There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.
It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution? We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, and the last person to make headway here was Bill Clinton -- who proposed an even more callous approach to cuts.
Bill Clinton had the "line item veto" which allowed presidents to get rid of things in bills (spending) they didn't like. Ultimately this power was rejected by the courts as unconstitutional. Congress is supposed to allocate and deal with spending.
This line item veto was supposed to stop congress people from attaching things into bills that just benefited their constituents (to get their vote).
"Congress granted this power to the president by the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 to control "pork barrel spending", but in 1998 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the act to be unconstitutional in 6–3 decision in Clinton v. City of New York.
The court found that exercise of the line-item veto is tantamount to a unilateral amendment or repeal by the executive of only parts of statutes authorizing federal spending, and therefore violated the Presentment Clause of the United States Constitution. Thus a federal line-item veto, at least in this particular formulation, would only be possible through a constitutional amendment. Prior to that ruling, President Clinton applied the line-item veto to the federal budget 82 times."
> None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.
Citation needed. They do their jobs, problem is politians also do theirs. Making sure military doesnt cut spending in their district even if military leaders think a base or tank factory is not needed.
Its easy to say this is wrong and these people are idiots because thats the case. Actually I wont even say theyre all idiots theyre just malicous and dont care about the damagr they cause. This isnt some sort of careful attempt to make goverment work better. Its axing random groups because they once said something positive about minorities or necause they prosecute political corruption or because they can install their own cronies or outsource it to their company
Wait, you’re alleging Bill Clinton downsized the government by measures more callous than randomly firing workers, forcing them to en masse justify their positions to an unelected billionaire? I was alive then and I don’t remember any of that. Citation needed.
And he actually did manage to balance the budget. Too bad that didn’t last long under Bush.
>It's easy to just go online and say "this is wrong these people are idiots" but what is your alternative solution?
For starters, these people are in fact idiots. They randomly fired people at NNSA with virtually no warning. What the fuck? [0]
In response to your point: Why throw USDS in the trash? That was a great example of an effective, agile non-partisan tech workforce. [1]
Now federal workers are having to submit to political loyalty tests. [2]
Perhaps their true intentions here aren't really cost savings, if that isn't blatantly obvious already.
>We have exhausted pretty much every other method at this point, all the big consulting firms have also come in and tried to assist, ...
That's like trying to cure cancer with cancer, but on the face of it and not in some clever cutting-edge way.
Actual solutions? Take highly effective organizations and copy them. USDS and JSOC come to mind.
I don't buy it. Shucks, we've exhausted every other method—therefore, the solution here is to hand over the reigns to immature, extremely low caliber people with conflicts of interest that are absolutely massive [3], and whose motivations are questionable at best?
Yeah, no thanks. I dislike government waste and inefficiency as much as the next person, but using the guise of cost cutting to rapidly install loyalists at critical power junctures isn't a good thing. Never mind the flagrant disregard for the law that's taking place as this is all unfolding.
Lets talk about Clinton's cuts to the federal workforce and compare them to what's happening now.
- 3/4 of those cut were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended
- large swaths of gov employees weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing (the long-term effects of which are yet to be felt)
- it was a more thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.
- there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned
- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut primarily benefiting the wealthy
There's really no comparison with what is happening now.
- they weren't fired overnight and in the highly immature manner DOGE is doing
- it was a measured, thought-out process, not randomly firing all employees on probationary status, or gutting programs that are actually useful to Americans like the CFPB, reducing NIH research, etc.
- most importantly, 3/4 of those were from the Defense Dept, and the whole point was to reduce the defense budget overall, which had become unnecessarily large especially since the Cold War had by then ended.
- he used the savings to balance the budget rather than give a tax cut to the rich
- lastly, there were no conflicts of interests where Clinton was gutting agencies which oversee private companies which he owned
So basically night and day compared to what is happening now.
Yes, DOGE is being raked over the coals but only 77k federal employees have taken their severance package. Clinton also famously proposed majority cuts to the federal workforce.
Trump is getting flack for breaking the law. Clinton’s layoffs were done with Congress which avoided all of the concerns about impoundment or other unapproved changes to their directed spending, they spent months planning first to avoid doing the cycle we’re seeing now where they ask people to come back after telling them they were fired, and they worked with the unions.
