I think that they are having a good think about what they are doing, but I believe that, in cutting key agencies that protect consumers from corporations, their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country.

> their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country.

When people express worry over superhuman-AI alignment on forums like this, I find myself wishing they'd shift focus to the fact that we actually already have a problem with the mis-alignment of super-human entities in the form of large corporations and the billionaires who control them. (And yes, governments too; the whole point of our democratic form of government is that it's supposed to keep that behemoth better aligned with the values and will of "the people".)

To me it seems obvious that keeping a misaligned super-AGI from destroying humanity and keeping billionares and large multinational corporations from destroying humanity with climate change in the long-term or just degrading our quality of life (via pollution, wealth inequality, etc.) in the short term are really just differences of degree and not of kind.

But we actually have the latter problem right now, and, as a bonus, if we can figure out better ways of aligning our carbon-based and economic-legal system "overlords" in the present maybe it helps point us toward a better way of aligning our potential silicon-based "overlords" in the future.

Congratulations, you've discovered class analysis. Unfortunately, that mode of thinking was successfully stigmatized during the Cold War's red scare, so good luck getting any group with power to take it seriously.

Yeah, the problem is that the interests of the cutters are not necessarily aligned with the interests of the people. You can argue in good faith about whether efficiency should be an overriding goal of government, but I think it’s pretty clear why the republican budget proposal includes a $400m carveout for armored teslas.

well good thing we have inspectors general to make sure that people in the government are acting correctly!

oh wait

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...

Good example is the CFPB. If they destroy it return all the money to taxpayers as Elon is saying he is doing, it's about 2 dollars to each of us. In return, we have a largely unregulated banking system that can do things like charge structuring for credit cards and checking account to maximize fees or overdrafts in a frankly fraudulent manner. It will cost us billions of dollars as a society to not have those protections anymore. Not to mention things like forced subscriptions that are impossible to cancel that the CFPB has been working against.

I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences.

>I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences.

Those 'costs' to society are 'profits' to the banks. You don't get to have a choice about it. Elon is in charge and he's going with the banks.

Most banking regulations today do not come from the CFPB.

That's beside the point. Chances are you are saved more than the cost.

It directly addresses the notion posed by the commenter I was replying to with regard to the origin of banking regulations.

We have, in no particular order:

- The FDIC

- The SEC

- The Federal Reserve Board

- The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

Those agencies regulate banking. Then we can go further and we have:

- The National Credit Union Organization

- The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)

- The Financial Insurance Office (part of Treasury)

- The Office of Foreign Assets Control

- The Securities Investor Protection Corp.

- The Commodity Futures Trading Commission

- EBISA, ERISA, PBGC for retirement plans...

And we need an additional agency because...?

We don't need the CFPB.

Quick question... Which one of those do I contact when my credit card company is trying to hold me responsible for fraudulent charges on my credit card?

Until someone can answer me that question with a link to a form I can fill out with an agency that has a track record of actually fixing these problems, you've made no progress on convincing me we don't need the CFPB.

What makes you think consolidating the same services under fewer names makes it better? Isn't the system simpler with clearly marked out territories?

It's not obvious to me that some other agency will pick up the same responsibilities. If it happens without a budget change elsewhere then obviously DOGE would be right in cutting this particular agency.

Oh man, a 2008-type event with these doofuses in charge will be amazing...

For a recap: https://youtu.be/ovcno7tiZas

It's like hiring Cookie Monster to make the cookie factory more efficient.

He's just going to plant himself at the end of the conveyor belt of fresh cookies with his mouth open, and get rid of everything else.

Musk is going to try and entrench himself so much, that he'll never be able to countenance his opposition winning and removing him. Unless Trump dislodges him first, he's going to be a permanent problem.

The most charitable interpretation is that Musk's doing what he did at Twitter -- wildly cutting back, and then backing off and repairing when he finds that something he threw away was actually necessary.

I'm not convinced that this is a good strategy when dealing with something with higher stakes than "posting dank memes", though. "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.

That is, as you said, sometimes the fence-that-is-inefficient-processes exists for a reason.

EDIT TO BE LESS SUBTLE BASED ON REPLIES: I think this is bad. Even in the most-charitable interpretation, it is bad. Particularly for the government, but even at Twitter it succeeded at making it smaller, but approximately-nobody thinks Twitter is better now.

A key difference is that twitter has (had) users, and users can move to e.g. bluesky once twitter's CEO decides to wreck it. The US has citizens instead, not users, not customers, but citizens, and citizens can't move if they don't like what Elon is doing. There is no Bluesky equivalent of the USA, and citizenship is not a free market.

