The goal is to dismantle as much of the government as possible. Where possible, they can replace the existing people with their own people, then steer government contracts to themselves.
The way they're going there might not be a government much longer. I really do believe they're that stupid.
The entire stock market is premised on the stability of the US government. Without it all their wealth would disappear overnight. All the luxuries they love would cease being produced. They wouldn't be able to fly their private jets anywhere.
In the past the rich could stockpile easily-tradable goods like gold in order to maintain a luxurious life even if their government collapsed. When it comes to billionaires that's not possible. The logistics of keeping and moving that much physical currency/gold/etc don't work out in their favor.
If they keep this up they're going to lose almost all of their wealth as the world destabilizes. They're also setting themselves and their families up to be assassination targets for the rest of their lives (far, far beyond what they are already). There's people everywhere that will be severely impacted by their actions. There will be nowhere for them to go because the US really is the pillar of the world's economies.
They can operate this demolition op from the safety of their bunkers in NZ.
All they need is a way to send messages to their "useful idiot" new college grad minions.
True, instigating a global collapse might eventually get to them, but AFAICT, they just want to personally profit from US dysfunction. Plus, it seems like the rest of the world will simply bypass the US and say "you're not dependable any more, so we're just gonna pretend you don't exist". Ostracism (of the US) seems more likely than the entire world destabilizing.
It'll be just like the 1930s with a deeply isolationist USA.
History sure does have an uncanny way of rhyming if not actually repeating.
Something that greatly galls me is that the livelihood of tens of millions of families depend on the whims of people who think only in terms of profit. Government is not supposed to make a damned profit! The government's primary role should be to care for everyone, from entrepreneurs to people with disabilities. I'm not saying "handouts for all", I'm saying that the government needs to provide stability, a level foundation for all to build upon.
It's like Venkman in Ghostbusters, in the ballroom: he yanks away the tablecloth sending everything flying except "the flowers are still standing!". The rich are the flowers, secure on their own foundation, calm with the knowledge that the guy pulling the tablecloth can't affect them. In other words, the new administration should be carefully enacting new policies not causing chaos by doing everything too quickly.
Unless their goal is to destroy the USA, in which case US citizens will need to decide what country they want to live in and whether republicans are capable of delivering that.
Thank you for that mental image of the flowers still standing :D
> Unless their goal is to destroy the USA
I have indeed heard this, even in his first term -- that people were so fed up of politics-as-usual, that they decided to "send a wrecking ball into the White House".
After having seen the damage that wrecking ball did the first time around... to send it back must mean that these folks really want to demolish the very ground they're standing on.
The US is not a wobbling Jenga tower, that's what the news media wants you to believe. They'll keep pushing that story to peddle fear and outrage until they make it true.
> Government is not supposed to make a damned profit! The government's primary role should be to care for everyone, from entrepreneurs to people with disabilities. I'm not saying "handouts for all", I'm saying that the government needs to provide stability, a level foundation for all to build upon.
My understanding from both reading a lot online and conversations with Americans in person is that a significant number of them would consider the above statement to be “socialism” which is something they’ve been taught to hate, no matter what.
I can’t say I understand it. To me, it’s the most basic raison d’etre for government. I’m not sure what the anti-socialism types in the USA think that the government’s purpose is
Slightly shaky start to the market today but it largely recovered and is just as high as it was 10 days ago. Seems the markets are divided between worried and cautiously optimistic.
Why would they do anything else? Last Trump Presidency caused incredible inflation that for a huge part went into the stock market, because where else can it go?
I know some of the people involved, and named in this article. So do many other people on HN. I pitched my startup to one of these zoomers just a few months ago. I can tell you that whatever this is, it isn't that kind of cronyism corruption. We can do better than such accusations, and that's what the person you are replying to is asking for.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Nothing these people are doing is transparent.
They're doing shady stuff in the shadows as fast as they can. Which is exactly the way you do things when they're not above board legally or ethically.
Whatever you think about Musk, he is a lot more transparent than other big donors and people who vie for influence in the USG. He is an idiot at times for sure, but he is an idiot publicly.
It's insane to me that people on the so called left are going to bat for the status quo, the status quo that protects bureaucrats and lobbyists and friends giving friends contracts and salaries.
Someone saying extremely stupid things in public, just making shit up and punishing those pointing that out, doesn't strike me as "honest", it strikes me as heavily disordered. And starting this stuff on a Friday night is the opposite of being transparent or welcoming scrutiny. Also:
> Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate and now head of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), told government tech workers in a meeting this week that the administration plans to widely deploy AI throughout the government. Shedd also said the administration would need help altering login.gov, a government login system, to further integrate with sensitive systems like social security “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud,” which employees identified on the meeting as “an illegal task.”