> There are 5 different existing agencies within the government that all exist for essentially the same purpose -- to track and audit government spending. None of them have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years.
People are acting like I'm making outlandish claims, you can literally just google this! If you are going to go down a rabbit hole I recommend USASpending, which consumes ATOM from FPDS and so is very close to source-of-truth.
I’m confused. USASpending looks to be source-of-truth as you say, so how has the US federal government failed in tracking spending when said source-of-truth is supplied by them?
Skimming OiG audit reports, they appear comprehensive and detailed. How has the government failed in auditing if these audits exist?
Where is the 20 years of failure to audit and track spending you mentioned? I’m not sure what you expect me to google.
It isn't particularly correct to say that these agencies have the same purpose. They do similar things, but each has its own remit.
You could maybe instead say that they should be under the same roof, rather than being independent entities. But I don't think this is itself evidence that any of them have been ineffective. Having read some of their reports, OMB and CBO are not ineffective on face value.
(I also don't think any of this is really about curbing government spending.)
GAO, civil OIG's, OMB, CBO, GSA, DoD OIG, Treasury OIG -- none have been successful in any capacity over the last 20 years. This was a bipartisan, consensus take 3 months ago.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. At most our debt is mildly concerning its not some sort of catastrophe unless we do something stupid tp sabotage ourselves(see DODGE) and most of the debt is owned by americans not foreigners. Also China owns less US debt then Japan. UK owns nearly as much as China and Canada is fifth. UK Japan and Canada are close allies, or were they might not be after Trump is done.
If someone wanted to make an actual good faith effort to make goverment more effecient going over the reports would be the first thing you would do instead of attacking theae agencies.
If someone wanted to randomly
cut departments that might object to illegal and corrupt actions the administration might take, or ones that once said nice things about minorites or just so you could stuff the fired positions with incompent cronies (or hire your freinds as contractors) then it would look a lot like DODGE
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/14/politics/corruption-justi...
> Since Inauguration Day, the Justice Department has paused all investigations into corporate foreign bribery, curtailed enforcement of a foreign agent registration law and deemphasized the criminal prosecutions of Russian oligarchs. And senior administration officials have considered eliminating the Department’s Public Integrity Section, which investigates and prosecutes alleged misconduct by federal, state and local public officials.
The problem with the military spending is on Congress, because they set the defense budget, not the White House (and certainly not DOGE).
But defense doesn't get cut because it props up a huge infrastructure across many states. No senator wants to be the ones to vote to cut that in their state.
The US economy is built, to some degree, on the military-industry complex, especially since we offshored all the other manufacturing.
Defense spending gets audited frequently, the audits just end in failure. This is primarily due to massive lines in their budget that are totally classified, but also they do lose track of resources. Until recently they did not even know how many warfighters they had!
That being said, at the very least basically everything they do moves towards some outcome. Most folks in the military are incredibly mission-driven. Plus, all their big contracts (50M$+) get regular hearings from Congress.
The same cannot be said for civil at all, they have little to no oversight, everyone is buddy-buddy so internal audits often border on fraud, there are many billion dollar contracts that have never gone thru Congressional approval.
If you want to really lose your shit, you should look up how OTA contract vehicles function. Literally just "trust me bro" spending, and for some reason rampant in civil.
Defense is not only auditable but is regularly audited; publicly by GAO and CBO, and internally by their OIG: https://www.dodig.mil
> they spend the most by far
This is not true and for some reason a common myth that is easily disproven; defense spending is only 13% of the budget, the 54% number people keep throwing around is discretionary spending and not relevant as we should be looking at the entire budget.
DOGE is literally just sorting by percent of budget; Medicaid is 22%, SSA is 20%, interest on our deficit by itself is 11% and on track to exceed our entire defense budget.
> The only reason we have a deficit is because GOP keeps cutting taxes for millionaires.
I mean, the math does not check out at all. We can expect losses of revenue from cuts to be around the same as receipts from audits done by the IRS; we know this number to be only around ~50B$ a year. You are being gaslit into thinking the problem is your fellow citizens not paying more in taxes, when anyone going into government can tell you they are reckless with spending.
