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Comment by readthenotes1 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how the budget cuts to R&D will affect the replication crisis?

It's not like all this money was going to authentic, well-intentioned pursuers of the truth.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01266-x

The reality is that US AID money went to any NGO that had mechanisms to pipe some percentage back to Act Blue as cash and hidden through donors like my mom that donated once and had her record in there 20 times. Mostly facilitated by corrupt lawyers there.

Do you have any evidence of that? It seems unlikely that they would keep this out of court if it was true.

It ran last week every night on FoxNews, what more evidence do you need? </s>

Interesting. Any source beyond the EO? Can't find anything about this.

Not sure about the USAID part, but ActBlue has been suspected of illegal fundrasing activities for a long time. Googling will find a lot of stories similar to the one above.

"Mark Block, former chief of staff to Republican 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain, alleges that a total of $884.38 given in his name and without his knowledge between May and October was designed to circumvent federal election law and may be part of a larger scam involving tens of thousands of unwitting donors." https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/is-actblue-in-lega...

"An 88-year-old retired Yale University professor, for example, supposedly made 7,539 donations for a total of $213,163, according to FEC records." https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/01/08/elderly-democrats-say...

Your first quote isn’t on the page you referenced but the New York Post’s coverage of a lawsuit brought by a Republican activist – not exactly a neutral party – and he didn’t include ActBlue in his lawsuit which is going after a specific person identified only by their American Express card number, no doubt recognizing that the burden would be much higher to prove that ActBlue was colluding with rather than being victimized by whoever that was.

Similarly, your second quote is from a different Republican activist. His data and methodology don't appear to have been independently reviewed, and it doesn’t sound like there’s been any independent review of what he told people to get them to sign affidavits or verification of their claims, all but the first of which are small (it would not be the first someone elderly forgot about clicking on a link or signing up for a recurring charge), much less establishing that ActBlue condoned that activity.

The underlying problem here is that there aren’t higher standards for donations and because we don’t have a national digital identity system and the super court has found that political spending is close to speech in terms of the protections it deserves, it’s not clear how much more could even possibly be required.

I think everyone is this country agrees that there is some corruption everywhere, and isn't opposed to cleaning that up.

The complaint against Trump is that he's "solving" everything by just burning it down.

Government waste has been known for decades and people want it cleaned up. However the same people we have trusted to clean it up are part of the very system that has allowed it to continue. Take a close look at something like funding for the homeless in big cities like LA or Portland and you will find the $ amount per homeless person to be way higher than it should be. You have companies that insert themselves into the government system that do nothing but drain the money that should be going to help the people it's suppose to serve, like the homeless, and every year the problem gets worse and they need more money. People are tired of the lack of accountability for results and ever constant requests for more money.

While this is all true, you've sort of pointed out what the problem is here: the private sector.

Conservative policies consistently "outsource" public services to the private sector, allowing corruption and greed to grow. When things are done publicly, they're very efficient. We don't do that here. We outsource steps A-X to private companies which outsource to other private companies which all essentially launder government funds. At each "hop", there is a massive loss, because each party needs to turn a healthy profit. In addition, each "hop" introduces communication barriers, which further drives inefficiency and even results in failures.

Doing it all under one roof is just good sense. The American Republicans are explicitly against this, and will dismantle it whenever possible. They're not actually "starving the beast". They're just taking the beast's food and giving it to their buddies, who have no intention of helping the public.

The unfortunate reality is that simply cutting funds doesn't do what we think it will. DOGE will cut funds to service X but service X still needs to be done. Now, it will be mostly conducted by the private sector at 10x the cost, and will be paid for by government contracts. Congratulations, everything is worse.

Private sector can make it more efficient for some things...but what I'm referencing is the use of NGOs for public services and the most wasteful I've seen are in the "Large Blue Cities". CEOs of relatively small firms that get millions of dollars in funding but also give themselves 6 figure salaries for "charity work".

I saw a recent article about an NGO that was going to not be able to help immigrants learn how to navigate the path to citizenship. Big story about losing $300K a year in federal grants. However they also took in $2-3M a year in other funding and spent most of it on lobbying for immigrant law changes, as well as paying their CEO a decent 6 figure salary. However the sob story about cutting services to immigrants was the only thing they talked about cutting.

The use cases for outsourcing to the private sector are few and far between. Only if the product or service is extremely difficult, complex, and one-off. Other than that, you save money in the long-run doing it in house, and long-run is MUCH more important for governments than companies.

>>>and long-run is MUCH more important for governments than companies.

Yes, but rarely for the people in charge of spending the money in the government or the people who were voted in to do so.

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