> If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
And maybe (just maybe) raise your voice in _actionable_ support for dismantling the complexes these money ghouls use to wage war against you and regular society.
Peaceful protests, calling your reps, voting, and donating to organizations that have lawyers in the courts and lobbyists on Washington repping your interests are all super helpful relatively low effort steps that have impact when done en masse.
For those curious about a more thoughtful model of government reform--which is still sorely needed--the original US Digital Service team just published a bunch of interviews:
https://usdigitalserviceorigins.org/interviews/
Lyn Alden had a good, terse analysis of why DOGE was unlikely to be effective in this newsletter[0]. The math was simple, the folks behind DOGE must have themselves known that their stated mission was impossible.
It starts with these paragraphs, if you want to seek to it:
"This is the goal of the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. This is an advisory commission rather than an official government department. Musk has famously vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending—roughly 30% of last year’s federal budget.
Although this sounds good on paper, achieving such a target will be quite challenging, given the composition of government spending. Last year, the government spent $6.75 trillion, with $4.1 trillion (61%) classified as mandatory spending."
Classifying some spending as "mandatory" is a ruse to make people ignore the potential for any savings there.
The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything? Paying for things that are ineffective or unnecessary? Would it be better to means test certain benefits so that the government isn't making big social assistance payouts to recipients with a net worth over a million dollars? Is there any Medicare fraud?
The next largest and almost as big is social security, so what happens if we means test that program, or even just get rid of the reverse means testing in the existing program which makes larger payouts to people who made more money?
These things would all reduce "mandatory" spending, potentially by a significant amount, and there is nothing preventing that from happening except for the false insistence that it can't be done.
I often find myself guilty of not reading the article but only the comments here myself, so in case this is you: Go take the time and read it, even if it's painful.
I read a lot of heavy stuff, but this collection of quotes makes me sick to my stomach.
And even more so: how this inhumane, perverted treatment of fellow human beings, regardless of whether you fantasize/reason that DOGE does net good for the planet, finds no mention yet in the comments here, at all. To add to that, these are people who have spent much of their life in public service, for the benefit of society.
To be honest, I don't even know what is worse; the quotes, or that.
Even if you don’t give a f*ck about decency, it is simply irrational to do it like that if it were about cost cutting. The only goal of this can be to create trauma and more violence, like one person in the article rightfully quotes. This is to provoke people into violence, plain and simple.
“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
These people do not believe in America as it exists or the promise of what it could be. They hate us and they want to destroy what we have to create something fundamentally different.
I don't know who this person is, but I looked up the quote. The quote you've cherry-picked is complaining that the left has been especially violent this political season. He says the right is winning and will continue to win bloodlessly if the left cuts out the political violence. Here's where I found it: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kevin_Roberts_(political_strat...
Political violence against disagreeable people is disturbing and I wish you would condemn it.
The whole point of Doge was to fire the agencies that were investigating all of Musk's companies that were breaking laws. That and getting rid of competent people who might stand up to the orangefuhrer.
I think the self-dealing and getting rid of oversight was a very welcome bonus, but I think they genuinely thought they were the good guys coming to clean up government. Their methods were tragically ineffective as every serious person predicted.
We have fiscal issues, clearly, and they thought they were doing good work, but it was an absolute failure and many of the issues still remain, and were exacerbated by what DOGE did.
Well, the guys on the ground might be useful idiots [1]. But at the top there's no way they thought they were doing anything but dumping stuff into the trash.
Which when the EPA / etc are the only organizations large enough to stand up to you is uh very good for you.
It's impossible to prove intent. With the exception of the NHTSA, the following agencies were gutted, each whose jurisdiction covered his business interests. In the case of the NHTSA, about half of the team that oversees autonomous vehicle safely was let go [1].
It is upsetting to me that people have so much trouble sifting fact from opinion or narrative.
The fact is that DOGE made cuts to NHTSA. It is also a fact that DOGE made cuts to a bunch of agencies, not just ones related to something Elon was doing.
There isn’t even any evidence that DOGE was more aggressive about cutting things related to Elon vs other government waste.
Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government. The opinion is that the reason is to cut people specifically going after Elon.
And to be clear I gave no opinion on what Elon did or didn’t do. My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious.
What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
> What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
How doge isn't a plain dictionary definition of corruption? A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
It used to be that in such cases that private citizen then must give up their rights to their businesses (or some other way of avoiding conflict of interest).
