Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. And to set a price floor for agricultural products.
1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.
2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget
3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.
4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.
> 1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.
That's... pretty much a good definition of soft power, and frankly not even a cynical one. Your argument presupposes a world where "clandestine infra" and whatnot simply wouldn't happen if we didn't do it. But obviously it would, it would just serve someone else's interests.
And fine, you think the cold war US was bad, clearly. And maybe it was, but it was better (for the US, but also for the world as a whole) than the alternatives at the time, and it remains so today. China's international aspirations are significantly more impactful (c.f. Taiwan policy, shipping zone violations throughout the pacific rim, denial of access to internal markets, straight up literal genocide in at least one instance) and constrained now only by US "soft power".
The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S., just a highly visible one.
Besides security guarantees/defense aegis, the heaviest lifters in U.S. soft power projection are structural and cultural forces that operate largely independent of government:
I'm somewhat ignorant on this subject (by design, my mental health cannot afford too much pondering on that which I cannot control)
but in this instance I can't help but wonder from a game theory standpoint, is there anything GAINED by affecting USAID in a way in which we clearly lose some (relatively small per your comment) amount of soft power?
That is to say, a perfectly played game would involve not making any sacrifices unless it was to gain some value or reduce some loss. What is gained (or not lost) here?
Domestic 'gain' is fiscal + political + transparency. USAID was pass-through where taxpayer dollars flowed to NGOs and contractors whose missions aligned with whatever administration or congressional bloc was in power – but with enough layers of separation to obscure the nature of the spending.
Foreign 'gain' is a move away from liberal internationalism to transactional bilateralism/resetting expectations wrt American largesse. We were being outbid everywhere anyway, and the org was ineffectively doing something DoS should be doing.
Local producers cant compete with the aid (nor in trade). The same scheme China runs in the west. On the receiving end you not just stop development but you actively shut down what you had and forget how to do it.
I feel like currently, all four of those points you raised have also been significantly eroded too, and will continue to be for the following decades - countries seem to be rolling back US tech, contracts, dollars, and less people are going to the US for study.
Yes, USAID was only one part of US soft power. Everything else you have listed though, the destructionists have done effective jobs of trashing those as well!
In a thread about USAID it makes sense to talk about the damage to USAID. If these other pillars of soft power matter more to you, then try writing productive comments lamenting their destruction rather than downplaying in this discussion.
>> The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
> USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S.
And the goalposts move again. Your original point was that soft power was bad. After pushback, now it's "soft power is good but USAID was inefficient".
I submit that neither of these arguments was presented in good faith and that your real goal is just defense of DOGE.
This is all debatably valid, except for the fact that the entrenched system produced massive fraud, money laundering, wagging-the-dog and worst of all, a decade of domestic propaganda and anti-democratic schemes in an attempt to protect the machine from widespread exposure.
Except all of that was widely recognized and reported on at the time. People just didn't care. Lots of people will argue about this stuff until they're blue in the face, but no one is "surprised" by any of the evidence. The malfeasance was going to happen anyway, it's an inevitable consequence of global realpolitik. There's no Rule of Law on the high seas, as it were.
My point really isn't that cynical, it's more optimistic: if you're going to do all that stuff (and let's be honest and admit upfront: we were 100% going to do all that stuff) you might as well feed a bunch of people and garner some good will along the way.
There's clearly a difference between "what about" as a distraction technique (introducing an unrelated argument to avoid having to defend the original) and pointing out the existence of a clearly related issue. This is "youforgotaboutism", if you must label it.
Basically: analysis of international relations and influence techniques can only be correct when it treats with the influence of all parties, and not just the US. You agree with that framing, right?
The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman.
Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.
The most compelling explanation for US soft power is balance of threat theory[0]. Soft power comes from you not being seen as a threat, and you being seen as a way to prevent other threats. Because above all, countries prioritize security.
The status quo in US foreign policy was that as long as you're pliable to US interests, then the US was nice to you. You get democracy and get bounded autonomy, more autonomy than was afforded to subjects under any previous empire, to the extent that people would question whether the US even was an empire. Despite US being incredibly powerful militarily, the US was seen as non-threatening to friendly countries. That was an incredible magic trick, since those two things are usually correlated. This drew countries into its orbit and expanded its influence.
Countries could see the contrast to being in the Soviet Union's orbit and having your grain stolen, your people getting kicked out (Crimea) or being put into a camp.
This theory is a way to conceptualize the problem with Trump's bellicose and volatile attitudes towards Canada and European countries. If everyone sees you as a threat, this theory predicts that they will balance against you. In concrete terms, this theory predicts that countries who aren't threatened by China (due to being far away) will become closer to China if they feel threatened by the US.
Very well put. As a Canadian, what I see is Trump's attitude gave the green card for Canadian politicians to take a stand, sacrifice short term goals for long terms strategies, and indeed, we end up seeing China as less dangerous comparatively, it being true or not. Trump made overt what was happening covertly (and also objectively hurt allied relationships).
"politically impossible" is giving up on Americans ability to perceive the national advantage as well as the moral good.
Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side.
This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.
> An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible.
I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.
Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.
> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.
Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.
> Another problem is the US is broke.
USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.
I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective. The justification outlined for USAID is that it was "softpower". While this is true, we have to admit it's limitations. As you said, it was only 45B. You don't shape the world with such small amount of money. So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID.
> I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective
By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?
> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID
That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.
It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.
The Belt and Road Initiative is reputed to be 7 times bigger than the Marshall plan in today's dollar. It's getting hard for the US to compete with that.
> It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.
So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?
It's quite likely that, sprinkled in among the idealistic helpers of the third world, were some number of CIA agents. For good or ill.
(the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)
It's also quite likely that the reincarnations of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Jesus are sprinkled among the same idealistic helpers.
> the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of...
...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you.
Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).
>All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives.
You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor.
It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot.
It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.
Taking those line items at face value is just a bunch of Dunning-Kruger. The government isn't like a tech company with a single product that can be understood well by one person. It produces many thousands of different specialized products and services.
When the National Partnership for Reinventing Government successfully cut spending in the 90s, they took 5 years to carefully evaluate what the government was doing and why, followed legal processes to propose improvements, and saved a lot of money simply by finding ways to streamline processes and procedures.
DOGE has taken a completely different approach, slashing and burning without understanding the consequences of their actions (or potentially, not caring), and intentionally doing it without involving other stakeholders. Many of the things they've cut that they thought were stupid were immediately found to be important and reversed. Some of the other things they’ve cut we’ll be finding were important for decades to come.
Pretty much every example of flagrant waste I've seen brought up by DOGE -- regardless of how insane the line item sounded -- actually ended up reading as more and more valuable the more I read about it.
Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.
Government spending and the deficit has increased by approximately $800 billion since Trump came into office. It certainly hasn't gone down. Weird that none of the DOGE apologists seem to care anymore. Trump adding billions of dollars to the deficit in increased military spending in 2026? Not a peep.
Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless.
But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink.
The whole thing is a sham. The real purpose of DOGE is to enact radical ideological changes that Congress has been unwilling to implement, by strategically sabotaging parts of the executive branch that the Heritage Foundation has a problem with.
Was the statement that over 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?
It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.
> 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?
Yes, in as much as that is a nonsense phrase meant to sound bad. If USAID buys wheat from American farmers, the money stays in the US and the wheat is exported.
add the recent public meeting with CA Gov's office in San Francisco, delivering 9 figures of new money to the homeless situation in CA.. with Democrat figures emphatically and pointedly declaring all the money legitimate and accountable.. at the very same moment that news headlines are showing court documents of the opposite at a large scale in multiple jurisdictions .. mostly Los Angeles to be clear
#--
Governor Gavin Newsom met with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on January 16, 2026, to announce over $419 million in new state funding for homelessness and mental health efforts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The funding comes from the sixth round of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program and includes $39.9 million for San Francisco to support shelter operations, navigation centers, and services through June 2029.
If anyone believes that USAID was primarily foreign aid, then they have fallen for the lie.
