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Comment by onepremise | Hacker News Reader

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I will gladly give him more money. I have no vendetta against him or his actions, you're free to do as you please but don't enforce your political agenda on everyone.

Same. I support everything that's going on at DOGE. There's a certain type around here that needs to get used to the fact that their political views do not enjoy industry wide hegemony.

What's wrong with DOGE? How is eliminating bureaucracy/spending a bad thing? This has been done about 100 years ago, research on what happened after. It feels like people that scream the loudest are the ones leaching from the system.

What's wrong? Let me count the ways.

- Much of the spending they're eliminating is good and important (E.g. USAID).

- The way they're cutting is reckless (They accidentally fired nuclear safety workers).

- Many of the workers are Musk sycophants, who were hired from Twitter/Tesla/SpaceX.

- There's a tremendous conflict of interest in this agency being run by a massive government contractor (NASA and the military are both avid SpaceX customers).

- The workers are not experienced with the data they're working with, and misinterpret it constantly in public before verifying it.

- Despite claims of "transparency", Musk asserted that it was illegal to publish the names of his employees.

- Their one product, their government spending portal, is a worse version of a spending portal which already exists, and they didn't even secure their database.

- They say they "use AI" for their decisions. Which AI? Where is confidential data going?

- Do the staff have security clearance?

how does that weigh against the good they are doing? the spending crisis is critical, so of course some collateral damage will be necessary

The only "crisis" in US spending is that each party keeps shutting down the government when they don't like what the other one is doing. That's not going to go away with balanced books, but it sure is a recipe for disaster. It stops being a democracy when the decision making process stops being about majorities and starts being a game of "whoever doesn't blink sets the rules".

The country prints its own money; and right now it's the world reserve currency, giving the US a huge advantage when it comes to borrowing whatever it wants — the biggest threat to continuing to be the world reserve currency right now, is that the scale of cuts being talked about can only be met by cutting at least one of interest payments on government loans or things the US government considers to be "mandatory" such as pensions, social security, etc.

There are both immediate and long term consequences to the debt. In the short term we are paying a large share of revenue into debt servicing. We are all working months a year to pay interest. In the long term, we are impoverishing the next generations.

The govt can debase the currency by printing money. That only impoverishes people , except for the wealthy, causing greater wealth gap.

> There are both immediate and long term consequences to the debt. In the short term we are paying a large share of revenue into debt servicing. We are all working months a year to pay interest. In the long term, we are impoverishing the next generations.

Only if your economy doesn't grow.

> The govt can debase the currency by printing money. That only impoverishes people , except for the wealthy, causing greater wealth gap.

It impoverishes lenders and savers, but not borrowers. It's not as simple as wealthy or poor, as any can be any.

that's not what's happened in the past 5 years. assets have ballooned. cost of living has skyrocketed. wages have not kept pace. Rich got richer, poor got poorer.

How is growing dept a good thing? How is cutting costs a bad thing? Have you seen Argentina example? How did it turn out? Can the same thing be done in USA? Only reason to say no is because someone is directly profiting from not cutting costs. If you know Musk's story then you know why he is the only best candidate to do so.

> How is growing dept a good thing?

You can afford it, it's fairly close to a neutral thing, for a government to have debt.

Right now, the US gets to set the terms for those loans.

> How is cutting costs a bad thing?

Consider weight as an analogy: Most people can do with loosing weight, losing weight by getting enthusiastic amateurs to perform a quadruple amputation is not advisable.

Musk's target can only be met by deleting your entire armed forces.

And then you have to find another $1.2 trillion.

So the military and the entire CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, NASA, Federal Highway Administration, FAA, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, Department of Justice, the Treasury, …

… all that plus the military still doesn't add up to Musk's target.

Unless you want to cut stuff that's considered "mandatory" (like military pensions), or the interest repayments on the very loans you wish you didn't have.

First two points are pretty much the same and ignore all nuance.