Finally, batting against someone trying to make the status quo worse for his own gains isn't "batting for the status quo". If your house needs renovating, and I stop someone who tries to set it on fire, it doesn't mean I'm against renovation.
So you prefer corporate speak suits who don't make the mistake of embarrassing themselves in public? Because they don't ever speak in public? Are you honestly telling me you prefer un-named lobbyists having influence, because that has been the status quo. At least we can point the finger at Musk. And yes, I would posit doing and saying stupid shit in public IS more human than what we normally get. Its a pretty normal human behavior to make mistakes, embarrass yourself, lash out, etc. It's certainly more human like behavior than elected politicians engage in where they disclose absolutely nothing and hide behind PR speak approved by a team of 20.
I don't really know what your quote is about, seems like grinding a specific gear which I'm not particularly interesting in looking into.
But to your final point. The jury is still out on whether Musk acts _exclusively_ for his own gains. Sure he has an ego, but he was also instrumental in bringing EVs to the market (which many of his now opponents were quick to adopt), and at the very least has rekindled an interest in space exploration and so on.
I have many misgivings about the man, but at least we can see him. Which is better than the previous status-quo.
This is a False Dilemma fallacy. I'm not going to pretend the government is perfect but handing the keys of the kingdom to a Nazi will always be a bad idea. Let's do something else.
> So you prefer corporate speak suits who don't make the mistake of embarrassing themselves in public? Because they don't ever speak in public?
No, because they're not insane, have no clue what they're talking about, and don't call anyone who points that out a "radical leftist", or whatever their particular word for "unperson" would be.
> At least we can point the finger at Musk
And then you can get fired, like the Twitter engineer correcting his utter nonsense claims about how Twitter works. So he's an "idiot" (lies, smears people, and talks nonsense, too), but at least he's unable to hide it.
Because since we "can point our fingers at him" the pointed fingers get dismissed. Some people even said he can't have anything to hide because he posts so much on X. Okay, so so we know he's a terrible person and up to idiotic, destructive things, but that's a good thing, because other people could be worse because they're not posting every brain fart on a social media site they bought for that purpose. What?
> I would posit doing and saying stupid shit in public IS more human than what we normally get
All humans are human. One world you could use, just not for Musk, is "humane". To me he's very stuck up, pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-deep. He's not an adorable dork, he's a pushy, controlling, cowardly try hard. He wants desperately to be liked, or feared, or respected, but he doesn't genuinely love other people, and he isn't genuinely curious either, so it's all just a ghoulish, awkward, and completely dishonest show.
And people who don't tell people to "fuck their face" and such, or agree with neo-nazi conspiracy theories, or don't find outrage at their Hitler salute so funny they can't stop joking to the point even the ADL says something, etc. don't only refrain from these things because they have big PR team.
> Sure he has an ego, but he was also instrumental in bringing EVs to the market (which many of his now opponents were quick to adopt), and at the very least has rekindled an interest in space exploration and so on.
And if WWII hadn't happened, we wouldn't have computers right now. So? We would have had them 300 years later or whatever. This idea how progress, that humans constantly nibble at, that they cannot help but think about, could only have happened exactly how it happened is something I don't buy into. And without looking at the damage it's not a credible "calculation" anyway.
Do you think that there are security or data exfiltration risks with their approach, e.g. putting classified documents/emails into private company's LLMs to summarize information or identify certain ideological motivations? I don't see how they could begin to understand the scope of what they're working with without A.I. assistance.
Since you know the people in question, do you have any ideas? I am honestly mystified myself and hopeful someone who knows the people in question can shed some light.
Do you have specific questions? I really don’t think it is complicated. They’re doing what they say they are doing: instrumenting up the government to see what it is doing, and reorganizing it from the ground up to be more efficient. So far all their actions are in line with this.
It’s like a creditor-initiated bankruptcy proceeding. An agent comes in and stops all transactions, audits the assets and liabilities, and comes up with a plan. That’s what they are working on right now.
I’m trying to be objective in my description. I’ve personally worked for the government before and I think they are being hopelessly naïve in thinking that the government can fixed in this way, and also appear to be dangerously ignorant of the law (or counting on executive pardons). But I do t think there is any intentional malice or corrupt intentions here.