If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.
The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.
This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen end up also not getting any credit to the institutions and regulators, so on the budget it feels (to uninformed voters) that these departments are simply wasting taxpayer money.
> This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
> On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen […]
Michael Lewis (of The Big Short fame) has two books on the things that government(s) do that no one else (often) can, either because they're too big, too expensive/unprofitable, or a co-ordination problem where it effects many actors simultaneously:
I haven't read _Who is Government_ yet (in spite of the fact that it has a better title!) but _The Fifth Risk_ was a fantastically illuminating paradigm-shifting read for me.
"What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?"
> This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
This is one of the more frustrating things working in SRE/ops/infra. Yes, if you have really good metrics and monitoring you can show to some egghead exec that might care that your numbers are improving - but lots of times that visibility doesn't exist, or no one cares very much. I've been advised more than once in my career to just "let it break" so when I come to fix it after I had warned about it breaking, it makes me more visible, when I easily could have prevented it in the first place. This mindset is rampant, in my own career anyway. I think it's really idiotic.
Thank you for reminding me of Y2K! It's the perfect example of what happens when you forget about the people keeping things together.
My team and I worked really hard for several years to make sure that Y2K didn't have any effect, or at least a dramatically downsized one. It worked but I did hear from several people that they were annoyed that we spent so much money, time, and resources on something that turned out to be "not that big of a deal". Arrrgggghh!!
> The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
> I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
It's a problem with libertarian thinking, generally. Most of the things libertarians rail against exist for good reason, and the libertarian "solution" is actually the thing that already failed in the past.
Your typical libertarian becomes one by reading a ~300 page propaganda book as a teenager or young adult that outlines the problems with Soviet central planning, adds in some legitimate gripes about present-day government rough edges, then lays out a compellingly-neat libertarian free-market fantasy. It's very black and white, offering a stark, false choice between Soviet central planning or minimal government libertarianism.
It doesn't prompt anyone to think about history before the complained about government functions arose: e.g. how was food and drug safety before the FDA? How did that work out for the people then? Were people really better off being able to buy radium water to try to cure what ails them?
It's also very selective. I've never seen any libertarian advocate the abolition of all the government bureaucracy and regulation that protect property rights.
They fired a lot of people at the FDA and also deliberately made it harder for the FDA to regulate. That is likely to cause problems for our food and medicine supply, the FDA has been the world standard for a long time.
The true purpose of DOGE was to exfiltrate sensitive data from the IRS, SSA, Medicaid, and other agencies. We may never know what all they have done/are doing with it, but it's certainly playing a role in the current immigration crackdowns.
Long term it will affect us all, likely more than the cuts the news prefers to focus on (tragic though they may be).
Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending (especially spending viewed as ideological) doing far more harm than good?
Government salaries are such a small percentage (less than 5% is what I'm seeing in cursory searches) of spending that it doesnt make a lot of sense to me that DOGE was a genuine attempt at cutting spending. I work in defense, and at least a few times a year, I see government contract money that could pay a dozen salaries wasted on equipment that never even gets installed. We have a government bought tool that cost $2million 8 years ago, and we plug it in when senators come tour our facility so we can pretend we use it. If anyone in the government cared about reducing costs, I don't think they would care too much about payroll. Its the equivalent of taking all the appliances out of your house because your electric bill was $200 when you take home $5k.
I won't pretend to know what the actual motives were, but financial "efficiency" seems suspect to me.
Doge did far more than cutting salaries, the salary cutting was almost entirely voluntary and actually a tiny fraction of what they were cutting. Mostly it actually is third party contracts being cut. You can see all the contracts being cut here: https://doge.gov/
Please don’t cite doge itself as if it’s a reliable source.
Citing doge as a source shows that your viewpoint is built on provenly bad info.
And Frankly it’s insulting to HN readers that it’s being cited given how well published it was that their estimates were grossly inflated, unreliable, and kept trying to claim credit for cutting things that were already ended.
Doge has not been proven unreliable anywhere I've seen, if you have data to show that please provide it. I have seen the kind of anti-doge news articles you are referring to but if you viewed the authors of those articles it was always folks who post entirely anti-elon or anti-republican articles like they are an attack ad placed by the democrat party and were debunked quickly.
Okay… well it was extensively reported like everywhere so I don’t know what you’ve been doing but it’s sure not reading the NYT, NPR, CBS or the similar.
Okay so you somehow haven’t seen any of the many many accounts of doge being extremely unreliable but today you’ve seen people tell you they are unreliable.
After hearing that, to you, surprising new info did you consider googling it or cross check it in anyway before replying?
have you so much as tried googling “are doge estimates reliable?” After hearing other people call them into question?
Anyway here’s the AI google summary for you to get you started:
Based on analyses of the "wall of receipts" posted by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in early 2025, their savings estimates are not considered reliable by budget experts, government contractors, and media outlets. Investigations have revealed that the claimed savings are heavily overstated, often misleading, and sometimes factually incorrect.
DOGE already address all of those political hit piece articles. The claims made in them were spurious such as that they could not use the full amount of the contract. DOGE addressed this criticism by saying over 99% of contracts end up fulfilling their full amount. I'd be wary of what you read in the news especially when it relates to politics. Those news sites even thought Elon Musk was saluting a long dead genocidal maniac when he waved to the crowd - but specifically only Elon Musk and not any other person who made similar waves - why would that be?
Tesla is a meme stock and will one day explode like a game of hot potato.
Going online and defending every poor decision musk makes won’t change the reality that these days musk is a drugged out buffoon with a penchant for white nationalism who pays people to cheat at videos games for him.
His main selling point these days is how He has a loyal core group of cheerleaders that sticks with him no matter what. It’s prolonging the inevitable.
I was talking to an applications engineer one night at the bar in a restaurant. The company he works for makes equipment for mass producing the large armament shell cylinders. One of the clients that bought their equipment was a missile manufacturer. He went on site and found the machine had incorrect tolerance and was producing deformed products. They also lied about the thickness of the material they planed on using. Finally when the DOD general asked him point blank, "Will this help us produce X missiles a year?" he said no and why. Turns out the contractor directly lied about their capability and yet retained the contact because they are one of the few companies that produces missiles. He never got a call back from the company because they wanted him to lie to the general.
This is the actual waste that needs to be looked before the checks are even signed. No way in hell DOGE or anyone in the current administration will actually look at bad spending. Specially now this administration likes the name Department of War. These are the same companies that bribe ... I mean donate to politicians to retain this corrupt funding.
Israel wouldn't take the Bradley Fighting vehicle because this know it was bad just by looking at it but the Pentagon doubled down and flawed designs.
Reminds me not to get tunnel focused with-in a company and keep looking around to see what outsiders are doing.
The talk about the AR-15 being flawed but not why. 1) Sold as a firearm that did not need to be cleaned and maintained which is 100% false. 2) It was a gas based system that push the debris in the barrow into the chamber. This is why Vietnam solders would place condoms over the end of the barrow. It took years to move it to the gas piston system which people use now.
> Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
I think this is obvious. It was one of many goals, that aligned under an umbrella of activities. Asking for specific data creates a paper trail and triggers regulation. Restricting access, taking outright possession of hardware, and firing people along the way, helps shield the activity.
> Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending
aka "Aww shucks, we were just doin our best."
No rational organization would take many of the actions that were taken, if one of their primary goals was accountability. It was a smash and grab (disorganized would be fair to say), with an ad-hoc rationalization that was never reasoned.
There definitely has been a pattern of shoddy behavior, but it's been difficult to find a smoking gun of DOGE exfiltrating the data at many agencies. I am looking to see if there are more revelations to come out of DOGE's activities at SSA for instance.
That said, lack of evidence isn't necessarily exonerating. DOGE's MO has often been to take over the CIO and/or front office of the agency to ensure there is nothing to monitor them. It's basically like if the CEO of the bank sends all the security guards home and lets robbers in through the side door. You can't prove they took anything necessarily (my bank metaphor falls flat here, because data can be copied but if money were stolen, you could count it), but also it IS often shady as hell too.