A country is not a private company in a free market. For some this is hard to understand.

The thing about Charleston's fence is you don't know why the fence was erected. But we do. The government created it, and the government can remove it.

A wild and ruthless cut would mean that the US Government would revert to a similar relative size it was in say, 1990. Back then Debt to GDP was about 60%, now it's over 120%, for measurably worse outcomes, wage stagnation, housing costs, healthcare, education, etc. One vocal group seems to think that we could solve it by spending more money and creating more programs. You know what they say about repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results.

The argument you’re making is potentially valid but we can’t know for sure as it depends on numbers you don’t provide - how much government growth there’s been since 1990.

There’s two extra nuances too. First, what’s been the corresponding capability growth; and second, what’s been the growth in population served.

It may be that, controlling for these factors, things are more efficient than back then. And to go back would require removing capability that would be missed by some - or be critical due to today’s more complex world.

Which group is it that spends all the money? From this chart it seems like the line goes up under Democrats and down under Republicans. Since the Clinton years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSD/

To be fair, if you ignore the war, it's not spending that makes the deficit go up under Republicans; it's the tax cuts. It's like announcing you are going to get your household finances together by quitting your job.

And they are doing it again. The latest budget proposal involves ~4 trillion in tax cuts and ~2 trillion in spending cuts. Wild for a group that a few months ago was panicking at how much debt we have.

> The thing about Charleston's fence is you don't know why the fence was erected. But we do. The government created it, and the government can remove it.

Knowing Bob put up the fence is not the same as knowing WHY Bob put up the fence. You've answered the who, not the why.

except when things break, actual people in the country get harmed, and "Repairing" in this case will be privatization

Yes, I wasn't trying to imply that it was a good approach to apply to the US government. ;_;

And the federal workforce outside of the military is only like 4.5% of the federal budget

Of course there's a lot of factors, but the people who defend his cutbacks at twitter often ignore just how crappy the platform has gotten under his relatively tenure.

Its not really an interpretation- he has literally talked about this as his playbook dozens of times.

One step in the playbook is reduce - “if you dont break things 10% of the time then you are not reducing enough” is almost verbatim what he has said, and done, for all of his companies.

I strongly disagree with my fellow Americans that government systems should be immune to this process or that people will be harmed. This sensitivity to perceived harm is a problem in and of itself.

You think breaking things for 10% of Americans is not harmful?

Of course it isn't, for him; that 10% is people who rely on the state, which means the poor. He is not poor, he does not need the state. Until, that is, he has an accident, a surprise, something that derails his "normal" life, and then he will cry that the government wasn't there to save him.

America runs on the myth of "If you work hard enough, you'll succeed.". If you believe this, and you discount the role external factors has played in your life (who your parents are, whether you were discriminated against, that chance meeting with an investor who happened to like the same football team as you and gave you your break), you'll believe the opposite "If you're not successful, it's because you're lazy.", ignoring factors like poor education or hard luck like illness or accidents.

And so the poor get viewed as lazy grifters, while the billionaires are the piously hard-working...

The biggest problem for people like you is that there are plenty governments and companies that are being led by competent leaders that don’t need to wield an axe to effect change. To the people wielding the axe, every problem looks like a tree.

I would point out that former twitter lost both advertisers (you know money resource) and users. Its usability went down. Now the obvious difference is that x dont matter to people in real life, goverment does.

It is pretty obvious that real goal here is to cause maximal harm and destruction. Fascists do better in destroyed countries, Musk does not need consumer protection or functional FBI, he wants them corrupt and weak. Just as he made x weaker.

I am aware that pro-Musk people do not care about ethics, harm, morals or legality. Harm to other people is feature to people like you, I get it.

Why are we giving these people charitable interpretations any more? Elon Musk did a full on nazi salute at the inauguration rally; since then he and his cronies have extralegally tried to insert themselves inside the entire american government to cripple the regulations that prevent him and other techno-fascists doing exactly what they want with their effectively infinite money.

You need to call a spade a spade. Occam's razor is being held to the neck of this country.

The challenge is that he is following his values and not the values of the country.

The Twitter analogy is that racist and disinformation posts are perfectly fine to Musk so after gutting all of the teams looking after these things, he was perfectly fine with the large increase in both.*

We shouldn't expect a different outcome with his changes to the government. We should expect large increases in abuses by banks (because regulation was gutted), large increases in racism and disparity in Alabama public schools (because the Department of Education was gutted), etc. etc.

* https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-02-13/hate-speech...

> "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.