The one they did the most damage to was probably USAID. They didnt have anything to do with Elons businesses. Meanwhile the FAA was still blocking starship flights.
Remember: if anyone supported DOGE or still supports DOGE, they (both DOGE and their supporters) were not ever serious about the debt or government efficiency.
Elon was serious about the debt. Thats why he and Trump don't get along any more. After the initial DOGE efforts, Trump raised the debt ceiling a few trillion dollars and got a new spending bill passed that increase spending like another trillion dollars - obviously not concerned about the debt.
Why do you think otherwise? He was very clear about it long before DOGE. He viewed the debt as an existential threat to the country and believed Trump was the only candidate that might actually fix it. Looks like the joke was on Elon.
What's certainly not going away is that Government waste and bloat is a home-run bipartisan issue where the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine.
Everyone left and right instinctively knows this is, that it's a problem that they're both taxed directly for and (I hope) many people know they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime.
I don't know if this was in your lifetime, but Bill Clinton reduced government spending through the National Performance Review. Not only did he do it, but he did it in a planned and strategic way, that included an initial phase of research, followed by education and recommendations, which were send to congress for approval.
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
The Republican party is literally in control of Congress and the presidency. Copying Clinton is something they could do. The fact that they don't appear to have made a serious effort to increase revenues and reduce spending in a sane and organized way raises questions.
The Republicans have this idea that cutting taxes and increasing spending will reduce the ratio of debt/gdp by increasing the denominator. It does increase GDP but I think it increases the debt faster, so it can't work. Happy to be proven wrong.
It doesn't "raises questions" it "answers questions". Anybody who believes the republicans in America are "the party of fiscal responsibility" is a joke.
> Everyone left and right instinctively knows this
That’s the first sign that a large group of people are going to something thoughtless and destructive.
Looking around at actual data from both gov and think tank sources, this quote from Pew is a good summary: “While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years.”
But that’s not the whole story. The postal service is shrinking, the vast majority of those federal employees work for the VA, the amount of funding being directed by the federal employees has grown (because of budget growth), federal regulations touch more private sector activity than in the past, and state and local governments employ significantly more people than they used to.
DOGE’s focus on headcount was wrongheaded because the number of federal employees is not the problem. The problem is Congress (budgets and laws) and states.
Conventional wisdom is that federal payroll growth is massive, and that is just wrong.
> DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime
On what timeline? The week of the first round of RIFs? The first month?
I assure you, as someone who works with in the space where DOGE has played, it will NOT be a reduction in costs in the long run. In fact, costs will go up because of the indiscriminate nature of "cost reduction". When the only people with knowledge of a system are removed, the remaining people cannot run it - no matter what AI they are given. At that point, you have to either hire back the people you fired, with a serious delay of important work, or you stumble for years until it can be figured out at the cost of delays, protests, lawsuits, whatever.
Considering firing everyone a reduction in costs is a shallow, short-term view.
What metric are you looking at when you say "the size of government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector" - AFAICT, excluding 2020 and 2021 (which I think is reasonable), the federal budget has been between 17% and 25% of GDP for the past 50 years (where the fluctuations are more a function of variable GDP).
The number of federal government employees has also remained mostly flat for the past 50 years (and IIRC most growth in overall public sector employment comes from schools).
> they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
Don't worry – unless we stop giving out tax cuts as well, we'll still be running deficits until Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. For the average taxpayer, it's about fiscal sustainability - "smaller government" may as well be a feel-good abstraction compared to that.
I do not instinctively know this, no. I encourage you to take an evidence-based approach. The deficit has largely grown over the past 25 years because of foreign wars, tax cuts, and pandemic response.
It was the only thing to be optimistic about in this administration, but it sure didn't last long. We should all know that this was the last attempt that had a chance of addressing the national debt -- the only other way out is extreme inflation.
Musk was absolutely the wrong guy for the job. He doesn't have the patience to spend 4 years carefully poring over government expenses, nor the security clearance (AFAIK) to address pentagon spending. Plus, I don't think he's humble enough to bring in people who actually know what to look for.
People are having a tough period where they think their government doesn't care about them, to see so much wastage ignites the hard feelings that the "elite" has prioritised others than their own people.