This has been unfortunately necessary since DOGE has worked to really avoid any transparency or accountability. If FOIA or legal filings have more information, I do add them, but I always provide the source citation for you to know.
Isn't that the point? That the oversight of DOGE is so bad that the only way to get information about its operations is through online news? Banana republic level of state behavior.
It's probably just sourcing data from doge.gov which already lists every single thing doge is cutting. This "tracking" website is just a way to add a democrat slant toa republican led project. This version literally starts with "tracking the damage" as their sub-header slogan.
Far from it. There has already been ample reporting on how inflated and distorted DOGE's savings are (for instance, they made rudimentary errors in understanding how blanket purchase agreements work and also counted the whole amounts of contracts as savings when they canceled ones that were already mostly disbursed). You can probably search for coverage by ProPublica or David Farenthold if you want to see what I mean, but I would guess you don't want to.
Instead, I have been focusing my efforts on tracking DOGE's staffing in agencies and their activities and system access there. DOGE has not been transparent at all. Rather, they have abused the Vacancies Act and government detailing to hide their activities and skirt many of the laws around government ethics, privacy and data security in the process. And they have been doing a lot of damage in the process, claiming to be doing "IT Modernization" but doing many things outside of the scope of the Executive Order that established them and also the separation of powers that gives Congress the power over appropriations.
>okay? Why are you browsing my comment history lol
Why not? That's kind of the whole point of having accounts here on HN. To create an environment where folks can discuss stuff in good faith. Posting history is public because the posts were public in the first place and they represent who you are (or present yourself to be) on the site.
It allows each of us to be authentically 'us'. Do you not stand by the things you've posted in the past four plus years?
If you do, why do you care if people are looking at your posting history?
If you don't stand by what you've written here in the past, you're likely not posting in good faith.
Either way, why are you concerned about folks looking at the stuff you've publicly posted in the past?
Do i seem concerned? You are the one whose only reply to my post was to my history rather than addressing the topic. I stand by all of those things, its just odd that you would be so concerned with that.
There is a lot of philosophical manoeuvring here but a common argument is that governments aren't supposed to be so much efficient as effective. It's not about maximising use of resources, but maximising outcomes. Companies already provide the efficiency angle in society, governments are there to provide a counter-balance. If we try to run governments as companies then we might as well not have governments at all.
I've heard of one professor summarizing it as "would you want to take an airplane flight that has only exactly the amount of fuel needed to get to your destination? What about if the fuselage didn't have any extra rivets? Really, you need more than one engine?"
Maximizing efficiency is a canard when government is supposed to be there as a backstop for disasters and economic downturns. Unlike businesses, governments can't choose who they serve as customers, and often have to be there for the neediest and most vulnerable. The Founders understood this (there are several states that call themselves Commonwealths for instance), but a strident faction has been trying to replace "we're all in this together" with "you're on your own, sucker"
Absolutely it can be done, but this kind of slash and burn cuts from people who come in from outside and have no understanding of how anything works are always going to be counterproductive.
Yeah, I didn't mean them. They were not doing this.
Typically those that take the slash and burn approach are trying to break things yes - in the UK is has generally come from those with a small government agenda who want to break things to justify privatizing them or scrapping them altogether.
Basic knowledge of civic history and political science makes this point very salient. Anyone with a clue would know this from the beginning - that's why it was so terrifying to see what actually was motivating people, feels like the ultimate recipe for unchecked power and disaster with bad actors employing fools to do their bidding.
So we shouldn’t try? Just let the budget expand forever?
If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts (without stopping with the yearly increases they already get). That would make it similar to many businesses, and force the management at the agencies to actually figure out how to do things efficiently.
Of course, people would whine incessantly as we saw with DOGE the second those cuts hit a program where the media can cause an uproar about hungry children or health programs or whatever.
> If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts
It'd be better to audit them to make sure that the money was being used smartly and that those agencies were accomplishing what there were created for. Arbitrary cuts would mean that agencies that were well functioning and lean would be suddenly unable to do the job we've been paying them for and it could encourage them to push for more funding than they need just so that they can survive the random cuts every 5-10 years.
We don't need to intentionally cause a crisis that will impact the lives of Americans who depend on the services their taxes fund. There are smarter ways to identify waste and hold accountable any people mismanaging funds. Government shouldn't be run like business, but honestly I'd also question the wisdom of companies who acted that way.
Auditing won’t cause them to fire their workers that aren’t doing a great job.
I don’t say it should be crisis level, but tightening the belt from time to time would force them to find efficiencies. Right now they have absolutely no incentive to do so because they have no competition and no impetus to.
It sounds like you are proposing some of the oversight already done by the Government Accountability Office.
I hear where you are coming from, but the whole point of the Constitution is that a king does not get to determine how the budget is allocated. Congress has the sole power of the purse, and the responsibility and blame for how money is appropriated belongs there. Congress could potentially enact measures lke this to sunset expenditures unless they are re-authorized, but I think that would likely turn out to be a chaotic disaster in its own right, given that Congress currently is struggling to pass budgets.
In any event, I think hungry children is a problem, and I don't need the media to tell me that, so that's my perspective.
The federal workforce shrunk by 20% under Clinton and it wasn't a clusterfuck like doge. Just like the tariffs situation this administration only hires incompetent sycophants and clowns and are unable to do anything anything correctly.
The US also had a relatively very small government overall compared to many other countries and variably multiple areas are extremely under-resourced like product and worker health and safety generally.
Yep. Governments, by virtue of being the functional backstop on all possible negative outcomes, necessarily runs with enormous slack. The ones that do not simply break under stress and they're replaced over and over until a government emerges that figures out that extreme efficiency is a liability.
Not to mention the US government in particular was quite literally deliberately designed to be inefficient as a way to safeguard personal liberties as well.
Not to say we shouldn't cut inefficiencies where we can, but the early DOGE promises were obviously made from a place of profound ignorance and (worse) lack of curiosity.
Oh great, I was really hoping to get my blood boiling today. Reading about data breaches done in the light of day is appalling, infinitely more so when it's condoned by the government who's supposed to prevent such grift and violations of privacy. It will take a long time to recover from this insane timeline (if ever).
Just today I ran into one of the very minor legacies of doge. When talking about conflict styles I used to have students take a survey on the US Institute of Peace's website. Doge shut it down. I guess that survey was taking up too much money to run... Now the only thing there is a press release stroking Trump's ego.
It is biased. I do not think we can "both sides" the impact of DOGE here and I think the site makes its case for why it should be seen as a destructive force.
It calls DOGE workers "wreckers" and it lists all the staffers related with the DOGE project with a detailed description of how they're related and what they've done recently. They even have a page just for revealing anonymous staffers in court documents: https://dogetrack.info/people/aliases/
I agree DOGE is destructive but is it productive to reveal all the names and history of every staffer, contractor, lawyer, etc... related to the DOGE project?
The above is why I see it as "biased and emotionally charged".
This website very well could've gone without the extensive list of people related. Which is why I see this as more of a harassment list.
Doge.gov already has the most transparent listing of everything they are cutting. This other website that starts out its header with "Tracking The Damage" is clearly a biased attempt by democrats to discredit a program that was started by republicans. It's actually kind of sad people don't realize that the two-party system involves tribalism where no matter how good something is, the other side will call it bad if it wasn't their idea.
I haven’t looked at it in almost a year, but was that the site that was full of basic errors and misleading info that was clearly designed to expose “waste, fraud, and abuse” that actually wasn’t any of those things? Yeah, I don’t know why we wouldn’t trust them…
Most things are clearly linked to the contracts themselves with descriptions. Waste is a broad term and things like DEI or many more definitely fall into that category. Imagine spending billions of dollars on your HR department for the specific purposes of DEI without any tangible return on the investment. Its definitely wasteful and at most corruption. Discretionary funds for things like 'payroll' were being used to fund a very specific political ideology that aligned with one political party and congress did not authorize the use in that manner, which is why they were able to cut it so easily.
