Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw0101c | Hacker News Reader

> At some point we have to consider the possibility that these aren’t just cuts to the budget

"At some point"? That point was a few weeks, like when they blindly purged the folks that did maintenance on nuclear weapons:

* https://time.com/7225798/doge-fires-national-nuclear-securit...

Or when they purged people dealing with bird flu:

* https://apnews.com/article/usda-firings-doge-bird-flu-trump-...

View on HN

Indeed, as Gary Kasparov eluded to

"These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power any time soon, or ever."

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/pu...

https://archive.is/l4kLV

Not sure why you took a downvote. I think it is plain to see that we are unlikely to have free and fair elections in 2028, possibly even the next cycle.

That's exactly the attitude a number of right-wing people had after Trump's 2020 election loss.

The thing is, are these situations really comparable?

Biden has just transferred power peacefully and gracefully, his supporters didn't initiate any coups.

And after Trump's 2020 loss, Biden basically enacted a bunch of sensible policies, including continuing some reasonable Trump policies (some specific tariffs, for example). Trump in 2025 instead decided to ban paper straws (!!!!).

Given that they Kennedy retracted on the vaccine mandate suggests gross incompetence might be at play here.

I normally defer to Hanlon's Razor, but with this administration it's 50/50 if their actions are due to incompetence or malice.

The only thing we know is their intent is never to benefit the majority of the people they are meant to be serving.

I don't think we need to pick between incompetence and malice here. I think both apply to most of their actions.

Select non-malicious but incompetent people to head departments, gives you plausible deniability when people claim that what's happening is malicious. "No, look, RFK Jr is sincere in his desire to help the American people." He's just really bad at it. Of course, that doesn't speak well to the judgment of the people at the top. They'll try and claim that RFK Jr did a fine job and it was the Deep State that caused the problems.

Probably exactly what will happen. “Oh, with the dramatic reduction in vaccinations the American people would have been so much healthier, but the Deep State sprayed measles from chemtrails just to make us look bad”

At this point, I don't see why it should matter if it's criminal negligence or malice.

They know what they are doing is illegal. Or, if they don't, it's because they are actively insisting on not learning it, what shouldn't make any difference.

> I normally defer to Hanlon's Razor, but with this administration it's 50/50 if their actions are due to incompetence or malice.

The incompetent people were hired / appointed[1] as a form of malice against the "Deep State" (read: civil service) specifically, and government and civil society in general.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

Hanlon’s razor is funny because it assumes that malicious actors can’t be incompetent and incompetent people can’t act maliciously. It is a fun logical trick that functions by pretending that huge swathes of the population don’t exist, like a sort of inverted cognitive behavioral therapy exercise

I don't think it is assuming that malicious actors can’t be incompetent or that incompetent people can’t act maliciously, it's just asserting that incompetence is so, so much more widespread than actual malice.

I think if your argument is that they're making hasty decisions, you've provided good evidence for that. But the remainder of the sentence you quoted was:

> but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.

If your argument is that they're trying to make agencies die, and you're using the above as evidence for this, then you'd have to convince me that they want the government to lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu.

> If your argument is that they're trying to make agencies die, and you're using the above as evidence for this, then you'd have to convince me that they want the government to lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu.

I'm saying they want to get rid of government:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43218884

I don't necessarily disagree, but unless they're literally ready to jump to anarcho-capitalism in the next four years I don't think they're trying to let the nuclear bombs go unattended. I think the specific examples you gave aren't your best examples to this point. If anything it's a counter-argument.

There are US citizens, former employees of USAID, who have been abandoned after trying to stop a cholera outbreak in the middle of a civil war in South Sudan.

With their families.

Their security detail: fired. Their logistics team: fired.

No water, no power, no fuel.

Look: sufficiently advanced incompetence and/or carelessness is equivalent to malice.

I don’t care if you WANT to attend to the nuclear weapons, if you are so unserious, or understaffed, or incompetent, or distracted, or whatever to fail to actually do the thing.

Intent is irrelevant. Outcomes are everything.

That's fair, but the initial point I was replying to was about intent.

Again, intent is irrelevant.

Sure, criminal negligence vs murder, but do you really care if it’s your kid?

And again, I'm responding to another post (two, actually) about intent. If you have an issue with it, take it up with them. I acknowledge your point as fair, but a separate point.