Just to put things in perspective, Medicaid is hardly an actual healthcare program as it applies to less than 20% of our population. However it somehow(?) costs more than 4x as much as the entire NHS.
Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.
> Sounds like a good argument for [properly-administered] single-payer, universal healthcare.
The opposite right now! The US government is SO bad at managing healthcare, that they are somehow making the NHS look great.
We need to get our bureaucracy and spending under control. Then definitely yes, government funded healthcare, we can have a system closer to Australia in efficacy.
This is a tangent to this thread but I think in practice we will probably end up with something closer to the Swiss hybrid system.
> Yes, hence why I'm comparing it to the NHS supporting the UK (~70M pop). Also note the NHS's coverage far exceeds Medicaid.
They might both cover ~70M, but the NHS population has a median age of ~41, for Medicare it's ~71. The US health system is expensive, but NHS vs Medicare cost is not really a valid comparison with such drastically different demographics.
Doesn’t help the situation when you the very senators entrusted to run the legislative branch of government were the ones in charge of organizations that defrauded Medicaid and Medicare for billions of dollars. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott
Perhaps we should be barking up the tree of the private medical-insurance complex which is the real problem when it comes to healthcare costs.
Yes Congress cannot be trusted, that is why I am not complaining like many in this thread about the methods of achieving cuts or executive overreach — this is the best chance we have had in years to get anything done.
The only real way you can reform the government purely from the confines of the system is turning over around 70% of the legislative branch, I do not see that happening in any future.
I have to respectfully disagree - turning over basically unlimited power to reshape the entire bureaucracy to an unelected person isn’t the way to do it either. It’s not a binary choice.
I wish I was optimistic as you. Only problem is, I highly doubt any savings realized from spending cuts will materialize in the form of better healthcare.
Regulatory capture is rampant, and then there's that whole pesky issue of growing unchecked authoritarianism that has a good chance of not aligning with the will of the people.
Yeah I can understand the sentiment. I’m being optimistic primarily because the alternative is to accept that our economy is going to eventually go bust and turn us into a debtor society to foreign economies.
The building is on fire, closing your eyes or clinging to a bottle of water are both valid reactions!
Recently medicaid overtook defense. You're right, but medicaid shouldn't exist and is a symptom of the larger forced government inefficiency that is the health insurance system.
People also claim that social security is a great portion of spending, but it's fully funded through income tax and even more solvent since covid killed so many of it's recipients.
Exactly. They exploit people like the one you’re responding to as mouthpieces for their broader campaign against the institutions that regulate their businesses. As long as they can claim they’ve stopped some money from being “wasted,” these people will look the other way and let them operate unchecked.
Trump and Musk are both petty, vindictive, greedy, and narcissistic billionaires, known for grifting, deception, abuse, and ruthless behavior. How can anyone trust them?
None of the existing cuts target deregulating SpaceX/Tesla, and the proposed regulatory cuts affect everything across the board and not just Musk's companies.
When it comes to deregulation, we can pretend like this is new, or we can have an honest discussion and acknowledge deregulation in various forms has been a key component of the Conservative, Libertarian, and Liberal platforms for decades. Recently even the Socialist platform has adopted deregulation for key industries like housing and infrastructure.
You can both hate Musk and Trump (as both are demonstrably all of the things you said above) and acknowledge that ultimately what they are doing is the best progress we have had on this front in 20+ years. Regardless of how many bureaucrats parade on media claiming otherwise, we must not forget that the government is and has historically been incredibly inefficient, reckless with spending, and filled with endless waste. This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!
We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_. It is not perfect, nor is it optimal, but it is far better than the last 5 attempts.
> This was a universal and bipartisan opinion up until 3 months ago!
No it wasn’t.
> We have a chance for the first time in decades to actually reform our bureaucracy; instead of passing on it because of character flaws, we should seize and celebrate this as _progress_.
This is like an arsonist setting fire to your house and saying we finally have a chance to renovate.
The only thing that seems to bind you and Musk is your disgust for bureaucracy. How you can conclude the many conflicts of interests Musk has will not benefit him or his companies is beyond me. He did nothing to gain our trust. Most people wouldn’t even let him watch their kids, and you trust him with your whole country.