Third point is opinion, at best.

Forth point; couldn't this be said about any politician?

Fifth point; So you're saying that no outside group is capable of auditing.

I'll stop there. You've drank the koolaid.

The world’s richest man is gutting the regulatory bodies which were designed to keep him in check, and you’re defending it. I’d say you’ve drank the Kool-aid.

No, seems like you are defending cost cutting and it doesn't make sense why are you so against it? USA is democracy, if after 4 years things go south you can always vote different and get everything back the way it was. Most probable outcome here is financial situation in USA will get better, you make it sound like USA would collapse to stone age era, it wont.

We have a mechanism for that: it's called congress. DOGE is an executive abuse of power that's resulting in national security critical roles being fired and then attempted to be rehired because they're so incompetent.

What happens when Congress is asleep at the wheel or in on the take?

You campaign for other congresspeople and try and get them thrown out. Congressional representatives are very receptive to constituent calls.

I mean, we could also do your plan and just hand off essentially dictatorial power over spending to the richest man in the country.

Seriously the number of people willing to burn down the whole government over grievances that often haven’t even impacted them is incredibly scary.

You do not throw out the baby with the bath water.

Everyone in the United States is impacted by government insolvency and the economic collapse it will inevitably lead to if unchecked.

Everyone is impacted by the fact that money-printer-fueled government spending crowds out private spending / investment / growth.

and your solution is empowering a dictator and... hoping it goes well?

Article 2 says “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” That means the power to “enforce laws, manage national affairs, and oversee government agencies.”

It’s Congress’s role to allocate funds to certain purposes, and the President’s to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” including overseeing the bureaucracy that implements them.

The President already has dictatorial power over the bureaucracy, as per the Constitution.

Not over spending, which Elon's seizure of payments infrastructure has made.

Unless you extend it to that, in which case why have courts? Its not like they have enforcement power and the president can stretch discretion to the limit.

I don't think that's what DOGE is doing. Seems extremely vindictive and ideological in the way it's acting and time will tell but I would not be surprised if it ends costing the taxpayers more in the long run.

Wouldn't Argentina be a good example of what is DOGE doing now? Financially it has been a good experiment for Argentina. What are the cons?

Argentina and US are very different countries, starting these cuts with very different economic realities. For example, 55% of all registered workers are employed by the government in Argentina. Although not a directly comparable metric (since in the US you also need to account for state and local civil workers), the US federal government employs around 3 million people. That's just 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce.

Again, DOGE operates from the premise that the federal government is bloated. Although this is a very popular message, I'd love to see some more objective data to support this and I doubt that CDC or USAID are the agencies where the bloat is. Like I said, their actions seem vindictive and careless. Also, likely to result in legal cases that will drag for years and end up costing taxpayer more than the supposed savings.

The main con is that once you fire the workers that you thought you didn't need (but that you did indeed need) hiring them back becomes more expensive and a lengthy process. Some of the firings are already causing chaos in vital teams among several agencies and have forced DOGE to try to reverse course (bird flu monitoring, nuclear response...).

And that's not to mention the dire situation you put the people you are firing in. Laying off people from their jobs is never "an experiment" unless you are willing to suspend every trace of empathy.

Eliminating waste is a great idea. But it’s unclear that that’s all he’s doing, it’s unclear how or how well it’s being done, he’s brought in people without security review (which means they, and the systems they are opening up and creating, can be more easily compromised by our enemies), and he has enormous conflicts of interest.

Eliminating superfluous bureaucracy is fine.

Note that DOGE fired, and is struggling to rehire, the team whose job was to mainain America's nuclear arsenal.

Also note that the stated goal of DOGE, $2T, exceeds the entire discretionary budget of the federal government, even though half the discretionary budget is your entire active military.

Even treating $2T as a stretch goal, eliminating literally everything but the military from the discretionary budget doesn't reach the lower $1T that Musk says he has a "good shot" at.