The article refers to the DOGE employees as "bros" and "chucklefucks" throughout and says things like "as far as i can tell" when describing their history. This is clearly biased and not a real article - more like a forum post from a 4channer.
I think it is really important from time to time to shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives and form a somewhat subjective overpromise/underdeliver judgement (also looking at where, why and how they succeeded or failed).
To me, the whole Doge initiative scores quite poorly in this regard:
Initial promises appear not realistic (or even worse: deceptive), while the (preliminary) results are lackluster, too.
My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
I think promises along that exact line deserve extreme skepticism: "Simply" slashing regulations/public budget for "easy gains" is just not credible, and if anyone is gonna bring up the same arguments in favor of nuclear power or similar things I'm just gonna label them "liar/idiot" and watch reality endorse my view...
If you wanted to do this for real, your would double the size of 18F (which was doing extraordinary work), and given the Inspectors General a blank check to eliminate fraud. These are both apolitical entities. Frankly the only people this would upset is the legacy government contractors.
So obviously they eliminated one and gutted the other.
Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization
I don't know how into building organizations you are, but 18f succeeded. they had a small footprint, and outsized impact, and really good relationships with the rest of the government. That kind of effectiveness is really difficult to grow in a massive bureaucracy. If your goal is efficiency you try to nurture that success.
throwing it away and starting over for purely political reasons is a completely negative outcome. the best you could hope for is to replicate what it was, but odds are against you.
18F was founded during the Obama administration, so absolutely no one in MAGA-world will ever have considered it apolitical.
One of the many fired IGs last year was investigating Neurolink - so noone in Musk-world will have considered them apolitical either.
Nothing government-related or government-adjacent will ever be broadly accepted as apolitical again in the US, regardless of intent or truth. Its very depressing.
> My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
That doesn’t seem inferior at all. There’s very little to be gained by doing everything the same but with less money; the only way to make an actual difference is to quit doing the stupid shit that’s expensive. That’s what 90% of the world means by efficiency, i.e. don’t do the things that don’t need done.
> shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives
You could take a good will attitude to DOGE then. I think many (including Elon) genuinely believed they could cut fraud and waste. But by their own admission, they were only mostly an advisory committee.
You can only do so much. Congress still has authority, and that's how it works, that's how the system is intended. And the reason DOGE hasn't done much is exactly because congress isn't willing to cut spending. It NEVER will. It didn't under any president including Reagan.
So basically you have an ever increasing deficit and spending because the way the political system is setup drives this. In fact, it happens in basically every democracy, so maybe it's just something that happens in democracies.
So - you could call the promise of DOGE lies, but I think they were a lie from Trump and not Elon. I think Trump promised Elon cuts, to get his help in the election, then backtracked, and that's exactly why Elon stormed out, he didn't get what he wanted.
And the US government is still massively overspending. Trump didn't really cut anything.
But needs some overall graphic, some charts or something, to tell a story. Something like dollars spent versus saved, to show how this whole effort was in-efficient.
And. I'd like to see something similar for Project 2025.
The problem with Doge was not that it was inefficient.... It's that it damaged a whole lot of essential infrastructure, exfiltrated a bunch of data, and generally destabilized a lot of essential systems.
Doing so but more efficiently would not have improved it.
I decided to not tackle the lies about "savings" because the math was so bad and it was quite frankly being covered much better by other organizations and sites. I also don't want to perpetuate the idea that this was about efficiency, since that and "IT Modernization" were more like a cover for DOGE's other activities.
I would like to add more graphics and charts, but I have been struggling a lot with how murky and noisy the data is. Charts communicate a certainty that I don't feel entirely comfortable presenting. One possibility might be to use them for timelines (like I do for the CIOs on the Enablers page), but if you have other suggestions, I'm always open to hear them! Thanks!
DOGE has no power. It produces information. Is the premise of this page that information about government operations is bad? If the goal is to persuade somebody that government should grow with no oversight forever, good luck. Democrats will read the site with horror. Republicans will cheer the accomplishments listed. People in neither camp probably won't pay attention, but if they do, they'll split down the middle.
Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, MbS, Netanyahu, Berdimuhamedow, and much of the worldwide pedophile oligarch class are celebrating all of their various, ascendant authoritarian restoration of de facto criminal aristocracy in multiple countries. Fascism rarely leaves peacefully once it takes hold.
Putting everything that DOGE has done, am I the only one who thinks that there is a teeny, tiny conflict of interest in Musk naming a department pretty much the same as one of the cryptocurrencies that he supports (Dogecoin)? Isn't that using the government for marketing?
Yes, when you set aside Musk buying Twitter and using it to platform white supremacists and extremists to help get Trump elected in exchange for benefits to his companies and direct control over private regulatory and financial data that allowed him to gain potential advantage over his competition and punish his enemies, naming your fake government office after your memecoin is also a problem.
People probably don't focus on that because it's the least worst aspect of any of this. Also the President of the United States rugpulled the public on two memecoins and wiped out $4 billion, and no one talks about that either.
Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. And to set a price floor for agricultural products.
1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.
2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget
3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.
4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.
> 1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.
That's... pretty much a good definition of soft power, and frankly not even a cynical one. Your argument presupposes a world where "clandestine infra" and whatnot simply wouldn't happen if we didn't do it. But obviously it would, it would just serve someone else's interests.
And fine, you think the cold war US was bad, clearly. And maybe it was, but it was better (for the US, but also for the world as a whole) than the alternatives at the time, and it remains so today. China's international aspirations are significantly more impactful (c.f. Taiwan policy, shipping zone violations throughout the pacific rim, denial of access to internal markets, straight up literal genocide in at least one instance) and constrained now only by US "soft power".
The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S., just a highly visible one.
Besides security guarantees/defense aegis, the heaviest lifters in U.S. soft power projection are structural and cultural forces that operate largely independent of government:
- Dollar hegemony & financial infra
- Cultural exports
- Universities & research
- Private sector (including tech)
I'm somewhat ignorant on this subject (by design, my mental health cannot afford too much pondering on that which I cannot control)
but in this instance I can't help but wonder from a game theory standpoint, is there anything GAINED by affecting USAID in a way in which we clearly lose some (relatively small per your comment) amount of soft power?
That is to say, a perfectly played game would involve not making any sacrifices unless it was to gain some value or reduce some loss. What is gained (or not lost) here?
Two games: Domestic and Foreign
Domestic 'gain' is fiscal + political + transparency. USAID was pass-through where taxpayer dollars flowed to NGOs and contractors whose missions aligned with whatever administration or congressional bloc was in power – but with enough layers of separation to obscure the nature of the spending.
Foreign 'gain' is a move away from liberal internationalism to transactional bilateralism/resetting expectations wrt American largesse. We were being outbid everywhere anyway, and the org was ineffectively doing something DoS should be doing.
Local producers cant compete with the aid (nor in trade). The same scheme China runs in the west. On the receiving end you not just stop development but you actively shut down what you had and forget how to do it.
I feel like currently, all four of those points you raised have also been significantly eroded too, and will continue to be for the following decades - countries seem to be rolling back US tech, contracts, dollars, and less people are going to the US for study.
Yes, USAID was only one part of US soft power. Everything else you have listed though, the destructionists have done effective jobs of trashing those as well!
In a thread about USAID it makes sense to talk about the damage to USAID. If these other pillars of soft power matter more to you, then try writing productive comments lamenting their destruction rather than downplaying in this discussion.
>> The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
> USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S.
And the goalposts move again. Your original point was that soft power was bad. After pushback, now it's "soft power is good but USAID was inefficient".
I submit that neither of these arguments was presented in good faith and that your real goal is just defense of DOGE.
This is all debatably valid, except for the fact that the entrenched system produced massive fraud, money laundering, wagging-the-dog and worst of all, a decade of domestic propaganda and anti-democratic schemes in an attempt to protect the machine from widespread exposure.