They know absolutely nothing about running the government or administering these programs, and these idiots are pushing to prod in a system that controls 1/5th of the US economy.
>Do you have specific questions? I really don’t think it is complicated. They’re doing what they say they are doing: instrumenting up the government to see what it is doing, and reorganizing it from the ground up to be more efficient. So far all their actions are in line with this.
I think this is pretty much correct. The media, however, is taking full advantage of creating as much panic as possible.
I am curious though - what do you think about Curtis Yarvin being invited to the Coronation Ball in DC? It's things like that that make these theories spread. Why are they friends with a guy who openly calls for the fall of democracy and even invited him to high-level events?
Gotcha. The reason I was mystified is that the budget is written by Congress, so I would guess a phone call to a leader in Congress with a desired budget number would do the job. Given that this doesn't seem to be the plan, I couldn't tell if maybe they had some other goal. I hope that explains how someone could be mystified.
It is not the budget that is the issue to them, except maybe in the total size. I'm sure they think it can be done cheaper. Rather it is how the money is spent that they are looking at. That's within the executive branch's authority, not Congress.
No, you are absolutely wrong about that. The whole point of the Revolutionary War was we didn't want an executive who decided how to spend our tax money.
Congress doesn't just give the executive branch a slush fund they can use to implement whatever political agenda the administration has. The money is for specific things, and the president has to spend it on them. He also can't just not spend it. His just is to make the money go from A to B, not to decide whether or not it gets to B.
Yes, the executive can set a policy agenda, and they have powers within the executive branch to administer the agencies, but one of those power is not the ability to spend or hold up congressionally appointed funds. The president's job is to spend that money on our priorities, not his. Many times his priorities will align with the voters, but at the end of the day he is the president for everyone, not just Republicans. This is the whole system of representation we have been living under for 200+ years.
We pay those taxes, we vote for our representatives, they allocate spending, the president makes sure the funds are lawfully spent. That is the system. You seem to be suggesting some other system where the president gets to decide how the money is spent. That's not how the system works.
Have you worked in government? I have. I helped manage a program that was an actual line item on the national budget. I'm quite familiar with how it works.
There is a lot of executive leeway in interpreting how to spend money allocated in congressional authorizations. As I said, I was managing a program that was in the 10's of millions of dollars and a line item on my agency's budget. The actual wording of the authorization was quite short, and there was a lot of executive agency in deciding how to structure it.
But most of your comment doesn't seem to be addressing what my comment was saying, and is politically charged enough that I don't think it would be fruitful for us to continue this conversation. I wish you the best.
As an employee of the government responsible for these items, you are beholden to follow the law. If you break the law you are prosecuted. You have to go through background checks, get training on what you're legally allowed to do, receive training for security clearances and how to handle sensitive data, go through that whole vetting process. You must preserve documents, be free of conflicts of interest, your work is auditable, and your department must respond to FOIA requests. The bar is high for you because the public puts our trust in you to spend our money.
None of this is true for Musk. He's not treating any of this with care, and we can see this in real time as USAID food/medicine is held up and rotting at borders. How is that not wasteful?
If you were to make those kind of capricious decisions as a government employee leading to people going hungry and staying sick or worse dying... Congress would rightfully be demanding answers and your resignation.
I think it should be obvious to everyone we are not dealing with an instance of a regular employee exercising routine and precedented discretion here, when Congress is up in arms, agency employees are up in arms, class action lawsuits are being filed. How often does a response of this scale happen when you make a decision?
Why would I assume otherwise? They aren't neutral observers from a trusted third party. Neither Musk nor Trump has a track record of honesty, and both have used their power for personal gain. A recent example is Musk moving NTSB announcements to Twitter.
From what I can tell, the apparent purpose of DoGE is to benefit Trump and his allies financially, weaponize funding against opponents, and dismantle parts of the government they oppose. Musk’s preference for young engineers may stem from the same logic the military uses with young soldiers — they tend to be more obedient and less likely to push back.
Even people who love Musk need to realize they're cogs in his machine. He's not here to make your life better, he's here to make sure nothing is in the way of the things he wants to achieve. He doesn't care about the quality of your life, the only thing you have, he cares about how much of it can be captured to his ends.
For some people, that seems to be fine. They work at SpaceX and Tesla and his other companies. For many of us, life is the journey and the quality of it matters, not the Martian destination, and he can fuck right off.
People like Musk dislike the government because people have a say. That say is imperfect and often corrupted, but people get to have some amount of input. They can vote, and organize, and they could decide that they'd rather have roads or water or any number of silly things that get in his way.
