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.
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.
Here's an idea, we let the voters decide. Oh right, they did.
That's frankly ridiculous. I'm glad Elon is doing what he's doing. It's time to cut through the BS and ship it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Maybe what goal do they think they're pursuing?
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.
You literally are, though
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you might not want to take that bet, they have a good track record predicting Trump.
This is an opinion held by the Left.
I can't see how that is a good thing either, even if you are somehow credulous enough to believe their claims.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&sca_esv=1...
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.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-usaid-c0c7799be0b2fa7c...
We don't have to pretend naivity.
Does the Republican Party have any humans with brains left, or is it all slime molds now??
https://www.state.gov/emergency-humanitarian-waiver-to-forei...
This stuff is also what breeds hate against US world wide. People are tired of foreign government mendling in their country.
Hiring a bunch of guys who work at companies he or Thiel owns definitely counts as nepotism.
They might care about other things more than that though...
(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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
A bold claim. Can I get a list of these nations?
Because last time I checked, if in doubt the US backed who is better for them not for the people of that nation.
And what’s waste is highly political.
In the long run the US will lose lots of its influence in other countries.
[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.]