Except all of that was widely recognized and reported on at the time. People just didn't care. Lots of people will argue about this stuff until they're blue in the face, but no one is "surprised" by any of the evidence. The malfeasance was going to happen anyway, it's an inevitable consequence of global realpolitik. There's no Rule of Law on the high seas, as it were.
My point really isn't that cynical, it's more optimistic: if you're going to do all that stuff (and let's be honest and admit upfront: we were 100% going to do all that stuff) you might as well feed a bunch of people and garner some good will along the way.
> The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
If you believe this, why did you just go "well, what about China?"
There's clearly a difference between "what about" as a distraction technique (introducing an unrelated argument to avoid having to defend the original) and pointing out the existence of a clearly related issue. This is "youforgotaboutism", if you must label it.
Basically: analysis of international relations and influence techniques can only be correct when it treats with the influence of all parties, and not just the US. You agree with that framing, right?
The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman.
Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.
> With a 6% of the GDP deficit
This isn't a problem if the money is well spent.
The problem is that a very small fraction of the money is being spent on anything that can reasonably be considered "an investment".
The most compelling explanation for US soft power is balance of threat theory[0]. Soft power comes from you not being seen as a threat, and you being seen as a way to prevent other threats. Because above all, countries prioritize security.
The status quo in US foreign policy was that as long as you're pliable to US interests, then the US was nice to you. You get democracy and get bounded autonomy, more autonomy than was afforded to subjects under any previous empire, to the extent that people would question whether the US even was an empire. Despite US being incredibly powerful militarily, the US was seen as non-threatening to friendly countries. That was an incredible magic trick, since those two things are usually correlated. This drew countries into its orbit and expanded its influence.
Countries could see the contrast to being in the Soviet Union's orbit and having your grain stolen, your people getting kicked out (Crimea) or being put into a camp.
This theory is a way to conceptualize the problem with Trump's bellicose and volatile attitudes towards Canada and European countries. If everyone sees you as a threat, this theory predicts that they will balance against you. In concrete terms, this theory predicts that countries who aren't threatened by China (due to being far away) will become closer to China if they feel threatened by the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_threat
Very well put. As a Canadian, what I see is Trump's attitude gave the green card for Canadian politicians to take a stand, sacrifice short term goals for long terms strategies, and indeed, we end up seeing China as less dangerous comparatively, it being true or not. Trump made overt what was happening covertly (and also objectively hurt allied relationships).
"politically impossible" is giving up on Americans ability to perceive the national advantage as well as the moral good.
Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side.
This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.
"You'll never go broke betting against the american people" -Matthew Cushman
> An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible.
I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.
Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.
> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.
Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.
> Another problem is the US is broke.
USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.
I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective. The justification outlined for USAID is that it was "softpower". While this is true, we have to admit it's limitations. As you said, it was only 45B. You don't shape the world with such small amount of money. So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID.
> I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective
By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?
> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID
That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.
It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.
The Belt and Road Initiative is reputed to be 7 times bigger than the Marshall plan in today's dollar. It's getting hard for the US to compete with that.
> It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.
So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?
What do you think is the moral thing to do here?
What polls are your referring to? Can you cite any?
It's quite likely that, sprinkled in among the idealistic helpers of the third world, were some number of CIA agents. For good or ill.
(the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)
USAID is considered instrumental in ending Apartheid in South Africa.
Given the timeline of the Musk family's arrival and departure... one might believe they viewed the end of Apartheid as a bit troublesome.
It's also quite likely that the reincarnations of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Jesus are sprinkled among the same idealistic helpers.
> the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of...
...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you.
Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).
It's how we found Osama Bin Laden. CIA posing as Doctors Without Borders going door-to-door pretending to vaccinate locals.
They actually did vaccinations until they found him and then quit, leaving a bunch of people with only the first dose.
And a complete distrust for Doctors Without Borders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...
>It's how we found Osama Bin Laden.
>The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden.
Your cite disagrees
Well, damn. Things I read before implied it worked and they'd keep committing the same f*ckery. Like vaccine denial isn't bad enough already. =[
Do you have any source for any of this?
NPOs are traditional places for CIA agents.
Tends to make them targets of suspicion.
Source: My father[0] was in the CIA, and worked at an NPO, in Africa.
[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm
>Increasingly, he found his cover work more engaging and important than his intelligence-gathering.
Your father was a great man.
Agreed. He left the CIA, because they became something he couldn't reconcile with himself.
If nothing else, the "Political Operations Abroad" section of USAID's wiki has some links and background.
Source for Top Secret info? No, but I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_... (not USAID, a different organization)
If you don't mind listening to right-wing adjacent commentators, Mike Benz document those links extensively on his podcast. For exemple:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR09YYX-3fg
>All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives.
You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor.
It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot.
It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.
>it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives
A check of pretty much any UN vote shows that this was a completely and utterly ineffective method then.
Example: https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overw...
Did you look at specifically some of the items the money was being wasted on?
Let me guess. Was it the "trans surgery for immigrants"
Taking those line items at face value is just a bunch of Dunning-Kruger. The government isn't like a tech company with a single product that can be understood well by one person. It produces many thousands of different specialized products and services.
When the National Partnership for Reinventing Government successfully cut spending in the 90s, they took 5 years to carefully evaluate what the government was doing and why, followed legal processes to propose improvements, and saved a lot of money simply by finding ways to streamline processes and procedures.
DOGE has taken a completely different approach, slashing and burning without understanding the consequences of their actions (or potentially, not caring), and intentionally doing it without involving other stakeholders. Many of the things they've cut that they thought were stupid were immediately found to be important and reversed. Some of the other things they’ve cut we’ll be finding were important for decades to come.
DOGE is just Chesterton’s Fence as a service.
Pretty much every example of flagrant waste I've seen brought up by DOGE -- regardless of how insane the line item sounded -- actually ended up reading as more and more valuable the more I read about it.
Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.
Government spending and the deficit has increased by approximately $800 billion since Trump came into office. It certainly hasn't gone down. Weird that none of the DOGE apologists seem to care anymore. Trump adding billions of dollars to the deficit in increased military spending in 2026? Not a peep.
Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless.
But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink.
[0]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886840365329608708
The whole thing is a sham. The real purpose of DOGE is to enact radical ideological changes that Congress has been unwilling to implement, by strategically sabotaging parts of the executive branch that the Heritage Foundation has a problem with.
That and to funnel more private data held by the government into private hands (and probably AI models)
+1 to all
DOGE was an exercise in vice signaling.
Which is a real shame because there was a real opportunity to inject a fresh set of eyes on what is surely a problem-rich environment.
It will unfortunately serve as discredit to all future efforts that look anything similar.
Was the statement that over 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?
It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.
> 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?
Yes, in as much as that is a nonsense phrase meant to sound bad. If USAID buys wheat from American farmers, the money stays in the US and the wheat is exported.
add the recent public meeting with CA Gov's office in San Francisco, delivering 9 figures of new money to the homeless situation in CA.. with Democrat figures emphatically and pointedly declaring all the money legitimate and accountable.. at the very same moment that news headlines are showing court documents of the opposite at a large scale in multiple jurisdictions .. mostly Los Angeles to be clear
#-- Governor Gavin Newsom met with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on January 16, 2026, to announce over $419 million in new state funding for homelessness and mental health efforts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The funding comes from the sixth round of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program and includes $39.9 million for San Francisco to support shelter operations, navigation centers, and services through June 2029.
If anyone believes that USAID was primarily foreign aid, then they have fallen for the lie.
If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.
> control their own destinies without interference from the US
Not on the menu. The question is do you want them controlled by the US or by China?
This much is true, like most things coming from Trump this move mainly benefited Russia and China while actively harming US interests.
The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.
This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen end up also not getting any credit to the institutions and regulators, so on the budget it feels (to uninformed voters) that these departments are simply wasting taxpayer money.