That depends on your perspective. I'm sure there are people out there who think that since social security goes to people who aren't economically productive that it's not a thing that matters. I disagree with those people, but defining what matters is critical, and for Musk & co "what matters" is only anything that enriches Musk & co.

Well, it would be incredibly ironic if its a musk outage that starts the 2nd American revolution

Here's another chestertonism: There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths.

Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.

..."can't put the clock back" doesn't literally mean that you can't change the time on a clock. It's referring to not being able to go back and change things that already happened.

This is true. There are things that, once done, cannot be undone. You can try to fix their consequences. You can change what you do going forward, so that the thing would not be done that way again. But you can't, say, un-kill an executed innocent.

reread the quote

Your argument about what Chesterton means remains built on deliberately misunderstanding what other sayings mean, so I'm skeptical.

The phrase comes from analog clocks where, depending on the internal design, winding them backwards could break them.

No. There are many things that are path dependent and much harder to fix if you do it wrong the first time. People resign and move on, and it can take decades to build up the skills again. For example: if Trump breaks Ukraine, how do you fix that later? Deals are signed. The war stops. China is now emboldened to have a shot at Taiwan.

People are already dying, and quite a few more will. You can't turn the clock back on that.

> Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths.

> Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.

It matters a little bit what he originally meant, but not a whole lot. What we mean with the fence is simply that you should do a bit of due diligence before making changes. That applies to all sorts of systems, government or IT, or anything else.

If something has only existed for decades it is essentially brand new and in a trial period, the trial failed. The context Chesterton meant was for things that have centuries or millennia of history behind them being upended. I'm sorry I know we like to feel very important in tech but if something hasn't been a thing for 100 years it does not matter historically.

There is no mystery why these institutions that are 30 years old exist, we have the documents and probably the people that formed them still around. We know what they got paid for and what they did. It's a very different thing if we have some cultural historical tradition (say gender roles, alcohol, only males voting, the stuff Chesterton actually talked that were actually issues at the time) that has persisted for centuries or thousands of years being upended because "i don't like it" without understanding it's actual structure.

Here's another good quote (the book is free to read, quotes are no way for actual human beings to think https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/470/pg470-images.html#c... ) >Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

And before people think "Oh yeah this applies to USAID" this is specifically in the context of people upending historically common beliefs Chesterton viewed himself as a great defender of. If you don't think morality and truthe are real and goodness is a part of nature you are still living in violation of that and that's probably why you have a hard time understanding why people are against things like USAID. Chesterton would be disgusted to be used in such a manner.

> There is no mystery why these institutions that are 30 years old exist, we have the documents and probably the people that formed them still around. We know what they got paid for and what they did.

You're suggesting the DOGE folks actually read these documents and talked to the people?

I'm having a difficulty understanding your last point:

> If you don't think morality and truthe[sic] are real and goodness is a part of nature you are still living in violation of that and that's probably why you have a hard time understanding why people are against things like USAID.

I believe morality and truth are real, and that both good and evil are part of human nature, but I still don't understand why people have it in for USAID. Well, I understand why the radical Left has traditionally disliked it, because they see it as advancing US "imperialism", but I reject that rationale. I don't get why American conservatives, who claim to believe in morality and truth (which include principles like "help your neighbor"), and also advancing American interests in the world want to destroy an agency that combines both.

Note: this is separate from the question of whether any particular aid project is worthwhile. I'm sure many aren't, and those should be shut down through the regular political process. This isn't what's happening right now.

Elon's philosophy is the exact opposite. Remove 90% and see what really needs to be added back.

The problem here is people die when those things are removed even for a few weeks or months. You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments. He's not doing this in good faith, he's convinced he's the smartest man in the world and should literally be a dictator.

It's fine, it won't hurt Musk himself. All these wild experiments are perfectly okay from his perspective because, to him, there's basically zero risk.

That kinda sounds like the Reddit answer to everything. "Don't do anything because < ...some scary edgecase ... > will happen."

Will things happen, yes but I believe he is acting in good faith and the result will be a much more efficient government.

That's not an edge case. Cutting services that people depend on to live will kill them. That's a guarantee.

>I believe he is acting in good faith and the result will be a much more efficient government.

If he's acting in good faith then where is the transparency he's promised? Taking Elon at his word is, at this point, naive at best.

> You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments.

"Good" news then, this is already the case! Or should very much be assumed to be the case, following the various GSA hacks.

It's usually said in business that you should spend your first 100 days getting the lay of the land before you start making big decisions. It might even be more ideal to give it 12 months before you tear up the playbook and bring your own.