I believe that is the reason why DOGE was supported by Trump, but I do think something like DOGE is needed but perhaps for better and less egotistical reasons.
The most incredible piece of logical gymnastics I remember from civics/history class in high school was that during economic downturns, we need government to spend more to help people, and during economic growth we of course also need more government to manage all the new growth. At no point do we cut the spending we've added, because it would always hurt those who have jobs.
People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
That's not a fair---or accurate---summary of Keynes.
The claim is that the government should act as a stabilizer: spending to drive aggregate demand during downswings (especially ones caused by external shocks) and regulating during up-swings.
In other words, "more" refers to different things and in different proportions in different phases of the business cycle; it's emphatically not a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" sort of thing.
> The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
In many cases, because they're slashing things that we are realizing that we do need, and we're going to pay even more to reconstruct the things they've destroyed.
The only way to effectively reducing spending and waste is by doing things slowly and carefully, evaluating the impact of the changes you are going to make carefully. This happened successfully in the 90s, but DOGE is not doing things that way.
The OMB has been trying to slowly and thoughtfully cut spending since the 70's, and they've struggled to see success. I think in terms of cutting spending, the slower it happens the less likely anything productive will come from it. It's why companies tend to cut whole departments at once, and the government desperately needs a way to cut funding from things that aren't working to reallocate it where the money is needed.
From what I've seen the DOGE cuts have been incredibly efficient in isolating poorly spent (or corrupt) money. Lots of corrupt foreign programs or government donations into partisan political groups. Most of the time when someone says they shouldn't have cut money, they're talking about an NGO or some research that benefits their particular partisanship at the cost of fairness or scientific rigor; which is exactly what we shouldn't be funding.
The Clinton admin was successful in the 90s. They cut costs enough to pull the US entirely out of the deficit. They did things slowly and methodically over 5 years, making sure the things they cut were unnecessary before cutting them. They also followed the law, avoiding the legal issues and consequential costs that DOGE is incurring.
Federal spending is up during this administration, the deficit is at modern-day averages, and the bills recently passed by this administration are going to increase it even further. The slash-and-burn style of cuts that DOGE is sloppy and ineffective. They are Chesterton's fencing themselves -- cutting things that they later find to be important. And on the other hand, not spending the time to actually seek out waste that is hard to find. A tech company works very differently than the government does, and they are slowly starting to discover that the hard way.
Another incredible thing you maybe didn't study in civics class is that the US had an "exorbitant privilege" it's now pissing away. The ability to borrow at extremely low rates from the rest of the world, because the US was so productive. We will miss it when it's gone.
a16z and certain Sequoia partners specifically supported this during the 2024 election.
If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
> If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
And maybe (just maybe) raise your voice in _actionable_ support for dismantling the complexes these money ghouls use to wage war against you and regular society.
Peaceful protests, calling your reps, voting, and donating to organizations that have lawyers in the courts and lobbyists on Washington repping your interests are all super helpful relatively low effort steps that have impact when done en masse.
For those curious about a more thoughtful model of government reform--which is still sorely needed--the original US Digital Service team just published a bunch of interviews: https://usdigitalserviceorigins.org/interviews/
The US Digital Service has done a ton of great work in a thoughtful manner. Thanks Obama!
I hope a similar oral history will be done for 18F – it ran very, very lean.
Lyn Alden had a good, terse analysis of why DOGE was unlikely to be effective in this newsletter[0]. The math was simple, the folks behind DOGE must have themselves known that their stated mission was impossible.
It starts with these paragraphs, if you want to seek to it:
"This is the goal of the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. This is an advisory commission rather than an official government department. Musk has famously vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending—roughly 30% of last year’s federal budget.
Although this sounds good on paper, achieving such a target will be quite challenging, given the composition of government spending. Last year, the government spent $6.75 trillion, with $4.1 trillion (61%) classified as mandatory spending."
[0] https://www.lynalden.com/full-steam-ahead-all-aboard-fiscal-...
Classifying some spending as "mandatory" is a ruse to make people ignore the potential for any savings there.
The largest component of "mandatory" spending is health spending (e.g. Medicare), and it certainly isn't the case that Medicare is fully optimized. For example, is it overpaying for anything? Paying for things that are ineffective or unnecessary? Would it be better to means test certain benefits so that the government isn't making big social assistance payouts to recipients with a net worth over a million dollars? Is there any Medicare fraud?