Do not worry about world-ending neglect towards the staff responsible for the maintenance and security of our nuclear arsenal, their intent was only for a smaller government!

I don't know what's going on with HN right now, there usually is a lot more reading comprehension and level headed conversation, even on controversial topics.

It's not me minimizing a series of catastrophic events because in my great wisdom I have perfectly ascertained the intentions of an unpredictable administration, it's reading comprehension.

The foundations of the American government and its ability to care for its citizens. People are loosing their livelihoods, people are dying, etc.

You have been desperately attempting to defend the “intent” of the perpetrators.

That might rub folks the wrong way, huh?

They have spoken their intent out loud, over and over.

I think I did a poor job of articulating my point. My point is that they've spoken their intent to smash the bureaucratic state. Their intent is not to dismantle 100% of the government, including the military and the nuclear bombs. So I don't think the nuclear bombs incident is a great example of them enacting their intent. Unless you actually think they want to do that, but then that's a much different claim you're backing up.

Sufficient active disregard for consequences is equivalent to actively seeking said consequences.

If someone consistently drives extremely recklessly, refuses to service their brakes, allows their tires to become completely tread worn, removes their mirrors, etc. etc.

What could one reasonably infer about their desire to get into a car crash?

Would loud and repeated claims of a desire to drive safely convince you? Moreover, would you consider such claims to be in good faith, especially if said reckless behavior continues?

Besides, the GOP has said time and time again: let’s make the government so small we can drown it in the bathtub.

What private sector entity would find it profitable, or even be able to, control the bird flu or manage the nuclear arsenal.

Much less, do you want there to be a profit motive in those places?

"Yes, your honour, I did shoot him point blank in the chest. But you can't use that fact as evidence that I wanted to kill him, that's just evidence of how he died."

Murder, manslaughter, intent, accident, purpose, neglect. We have many words that try to put a degree of malice on the act of taking a life, but the life is still gone.

At some point, you need to draw a line in the sand and say "They're going where I can't follow.". Right now, it seems like you're drawing the line right after they come out and tell the world that they specifically intend to burn America to the ground and auction off the remains for their personal profit. Where you draw your line is your own personal choice, but it's worth thinking about ahead of time.

What is your model of this group of people behind DOGE? If it's a group of radical right wingers with libertarian leaning who want to smash the bureaucratic state, that's probably accurate and most people (even supporters) can get behind that characterization. Do you think this group of people, ushered in by Donald John Trump, want to dismantle the military? If not, then why would they purposely try to lose control of the nukes? There probably exist some radical libertarians (or even left-wing anarchists) who would actually advocate for let's say decommissioning the nukes, but I think it's pretty clear that that's not who's in office.

What I see is a ham-fisted approach to slashing the Department of Energy. That's the actual goal. Plenty of anti-Trump outlets report it that way. The idea that they actually want the nuclear weapons to lapse is a pretty bold implication, assuming I'm not misunderstanding the argument.

I don't think there is one unified plan to destroy the federal government; however, many influential people in the current administration are motivated to destroy particular parts of the federal government and will not get in each other's way. I believe the result of this is that the current administration will attempt to destroy the union (inclusive OR) of all the agencies that influential individuals within the administration want to destroy.

Here's a quote from the conservative political operative and self-described Christian Nationalist Russ Vought, who is both the current and former head of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.” [1]

This is a visceral and radical statement which has gotten some airtime on the news recently. However, it's interesting to note that Project 2025, which Vought helped lead and authored key sections of, does not advocate for the dismantling of USAID, rather recommending that its mission be narrowly aligned to national security goals[2]. In 2025, however, Elon Musk wanted USAID shuttered, and Vought was happy to oblige in his position as "the nerve center of the federal budget."

However, Project 2025 advocates for eliminating or defunding the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, EPA, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and other government agencies. It's likely that these will also come under fire.

Finally (and this is my opinion), I believe it is impossible to understand this current administration's policy agenda without at least a surface level understanding of the writing of Curtis Yarvin, a software developer and reactionary political blogger. One this topic, Yarvin says the following:

“What is government? A government is just a corporation which owns a country. Nothing more, nothing less. It so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what we do to all corporations that have failed. We simply delete them.”

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...

[2] https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FUL... (pg 253-255)

[3] https://apnews.com/article/trump-doge-russell-vought-project...