Comment by benzible | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benzible | Hacker News Reader

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"Faulty intelligence" accepts that DOGE / Russell Vought / Project 2025 are sincerely concerned with government spending. The evidence says that this is deliberate sabotage of government functions to erode public trust. Consider:

Douglas Holtz-Eakin (former Republican CBO director) noted DOGE is specifically "going into agencies they disagree with" for ideological reasons, targeting programs that are a tiny fraction of the federal budget. https://thefulcrum.us/governance-legislation/doge-layoffs-tr...

OMB Director Russell Vought explicitly stated his intention for federal workers to be "traumatically affected" - showing disruption is the intended goal. https://www.govexec.com/transition/2025/04/project-2025-want...

DOGE cut specialized IRS teams that brought in billions despite small costs. One team of <10 people had recovered $5 billion over four years before being fired. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-doge-irs-cuts-will-co...

DOGE has repeatedly made fraud claims that "none have held up under scrutiny" - appearing designed to undermine public trust rather than address actual problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...

The pattern is clear: target high-visibility but relatively low-cost programs (like NSF internships) that provide tangible benefits to citizens. When services deteriorate, people naturally ask "why am I paying taxes for this?" - which is exactly the intended outcome.

A $10k internship that launches careers and advances American innovation is precisely the type of program that makes visible the value of government - which is why it's being targeted despite minimal fiscal impact.

Something, something small enough to drown it in the bathtub.

This isn't new. Republicans have always worked to erode government offerings to justify further cuts. What is new is the scale and speed.

Is there literally nothing Congress can do or are they just doing nothing?

Yes, but Grover Norquist thought the path was tax cuts → Congressionally mandated spending cuts → worse government. Trump/2025/DOGE's big innovation has been skipping the first step and simply ignoring Congress' "power of the purse" and unilaterally (and illegally) withholding spending as they see fit [1]

The US constitutional system was always built on "norms," good faith, and an assumption that even personally corrupt actors in power won't act to burn the whole system down, or will fear the consequences of the rule of law. It's always been the case that Congress and the Supreme Court don't have cops or soldiers at their command, so the enforcement powers of 2 out of 3 branches of the federal government rely to some extent on fears that the system will find some way to dole out consequences, or a good faith belief in the rule of law. Even Nixon resigned once the Supreme Court ruled that he had to release the tapes.

However, the Supreme Court has essentially ruled that a president (at least, a Republican president) is immune from personal consequences for everything, so at this point an authoritarian-minded president can behave as a king. Congressional Republicans would likely prefer not to cede their power but more than that, they don't want to cross Trump for fear of being defeated in a primary by a Trump-backed challenger. The appeal of a job that at this point almost exclusively consists of debasing oneself is beyond me.

[1] A great primer on exactly why this illegal withholding of congressional spending is unconstitutional can be found in Senator Murphy's confrontation with DHS Secretary Noem earlier this week. Murphy documents how the department is illegally impounding funds, violating Supreme Court orders, and ignoring statutory requirements - creating precisely the constitutional crisis predicted when an administration decides it can simply disregard Congress's power of the purse: https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy...

They’ve been doing nothing for decades.

> They’ve been doing nothing for decades.

Here's a list of the 250+ pieces of nothing that the 118th Congress passed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_118th_Un...

If you're going to reach for hyperbole, at least make it defensible.

The Wikipedia article you link states:

> It has been called one of the least productive Congresses since 1951

Let’s not measure productivity in terms of count of bills passed like measuring output by lines of code.

Healthcare reform, SS reform, fiscal sustainability, electoral reform, climate, immigration, information environment, cybersecurity, how many of these pressing issues have been tackled and solved by congress?

Congress has two parties in ut and one of them is strictly opposed to all of these. The issue is not doing nothing, the issue is large parts of population and their political representation being actively against it.

Talking about it in abstract, to make it sound like the congress ia a monolith where all are ambivalent ... is part of the problem.

If "nothing for decades" isn't true, then parent can use different words.

"Least productive" != "nothing"

If language collapses into describing a different reality just because of the way someone feels, then communicating is going to be difficult.

Exactly. They raise campaign funds and appear on tv and cross examine industry leaders like Altman and Zuckerberg. Clearly that is not “nothing”. But some worry that is not enough to keep pace with emerging threats and opportunities and that’s given justification for presidents to increasingly fill that gap, to disastrous effect. Some argue that a single strong leader calling the shots via EOs is better than having congress try to get up to speed on complex, emerging matters (ie AI export controls) but I’m unconvinced.

Something 'taking an Act of Congress' (to indicate that it's difficult and time-consuming) is in the lexicon for a reason. It's been true of the US legislative process for that long.

But!

That isn't to say that after the gears grind, Congress doesn't complete important and essential work, even in toxic times.

The nihilism of a blatently false claim that Congress is doing nothing just feeds into 'so let someone else do it' fervor. Untrue memes can be dangerous.

Ten democrats in the senate voted with the republicans, giving Trump (filibuster-proof) free rein for his entire agenda for the rest of 2025.

So, yeah, there’s stuff they can do, and they’ve already accomplished a lot this year.

"deliberate sabotage of government functions to erode public trust."

Is there any non-dystopian reason to do this? Is the end game really the collapse of the US?

One person's dystopia is another's Christian nationalist authoritarian paradise. Vought / Project 2025 have been quite explicit in their goals. They believe that they're at war with secular institutions and what they call the "administrative state" - any government function that operates independently of direct political control by the executive branch. That is an explicit goal of doing away with the US Constitutional system. Vought has justified this through conspiratorial nonsense, claiming that the "deep state" has already brought about a "post-Constitutional" order via bureaucratic overreach.

Their plan will mean impoverishment of most of the population, as well as removal of a substantial part of the population through deportation but they're not particularly concerned with that. In their eschatology, non-believers (which includes not just atheists but Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and even other Protestant denominations they deem insufficiently pure) are literally destined for eternal torture in hell. Some of the more extreme elements actively look forward to this as divine justice. Their apocalyptic worldview frames everyone outside their narrow in-group as either potential converts or enemies destined for damnation. Why worry about climate change, democratic institutions, or social welfare when the faithful will be raptured away while the unrighteous suffer? This theological framework makes it remarkably easy to dismiss the suffering of others as either deserved or irrelevant in cosmic terms.

Musk has a different set of motivations. Some of it is just straightforward corruption - killing off agencies and firing specific individuals who have pushed investigations of his various enterprises, as well as awarding contracts to himself (e.g. the FAA Starlink contract, which is genuinely terrifying).

But as far as his motivations to decimate government more generally, I think it's a combination of things. He seems to genuinely believe that dismantling government oversight will unshackle great men such as himself to bring about some techno-libertarian utopia. But I think a lot of it is that his brain has just been pickled by right-wing social media and he's a bit of a useful idiot. The fact that this aligns with Christian nationalist goals is just a convenient overlap.

Then there's the Stephen Miller wing, who are primarily motivated by racism (of course, all of these factions are extremeley racist).

It's all quite grim.

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