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Comment by reenorap | Hacker News Reader

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The vast majority of federal spending is tied to programs like social security, Medicare, and the DoD which DOGE didn’t cut.

DOGE actions appear to have been largely based on the chaotic whims of Elon in response to perceived slights and tweets sent to him and did not have any significant effect on the budget. They chased after ghosts previously investigated by IGs and found insignificant, such as dead people on the social security rolls.

Real budget reform proposals remain out there from CRFB and others, and perhaps some future administration will undertake them when social security becomes insolvent in a few years.

Right, and the vast majority of most people’s budgets are their mortgage/rent. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t cut out that streaming subscription they don’t need when they’re accruing debt every year. Every bit helps.

If their time and energy are limited, the highest impact actions would be reducing the mortgage/rent or increasing income. And it's questionable whether foreign aid is a "streaming subscription" or a "gym membership" expenditure. Assuming you regularly go to the gym maybe keeping it will help you get a better job.

Even that isn't what's happened here. If we continue the analogy it's more like stop paying for wifi, then later discover you need it for work so sign up again at and pay an extra fee.

There is so much conflation (maybe intentional, I dunno) between the goal of cutting spending and the method that DOGE employed. If DOGE went in methodically and actually cut waste and fraud I'd cheer them. What actually happened was a mixture of:

- Cutting things without knowing the details and then later having bring them back at extra cost (e.g. employees)

- Cutting things regardless of consequence based on ideological views (or just randomly?)

- Not actually saving anything and just lying about it

A man cuts back on his budget for vegetables and other healthy groceries to save money while also 10xing his spend on alcohol which he likes ice cold, surpassing the food budget by far.

Most people: “hey dude that’s a huge mistake for xy and z reasons”

There’s always one: “most Americans spend too much and save too little, we should applaud this guy!”

—- Edit - to head off any nit picking, 10x is illustrative not exact - It’s 3x up to $28B for ice while the usaid spend was either $22B for pure usaid spend, or $35B with co-managed other state dept stuff as of 2024. So depending on accounting, ice either far surpassed it or at least countered all cuts since the spend wasn’t fully eliminated . (And that’s not even touching on the moral turpitude of simply letting hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medicine rot as a consequence of the cuts as warned by the relevant inspector general before I’m assuming they were fired)

One thing that could really help your position would be to speak specifically about one that doubled and why you believe it was wasteful besides HC/Budget. Were they not delivering value proportional (or better) to their growth?

> The number of employees in some departments of the government almost doubled in 5 years

Which ones? By how many employees? If a department went from 2 to 4 people that isn't prima facie outrageous.

It's very common for politicians to point to federal staffing levels as some sort of measure of waste and bloat, but those numbers have been increasingly deceptive since the era of Reagan. Essentially, government has grown in its budget and scope but staffing numbers have not matched that increase because many agencies have instead staffed projects and roles with contractors instead.

This is worst in all accounts: there is no accurate count of how many contractors work for the federal govt (vs. federal employees), they generally are more expensive to hire than staffers and they get trained up on the public's dime and then walk out the door to other projects meaning the agency doesn't benefit from their upskilling like they would if they were internal employees.

With 18F, USDS and digital services within agencies, the government had been trying to reverse its dependency on external contractors to ship code. DOGE eliminated many of those people – you could argue one of its goals was to make government more dependent on vendors and contractors. There is now a new Tech Force initiative, but it seems like it's mainly a way for companies like Palantir to embed junior staff within agencies to find new places to sell software.

I can't believe anyone still believes DOGE was actually about cutting federal spending. The current party in power has spent the past year massively increasing the federal deficit and future debt. If they are serious about anything it certainly isn't balancing the federal budget.

You've set up a strawman, or are arguing against a position that's not relevant here. One can absolutely believe that spending should be made more efficient AND DOGE was a destructive and harmful disruption to essential spending.

Do you know how much money this administration is spending on ICE and the military?

Trump fired a bunch of people in his first term that’s why the numbers went back up under Biden. There seems to be a huge 4 year gap in peoples memories as well as no concept of what an acceptable number of government employees actually is. Just a whole bunch of “that’s a big number!”

The same thing happened with NY Times headline about spending $6B over 3 years on immigration services. Too much money! Now here we are $40B deep in one year for Dhs et al. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Trump’s spending on Dhs alone is expected to hit $480B by the end of his term. How’s that for reigning in spending?

We could have had healthcare, instead people chose hate, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

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