It would of course be better if you stuck to known facts instead of rumors from anonymous people on X. But even if misuse of USAID money comes to light, which I’m sure there is, wouldn’t it be better to understand al the facts, and change course if need be?
The tactic right now seems to be to cause as much chaos as possible, to find and point to one silver lining and then to move on as quickly as possible. Ignoring all the irreparable harm caused along the way.
There will never be another opportunity to fix this stuff in my lifetime. It’s the sort of thing we read about in history books in the 1990s about what the CIA/State Department did decades before, and we assumed they weren’t still doing the same things. The Bangladesh thing happens to be what irks me for obvious reasons. But the civil service is full of ideologues who push various unpopular policies (e.g. racial preferences, foreign intervention, increased immigration) regardless of who wins the election. It was a miracle that Musk got into the position he’s in now and he needs to gut these agencies now because they’re won’t be another chance.
Social security and Medicare payments will continue to be made. That’s the essential stuff. Everything else can tolerate some disruption.
Maybe they will fix some of the stuff. Hard disagree here, chaos doesn't mean change for the better but there is at least some chance.
Did you ever consider what you and everybody else will lose by allowing all this to happen in such ways? One random example from the sea of examples - US within a month lost all the international respect it ever built after WWI lets say. I mean all of it, and its not coming back anytime soon.
Now its a fat bully who kicks kids randomly including former friends, chokes them from all lunch money and some more. Literally China looks like our new best buddy from European perspective. Once we move to their ways of working and their financial flows, petrodollar will never ever be the same power projection it once was. And you know what China has to do to achieve all this soft power win? Absolutely nothing, just sit back and enjoy the view of an orange man have his mental fits and petty vengeful fights on all sides (apart from russia obviously, they were always great friends to US and its democracy).
> Did you ever consider what you and everybody else will lose by allowing all this to happen in such ways? One random example from the sea of examples - US within a month lost all the international respect it ever built after WWI lets say.
What international respect? People in my corner of the world are quite happy about Trump revealing the U.S. meddling in south Asian affairs. Liberal internationalism is deeply unpopular outside Western Europe, because it generally invokes America meddling in the internal affairs of Asian and middle eastern countries.
Also, Americans clearly don’t care about “international respect”—in the sense you’re talking about it. Your example is the archetype of the problem: you have government filled with liberal internationalists who have particular values that don’t reflect the electorate. Most democrats don’t care about American hegemony—they just like Obamacare. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous Iraq War, most Republican voters want to turn inward and close the border.
But somehow the internationalists
have burrowed into the federal government and you can’t get rid of them. Similarly, support for increasing immigration has never been over 34% but somehow immigration keeps increasing. Affirmative action keeps being resurrected and renamed. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to get these people out of the government.
US is meddling everywhere it can, no continent was ever spared, same goes for Russia or China (albeit this is very soft so far). Anybody surprised by this has some gigantic gaps in history lessons and just ignores whats happening in the world, those organisations were out in plain sight for decades.
What respect? All its relevant allies - whole Europe, Canada. Half a billion of wealthy democracy aligned folks in Europe and Canada. Remove them and most of the remaining world doesnt share at all core values with what we call western democracies. Those wont ever be long term allies.
China seems very happy with his moves, so is India with current government. And thats about it for important players. I did expect him to be friendly towards russia but speed and intensity of his ass kissing and ignoring basic facts is quite something. But somebody ignoring his own constitution from Day 1 can't be expected to deliver much.
> One random example from the sea of examples - US within a month lost all the international respect it ever built after WWI lets say. I mean all of it, and its not coming back anytime soon.
In 2003 the USA invaded Iraq because the "intelligence community" made up claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, resulting in the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and 4,700 coalition troops; and the rise of ISIS. You think Trump's actions in the past month are worse than that?
To our allies, yes and without a doubt. Maybe if we had invaded an ally based on questionable intelligence. But now, the US is siding with dictators and oligarchs and against Canada, Mexico, EU, England, Japan, South Korea. If you don't see that as worse or didn't know it was happening, you should re-evaluate your news sources. The oligarchs aren't your buddies and you're not going to be one.