The next largest and almost as big is social security, so what happens if we means test that program, or even just get rid of the reverse means testing in the existing program which makes larger payouts to people who made more money?
These things would all reduce "mandatory" spending, potentially by a significant amount, and there is nothing preventing that from happening except for the false insistence that it can't be done.
I often find myself guilty of not reading the article but only the comments here myself, so in case this is you: Go take the time and read it, even if it's painful.
I read a lot of heavy stuff, but this collection of quotes makes me sick to my stomach.
And even more so: how this inhumane, perverted treatment of fellow human beings, regardless of whether you fantasize/reason that DOGE does net good for the planet, finds no mention yet in the comments here, at all. To add to that, these are people who have spent much of their life in public service, for the benefit of society.
To be honest, I don't even know what is worse; the quotes, or that.
Even if you don’t give a f*ck about decency, it is simply irrational to do it like that if it were about cost cutting. The only goal of this can be to create trauma and more violence, like one person in the article rightfully quotes. This is to provoke people into violence, plain and simple.
That was the explicitly stated goal of the creators of Project 2025. “We want to put them in trauma.”
Yes. They've said it even more blatantly.
“And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
These people do not believe in America as it exists or the promise of what it could be. They hate us and they want to destroy what we have to create something fundamentally different.
I don't know who this person is, but I looked up the quote. The quote you've cherry-picked is complaining that the left has been especially violent this political season. He says the right is winning and will continue to win bloodlessly if the left cuts out the political violence. Here's where I found it: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kevin_Roberts_(political_strat...
Political violence against disagreeable people is disturbing and I wish you would condemn it.
https://archive.is/TiaSF
The whole point of Doge was to fire the agencies that were investigating all of Musk's companies that were breaking laws. That and getting rid of competent people who might stand up to the orangefuhrer.
I think the self-dealing and getting rid of oversight was a very welcome bonus, but I think they genuinely thought they were the good guys coming to clean up government. Their methods were tragically ineffective as every serious person predicted.
We have fiscal issues, clearly, and they thought they were doing good work, but it was an absolute failure and many of the issues still remain, and were exacerbated by what DOGE did.
That’s what C- brains bring to a project.
Well, the guys on the ground might be useful idiots [1]. But at the top there's no way they thought they were doing anything but dumping stuff into the trash.
Which when the EPA / etc are the only organizations large enough to stand up to you is uh very good for you.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
"You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!"
Kakistocracy edition
In other words, their heads were so far up their own asses they couldn't distinguish between self-dealing and public good.
Do you have an example of a cut to something that was investigating Musk? I'm not saying you're wrong - I have no clue and I'm truly curious.
It's impossible to prove intent. With the exception of the NHTSA, the following agencies were gutted, each whose jurisdiction covered his business interests. In the case of the NHTSA, about half of the team that oversees autonomous vehicle safely was let go [1].
NHTSA, CFPB, DoT (FAA), DoE
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/21/musk-doge...
Starship ban was immediately lifted once Musk got in power. Look the dates.
https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-spacex-doge-faa...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/28/faa-clears-spacex-for-starsh...
One internet search away: https://qz.com/elon-musk-doge-nhtsa-tesla-neuralink-spacex-f...
Which one was "investigating" musk?
https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2025.02....
It is upsetting to me that people have so much trouble sifting fact from opinion or narrative.
The fact is that DOGE made cuts to NHTSA. It is also a fact that DOGE made cuts to a bunch of agencies, not just ones related to something Elon was doing.
There isn’t even any evidence that DOGE was more aggressive about cutting things related to Elon vs other government waste.
Instead, all we have is an opinion by a reporter at an organization with a known bias for promoting the increase of government. The opinion is that the reason is to cut people specifically going after Elon.
And to be clear I gave no opinion on what Elon did or didn’t do. My problem is I’m tired of living in a world where everyone assumes that anyone not in 100% agreement with their policies must of course be doing something nefarious.
What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
> What if instead of repeating everyone know Elon is crazy and everyone knows Elon is corrupt and everyone knows this and that… what if we actually tried to analyze it rationally and sift through the news stories looking at the things that are definitely factually true vs. the authors opinions we happen to like because we want to imagine some people are awful and others are saints.
How doge isn't a plain dictionary definition of corruption? A private citizen given a power to destroy organisations that overlook that citizens businesses?