> This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
> On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen […]
Michael Lewis (of The Big Short fame) has two books on the things that government(s) do that no one else (often) can, either because they're too big, too expensive/unprofitable, or a co-ordination problem where it effects many actors simultaneously:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Risk
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788713/who-is-govern...
I haven't read _Who is Government_ yet (in spite of the fact that it has a better title!) but _The Fifth Risk_ was a fantastically illuminating paradigm-shifting read for me.
"What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?"
> This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
This is one of the more frustrating things working in SRE/ops/infra. Yes, if you have really good metrics and monitoring you can show to some egghead exec that might care that your numbers are improving - but lots of times that visibility doesn't exist, or no one cares very much. I've been advised more than once in my career to just "let it break" so when I come to fix it after I had warned about it breaking, it makes me more visible, when I easily could have prevented it in the first place. This mindset is rampant, in my own career anyway. I think it's really idiotic.
I'm looking forward to 2038.
After all, Y2K came and nothing happened. What a hoax! /s
Thank you for reminding me of Y2K! It's the perfect example of what happens when you forget about the people keeping things together.
My team and I worked really hard for several years to make sure that Y2K didn't have any effect, or at least a dramatically downsized one. It worked but I did hear from several people that they were annoyed that we spent so much money, time, and resources on something that turned out to be "not that big of a deal". Arrrgggghh!!
It's nicely timed that I can spend the last few years before my retirement charging people inflated amounts to convert int to long.
> The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
> I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
It's a problem with libertarian thinking, generally. Most of the things libertarians rail against exist for good reason, and the libertarian "solution" is actually the thing that already failed in the past.
Your typical libertarian becomes one by reading a ~300 page propaganda book as a teenager or young adult that outlines the problems with Soviet central planning, adds in some legitimate gripes about present-day government rough edges, then lays out a compellingly-neat libertarian free-market fantasy. It's very black and white, offering a stark, false choice between Soviet central planning or minimal government libertarianism.
It doesn't prompt anyone to think about history before the complained about government functions arose: e.g. how was food and drug safety before the FDA? How did that work out for the people then? Were people really better off being able to buy radium water to try to cure what ails them?
It's also very selective. I've never seen any libertarian advocate the abolition of all the government bureaucracy and regulation that protect property rights.
>The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet.
It's a neat trick to pull to say something is a terrible disaster but also that you won't show why and that's by design. Impossible to refute.
They fired a lot of people at the FDA and also deliberately made it harder for the FDA to regulate. That is likely to cause problems for our food and medicine supply, the FDA has been the world standard for a long time.
The true purpose of DOGE was to exfiltrate sensitive data from the IRS, SSA, Medicaid, and other agencies. We may never know what all they have done/are doing with it, but it's certainly playing a role in the current immigration crackdowns.
Long term it will affect us all, likely more than the cuts the news prefers to focus on (tragic though they may be).
Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending (especially spending viewed as ideological) doing far more harm than good?
Government salaries are such a small percentage (less than 5% is what I'm seeing in cursory searches) of spending that it doesnt make a lot of sense to me that DOGE was a genuine attempt at cutting spending. I work in defense, and at least a few times a year, I see government contract money that could pay a dozen salaries wasted on equipment that never even gets installed. We have a government bought tool that cost $2million 8 years ago, and we plug it in when senators come tour our facility so we can pretend we use it. If anyone in the government cared about reducing costs, I don't think they would care too much about payroll. Its the equivalent of taking all the appliances out of your house because your electric bill was $200 when you take home $5k.
I won't pretend to know what the actual motives were, but financial "efficiency" seems suspect to me.
Doge did far more than cutting salaries, the salary cutting was almost entirely voluntary and actually a tiny fraction of what they were cutting. Mostly it actually is third party contracts being cut. You can see all the contracts being cut here: https://doge.gov/
Please don’t cite doge itself as if it’s a reliable source.
Citing doge as a source shows that your viewpoint is built on provenly bad info.
And Frankly it’s insulting to HN readers that it’s being cited given how well published it was that their estimates were grossly inflated, unreliable, and kept trying to claim credit for cutting things that were already ended.
Doge has not been proven unreliable anywhere I've seen, if you have data to show that please provide it. I have seen the kind of anti-doge news articles you are referring to but if you viewed the authors of those articles it was always folks who post entirely anti-elon or anti-republican articles like they are an attack ad placed by the democrat party and were debunked quickly.
Okay… well it was extensively reported like everywhere so I don’t know what you’ve been doing but it’s sure not reading the NYT, NPR, CBS or the similar.
Okay so you somehow haven’t seen any of the many many accounts of doge being extremely unreliable but today you’ve seen people tell you they are unreliable.
After hearing that, to you, surprising new info did you consider googling it or cross check it in anyway before replying?
have you so much as tried googling “are doge estimates reliable?” After hearing other people call them into question?
Anyway here’s the AI google summary for you to get you started:
Based on analyses of the "wall of receipts" posted by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in early 2025, their savings estimates are not considered reliable by budget experts, government contractors, and media outlets. Investigations have revealed that the claimed savings are heavily overstated, often misleading, and sometimes factually incorrect.
DOGE already address all of those political hit piece articles. The claims made in them were spurious such as that they could not use the full amount of the contract. DOGE addressed this criticism by saying over 99% of contracts end up fulfilling their full amount. I'd be wary of what you read in the news especially when it relates to politics. Those news sites even thought Elon Musk was saluting a long dead genocidal maniac when he waved to the crowd - but specifically only Elon Musk and not any other person who made similar waves - why would that be?
Noice, defending musks hitler salute.
Tesla is a meme stock and will one day explode like a game of hot potato.
Going online and defending every poor decision musk makes won’t change the reality that these days musk is a drugged out buffoon with a penchant for white nationalism who pays people to cheat at videos games for him.
His main selling point these days is how He has a loyal core group of cheerleaders that sticks with him no matter what. It’s prolonging the inevitable.
Yep, he definitely was pledging allegiance to a long dead person while at the same time wearing a necklace honoring jews. yep. you got him.
I’ll defer to the majority of German newspapers - Germany is kind of an authority on this topic - it was a nazi salute.
The son of the apartheid, musk, even literally videoed in to Germany’s modern day extremist party, the afd, that same day.
Not a coincidence - musk is a racist white nationalist.
I was talking to an applications engineer one night at the bar in a restaurant. The company he works for makes equipment for mass producing the large armament shell cylinders. One of the clients that bought their equipment was a missile manufacturer. He went on site and found the machine had incorrect tolerance and was producing deformed products. They also lied about the thickness of the material they planed on using. Finally when the DOD general asked him point blank, "Will this help us produce X missiles a year?" he said no and why. Turns out the contractor directly lied about their capability and yet retained the contact because they are one of the few companies that produces missiles. He never got a call back from the company because they wanted him to lie to the general.
This is the actual waste that needs to be looked before the checks are even signed. No way in hell DOGE or anyone in the current administration will actually look at bad spending. Specially now this administration likes the name Department of War. These are the same companies that bribe ... I mean donate to politicians to retain this corrupt funding.
There's an old HBO movie called "The Pentagon Wars" that's worth checking out
I have and watched it about four months ago.
Israel wouldn't take the Bradley Fighting vehicle because this know it was bad just by looking at it but the Pentagon doubled down and flawed designs.
Reminds me not to get tunnel focused with-in a company and keep looking around to see what outsiders are doing.
The talk about the AR-15 being flawed but not why. 1) Sold as a firearm that did not need to be cleaned and maintained which is 100% false. 2) It was a gas based system that push the debris in the barrow into the chamber. This is why Vietnam solders would place condoms over the end of the barrow. It took years to move it to the gas piston system which people use now.
> Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
I think this is obvious. It was one of many goals, that aligned under an umbrella of activities. Asking for specific data creates a paper trail and triggers regulation. Restricting access, taking outright possession of hardware, and firing people along the way, helps shield the activity.
> Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending
aka "Aww shucks, we were just doin our best."
No rational organization would take many of the actions that were taken, if one of their primary goals was accountability. It was a smash and grab (disorganized would be fair to say), with an ad-hoc rationalization that was never reasoned.
>Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
To hide the true purpose behind a curtain of "aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending".
No, because there is evidence DOGE did exfiltrate a vast amount of data, illegally, and gave it to Palantir and possibly others.
Maybe they were naive and useful idiots, but that doesn't just happen by accident.
There definitely has been a pattern of shoddy behavior, but it's been difficult to find a smoking gun of DOGE exfiltrating the data at many agencies. I am looking to see if there are more revelations to come out of DOGE's activities at SSA for instance.
That said, lack of evidence isn't necessarily exonerating. DOGE's MO has often been to take over the CIO and/or front office of the agency to ensure there is nothing to monitor them. It's basically like if the CEO of the bank sends all the security guards home and lets robbers in through the side door. You can't prove they took anything necessarily (my bank metaphor falls flat here, because data can be copied but if money were stolen, you could count it), but also it IS often shady as hell too.
This is a conspiracy theory
I like the layout of this site. However I feel it should be stated more prominently that the primary source of data are online news articles.
This has been unfortunately necessary since DOGE has worked to really avoid any transparency or accountability. If FOIA or legal filings have more information, I do add them, but I always provide the source citation for you to know.
Isn't that the point? That the oversight of DOGE is so bad that the only way to get information about its operations is through online news? Banana republic level of state behavior.
It's probably just sourcing data from doge.gov which already lists every single thing doge is cutting. This "tracking" website is just a way to add a democrat slant toa republican led project. This version literally starts with "tracking the damage" as their sub-header slogan.
Far from it. There has already been ample reporting on how inflated and distorted DOGE's savings are (for instance, they made rudimentary errors in understanding how blanket purchase agreements work and also counted the whole amounts of contracts as savings when they canceled ones that were already mostly disbursed). You can probably search for coverage by ProPublica or David Farenthold if you want to see what I mean, but I would guess you don't want to.
Instead, I have been focusing my efforts on tracking DOGE's staffing in agencies and their activities and system access there. DOGE has not been transparent at all. Rather, they have abused the Vacancies Act and government detailing to hide their activities and skirt many of the laws around government ethics, privacy and data security in the process. And they have been doing a lot of damage in the process, claiming to be doing "IT Modernization" but doing many things outside of the scope of the Executive Order that established them and also the separation of powers that gives Congress the power over appropriations.
Judging by your comment history, you might be Elon Musk's fiercest warrior!
okay? Why are you browsing my comment history lol
>okay? Why are you browsing my comment history lol
Why not? That's kind of the whole point of having accounts here on HN. To create an environment where folks can discuss stuff in good faith. Posting history is public because the posts were public in the first place and they represent who you are (or present yourself to be) on the site.
It allows each of us to be authentically 'us'. Do you not stand by the things you've posted in the past four plus years?
If you do, why do you care if people are looking at your posting history?
If you don't stand by what you've written here in the past, you're likely not posting in good faith.
Either way, why are you concerned about folks looking at the stuff you've publicly posted in the past?
Do i seem concerned? You are the one whose only reply to my post was to my history rather than addressing the topic. I stand by all of those things, its just odd that you would be so concerned with that.
To me improving "government efficieny" is unattainable for large states. Who claims to achieve this is a fool or a bad actor.
There is a lot of philosophical manoeuvring here but a common argument is that governments aren't supposed to be so much efficient as effective. It's not about maximising use of resources, but maximising outcomes. Companies already provide the efficiency angle in society, governments are there to provide a counter-balance. If we try to run governments as companies then we might as well not have governments at all.
I've heard of one professor summarizing it as "would you want to take an airplane flight that has only exactly the amount of fuel needed to get to your destination? What about if the fuselage didn't have any extra rivets? Really, you need more than one engine?"
Maximizing efficiency is a canard when government is supposed to be there as a backstop for disasters and economic downturns. Unlike businesses, governments can't choose who they serve as customers, and often have to be there for the neediest and most vulnerable. The Founders understood this (there are several states that call themselves Commonwealths for instance), but a strident faction has been trying to replace "we're all in this together" with "you're on your own, sucker"
Gore reduced the federal civilian workforce by 20% in a careful bi-partisan effort that did not really hurt effectiveness.
Clinton left office with the budget in surplus.
Government can work if you pick good leaders.
Absolutely it can be done, but this kind of slash and burn cuts from people who come in from outside and have no understanding of how anything works are always going to be counterproductive.
I would not assume the goal is actually to improve government.
They have contempt for government, they seek to degrade it with the hopes of further discrediting it in the eyes of the public.
Yeah, I didn't mean them. They were not doing this.
Typically those that take the slash and burn approach are trying to break things yes - in the UK is has generally come from those with a small government agenda who want to break things to justify privatizing them or scrapping them altogether.
Basic knowledge of civic history and political science makes this point very salient. Anyone with a clue would know this from the beginning - that's why it was so terrifying to see what actually was motivating people, feels like the ultimate recipe for unchecked power and disaster with bad actors employing fools to do their bidding.
Lots of organizations have massively increased government efficiency in the USA. 18F comes to mind as one.
So we shouldn’t try? Just let the budget expand forever?
If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts (without stopping with the yearly increases they already get). That would make it similar to many businesses, and force the management at the agencies to actually figure out how to do things efficiently.
Of course, people would whine incessantly as we saw with DOGE the second those cuts hit a program where the media can cause an uproar about hungry children or health programs or whatever.
> If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts
It'd be better to audit them to make sure that the money was being used smartly and that those agencies were accomplishing what there were created for. Arbitrary cuts would mean that agencies that were well functioning and lean would be suddenly unable to do the job we've been paying them for and it could encourage them to push for more funding than they need just so that they can survive the random cuts every 5-10 years.
We don't need to intentionally cause a crisis that will impact the lives of Americans who depend on the services their taxes fund. There are smarter ways to identify waste and hold accountable any people mismanaging funds. Government shouldn't be run like business, but honestly I'd also question the wisdom of companies who acted that way.
Auditing won’t cause them to fire their workers that aren’t doing a great job.
I don’t say it should be crisis level, but tightening the belt from time to time would force them to find efficiencies. Right now they have absolutely no incentive to do so because they have no competition and no impetus to.
It sounds like you are proposing some of the oversight already done by the Government Accountability Office.
I hear where you are coming from, but the whole point of the Constitution is that a king does not get to determine how the budget is allocated. Congress has the sole power of the purse, and the responsibility and blame for how money is appropriated belongs there. Congress could potentially enact measures lke this to sunset expenditures unless they are re-authorized, but I think that would likely turn out to be a chaotic disaster in its own right, given that Congress currently is struggling to pass budgets.
In any event, I think hungry children is a problem, and I don't need the media to tell me that, so that's my perspective.
The federal workforce shrunk by 20% under Clinton and it wasn't a clusterfuck like doge. Just like the tariffs situation this administration only hires incompetent sycophants and clowns and are unable to do anything anything correctly.
The US also had a relatively very small government overall compared to many other countries and variably multiple areas are extremely under-resourced like product and worker health and safety generally.
Yep. Governments, by virtue of being the functional backstop on all possible negative outcomes, necessarily runs with enormous slack. The ones that do not simply break under stress and they're replaced over and over until a government emerges that figures out that extreme efficiency is a liability.
Not to mention the US government in particular was quite literally deliberately designed to be inefficient as a way to safeguard personal liberties as well.
Not to say we shouldn't cut inefficiencies where we can, but the early DOGE promises were obviously made from a place of profound ignorance and (worse) lack of curiosity.
Oh great, I was really hoping to get my blood boiling today. Reading about data breaches done in the light of day is appalling, infinitely more so when it's condoned by the government who's supposed to prevent such grift and violations of privacy. It will take a long time to recover from this insane timeline (if ever).
Just today I ran into one of the very minor legacies of doge. When talking about conflict styles I used to have students take a survey on the US Institute of Peace's website. Doge shut it down. I guess that survey was taking up too much money to run... Now the only thing there is a press release stroking Trump's ego.