Companies are not democracies, Musk says "get rid of the supercharger team" and no one gets a vote, they just get rid of them. We should all be worried about what goals he efficiently wants to achieve, if you or I were in the way, would he care.
The danger is in the unchecked nature of this power, even if someone likes Elon Musk and thinks he's a brilliant genius, what gives him the right to supplant the will of the people with his own.
Elon has shown time and again that he will prioritize what HE wants, and if that means some people don't have jobs, well that's just fine. If that means that people should have to sleep on the factory floor and wake up and make cars he can profit off of and then back to sleep on the factory floor, that's also just fine. If that means that USAID doesn't feed the hungry, that's also just fine.
And maybe to anyone reading this that's happy with what he's done, you are just fine with it too. But what happens when he decides something you do care about is alright to destroy too to meet his goals, he's just fine with it. What do you do then? How confident are you that your goals and his will stay aligned, forever, that the ax of "efficiency" won't come for you and yours someday. And if that day comes, what will you say to the people that tell you "he's a brilliant genius and he's fine with it so so am I"
If the issue were actual waste and balancing the budget, they'll go after the _actual waste_ like the military budget, or Trump's golf outings. They wouldn't decrease taxes, especially not at the top.
Also trust is earned. Do I have to remind you of the hundreds or thousands of lies, many of them very recent, of these people?
"This decript junk" includes institutional knowledge that will take decades to reconstruct, USAID agents suddenly cut off from all official communication and equipment in the middle of war zones, and basic security guarantees about the payments system used by the US Treasury.
I agree that there is a lot of junk going on in the US government, but Elon Musk is close to the last person I'd trust to do a good, unbiased job cleaning that up.
Especially without oversight or any kind of accountability. Especially when he's flaunting federal law to do so.
He's a fool. This is akin to an outside engineer hacking and slashing at code he doesn't understand and then tests it "in production". All of us engineers worth a damn know how that is going to turn out.
I would guess that part of it is to tear down what’s there so they can rebuild in their own vision. I think this is a desire that any engineer can understand- and also understand that it often has to be suppressed because it’s a common blunder.
How many engineers have walked into a legacy project and their first instinct is to rebuild? Of course this is sometimes warranted, but almost always costs way more than anyone expects and doesn’t necessarily lead to a better outcome.
Edit: I’ll also add that this mentality is more common in younger / junior folks, which fits the context here.
The goal is to find government waste and to trim the fat. The goal is to make the US government lean, efficient, and effective at improving the lives of Americans while not prioritizing improving the lives of citizens of other nations. The view is that the government of those other nations should be responsible for taking care of their own citizens. The goal is to uncover fraudulent payouts, stop more from going out in the future, and to bring the fraudsters to justice. Overall, the goal is to do a thorough accounting of where exactly US tax dollars are going to, and to use that information to decide if they should keep going to those recipients in the future, to put it to a vote using congress to decide.
[Political bias report: I'm a liberal who has read Rand and who does not agree with The Republican Party's views in the vast majority of cases. I have been listening to Musk and Ramaswamy talking about DOGE on X. I also follow conservative meme sites to keep up to date with the way they are thinking about things.]
If that actually was the goal, and if this function were being executed by a legally formed executive branch agency, with non-partisan career employees that have been properly vetted, hired, and granted security clearances, I might be behind this effort.
But that's not what's happening.
It's clear to me their goal is to dismantle as many "leftist" agencies as possible, like environmental protection, labor rights protection, securities laws enforcement, humanitarian aid, etc., and replace them with people who will enrich their friends and families and allow corporations to run roughshod over the rights of regular people.
It is bizarre to me that anyone could lack the critical thinking skills such that they'd accept DOGE's stated goals at face value.
Come now, it's obvious why they're not using "non-partisan career employees that have been vetted..." Please stop assuming we're not thinking critically or clearly if we disagree with you, you can't just shout it into the air and manifest it as truth. There are many arguably 110% valid reasons for why they are doing things the way they are.
They assume, as rightfully a lot of us do, that this all happened under the watch of these same individuals, and that they're arguably biased (we can't assume they're non-partisan). The problem is that the government is in a state of auto-pilot, and that's what led us here because we're not paying attention. In order to get out of it, we need to try something different and get (arguably) impartial or fresh pairs of eyes on the problem.
> it's obvious why they're not using "non-partisan career employees that have been vetted..."
Right, because those people are not loyal to them.