It used to be that in such cases that private citizen then must give up their rights to their businesses (or some other way of avoiding conflict of interest).
The one they did the most damage to was probably USAID. They didnt have anything to do with Elons businesses. Meanwhile the FAA was still blocking starship flights.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
Utter and complete disgrace, I hope people don't forget what was done here.
You can't forget what you never knew. Nobody's paying attention and nobody cares. If you disagree, then explain how we got here in the first place.
It’s easier to destroy than to build
I see hollowing out of institutions but no one is building anything
Remember: if anyone supported DOGE or still supports DOGE, they (both DOGE and their supporters) were not ever serious about the debt or government efficiency.
Elon was serious about the debt. Thats why he and Trump don't get along any more. After the initial DOGE efforts, Trump raised the debt ceiling a few trillion dollars and got a new spending bill passed that increase spending like another trillion dollars - obviously not concerned about the debt.
Uh huh. Elon serious about the debt. Sure.
Why do you think otherwise? He was very clear about it long before DOGE. He viewed the debt as an existential threat to the country and believed Trump was the only candidate that might actually fix it. Looks like the joke was on Elon.
They were, but the actual cuts needed (to entitlements) are politically impossible to make.
Which is why they went the non-democratic/illegal route by avoiding congress.
What's certainly not going away is that Government waste and bloat is a home-run bipartisan issue where the size of the government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector in both times of feast and famine.
Everyone left and right instinctively knows this is, that it's a problem that they're both taxed directly for and (I hope) many people know they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime.
I don't know if this was in your lifetime, but Bill Clinton reduced government spending through the National Performance Review. Not only did he do it, but he did it in a planned and strategic way, that included an initial phase of research, followed by education and recommendations, which were send to congress for approval.
You'll notice that this approach is consistent with basic project planning and execution principles, and follows the principles of government set out by our constitution. In contrast, DOGE sidestepped the legal and administrative principles of the government, which led to cuts followed by retractions, which are ultimately more costly and wasteful.
Reference: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...
That's true, although that also took an act of congress so it was very much a bi-partisan effort, something we're sorely lacking today.
The Republican party is literally in control of Congress and the presidency. Copying Clinton is something they could do. The fact that they don't appear to have made a serious effort to increase revenues and reduce spending in a sane and organized way raises questions.
The Republicans have this idea that cutting taxes and increasing spending will reduce the ratio of debt/gdp by increasing the denominator. It does increase GDP but I think it increases the debt faster, so it can't work. Happy to be proven wrong.
> raises questions.
It doesn't "raises questions" it "answers questions". Anybody who believes the republicans in America are "the party of fiscal responsibility" is a joke.
> Everyone left and right instinctively knows this
That’s the first sign that a large group of people are going to something thoughtless and destructive.
Looking around at actual data from both gov and think tank sources, this quote from Pew is a good summary: “While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years.”
But that’s not the whole story. The postal service is shrinking, the vast majority of those federal employees work for the VA, the amount of funding being directed by the federal employees has grown (because of budget growth), federal regulations touch more private sector activity than in the past, and state and local governments employ significantly more people than they used to.
DOGE’s focus on headcount was wrongheaded because the number of federal employees is not the problem. The problem is Congress (budgets and laws) and states.
Conventional wisdom is that federal payroll growth is massive, and that is just wrong.
> DOGE may not be the right answer, but it's the first actual reduction in spending in my lifetime
On what timeline? The week of the first round of RIFs? The first month?
I assure you, as someone who works with in the space where DOGE has played, it will NOT be a reduction in costs in the long run. In fact, costs will go up because of the indiscriminate nature of "cost reduction". When the only people with knowledge of a system are removed, the remaining people cannot run it - no matter what AI they are given. At that point, you have to either hire back the people you fired, with a serious delay of important work, or you stumble for years until it can be figured out at the cost of delays, protests, lawsuits, whatever.
Considering firing everyone a reduction in costs is a shallow, short-term view.
What metric are you looking at when you say "the size of government has vastly and consistently outgrown the private sector" - AFAICT, excluding 2020 and 2021 (which I think is reasonable), the federal budget has been between 17% and 25% of GDP for the past 50 years (where the fluctuations are more a function of variable GDP).
The number of federal government employees has also remained mostly flat for the past 50 years (and IIRC most growth in overall public sector employment comes from schools).