Cuts on this scale directly, all by themselves, even aside from all the other economic diasters that America expressly chose to vote for as a package deal with this, will shrink the US economy about 6%.

US Americans seem quite green, have never had this done to them before on such a scale and so haven't seen the trick before. The art of the hostile takeover. [0] Curtis documents it well, but at tedious length unless you're British, on the Slater, Goldsmith and Rowland gang. "Efficiency" is an entry point, a common bullshit word that's a perfect cover for hostile takeover, because nobody argues with it - it's a "STFU and agree" word [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayfair_Set

[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/efficiency/

There's nothing wrong with it. Our current deficit is increasing something like 1 trillion every 3 months. Getting creative to reduce government spending seems necessary at this point.

All the hysteria over this is just partisan politics as usual.

Doge disrupts everything except for spending: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/12/e...

stop falling for branding and actually concentrate on the numbers: spending is going up, not down, and only touching entitlement programs, the military, or offsetting monetary loosening (via debt interest) will change that.

Well.

Only announce things your opponents do or even lie about it and spread the hate.

I'm 100% sure he won't direct the subsidies during COVID-19 for the hospitality sector, which Trump was quite happy about during his reign.

Or the expensive hotel stays for his security at trump hotels :)

DOGE has revealed that 400 million are rookie numbers when it comes to phony deals.

Forcing the government to spend money has always been the infinite money glitch.

On one side you have healthcare and pharma companies making sure everything is excessively overpriced, then they lobby the government to make sure everyone has government sponsored healthcare, i.e.: turn all tax revenue into healthcare revenue. Then they pay the media to convince everyone that it is their moral obligation to subsidize $1000000 insulin while making it a taboo to ask why healthcare is so expensive.

On another side you have mass incarceration where each inmate costs more per night than a 5 star hotel.

On another side you have nonsense conflicts where the weapon of choice are thousands of single use weapons that cost at least 100,000 each. Or to simply leave it behind for the enemy so then it has to be repurchased.

On another side you have tax loopholes of billions of dollars.

Everyone is stealing. Did you pay 30% tax and then sales tax on everything you bought with your income? Is your effective tax rate around 50%? then you worked 6 months for the government so they can take that 6 months of your life and turn it into a dumb single use weapon to destroy a $1 tent.

Specifics are the enemy of populism:

- healthcare and pharma is overpriced because of information frictions, institutional supply constraints (this mostly means strict immigration controls), and people just really want healthcare relative to other wants! See: https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/1gsezga/comme...

also biden made insulin capped at a price so.

- mass incarceration is a SUPER populist thing! How many times do we hear "we need to be tough on crime"? This sure seems like the voters behind it, it's not like people are clamoring for shorter sentences.

- Indeed, our military is expensive partially because we require domestic production and have to pay really high domestic costs, and partially because the way the US fights war places a SUPER high value on human life. Desert storm was both expensive and only resulted in ~200 coalition deaths to take down the world's 4th largest military, whereas Russia has made it not very far into ukraine and taken over 200k deaths (and it hasn't even been substantially cheaper to boot, just a bit cheaper).

- The tax loopholes exist and are bad, although I challenge you to give me specific loopholes that cost high billions and should obviously be repealed in a way that both constituents are clamoring for and the representatives don't actually do. I don't think they exist.

You know what does actually degrade the fiber of the country? The richest person in the world taking personal control over every payment and arbitrarily destroying institutional knowledge by firing every government employee he has control over or who stands up to him. But no, instead we get "he's saving money" when (see the earlier comment from me) we're not even making outlays go down! A script kiddie who randomly rewrites lines into bad assembly while destroying the build system isn't a perf eng, they're a danger.

In the US healthcare system a bag of water with salt costs hundreds of dollars. You can cap the price of one thing and then the whack a mole game starts.

The conflicts in the middle east costed trillions of dollars and there is absolutely nothing to show for it.