This websites seems incredibly biased and uses quite emotional language.
Government sites do too, with big bright red headers. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-...
Justice will continue be served as more of these lawsuits make their way through the courts and their crimes are exposed.
It is biased. I do not think we can "both sides" the impact of DOGE here and I think the site makes its case for why it should be seen as a destructive force.
I'm not both siding this, I heavily dislike DOGE and consequently the 45-47 presidency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624536#43625085
It calls DOGE workers "wreckers" and it lists all the staffers related with the DOGE project with a detailed description of how they're related and what they've done recently. They even have a page just for revealing anonymous staffers in court documents: https://dogetrack.info/people/aliases/
I agree DOGE is destructive but is it productive to reveal all the names and history of every staffer, contractor, lawyer, etc... related to the DOGE project?
The above is why I see it as "biased and emotionally charged".
This website very well could've gone without the extensive list of people related. Which is why I see this as more of a harassment list.
Doge.gov already has the most transparent listing of everything they are cutting. This other website that starts out its header with "Tracking The Damage" is clearly a biased attempt by democrats to discredit a program that was started by republicans. It's actually kind of sad people don't realize that the two-party system involves tribalism where no matter how good something is, the other side will call it bad if it wasn't their idea.
I haven’t looked at it in almost a year, but was that the site that was full of basic errors and misleading info that was clearly designed to expose “waste, fraud, and abuse” that actually wasn’t any of those things? Yeah, I don’t know why we wouldn’t trust them…
Most things are clearly linked to the contracts themselves with descriptions. Waste is a broad term and things like DEI or many more definitely fall into that category. Imagine spending billions of dollars on your HR department for the specific purposes of DEI without any tangible return on the investment. Its definitely wasteful and at most corruption. Discretionary funds for things like 'payroll' were being used to fund a very specific political ideology that aligned with one political party and congress did not authorize the use in that manner, which is why they were able to cut it so easily.
Sorry, too many blatant lies from Elon and co, I don't trust anything on their bullshit site.
lol, this is relevant: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/doge-bros-grant-review-p...
DOGE Bro’s Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT ‘Is This DEI?’
Fuck these unserious clowns.
The article refers to the DOGE employees as "bros" and "chucklefucks" throughout and says things like "as far as i can tell" when describing their history. This is clearly biased and not a real article - more like a forum post from a 4channer.
You might consider sharing this in the fednews subreddit. Awesome project
I think it is really important from time to time to shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives and form a somewhat subjective overpromise/underdeliver judgement (also looking at where, why and how they succeeded or failed).
To me, the whole Doge initiative scores quite poorly in this regard: Initial promises appear not realistic (or even worse: deceptive), while the (preliminary) results are lackluster, too.
My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
I think promises along that exact line deserve extreme skepticism: "Simply" slashing regulations/public budget for "easy gains" is just not credible, and if anyone is gonna bring up the same arguments in favor of nuclear power or similar things I'm just gonna label them "liar/idiot" and watch reality endorse my view...
If you wanted to do this for real, your would double the size of 18F (which was doing extraordinary work), and given the Inspectors General a blank check to eliminate fraud. These are both apolitical entities. Frankly the only people this would upset is the legacy government contractors.
So obviously they eliminated one and gutted the other.
Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization
I don't know how into building organizations you are, but 18f succeeded. they had a small footprint, and outsized impact, and really good relationships with the rest of the government. That kind of effectiveness is really difficult to grow in a massive bureaucracy. If your goal is efficiency you try to nurture that success.
throwing it away and starting over for purely political reasons is a completely negative outcome. the best you could hope for is to replicate what it was, but odds are against you.
18F was founded during the Obama administration, so absolutely no one in MAGA-world will ever have considered it apolitical.
One of the many fired IGs last year was investigating Neurolink - so noone in Musk-world will have considered them apolitical either.
Nothing government-related or government-adjacent will ever be broadly accepted as apolitical again in the US, regardless of intent or truth. Its very depressing.
> My impression is that the vast majority of "savings" was never achieved by promised efficiency gains or elimination of pure waste, but instead simply by cutting projects, i.e. slashing some form of public service or benefit in order to save tax money. Which is obviously inferior.
That doesn’t seem inferior at all. There’s very little to be gained by doing everything the same but with less money; the only way to make an actual difference is to quit doing the stupid shit that’s expensive. That’s what 90% of the world means by efficiency, i.e. don’t do the things that don’t need done.
> shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives
You could take a good will attitude to DOGE then. I think many (including Elon) genuinely believed they could cut fraud and waste. But by their own admission, they were only mostly an advisory committee.
You can only do so much. Congress still has authority, and that's how it works, that's how the system is intended. And the reason DOGE hasn't done much is exactly because congress isn't willing to cut spending. It NEVER will. It didn't under any president including Reagan.
So basically you have an ever increasing deficit and spending because the way the political system is setup drives this. In fact, it happens in basically every democracy, so maybe it's just something that happens in democracies.
So - you could call the promise of DOGE lies, but I think they were a lie from Trump and not Elon. I think Trump promised Elon cuts, to get his help in the election, then backtracked, and that's exactly why Elon stormed out, he didn't get what he wanted.
And the US government is still massively overspending. Trump didn't really cut anything.
This site is great.
But needs some overall graphic, some charts or something, to tell a story. Something like dollars spent versus saved, to show how this whole effort was in-efficient.
And. I'd like to see something similar for Project 2025.
The problem with Doge was not that it was inefficient.... It's that it damaged a whole lot of essential infrastructure, exfiltrated a bunch of data, and generally destabilized a lot of essential systems.
Doing so but more efficiently would not have improved it.
Thank you for the feedback!
I decided to not tackle the lies about "savings" because the math was so bad and it was quite frankly being covered much better by other organizations and sites. I also don't want to perpetuate the idea that this was about efficiency, since that and "IT Modernization" were more like a cover for DOGE's other activities.
I would like to add more graphics and charts, but I have been struggling a lot with how murky and noisy the data is. Charts communicate a certainty that I don't feel entirely comfortable presenting. One possibility might be to use them for timelines (like I do for the CIOs on the Enablers page), but if you have other suggestions, I'm always open to hear them! Thanks!
https://www.project2025.observer/en
>And. I'd like to see something similar for Project 2025.
https://www.project2025.observer/en
https://progressivereform.org/tracking-trump-2/project-2025-...
One of the lessons of this Trump administration is that we *can* affect radical change, if the will is there.
I truly hope our future DSA gov takes this experience to heart.
DOGE has no power. It produces information. Is the premise of this page that information about government operations is bad? If the goal is to persuade somebody that government should grow with no oversight forever, good luck. Democrats will read the site with horror. Republicans will cheer the accomplishments listed. People in neither camp probably won't pay attention, but if they do, they'll split down the middle.
Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, MbS, Netanyahu, Berdimuhamedow, and much of the worldwide pedophile oligarch class are celebrating all of their various, ascendant authoritarian restoration of de facto criminal aristocracy in multiple countries. Fascism rarely leaves peacefully once it takes hold.
Putting everything that DOGE has done, am I the only one who thinks that there is a teeny, tiny conflict of interest in Musk naming a department pretty much the same as one of the cryptocurrencies that he supports (Dogecoin)? Isn't that using the government for marketing?
If the list of crimes and improprieties of this administration were ranked by their severity, this one will surely get a 5-digit rank.
Trump sold beans in the oval office.
Yes, when you set aside Musk buying Twitter and using it to platform white supremacists and extremists to help get Trump elected in exchange for benefits to his companies and direct control over private regulatory and financial data that allowed him to gain potential advantage over his competition and punish his enemies, naming your fake government office after your memecoin is also a problem.
People probably don't focus on that because it's the least worst aspect of any of this. Also the President of the United States rugpulled the public on two memecoins and wiped out $4 billion, and no one talks about that either.
And THAT is the biggest issue you have with the whole ordeal?