the constitutional order.
I envision something similar to a massive sankey diagram like dataset in a public git repo that anyone could access and audit. There is certainly lots of waste, but there is also loads of government spending where the value is not obvious.
However, creating an agency in the legislative branch is another story. One of the duties of the legistive is to investigate the executive, is it not? (not that this matters when both the executive and legislative are controlled by the same party)
That existed! The links the various DOGE apparatchik kept posting as 'evidence' were from publicly available databases of spending, contracts, etc. The 'receipts' site was just a poor, partially-understood scrape of that data!
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1iu44ub/up...
What was bad faith about it? As someone who literally only heard of this drama because of this comment, so far as I can tell the controversy is that they omitted some white immigrant neighborhoods (eg. little italy), and Mamdani backtracked on it?
"So you want to reform democracy" - Joshua Tauberer https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-...
I'm struggling to see an upside to that one (but I'd like to).
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.
It's the frog and the scorpion fable.
(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...
https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the...
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.
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.
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).
Though there is nuance there too, as some wasteful military spending seems to be more of a jobs program for specific congressional districts.
As a programmer I see waste all the time where people are doing work that could be clearly computerized for better speed and accuracy.
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.
*edit: spelling
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.
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.
Much easier to just gaslight everyone saying the money goes to black single moms or liberal homosexuals or whatever the latest cause is.
The claim he is pro peace was always transparent lie and people literally recognized it at the time.
It’s essentially self-evident that someone receiving money or benefits paid for by others considers those benefits to be “important.”
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
>>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.
Was Clinton particularly thorough in eliminating waste? Is there reason to believe that no new waste materialized in 3 decades?
>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.
Those are juat facts. No one on the right wont admit it, but that does not make it not right.
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.
What makes the federal any different than any other organization?
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.
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.
That it is does nothing to prove inefficiency.
To be clear this is per capita, not per recipient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
The dollars spent is not evidence of accomplishment.
"Academic accomplishment has not advanced at all" feels like something people say without expanding on what they mean by it.
What have we got to show for spending $3 trillion?
Y'all really don't understand how education works in America and your comments make it clear for all to see.
Because it seems to me that a chief indicator that waste likely exists is an inability to show ROI.
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...
When there is no profit motive, there is no motive to be efficient.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not saying this is true, but it’s the motivation.
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.
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.
The most expensive are purely for oil, for hawks feeling manly bullshit wars.
Even Ayn Rand took social security benefits. Some people point to that as hypocrisy, but I feel if the government forced you to pay into a program it is moral to take back from it (though not more than you contributed), even if you morally object to the program overall.
https://airtable.com/appjhyo9NTvJLocRy/shrNto1NNp9eJlgpA?Ffj...
They just slap DEI on any policy they disagree with.
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?
Even this assertion is heavily, heavily disputed:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210706065130/https://www.washi...
>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.”.
"[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...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/10/social-se...
Thus we're stuck in a situation where the systems that used to work are crippled by lack of resources and we're in a decidedly more inefficient world and nothing to show for it.
Relevant example for the HN crowd - nondilutive funding through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is much harder to get, because SBIR is a shell of its former self and startups doing interesting, cutting edge research are finding it much harder to navigate the process. The funds are still there, but the program administration has made it nearly impossible to access.
I'm very curious about how many other projects like this OPM retirement processing overhaul there are. I also wonder how this outcome will perform long-term.
It seems like the National Design Studio still has very close ties to Musk and is continuing a lot of what DOGE started.
I know your acquaintances are on X and it is 'ecosystem that is hard to leave', but sometimes it takes a bit of courage to stop contributing to vicious people. And by using his platforms, you are directly doing that.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Government_Accou...
May be worth noting/reminding of the 17 inspectors general that were fired on the first Friday (2025-01-24) of Trump 2.0 administration:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspec...
This is absolutely what should happen, but what will almost certainly happen is that the most openly corrupt president the US has ever had will blanket pardon everyone who remains loyal to him for the remainder of his term and there will be no federal level criminal legal consequences for any of these people.
And this is kind of the optimistic outcome, the one where the corrupt people in power don't find a way to extend their power indefinitely, which is certainly their plan (their incompetence may stop this from happening).
The US form of government is highly based on the existing British one and the British King had the ability to pardon and so that was copied over.
I do think it makes a lot of sense to do things like mass-pardon people for things that are no longer crimes (i.e. weed legalization) but I really don't see how singling out cases is correct since the supreme court already can do that.
You've obviously never been part of an SAP/ERP implementation. /s
But like many aspects of US federal government, the people who drafted the rules naively presumed the people invoking them would have some level of integrity and a shame response that would stop them from using it for openly corrupt purposes.
They were, of course, wrong.
At the very least they should have ignored Hamilton and made it so that Senate approval was required for the pardons... though even that wouldn't be enough of a check today because we now know that Congress is capable of completely abdicating its power to the executive branch.
But it is difficult to make a system Trump/asshole proof.
And why wouldn't he? Biden preemptively pardoned his family, which was unprecedented, and Democrats said it was fine.
This is now the world we live in, and why these precedents are bad.
* https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-future-of-no...
* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/civil-resistance-978...
At least per historical surveys (600 movements since 1900).
That's really the by far most important aspect!
(it was also possibly a very cleverly executed shitshow for the purpose of stealing a bunch of gov data)
A new democratic government will be burdened by failing institutions, services, missing funds and whatnot, ensuring victories for the coming dictators.
And the Republicans will blame them for it, despite them being the cause of it.
If I had a dollar for every time Republicans blamed Democrats for the national debt despite the deficit consistently falling under Democrats and rising under Republicans...
US Treasury is borrowing $155 billion every month is now paying $24 billion a week in interest
* https://fortune.com/2026/07/10/us-treasury-borrowed-155-bill...
And at least $21 TRILLION of the $40 TRILLION national debt is from militarization
* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
It wouldn't be hard to show transparency into budgets and how the money is spent. Actually track it and make certain non-confidential things public. But as it stands the system scams the public taxpayer by labeling everything confidential and then hiding the data. It feels to me how criminals operate at the highest level.
In any democracy, transparency is important, meaning you need to know what happens to taxpayers' money. So, this government decided to put down a cloak of silence around it. That in itself is not only suspicious - it is highly illegal. The sooner the people get rid of this authoritarian regime the better.
The British burned the White House. This is a far worse, a far more grevious sundering of our history, our heritidge. (And Elon Musk is the worst killer with the most blood on his hands of anyone in the 21st century, for Thanos snapping USAID and others our of existence.)
Both sides routinely use Signal and encourage its use. CISA said in December 2024 that Signal "better protected [government] officials".
All written communication for government business is supposed to be saved.
The CISA document you referenced doesn't seem to be clear on this point, although it is marked as not applying to sensitive communications anyway: "Sources may use TLP:CLEAR when information carries minimal or no foreseeable risk of misuse". https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
It does seem like members of both political parties have had issues following the law on this point though - after all, Hillary's famous personal email server was an issue for the same reason.
Which if you then reflect on Bush II, well, they did delete all the emails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_White_House_email_controv...
I also think it's so many cases like this last week, with OMB saying agencies can run whatever internal surveys they want and they don't have to report to the public. None of it is upstanding, up front. This seems so far beyond any "both sides" or "it's been like this". https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/07/opm-proposes-decen...
This behavior will continue on behalf of people like Musk and Trump until a real consequence is introduced.
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Don't really see anyone suggesting that.
At least we cut those wasteful USAID programs to stop children getting HIV.