> They assume, as rightfully a lot of us do, that this all happened under the watch of these same individuals
All what happened? Environmental protection? Consumer protection? Automatic tax filing systems? Those things happened over decades of fighting for the rights of everyday Americans over the rights of a few rich elites. They're written in the blood, sweat, and tears of the downtrodden and exploited. That's exactly why they're being targeted. If you want to find inefficiency, throw a dart almost anywhere within DoD.
Sure, so since it's not clear for now, let's give Trump and Elon the benefit of the doubt, that what they're doing is from the good of their hearts, for the benefit of all the American people.
It's not like they're openly corrupt, narcissistic egomaniacs with history of screwing up people for their personal gain or something. Up till now, especially Trump, has made huge strides in bettering the country and wellbeing of the people, let's let him cook.
Consumer rights, labor rights, and protecting our shared environment should match conservative principles. I agree with improving these agencies and making them work better for people.
But it’s absurd think that the representative government shouldn’t be involved in protecting citizens from companies.
Fact: most companies have only one incentive. To make more profit. Everything else is secondary. Companies have a very, very, very strong incentive to cut costs and hurt people if it helps their short-term bottom line. In fact, making more money is their only incentive. And there are thousands of examples of abuse, from tech getting shittier, to energy companies massively polluting certain regions, to poor safety records, to ballooning health care costs.
That’s a non-partisan fact — abuse from companies hurts everyone.
Your opinion is, apparently, that the free market and these companies themselves are better equipped to protect people. Even though there is absolutely ZERO incentive in capitalism for them to do anything that would protect people if it costs money and doesn’t help their bottom line.
who is destroying the EPA? or is the EPA doing stupid things like forcing Elon to kidnap seals? Who isn't taking their job seriously exactly? It's hard to tell.
Here's an idea, we let the voters decide. Oh right, they did.
i think they'll stop at the appropriate amount, they've been planning this for years and speaking publicly about it for just as long. they're extremely intelligent people who have been at the but-end of all of these agencies and have learned a lot of lessons that could correct or otherwise improve the agencies rather than just destroying them through whatever cartoonishly simple lens you're imagining
If that is the goal, then what happened to "profile before you optimize"?
As an analogy, what's happening feels like this:
* Somebody (let's call them "X") has embarked upon a mission to de-bloat the ancient-but-working family desktop PC.
* X's first actions appear to be to desolder various things from the motherboard, while the computer is on.
* Anyone who sees what X is doing, is somewhere on a spectrum between "scratching their head" <----> "wow, they're trying their best to destroy the PC".
To those defending this particular way of "fixing" things, would you yourself replace a large, working legacy software system in this manner?
Trump understands the "shock and awe" PR strategy. His opponents were caught on their back foot, and he's moving fast while they are in disarray. Military thinking might be more effective than software engineering for this moment.
Certainly, one might test the software by removing access to external systems to see what happens, whether things break, whether it complains… and certainly, that’s what’s happening.
Something I didn’t expect from this was to see the main complainers scramble to define what’s really important to them, thus implicitly justifying many of the cuts made.
You're right, as long as software is concerned, and customers being left without service is a non-issue.
Though if you do that with hardware, you might irreversibly break/short a component -- so you unplug, then figure out you actually needed that part, but plugging it back in now won't get the system working again.
I think "running a country" has more hardware-like characteristics than a pure software system.
If that were the goal, I think we'd see some evidence of it.
You do not "do a thorough accounting" by deciding in advance what programs and operations to terminate based on specific ideological viewpoints. I don't doubt for a second that this is "the way they are thinking about things" – but it's hopelessly, irredeemably naive to think that's what's being done.
I don't believe Musk or Trum cares about "improving the lives of Americans". They would try to protect Americans if that was their goal. Their first targets are consumer protection, environmental protection and such.
they don't care about fraud either. Both are fraudsters themselves, both will enrich themselves and their families. They both surround themselves with fraudsters.
What I give to Musk is that the staggering nepotism you see with Trump is not there as much.
Which sounds kind of useful, considering these diseases a) carry over to the USA, b) diminish the buying power of those the USA exports goods to, and c) helps these countries to improve their economies, leading to a bigger market for American products.
Does the Republican Party have any humans with brains left, or is it all slime molds now??
You could also call this "defending against anti-american expansion". Which seems like a thing foreign adversaries would love for the US to stop doing, if only they had a few folks on the inside to help them...
The problem with that simplistic reasoning is that helping people in other countries also can help Americans, sometimes in ways they directly helping Americans can't do.
