Comment by apical_dendrite | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apical_dendrite | Hacker News Reader

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apical_dendrite

This doesn't even line up with what Elon is saying publicly. Mike Flynn searches a public database for grants to organizations with the word "Lutheran" in them and then Elon tweets that they're all illegal and will be canceled. How is that a thoughtful process for identifying wasteful spending?

Or Elon saying he's "deleting" the IRS free file group. How is that wasteful? It's providing a service that actually solves a real problem for people - people have complained for years about having to pay TurboTax to file their taxes. What metric is being used to decide if it's wasteful? It seems entirely like government by whim.

And if they really think there are great people in these departments, why are they terrorizing them? Right now federal workers are facing daily emails telling them to quit, their bosses calling them unproductive, chaos and upheaval at work, and many of them are going to have to make these huge life changes to suddenly return to the office (long commutes, disruption to childcare and other schedules, maybe having to move on short notice). To my knowledge, all of the companies that did RTO gave much more notice.

I don't see how this is remotely incompatible with the parent. What percentage of the 8am-2am grind, do you think said Elon-tweets take? 1%? Less? What the team is doing during the unpublicized 99% is of more interest to me.

The parent is presenting this as a thoughtful exercise by serious, experienced people. It is absolutely not that.

The sudden closure of USAID is probably the best example. You have an organization of thousands of people that operates worldwide. It does a lot of things that save lives - deliver food to starving people, provide HIV medications, etc. If all of a sudden you tell all the grantees that you're shutting everything down, they won't get any more money or support, they need to stop the work they're doing, maybe they can get an exception but nobody is going to be answering the phone when they call to ask how because the staff are all on administrative leave - that has huge consequences. For instance, it meant stopping clinical trials in the middle. So there were women with devices implanted in their bodies with no ability to get support.

There are all sorts of other effects. We provide aid to allies all over the world. All of a sudden, we pull out the rug from under them with no notice. What are the short term and long term consequences of doing that? What would be the consequences to the stability of Jordan of pulling aid - the King has been our ally but it's a tenuous situation. What about Lebanon? Now that Israel has beaten up Hezbollah, we want to use the opportunity to strengthen the Lebanese state. What happens when we suddenly pull funding? There are dozens of different countries that are affected and each of them is a very complicated situation. It's not something that people with no domain expertise are going to figure out in a few days.

The way these guys are acting - it's complete madness.

it appears to be an abandonment of Kissinger's Realpolitik strategy.

Uh... no. It's an abandonment of any kind of strategy at all. You can be completely opposed to realpolitik and still believe in what USAID is doing (or the other things the Trump administration is getting rid of, like funding the WHO or other international efforts). For instance, an idealist would support USAID work to promote democratic institutions and conflict resolution.

It's not like they're saying "in the past we've played chess using only king's pawn openings and now we're going to switch to using queen's pawns openings", it's "we don't like this game so we're going to kick over the table and stomp off".

Yes, it is certainly an abandonment of all strategy, including realpolitik!

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