Comparing it to GDP doesn’t seem to make sense. Maybe to government revenue.
> they're also indirectly paying for it through inflation caused by government borrowing beyond their actual tax income.
Don't worry – unless we stop giving out tax cuts as well, we'll still be running deficits until Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. For the average taxpayer, it's about fiscal sustainability - "smaller government" may as well be a feel-good abstraction compared to that.
I do not instinctively know this, no. I encourage you to take an evidence-based approach. The deficit has largely grown over the past 25 years because of foreign wars, tax cuts, and pandemic response.
Wait, has there actually been a reduction in federal spending in total? Or just in specific agencies?
No, federal spending is up by $376 billion.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
It was the only thing to be optimistic about in this administration, but it sure didn't last long. We should all know that this was the last attempt that had a chance of addressing the national debt -- the only other way out is extreme inflation.
Musk was absolutely the wrong guy for the job. He doesn't have the patience to spend 4 years carefully poring over government expenses, nor the security clearance (AFAIK) to address pentagon spending. Plus, I don't think he's humble enough to bring in people who actually know what to look for.
People are having a tough period where they think their government doesn't care about them, to see so much wastage ignites the hard feelings that the "elite" has prioritised others than their own people.
I believe that is the reason why DOGE was supported by Trump, but I do think something like DOGE is needed but perhaps for better and less egotistical reasons.
And there was.
The most incredible piece of logical gymnastics I remember from civics/history class in high school was that during economic downturns, we need government to spend more to help people, and during economic growth we of course also need more government to manage all the new growth. At no point do we cut the spending we've added, because it would always hurt those who have jobs.
People like to criticize DOGE for going after smaller amounts (like hundreds of millions instead of tens of billions) but those are still hundreds of millions that could be put elsewhere, or even returned to the taxpayer or put towards federal debt. The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
That's not a fair---or accurate---summary of Keynes.
The claim is that the government should act as a stabilizer: spending to drive aggregate demand during downswings (especially ones caused by external shocks) and regulating during up-swings.
In other words, "more" refers to different things and in different proportions in different phases of the business cycle; it's emphatically not a "heads-I-win-tails-you-lose" sort of thing.
> The biggest concern with DOGE is that much of the spending is just going to come right back during the next election cycle
In many cases, because they're slashing things that we are realizing that we do need, and we're going to pay even more to reconstruct the things they've destroyed.
The only way to effectively reducing spending and waste is by doing things slowly and carefully, evaluating the impact of the changes you are going to make carefully. This happened successfully in the 90s, but DOGE is not doing things that way.
The OMB has been trying to slowly and thoughtfully cut spending since the 70's, and they've struggled to see success. I think in terms of cutting spending, the slower it happens the less likely anything productive will come from it. It's why companies tend to cut whole departments at once, and the government desperately needs a way to cut funding from things that aren't working to reallocate it where the money is needed.
From what I've seen the DOGE cuts have been incredibly efficient in isolating poorly spent (or corrupt) money. Lots of corrupt foreign programs or government donations into partisan political groups. Most of the time when someone says they shouldn't have cut money, they're talking about an NGO or some research that benefits their particular partisanship at the cost of fairness or scientific rigor; which is exactly what we shouldn't be funding.
The Clinton admin was successful in the 90s. They cut costs enough to pull the US entirely out of the deficit. They did things slowly and methodically over 5 years, making sure the things they cut were unnecessary before cutting them. They also followed the law, avoiding the legal issues and consequential costs that DOGE is incurring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Clinton...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Partnership_for_Reinv...
Federal spending is up during this administration, the deficit is at modern-day averages, and the bills recently passed by this administration are going to increase it even further. The slash-and-burn style of cuts that DOGE is sloppy and ineffective. They are Chesterton's fencing themselves -- cutting things that they later find to be important. And on the other hand, not spending the time to actually seek out waste that is hard to find. A tech company works very differently than the government does, and they are slowly starting to discover that the hard way.
> They are Chesterton's fencing themselves
Which is incredibly ironic for people who claim to be "conservative."
Another incredible thing you maybe didn't study in civics class is that the US had an "exorbitant privilege" it's now pissing away. The ability to borrow at extremely low rates from the rest of the world, because the US was so productive. We will miss it when it's gone.
You didn't learn that in civics/history class; you made it up.