(I'm not saying that every dollar deployed by USAID succeeds in having a large impact on indirectly helping Americans. But the net effect is surely positive.)
A big example is that almost all plastic in the ocean comes from a couple of Asian countries. No amount of money spent in the US could stop that. But it would likely be very cheap to combine funding plastic recycling with threats of sanctions against those countries.
>The goal is to find government waste and to trim the fat. The goal is to make the US government lean, efficient, and effective at improving the lives of Americans while not prioritizing improving the lives of citizens of other nations.
Lets be clear, that is not the goal - that is what they say the goal is and reality shows it is not. The goal is grift and theft adn destruction. Properly naming things is going to continue to matter more and more. Because no matter your bias or perspective, repeating propaganda is an act of propaganda.
and I was answering that to the best of my ability. I'm not just repeating propaganda, I'm distilling down the intent of the actors to the best of my understanding. No one can ever know someone's true intent, but I've done the best I can with the information I have.
With all due respect, I don't think you have done the best you can with the information you have. The only source of information your answer reflects is the stated intention of the people in question. But you don't seem to have made an effort to use information about the behavior of those people in order to evaluate whether to take their stated intentions at face value. You need to do that part to have done your best here.
It's fine if you don't want to do this, you're under no obligations here, but I just don't think "I've done the best I can with the information I have" is accurate.
The rest of this thread is based on about 1-2 weeks and people making wild projections based on it, that’s not much better.
For example multiple people here are making broad claims like Consumer Protections is completely shutting down, when all that’s been announced is a temporary freeze on operations as the new lead takes over (which happened in multiple agencies). Likewise the stated plan for USAID is to trim down foreign grants and merge the rest with the state department, so we don’t know what functions will continue there or if the Executive branch even has the authority to do that. Courts have already blocked last week’s freeze on federal grants and a few other things. The Mexican tariffs are already paused too and Canada probably isn’t far behind given the large risk to US markets and prices.
As dumb as plenty of this stuff is, it’s easier to get worked up and believe every dire headline you read than maintain a sober look at what tangible things have actually changed or can change that fast.
There is a lot of truth to this point that not much time has elapsed yet.
But, I think a lot of the thread is more informed by things that have already happened over much longer periods of time in the recent past than it is by the things that have happened in the last couple weeks. Specifically, there is a large amount of information available on the behavior of the current president during his last administration, and on the actions of the person behind the DOGE efforts.
Nobody is under any obligation to maintain a veil of ignorance about who these people have shown themselves to be. They have not earned any benefit of any doubt.
> the thread is more informed by things that have already happened over much longer periods of time in the recent past than it is by the things that have happened in the last couple weeks
Almost the entire modern history of the US government (including his last term) showed that not much at all changes. And it definitely doesn’t change quickly. Even stuff like tax rates have barely had any meaningful change considering US tax revenue has only increased exponentially since the 1980s along with the GDP. On paper very little changes in gov when you look more than skin deep.
This might be a new precedent where politicians actually do what they say and work hard to change the government but I’m highly skeptical.
Sounds like a lot of noisy broad stroke announcements and highly reactive social media headlines that will turn out to be minor IRL outcomes or get smacked down in court.
I think we're talking about different things. The history of human government is chockablock full of corruption. Not just in the US, but everywhere. Individuals with power often use it to enrich themselves at the expense of the public.
The people currently arrogating unaccountable power, illegally, have given us no reason whatsoever to trust them to use it for the public good rather than their own enrichment.
> behavior of the current president during his last administration
And what has been the lasting tangible effects of his last administration? Was it the end of democracy and the rise of fascism the Left loves to get hysterical about? Nope. And it won't be the case in this administration either. We can check back in four years to see who's right.
In 2016 people predicted he wouldn't leave office peacefully, and then 4 years later his administration closed with an armed insurrection, thus ending the tradition of peaceful transfer of power in America going back over 200 years.
So you might not want to take that bet, they have a good track record predicting Trump.
You are repeating propaganda though. You're describing the stated intentions of this group, on their terms, as they have defined them. There's no particular reason to presume those statements are sincere, and in fact there have been other, previous statements that directly contradict them.
Right, I can't wait for the announcement that they cut down x in spending and will use some percentage of the "savings" to do y (Mars via Elons proxy Jared Isaacman, AI infrastructure via Oracle/FAANGs) and then claim it will benefit the whole world.
They're literally accelerationists: They're shooting the gov in the face, so they can enact more emergency powers, and then it's one step to pure, raw fascism.
