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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

To know the value we'd have to know the benefit from this work. Maybe it's a great deal but we can't know from the average pay alone. It could be a massive net negative if these workers are, in aggregate, making everybody's lives harder with bad decisions.

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I'd argue that's precisely the point of electoral politics, checks and balances and the federal rulemaking process: a bad-decision making agency to Elon (say, FAA oversight of SpaceX) is a good-decision making bureau to others. None of the three are involved at this point, and by the time these cuts are litigated in the court of public opinion (and not, say, Twitter), it'll likely be too late to reverse them if desired.

Decisions are still going to be made, it's just that now they're going to be made by people loyal to Trump and Musk. That doesn't inspire confidence that they're going to make decisions that benefit the average American any better than the career civil servants who have been in these positions for decades.

In his first term, Trump focused on: huge tax cut for the rich and gutting EPA regulations, cutting back on Climate Change action, tried to cut ACA which would have brought back "pre-existing conditions" (don't know if you remember that, but it was pretty bad, and as someone with a child with a disability that would have been devastating), uh, what else?

We're seeing a repeat of that same stuff here, only worse (as in, now you can bribe foreign officials).

I haven't seen anything announced so far that benefits me as an average American citizen, just a bunch of culture-war stuff (like cutting DEI, or making sure transgender athletes can't compete in sports -- what do I care about any of that?)

The price of eggs hasn't gone down since Trump took office. I thought that's what people were concerned about.

Do you think people should be paid more or less if they are making everybody's lives harder with bad decisions?

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