I don’t think most people in Australia are really paying that much attention to what is happening in the US. And the fact remains that Australia needs the US and doesn’t really have any other real option. Our immediate neighbours are either even weaker than we are (New Zealand) or too culturally different to make a military alliance a viable option (Indonesia). The average Australian isn’t willing to incur the risk or cost of “going it alone” on national security. The UK is too far away to help us. The US is far away too, but the US retains an ability to project power globally which the UK has largely lost.
And if the polls are right, we are going to elect Dutton as our next PM, who even though he occasionally criticises Trump, on the whole is closer to Trump than our current government is.
Even my teenage kids hate the US now because of how Trump talks about Nato and that’s just because of how they talk in their War Thunder teams. Cozying up to Russia will do that for you. And they already didn’t respect the US because of how the government treats its own citizens.
It’s very hard to gain respect. It’s very easily lost.
>Who are the “right people” who would’ve flagged and stopped $29 million in usaid funds going to destabilized the government in Bangladesh, or DEI projects in Serbia?
Congressional representatives. You can share what you know with your representative and ask they investigate. Congress regularly calls in bureaucrats to talk about budgets. If your case bears out, ask your members of Congress to propose amendments to the next budget cutting or fixing bad programs. And representatives very often add amendments targeting specific programs, or even sponsor such bills. We don't often hear about them because they're not sexy enough for news.
The goals toward which we spend tax dollars must be debated by representatives of the people. The executive branch will then be told the goals, the structure, the controls, and the budget. If the executive agrees, they sign the bill. Afterwards, the executive's power is in deciding who will carry out the goals and how to adapt to the situation on the ground while staying within the boundaries of the law. If the law is too restrictive, the executive can talk to Congress.
What must not happen is an executive deciding to ignore a law voted on by the majority of Congress and signed by a president. That's not an executive power, that's just an unconstitutional power grab. If we allow that, there's basically no point to Congress.
But Congress never voted on funding dissidents in Bangladesh or DEI in Serbia. The process you’re describing isn’t how these grants were made in the first pace. Congress passed broad appropriations bills, such as allocating $3 billion for implementing the foreign assistance act of 1961. Additionally, USAID got $5.7 billion in “untied” money last year: https://www.devex.com/news/money-matters-how-usaid-got-billi...
The specific grants Trump is freezing were determined by the executive itself. They can be cancelled by the executive too. At some point, of course, Trump will need to seek recession under the impoundment act if USAID isn’t going to use its full appropriation. But in the meantime it’s totally within his authority to cancel specific grants that were decided by the executive in the first place.
I would strongly recommend listening to Rory Stewart's commentary in the first half of this podcast about the function and role of USAID as an expression of soft power.
I have never heard of Rory Stewart. My family came to this country because of USAID and my dad worked for USAID contractors his whole career. Probably 2/3 of the people at my family's Thanksgivings work for USAID and/or World Bank. Whatever "soft power" is projected by USAID is because of stuff like PEPFAR. But Samantha Powers--who my dad hates--shredded that good will by getting USAID involved in "democracy." Why would countries like India and Bangladesh ever trust USAID again after finding out USAID was funding political movements in their countries? It confirms what half the world already thinks about America: busybodies that meddle in other countries' internal affairs.
I'm from Australia lol the US constantly interferes in our country directly and indirectly. 'Busybody that meddles' is a pretty soft term for it, I would call it aggressively destablises its allies.
If you take away the premise that the US is doing something good, like for PEPFAR, then what is left? A gun wielding maniacal imperial power that you have no reason to deal or treat with. This is bad for the US and bad for the world
Actually exit polls say that most people who voted for Trump did so because they thought he would lower grocery prices, not because they thought he would make the government more efficient. So far grocery prices have risen significantly under his administration.
As far as I know there is no evidence that there was a program to destabilize bangladesh that doge cut, that appears to be another case of doge not really understanding what it was cutting. But if you have a credible reference on that which isn't just saying "Elon said so", I'd love to see it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump started mailing checks to people just before the midterms. I remember a documentary before election day where many gladly people remembered receiving stimulus checks just because Trump demanded they were sent in his name. They’ll forget about the wounds he’ll cause, as long as they receive a bandaid with his face on it.