Obviously, for a government staffed with experienced people, you'll be working with people who know how things work, and an incoming administration will have spent plenty of time outlining a plan of action well in advance of coming into office.

Does that apply to a notorious shitposting edgelord like Musk who is storming around like a bull in a china shop and sees the US as his new plaything? I doubt it - I certainly doubt any level of thinking is involved.

This administration (at least) thinks they spent an entire term learning, and now ith a 4-year gap are "hitting the ground running". The people were promised "we will quicky change and fix everything"; this is "we will quickly change everything", declare mission accomplished and hope they get lucky or maybe the dropped words won't be noticed.

> I hope they have a good think about what they're doing.

They probably did, if you look at it from a perspective of deliberately ruining the government. It looks like they are trying to reduce the government to nothing more than the IRS. Everything else will either get permanently trashed (any kind of consumer protection), sold off for parts, or contracted out to a private company started by one of their buddies.

Yeah, it might result in a very chaotic transition period, but these people don't care. They are rich enough that it's not going to personally affect them, and in the end they'll end up even richer. The entire goal right now is to do so much damage that it is going to take decades to restore - if it's even possible at all.

They especially want to gut the IRS. Look at how understaffed their enforcement division has been, for years.

And yesterday I learned they’re shielded from FOIA despite whatever transparency was promised.

They didn't.

I mean, it's not really a valid case of Chesterton's Fence if you're doing it _maliciously_. I don't _really_ buy the "they are merely terribly incompetent and demolishing a lot of Chesterton's fences", at this point.

The thing that frightens me is that the objective here is the explicit inverse of Chesterton's Fence: In dismantling these agencies, the DOGE team's intent is to cause the exact cascade of dysfunction that Chesterton warned about.

Elon Musk (and the billionaire class he represents) doesn't want a functioning CFPB because it doesn't serve him (or them). It will take a little while for them to fully sabotage the IRS and DOE as well, but they're working their way up to it.

They aren't going to dismantle the IRS, not when he and his friends are in a position to benefit from it.

> fully sabotage the IRS

Oh, I'm sure the parts that make sure I pay my taxes will function. But yeah, the parts that make sure Elon and Trump pay their taxes? If they aren't broken today, they will definitely be broken tomorrow.

This is already functionaly broken for them, but they can make it even better/worser

"It's very inefficient to devote all those resources to auditing billionaires, so we've decided to refocus those people on clawing back $15 from people earning under $20k who made minor mistakes on their taxes."

Without more color, aren't you guilty of "tearing down their fence?"

Seems like a forced meta critique.

It's a variation on "never change a winning team". Which is valid. As long as the team is winning. Doing more of the same is not going to fix things if it stops winning.

It's a problem with bureaucracies. They bloat. They grow. They never shrink.

Byzantine bureaucracies refer to the notion that this got out of hand shortly before the collapse of what remained of the Roman empire at that point. Bureaucracies are also sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque to indicate how nonsensical, illogical, and absurdist bureaucracies can become.

Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people. It's complicated, vast, and very change resistant. The task of doing something about that is so intimidating that no recent previous government has had the nerve to do anything significant about that. They all chickened out and instead just added their own layers of more bureaucracy to the mix. It's easier to add stuff to the pile than to take stuff away from it. So, after a few centuries of that, there's probably a lot of stuff there that barely makes sense to anyone.

The department highlighted in the article strikes me like a good example of a product of such a bureaucracy.

The article barely explains why this apparently very large, expensive, and richly staffed department exist, what it does, and why that is so important. It also fails to outline what kind of budget it has and what the intended purpose of that budget is.

I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing.

That chat bot that they highlight doesn't strike me as "key technology". Quite the opposite actually. The article raises more questions than it answers here. What was that thing supposed to do? Who was it for? Who backed/approved this? Why? How much did that cost? What else do people in that department do? All reasonable questions to ask.

> Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people

At < 3 million people this is substantially under its peak and at about its level in the 1960's, and a smaller fraction of the workforce than pretty much everywhere. Wages are 0.9 per cent of the federal budget.

> I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing.

Right, exactly. And neither can Musk, really. So at this point, the answer isn't to just go ahead and take a sledge hammer to it. The correct course would be to actually go through the Congress and ask those very reasonable questions you pose. But Musk doesn't even want to work with with the Congressional DOGE Committee he set up. That's highly concerning.

Musk's own stated advice is that if you don't reinstate 10% of what you delete you haven't deleted enough.

That's risky in politics because that will be used and abused against you.

I wish there was a good solution to Chesterton's fence.