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Move Fast and Break People

thehandbasket.co

25 pointsrbanffy16 comments

This is what makes this whole discussion so difficult. The US government isn’t as efficient as it could be. No one with any exposure to its inner workings will disagree with that. But the discussion is being framed as “well either you love the government or you love DOGE” but that’s a completely false dichotomy.

I strongly support DOGE’s publicly stated mission. But that’s not what they are doing. The data is there. You can’t save money by cutting people who make $100k a year. We know how to save the government money. We know that every $1 spent on the IRS nets more than $1 and every $1 taken away loses more than $1.[0] We already have agencies and organizations which publicly list fraud.[1]

As this article states the cruelty is the point. That’s been very clearly stated if not directly in the EO but by those involved. We can only move the discussion forward by actually talking about that. If you believe that making the bureaucracy afraid to do their job is a good idea then that’s an opinion you’re allowed to have. But hiding behind the facade of “efficiency” isn’t going to help get anything done.

[0] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60037 [1] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-105833

(New account since I’m closer to this than I’d like to be)

> I strongly support DOGE’s publicly stated mission. But that’s not what they are doing.

When I saw this news story about the 5 bullet email it didn’t strike me as an outrageous ask, but then I saw some of the chatter where people were going ballistic about it.

I was interested in the HN response to it. I mean probably a good majority of us on here do daily stand-ups where the previous day’s efforts are bulleted and the day’s target tasks are ID’d. So it doesn’t really surprise me that this hasn’t really provoked the HN outrage we usually see with all things DOGE.

A lot of the concern is about how it's going to be used. Who is even asking for it? For what purpose? Are they even in the chain of command?

Also some positions don't really lend themselves to listing "accomplishments". E.x. what's the guy running the scanner at the airport supposed to write down?

> for what purpose… There is a belief that many in government are not even checking their communications. It’s designed to help identify those folks who are not doing their job. My guess is that now with enough news coverage, those folks will make sure they respond, but at the very least if they have been “slacking off” on their duties, this will communicate that someone is starting to pay attention now, where perhaps someone wasn’t before.

> chain of command… If they are part of the executive branch and the president or one of his delegates ask for it, they are in the chain of command.

> guy running the scanner…

My guess is that guy probably won’t have a “government email address” and if he does, he responds with “I worked xx shifts for xx hours running the scanner at the airport per my prescribed job duties requires.

> There is a belief that many in government are not even checking their communications.

That’s just propaganda, though. If this was happening, it’d be known to their management and the IT department could just run a report, and it’s not plausible that someone is going to do a better job checking a couple million emails arriving into a shared inbox with no other context. If you’re worried about slackers, you’d want to look at what they actually produce rather than their self-assessment.

Maybe it’s propaganda or maybe not. It’s a belief that has been made public by the people doing this so I imagine that its validity will be evident soon enough.

However, it doesn’t matter if there is a better way to test this belief…this is the way they chose to do it and they are the ones get to decide on the “how”.

It doesn’t make sense as a serious effort: if they had data, they’d show it. If they were seriously looking to collect such data, they wouldn’t request a couple million email messages without the context needed to assess them.

Now, if the goal is producing propaganda, it does make sense. That doesn’t need rigor, they just need a big number to toss out claiming that there are people collecting paychecks but not working. When it later turns out that, say, the big number was explained by people who weren’t scheduled to work on Monday or whose training includes not responding to messages outside of their chain of command, they won’t care because they’ve already moved on to the next batch.

> There is a belief that many in government are not even checking their communications

Where are you getting this is the purpose? It certainly wasn't spelled out in the email. Sending an email on a weekend when they wouldn't be expected to check their email is an odd way to go about it.

> If they are part of the executive branch and the president or one of his delegates ask for it, they are in the chain of command.

Which one of his delegates is asking for this? It's again not been communicated in any way under whose authority this is being done. Elon tweets are not official communication and depending on the hour of the day he's either in charge or has no authority.

> My guess is that guy probably won’t have a “government email address” and if he does, he responds with “I worked xx shifts for xx hours running the scanner at the airport per my prescribed job duties requires.

Your guess is wrong. All employees of the federal government get an email address. And many contractors. Your reply doesn't sound like 5 bullet points as required by the email.

> Where are you getting this is the purpose…

Straight from the horse’s mouth: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1893657900851278115

> which one of his delegates…

Does it matter? Apparently the email was official. Also, Musk is an SGE and he gets a level of authority with that designation.

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/nx-s1-5293124/special-governm...

> Your guess is wrong…

Is it? You sound confident but do you have a source?

> Does it matter?

Yes it does. Chain of command isn't a thing that just exists in Trumps head. He has to actually put people in a position to give instructions.

How is a random government employee supposed to know this is an "official email" not a phish without even knowing who it's from? How do they know what information they are authorized to share? Just because something isn't classified doesn't mean it can be shared with anyone.

> Also, Musk is an SGE and he gets a level of authority with that designation.

Per your article SGEs can be granted the authority of normal employees. They don't magically get authority over the entire federal government. Court filings by the administration say he hasn't been granted any and serves only as an advisor.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/white-house-says-musk-is-not-d...

> Is it? You sound confident but do you have a source?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1893386883444437415?mx=2

Where do you think "all federal employees" are receiving that email?

The difference is that a standup conveys information to other people who can use it, and it’s not as an HR measurement of job performance. You don’t invite strangers from other departments to your standup meeting and if you’re worried about someone slacking you’d have the context to look at what they’re actually doing (“he said his code was compiling all week but only made two builds?”).

This is frustrating if you actually value efficiency. There’s an alternate universe where DOGE was doing stuff like collecting people’s blockers and looking for common complaints (“everyone says it’s too much hassle to get office supplies, we could streamline that“), or making sure that time is tracked at the project / task level so you could measure the true cost of a particular activity, etc. This not only isn't useful but it also taints the name of government efficiency by associating it with political purges.

> “he said his code was compiling all week but only made two builds?”

I've worked at places where you were lucky to get one fully tested build a day and those weren't hugely complex systems. Wouldn't surprise me if places existed where two builds a week was possible.

That’s the importance of context: assuming that wasn’t the turn of the century, someone who actually works there would be able to tell whether that’s a credible claim. Someone at OPM getting a million messages from other agencies wouldn’t have the knowledge needed to say whether that’s plausible.

> assuming that wasn’t the turn of the century

Within the last 10 years (intentionally vague to spare people shame.) Even where I've been recently, getting 2 fully tested builds a day[0] would sometimes be pushing your luck[1].

[0] Your standard 8 hours.

[1] There have been places which were fully test-suite-able on your local machine and that obviously helps speed things up.

Yknow, sometimes I think that the best thing for America would be to just wipe the slate clean.

We could do better. Maybe we just need a fresh start.

And I honest to god think that Trump and Musk are gonna burn our world down to the ground, piss on the ashes, and then demand payment for doing so.

And I dunno, somehow it all just feels so right.

I hope Musk has got double B working on a SOMA recipe for us...

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