They already have spoke about passing on the savings by sending out $5000 cheques. A small price to pay for gutting your healthcare benefits and social security :)
Coalitions are built by uniting various factions and their interests. Cutting the administrative state is #9 on Trump’s platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. Just because it wasn’t the top reason doesn’t mean it wasn’t part of the platform that people voted for.
For example, I don’t personally care for RFK. I’m the opposite of an anti-vaxxer, I think the government should vaccinate you in your sleep. But he was part of the pitch and MAHA was part of the coalition and I voted for the platform and was happy to see him confirmed. That’s how political coalitions work.
If Newsom explicitly runs on X, Y, and Z, and you vote for him for X and Y, I think it’s fair to say that you’re at least acquiescing to Z in return for forming a majority coalition.
Here's what the "adults" in Congress are doing now:
"The newly released House GOP resolution proposes a $4 trillion debt ceiling increase while allocating $4.5 trillion in new deficits for the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee."
Even if DOGE finds $29 billion in waste, it would essentially be a rounding error compared to those numbers.
By what calculus is that money "going back" to taxpayers? It looks like we're going even further into debt to issue massive tax cuts to corporations along with some scraps to throw at the base. Most of those millions will be skimmed by the elites while we the people get a far less functional federal government in exchange.
Russell Vought, Project 2025 architect and now head of OMB: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected… When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down… We want to put them in trauma.”
This is almost the definition of a dysfunctional workplace. The best you can hope for with this kind of organization is that it barely keeps limping along. (Of course, we already know that Republicans want to “drown [the federal government] in a bathtub,” so I imagine the trauma will only get worse.)
Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016 by breaking from party orthodoxy in opposing entitlement reform. Then he was president for four years and didn’t touch medicare or social security. So yes, I’m going to trust that over the same people who told me in 2016 that there would be Muslim internment camps.
Trump did nothing but increase taxes on the poor and decreased them for the rich in his first term because he had no plan. Now the plan is project 2025, which he pretended to not be aware of or have anything to do with, so not sure why you would trust anything he says.
By the same logic the GAO, OIG's, OMB, and GSA are all government employees, presenting an even more immediate and direct conflict of interest.
BTW SpaceX is a fairly tiny government contractor -- big ones like Accenture and other consulting firms have previously audited spending including their own contracts.
I don’t know, maybe not the richest man on earth who also happens to have massive conflicts of interest, calls respected people he disagrees with “retards” and is clearly losing his grip on his sanity. I mean that’s just my dumb take, though. What do you think?
Almost all of it would be related to military contracts and spending
As large as social security is, I'm sure there's some efficiencies to be gained too, but the military industrial complex is THE defacto leader in greed and wastefulness
But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them. You can't tell me they're competent after that big of a screw up.
If you look seriously you will find military contracts and spending usually achieves something and is in many cases very difficult to decrease.
It has become somewhat of a pattern for politicians to yell about defense spending, get elected, look under the covers and do an immediate 180 in favor of defense spending.
On the other hand you can cut around 70% of the civil government immediately with no impact on our country. Social Security would not be my first choice though!
> But these idiots tried to fire people related to the nuclear arsenal and had to go rehire them
They did not -- this is simple malicious compliance. This is a really well documented phenomenon and I am hoping this situation draws more public attention to it! Whenever faced with cuts, our govt bureaucracy reacts by cutting something visible to create a PR disaster and force back cuts -- the common saying is "firemen and teachers first" and this is often referred to as "Washington Monument Syndrome."
Except in this case the victims happened to be essential to maintaining the security of the United States' nuclear weapons stockpile.
Surely their evil, bureaucratic bosses just did it for show to score political points though, right?
>Whenever faced with cuts, our govt bureaucracy reacts by cutting something visible to create a PR disaster and force back cuts
Cite one credible source saying this is in fact what happened recently with NNSA and I might believe you.
The preponderance of evidence recently does not support this, what with it being widely reported that ill-suited unqualified personnel have been presiding over these cuts across all agencies, at a scale and speed which is unprecedented.
