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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

But he still doesn't seem to get the seriousness of the situation, at all. Like, he's saying no-one should have used his stuff, but also "It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script".

For instance, imagine you have surgery, and die of a complication. Your relatives will feel very differently, and be in a very different legal situation, if the hospital's explanation is "surgeon was the bottom of their class" vs "yeah, we just handed a visiting 5 year old a scalpel to see what would happen". Neither are ideal, obviously, but the latter is _criminal_.

The idiot in the article is clearly closer to the 5 year old than the scraping-a-pass surgeon; he is simply not in any way a proper person to have been given the sort of access or authority he was, this would have been obvious to whoever gave it to him, and whoever gave it to him is at least morally culpable.

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I mean, hindsight is 20/20, but that's probably why it's a bad idea to give a gaggle-load of inexperienced tech sisses/bros the ability to do stuff like this.

Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome. Drawdowns of the federal government should be measured and deliberate and done by grey haired people not given to rash action. Not by a kid with a python script he thinks is kind of cool.

A disaster was the expected outcome to anyone paying attention. We were screaming to the rooftops that this was going to end in disaster! Nobody should be playing the "shucks nobody realized this was going to be bad" card

Exactly! Many people on HN and elsewhere (including myself) could see that this was never a serious effort to make the government more efficient and called it out from the start. The evidence was overwhelming.

It was dismaying how many people took the Doge claims at face value, hopefully at least a few people will remember the chain of events and be more skeptical of these actors in the future.

If anyone thinks drawdowns should be done of the US federal government they aren't anywhere near the levers of government. There hasn't been one of those in the best part of a century as I recall.

> Thinking back on it, a disaster should have been the expected outcome.

I doubt anyone with decision making power is surprised - the flow of events has been both predictable and predicted. Whatever the goals with DOGE were it wasn't spending cuts or finding efficiencies. The first is in opposition to the preferences of the US Republicans as expressed in their actual voting patterns and the second is largely irrelevant and they weren't set up to do that.

> There hasn't been one of those in the best part of a century as I recall.

That’s just saying your media diet doesn’t cover it. Agencies adjust all the time (every year has a new budget and priorities from Congress), and there was a big Clinton effort which cut hundreds of thousands of jobs and restructured agencies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...

That tends not to get mentioned because it wasn’t disruptive – they actually took time to plan it – and because it happened under a Democratic president, the Republicans aren’t going to acknowledge it.

And it had no impact [0]. Increases in US Federal spending look like a jump from 5% to 20% of GDP. "Cuts" look like a flat line at 20%. Although I don't know what the situation might have changed post-COVID (higher again).

If we're defining "drawdowns" to mean "hold steady" then sure, lots of those. If it means drawing spending down then there technically was one in the 1940s. The proper terms for what we're seeing are "reallocation" or "expansion" depending on the congress.

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

Take a closer look at that chart. Notice the pronounced downward trend on the blue line (federal) starting from a peak in 1992 and declining until the Bush administration unbalanced the budget? In 1998-2001, we had a budget surplus!

https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs... https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181

The big thing, of course, is that total spending is a crude metric lumping discretionary and mandatory spending together. Federal employment has been getting a lot of attention this year, but it's at historic lows and there's no real way to significantly lower total federal spending there without cutting social programs millions of people depend on.

> Take a closer look at that chart. Notice the pronounced downward trend on the blue line (federal) starting from a peak in 1992...

So? That is noise on a flat line. A drawdown doesn't mean sticking to the consensus flat trend. The plan here seems to be a "drawdown" is something where I can say "spending will be about the same".

If I talk about increasing government spending I can point to spending growing from 3% -> 20% GDP with a really clear trend and level change. When we talk about drawdowns it is supposed to mean maintaining a trend at 20%? That isn't a drawdown. If that is a drawdowne then DOGE may turn out to have successfully drawn down US government spending! Even though spending seems to be going up.

If you’re arguing that going from 10% to 6% is flat, it sounds like you’re starting from a predefined conclusion and adjusting terminology to match.

Says the person whos missed most of the spending - US Federal spending hasn't dropped below 10% in 80 years. You might not have read the title of the graph you're looking at?

US Federal spending over any recent time period is basically sum(GDP over however many years)*20%. You're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction that, which potentially didn't even involve actually lowering spending since we're talking a % of something that is growing.

Y'know, well done Clinton and all that - balancing a budget is challenge. But if that is going to get called a drawdown it was about as effective as DOGE. It didn't bump Federal spending off the trendline and the small amounts render it largely meaningless in the big picture. It is literally statistical noise.

A lot of us knew it was going to be a disaster before they started. There’s a reason bureaucrats do things in a measured way. So to say “in hindsight” belies the point.

This disaster was exactly predicted by a ton of people, with foresight! To treat this as an unexpected outcome belies the exact lack of seriousness that characterized this whole ordeal

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