Quantitative easing costed trillions of dollars, most of the people responsible for causing the crisis got a big pay day from it.

If someome became "the richest person" probably you can learn something from that person. Without SpaceX, the US would have to use Russian rockets to put stuff in space because NASA shuttles were retired. Is that something you would like more?

The US is at the verge of bankruptcy and it is not because of $400m in trucks.

And it is not a Democrat or Republican issue, as I said, everyone is getting rich at the expense of the taxpayer, even taxpayers that haven't even been born yet are in debt already thanks to a wasteful mentality.

Would you bet the republic on your understanding of QE? I sure hope not

Whatever solution to the crisis I think it should have involved some jail time.

Agreed

The $400m cybertruck purchase was planned months ago under Biden.

There are many criticisms founded in genuine conflict of. interest, it helps everyone to stick to those.

I work, and the fact that my tax money is going into a black hole makes my blood boil. God bless Musk and DOGE for what they do.

Here is just one headline from today, The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are "almost impossible" to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.

Will you go on the record and say that $4.7T in a year is fraudulent or misspent? I want to be crystal clear with what you're insinuating, because that's a massive amount of money, easily the biggest fraud of all time by a factor of almost 30.

That's not what he said. He said the accounting is bad making it impossible to know how much is misspent.

I don't understand what this means though, almost all of our money passes an audit which necessarily has a paper trail. The few agencies which don't usually have very idiosyncratic audit misses which are, in any event, overseen by inspectors general (or were until trump fired all of them) which have been very zealous to jump on this.

That's not accurate. The Pentagon, for example, has not passed its annual financial audit since it was first required to undergo them in 2018.

This is definitely not accurate.

The poster or the headline doesn’t say they are all fraudulent. It says the payments are nearly impossible to trace.

so then misspent? Must be, because if it's not misspent than impossible to trace is a little irrelevant. It can't be unaudited, because every department passes an audit every year (except the DoD, but they basically pass an audit and the reasons they currently don't are mostly technical)

Well, it’s going to have to pass the Elon Misk audit now. Bless his efforts.

"insinuate -- suggest or hint (something bad or reprehensible) in an indirect and unpleasant way."

I am not "insinuating" but saying that I would like to know where my money goes. If you pay taxes, would not you?

Can you not find it? I can find basically any spending data I want at the tip of my fingers (well, less so now that it's unclear what's being paid) - anything specific that you feel is missing that you want to see?

If you know where the 4.7T went, please reach out to Elon.

I. don't. know. what he's talking about. that's the problem. If I tell you "I'm thiking of $5T, tell me where it is" where does that leave you?

> Here is just one headline from today, The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Monday revealed its finding that $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are "almost impossible" to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dishing out money.

And you believe them?

This is a department that fired multiple different nuclear weapons inspector and maintenance teams without knowing what their job was.

Had to re-hire them. They weren't redundant teams. DOGE just didn't understand what they (or the teams) were doing.

Now, I'm very happy for the US nuclear stockpile to shrink. I sure think you have too many of them. But then, I'm foreign and a hippy, so I would. But (1) do you?, and (2) do you want it to shrink by some of them accidentally exploding? Or being relocated by a hostile power taking advantage of the inspectors all being on early retirement?

I am not jumping to conclusions and will reserve the judgement for later. They provided no proof so far, but hopefully it will be forthcoming, and I would not dismiss their claim outright.

Relocated where and by whom? Just curious.

> Relocated where and by whom? Just curious.

As I'm asking you if you want this done, take your pick.

Loss of oversight made a bunch of USSR suitcase nukes, ~100 or so, go walkabout when they collapsed. Russia denies this, of course. They might be fine, or not, nobody (in public) really knows. Probably not a huge risk without maintenance, if you nick it but don't know what it is you might scrap it for parts and mistake the core for tungsten or lead, but… not great, unless it was existing nuclear powers who took them.

And even then, not great for Russia.