> I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric
You need to start caring about politics real fast if you care at all.
There is arguably no non-political angle to this. I’m not sure how you’d describe what appears to be happening without it seeming biased.
From here in Canada it looks a lot like the fascist takeovers I’ve read about since middle school. The playbook is bizarrely tight to Hitler, Mussolini, hints of Stalin, etc. I didn’t expect this in my lifetime. Or rather, I imaged I’d see it coming sooner.
What would seem like a reasonable, measured response right now?
It’s worth adding here too that Musk’s own purported ambitions are entirely political. He has even gone so far as to claim he has given up on democracy. Ironically, he also claimed this election was crucial. DOGE is a politically motivated program.
This is all worthy of intense scrutiny and concern
Why those funds were allocated to their ops and not equally to everybody? If those government organisations were serving only one side of the political spectrum than something is inherently wrong with it.
> If those government organisations were serving only one side of the political spectrum than something is inherently wrong with it.
Is there? I feel like there are many cases where this is not true. Supporting disenfranchised groups for one. If you are funding protection for a group of people you don't need to be funding their attackers as well to make it "fair", the funding of the disenfranchised groups is literally you putting your thumb on the scale to try and even things out.
"one side of the political spectrum" is pretty loaded and it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. If we are talking about "funding democrats" then sure, that's not good but if we are talking about "funding women's health" then no, I'm not going to play "both sides" games. The sad thing is we live in a country where a large number of people think that "funding women's health" _is_ "serving only one side of the political spectrum".
Unfortunately we're also talking about funding so our rivers aren't on fire. We don't have to speculate on what is left and right because even what is purely sensical is being completely dismantled. People should be fucking outraged but half the country thinks the EPA is "woke." We're genuinely fucked.
The goal is to overturn the system. The electorate is mad that nothing changes regardless of Dem or GOP in charge. They want something to change. They've wanted it for so long that at this point they're okay seeing it burn down.
I love this post. “Explain what is going on with the government without mentioning politics. If the reality is that current events and the people involved in them are driven by ideology, invent a version of reality wherein they are not” is like walking into a Sephora, opening up the folding chair that you’re carrying, and loudly demanding the catfish dinner and a beer.
Ever seen "Johnny English Strikes Again"? I'm sure Musk did, and is now implementing Jason Volta's plan as just retribution for the not-so-subtle reference hidden in the villain's electric name.
> But what is the goal? Maybe what goal to they think they're pursuing? This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.
I'm a bit confused because the stated goals, either the "digestible" ones or the ones they've stated outside of mainstream media, are all political in nature.
How could you get an answer about the motivation and goals of this behavior that isn't "political"?
This will sound like a conspiracy theory, but this is the playbook of Curtis Yarvin, specifically the "RAGE" step - Retire All Government Employees. Some references:
Watch the whole video (posted months ago predicting all these actions), but here is the relevant section: https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no?t=1201
Isn't this just the Dark Enlightenment that Curtis Yarvin has espoused and Thiel, Musk, and JD Vance have also endorsed? TL;DR - Dictatorships are superior to democracy, and quick executive actions that replace legislative responsibilities with the tacit endorsement of judicial and legislative branches are functionally the same. The foundations for this were laid when Trump got so many Federalist judges approved last term and the Supreme Court endorsed the anything goes if President does it theory.
The right is at present a coalition of conservatives, nationalist patriot types and globalist libertarians. DOGE seems to be a mix of two goals:
1. They think that the civil service has become not just openly hostile but outright dangerous to any form of Republican government, and therefore that taking direct control of the civil service infrastructure at high speed is essential to avoid being kneecapped by rogue federal employees again. They think that this happened during Trump's first term, and that if they don't get this problem under control then America has effectively become a Democrat dictatorship that does whatever the left wants regardless of who wins elections. They have a good reasons to believe this is a real problem they need to solve and fast, see Sherk for some egregious examples [1] but there are many more you could cite.
2. A genuine belief that the government is very inefficient and in particular that a lot of the waste is basically just funding the Democrats via various 'laundered' routes like allied NGOs that pretend to be politically neutral charities but aren't. Doing something about that is a good way to get libertarians like Musk and his allies on board. Everyone is in favour of government efficiency in principle so letting the libertarian types go cut waste is an easy way to build that coalition even if the other parts don't care about fiscal efficiency much itself.
These two are interlocked. Poor performance and efficiency improvements are one of the legal justifications for laying off civil servants, so it's much easier to get the civil service under control if #resistance results in being one of the ones "optimized out" of a job. That's doubly true if the sort of NGOs that would hire them if they were fired are being defunded simultaneously.
