Of course everybody wants the government to be efficient. People just have very different idea of what that means in practice (what is useful vs. wasteful spending is highly subjective (in many cases))
Which idea? The marketing, or the goal? Because nothing about DOGE was an idea about making the government "efficient". It was about weakening the government.
This is a disingenuous comment, possibly involuntarily so, but it assumes that the parties involve ever had any other goal than just killing what Elon deemed useless.
One of the darkest pages in American history.
> You're unlikely to find any seriously critical views here.
You're welcome to criticize him yourself, if you want. I suspect that your complaints will be pretty weak relative to the broader American political zeitgeist.
I've had plenty of political conversations on HN before. I've literally been on the platform for almost a decade. It's always been bent one way - which makes political dialogue a pointless endeavor.
Nope, you're doing exactly what the parent poster said, feeling secure in the 'support' you expect to get from many others on this site. The 'no politics' rule has always been a bit hazy but for about a decade it seems to have been forgotten as long as the 'politics' falls within the desired narrative. As W.O.P.R. said it is a strange game which can only be won by not playing.
I agree with you about this. If you go against the prevailing politics here, you'll get "source?"-d and nitpicked to death by an army of fact checkers while they can state opinions as facts with impunity. If your facts are unassailable you simply get downvoted and ignored.
The best thing to do is to flag political posts and comments to bury them. Happily, this appears to have happened here.
Two arguments that have so far, been talking completely past each other with no desire to understand each other:
1) efficiency means "use software to identify and cut federal programs that could reasonably be taken over by either the State dept, States themselves, or the market"
2) efficiency means "add new software and programs that streamline existing processes"
As usual, we should be doing both in a careful and considered way, and definitely should not be accusing the other side of either fascism or communism. "Efficiency" is not a decision on funding or not funding federal science research, and everyone using that word to mean that is being knowingly disingenuous.
There was a huge amount of bloat in USAID, and I'm sure there will be a huge amount of bloat in NYC, and I'm sure there was a lot of good in both. Unless you're willing to discuss specifics and tradeoffs with a calm head, you're not helping just by virtue of being upset.
I don't know how it works in your country, but in mine, each time a public monopoly is given to the market, corruption creeps in, costs increases, and suddenly you have to pay twice as much for your water and trash than the neighbouring municipality.
Ten years later some guy get arrested, other have to pay a small fine, a tenth of made profits, new red tape gets added to avoid the exact same situation. Stuff becomes so complex than muni employees avoid touching anything they don't understand (which is every contracts), corruption creeps in, and a new 10 year circle starts again.
The only way to do something about it is to really spend time understanding each item on your service list, take control of every contract on public monopoly where you can't understand everything, and cut deals with the company owners "we won't talk about your corruption, you accept our break of the contract without penalties" (one of my uncle used to do that, France's BPI took over more than 200 private contract in 4 years. He has stories, and threatening letters :D)
given that DOGE took a chainsaw to legitimate medical research that was working on saving lives and conditions for people who have no other options ... no, they were beyond heavy handed. They were out for blood using DEI as a smokescreen. Stop. This crap isn't welcome in the industry.
No, DOGE only recommended personnel and contract changes within various agencies. Trump promised not to touch entitlements and to increase military spending.
Note this was not the point of the original comment or my reply. You can in fact reduce spending without addressing defense spending: the majority of the federal budget is entitlements. No presidents (D or R) is even remotely hinting at doing this; it would be political suicide.