They deny that, but of course you know for sure that they are lying, that the nukes went missing, and you have the proof. Just like I know for a fact that there are alien craft hidden in Area 51.

It was a statement made by General Aleksandr Lebed, former Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, in a meeting with an American congressional delegation.

Here's the first US government report I found on it with all of the entirely negligible effort I am willing to entertain: https://commdocs.house.gov/committees/security/has078010.000...

Perhaps he was drunk, or lying, or just plain unable to find the people who knew which cupboard the devices were safely locked in. But he did make those claims. And you are missing the wood for the trees.

This "wood" (and the US report) consists of exactly one person who made this claim, and a member of corrupt Yeltsin's entourage to boot. I'd say if these nukes were real, they would have exploded somewhere by now. Try harder.

Most people, based on my experience, would rather support Elon Musk than support a strategy recommended by an individual who believes that the MSM should be trusted.

Not to mention that most of your sources to support your points are from far left MSM sources.

Your reasoning is exactly why there is so much support for Elon Musk. You probably made more Elon Musk fans just by your post.

Most people seem to believe the government is broken and MSM is a huge reason for this.

> Most people seem to believe the government is broken and MSM is a huge reason for this.

Is it because Fox News, the most influential channel of the so-called MSM, constantly repeats conservative talking points about the alleged inefficiencies of the government and downplaying the government's important work in protecting citizens?

Americans will soon get to experience what a real broken government is like, and I hope it provides them an education.

MSM is corrupt. That was the point. It does not matter the side.

a fact-free post. Nowhere hear is "he reduced spending by x" or "firing y is good."

It's all vibes, the deficit could double and the vibes would stay the same, he could be dictator and the vibes would never change.

You need to be vibe checked.

I believe you are mistaken about the timeline and details here. The $400m Tesla procurement was initiated under Biden. Trump actually cancelled it.

People who buy into Grok are willingly submitting themselves to the far-right propaganda machine. I’m sure it’s nice and tidied up for release, but there is zero chance that Musk will not use this tool to push his ideological agenda given its reach and impact.

So the Rust code it generates for me has a right-of-centre bias?

Your code will list and go round in wide circles.

Well, if you see any kind of propaganda, you can denounce and I’m sure this community will respond just like we responded to china propaganda and censorship on DeepSeek.

No good will come from of denying progress just because you don’t like someone else is opinions and worldviews.

Was Hitler mentioned yet?

> My question is how may of you are actually willing to give Musk more money after the questionable, legal, and ethical behavior he's exhibited while working for DOGE.

Oh yes, far better to give to alt-man, google or Facebook - those are morally responsible companies!

Far better to give elected representatives this responsibility, IMHO. This is bizarre. There are a lot of billionaires jockeying for influence and resources here. It's almost like a free for all. Musk could also use his position to force Sam Altman's hand in the acquisition of OpenAI, https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musk-sam-altman-relationship-6.... I'm not interested in either party, but it's clear there are huge conflicts of interests here. Musk also expressed disappointment when not getting a piece of this pie, https://www.axios.com/2025/01/22/stargate-elon-musk-trump-al.... I've also read more concerning material regarding JD Vances connections with Peter Theil and their interests in side lining the constitution for some other efforts prepping for "networked states", https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-in.... Much of this is impossible to follow closely. Like I said, this administration seems to be flooding the zone with shit to distract others from what their real intent is. I think it's worth vetting and questioning positions in government, you can't just blindly trust these ppl. Something seems really off. I say question everything at this point. I don't trust billionaires to fix the worlds problems. Democracy and the constitution should be upheld and well guarded.

I mean relatively speaking yes, only one of them is acting as an unelected dictator, circumventing our whole constitutional appropriations process by taking direct control over payment infrastructure.

I read GP to say we need to be skeptical of all LLM providers which I think is a fair point.

Saying we need to be skeptical about OpenAI (haha Open) does not mean we support Musk.

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