It's a plutocratic coup, a takeover of the country by a small group of unelected men. The goal is to own and exercise power without opposition and without any rules.
There's two parts to it. First, there's the reasonable position that the government is inefficient or has too much bureaucracy or regulation. If that's the case, how do you improve that? Chesterton's Fence says that all those regulations are in place for a reason, but it's reasonably to believe that some of those reasons may not be relevant anymore, or could be better written to allow for more efficiency. However, sitting down to figure out why existing regulations exist and how to get rid of them without allowing whatever bad outcome they were created in response to is difficult. If you have the general feel that a regulation is bad, why not just get rid of it? Or an office you don't like, or a committee that likes to say you're doing things wrong? If you've got the vibe that "this thing is bad", why do you need to prove it before getting rid of it? So it's taking things that are legitimate problems and trying to fix them based on vibes rather than data. Which, if some of the problems you're annoyed with are "it takes too long to build a building because the EPA wants data to see if there's environmental impacts", is it really a surprise you'd want to take that out without data?
Second is the dismantling of the deep state. The deep state exists, but it's not a conscious effort in general. Instead, it's the typical aspects of institutional inertia, multiplied by the fact that the kinds of people wanting to work in government favor inertia more than in most private businesses. Of course the low level government bureaucrat at your local post office or whatever is going to want to slow-roll things and keep things from changing as much as possible; that's just the kind of person that typically looks for a government job and gets hired. Of course they're going to resist rapid changes from people that want things to be fixed yesterday. If your conception of the government is as an agent to execute orders, rather than as an agent to steadily administer regulations, then you're going to resent the people who don't respond instantly to the executive's desires
FWIW I voted for Kamela because I think that the process of governance is just as important as the governance itself, and did not want Trump to remove the existing processes in this way. I can definitely see why people would want to change processes, and given the historical ineffectual attempts at changed processes I can see why people would vote for someone who promised to tear it all down, but I don't think tearing it all down is the best option. Although, I didn't vote for Harris as much as I voted for the most effective way to prevent Trump, but given the American first-past-the-post voting system that was the best I could do. https://ncase.me/ballot/
Since the goals are not clear for now, let's give Trump and Elon the benefit of the doubt, that what they're doing is from the good of their hearts, for the benefit of all the American people.
It's not like they're openly corrupt, narcissistic egomaniacs with history of screwing up people for their personal gain or something. Up till now, especially Trump, they've made huge strides in bettering the country and wellbeing of the people, let's let them cook.
Between Elon's stated goals, the systems under scope and my personal experience from state & local finance, they are performing a strategic efficacy audit of treasury spending. The US Treasury normally doesn't audit transactions -- they execute requests for transfers from other agencies and defer governance to congressional oversight.
The GAO doesn't even audit in the intuitive sense. They audit that spending is being recorded properly, and for many agencies even that low bar isn't met. In other words GAO is okay with you dumping money into a hole as long as you count how much.
DOGE is doing a practical audit of the spending. i.e. taking high-level spending principals from trump and identifying specific budget items to eliminate.
Asking the treasury to do ideological/legal analysis of transactions is the same as giving your bank the responsibility of approving your credit card expenditure based on their idea of what you need/should buy.
The fact that they're going for the payment system and not for contract/orders analysis is exactly the red flag people are and should be concerned about.
Banks actually do that though. Credit cards have massive risk analysis engines behind them, and the limits are tied to your creditworthyness. So maybe it's not a good analogy.
It's about spending your balance too. They will block transactions if they think there's a high risk of the transaction triggering a chargeback complaint, if they think the recipient might be sanctioned, if they aren't sure if the card was cloned etc.
It's worth noting the difference between Budget & expenses since families normally blur the two. Budgets are the plans developed by the President and approved by Congress, and expenses are what actually get spent during the year-- and they vary widely.
DOGE's unique approach is to use the Treasury as the "chokepoint" for telemetry so they can cluster and classify all of the transactions .
Imagine a massive microservices platform with 10k services and you want to know which ones are viable ( cost/benefit). Rather than survey all 10k, you would surveil a router or LB chokepoint to measure the input & output of all 10k services. That seems to be their approach with the treasury.
One minor nit: while presidents do usually present their version of the ideal budget, Congress is responsible for developing the budget, and what they pass can sometimes look pretty different from what the president proposes.
But what is the goal? Maybe what goal to they think they're pursuing? This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.