There's a reason the federal budget is several inches of very thin paper. The budget spells out how much money gets spent for various purposes, programs, projects, etc. Of course they don't specify the kind of paperclips the FAA buys. But they will approve or modify the FAA's budget plan which includes $X for office supplies, $Y for an upgrade to the FAA's network equipment in a branch office, $Z for upgrading some nav beacons, and so on.
The executive branch can't defund or "stop spending money on" anything. Nixon decided he just wouldn't spend money on programs he didn't like, and congress very rapidly passed a law that said that the president couldn't do it, because the "power of the purse" rests solely with congress.
It certainly can't stop issuing payments for existing obligations, and it especially can't take money back, which M did a day or two ago to NYC because he read a tweet that said NYC was spending money housing migrants in "luxury hotels", which shockingly turned out to be nonsense...
That's why all of this DOGE crap is such theatrical nonsense. Congress, representing their state's interests and the interests of those who live in their district, via two separate branches, approves all the budgets.
No matter what T and M say, no federal agency can just willy-nilly decide to spend money it's allocated by congress on other stuff.
That's all great in theory: in actual reality those laws are just words on paper, Congress has no interest in asserting its authority, and enforcement rests with the executive.
The goal should be messaging to everybody else. Especially those who might like the outcomes of Trump's crimes but would prefer not to have a president that just smashes through the law to get there. A way to help achieve this is to repeat, over and over and over, that Trump's actions are violating shitloads of laws.
Companies can declare bankruptcy and fold their hand: governments, notsomuch.
Jack Welch is the reason corporate America is a shit show, and GE is a joke.
So...Trump is breaking the law and getting away with it. What else is new?
Yes
He has immunity
BUT... even if the executive is under legal theory constitutionally unitary, it isn’t actually unitary, it consists of individual people who act based on their own perception of legitimacy, and when the President abandons the principle of government of law and not arbitrary individual will in dealing with the courts, well, that also threatens the theoretical infrastructure that binds the people carrying guns in various executive departments to his authority, and we can very quickly end up in one of those highly unpredictable periods of history that produces lots of really neat stories to read about afterwards but is somewhat less pleasant to live through.
Republicans who work on bipartisan platforms are punished and primaried.
They were even able to account for all their crayons! PT belts on the other hand...
And the President has more power around ending spending going to external contractors (which seems to be most of DOGE’s savings).
Like anything politics, it comes down if people agree with your definition, but if DOGE comes across external contracts for an agency that makes zero sense for their remit, then it makes sense to me they can kill it.
It’s starting to look like a lot of spending is falling into that category.
They're right now firing all probationary employees at multiple agencies. That is entirely indiscriminate, and almost certainly disruptive to the mission of those agencies.
The actions at NIH and NSF will likely kill a large portion of the scientific research they used to fund. So unless you consider science in general be a waste I think these broad cuts clearly don't target actual waste and abuse.
Compared to what? The Biden administration? Who never even held a press conference for months?
And what evidence? Did you want a downloadable pdf of justification for each cut?
The partisan nature of the criticism is obvious - Trump and Musk are bad, so nothing they do can be good. Produce evidence? Not good enough!
If you don't think foreign aid is important for the continued safety of the US then you don't understand soft power and have no business in modern politics.
Sadly the people in charge fit into this category, except for the ones like Marco Rubio who actually do understand this but have no spine and are willing to overlook this stupidity for a seat at the table.
Are you arguing that that CIA interference in foreign countries is a critical government service?
In that case I don’t know what to tell you.
You do know the polio vaccine program in Pakistan where DNA analysis to find Bin Laden was done through USAID? The one that set vaccination back decades?
And now you’re defending it. Amazing.
For example, today it was “167 cancellations with savings of ~$115M, including a $2.23M contract for HHS for “equity assessments of existing program policies”.”
Most of the contracts are related to DEI (which they consider waste) but you see a few building leases sprinkled it.
I haven’t seen anything so far that says “Agency will no longer do X”, but happy to be be corrected.
I think you can get the answer from what they post. Cutting $400M in external contracts for a $10B agencies isn’t cutting major functions of the agency.
To have the argument anyways, I looked back through their posts back to jan 20, and there’s really no information about most of the cuts. I presume that the few things they highlight, eg equity programs or whatever, are the worse of the worst that they could find, cause isn’t that what they’d show us? They could be cutting basically anything behind the scenes, and they themselves may not have a good idea what they’re cutting. As of jan 31st, they claimed to have cut 1-1.2 billion dollars overall. I assume that number is much higher now. Why would I trust that, while fumbling around looking at payment descriptions, one of Musk’s techbro zoomers didn’t hamper or cripple an important function of one of these departments? Where can I find the in-depth information on every cut?
That's $0.70 per taxpayer (assuming 166M US taxpayers).
Was it worth it?
Now do that 10,000 times and tell me what the total is per tax payer (noting that 40% of taxpayers don’t pay taxes).
I get $14,000 per tax payer, what do you get?
Can you put together an adult argument?
Perhaps because you yourself have none?
> but you see a few building leases sprinkled it.
You think agencies cannot lease buildings? And that it's a waste and fraud?
> I haven’t seen anything so far that says “Agency will no longer do X”, but happy to be be corrected.
They have literally unilaterally shut down several government agencies with bogus claims.
* They cut things blindly, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43046466
It's a clown show.
You don’t need to write “the agency will no longer do X” you just need to fire the people doing X. Case in point the EPA and CFPB (which catch fraud among companies but were not worried about that anymore are we)
There aren’t any examples so far of stuff that is clearly waste and abuse.
I thought doge was about efficiency, why is he spending resources on the culture war?
Or unintended 2nd order effects.
Who knows if the final outcome will be an improvement but it resembles fixing a TV by dropping it from a height and hoping.
Where did you get this from in their comment?
Where did this come up?
The only example of waste are the 150 yr old SA recipients. Sure that happens (we’ve been hearing about “welfare queens” for decades) but certainly not something new the DOGE “uncovered “.
And why are we entrusting a bunch of young engineers to identify fraud? They might be qualified to refactor and streamline computer systems but are certainly not qualified to determine what is “legitimate “ spending and what is not.
>just destroying parts of the government they don't like
There is no inherent contradiction here. Both things are subjective.
The intent of my comment was not to claim that what Musk and co. are doing is good, or that it's bad. It was to point out precisely why the claims in the post I replied to will not convince anyone who is not already convinced.
If the poster I replied to just wanted to vent, fine. But if they wanted to persuade someone on the fence, they have provided nothing towards that.
Nothing, that is, besides the standard appeal to emotion that infests almost all such arguments (on both sides) and is effective on human brains for all the wrong reasons.
https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
Nothing is legitimate about this. Literally everything they are doing is both illegal and completely unconstitutional. They have thrown out the entire rule of law and it is a pure flex of power, a shock-and-awe meltdown that they hope to execute faster than the normal processes can react. They absolutely intend to abolish resistance and they know they can suffer no consequences for it.
Dark times ahead. We're aren't arguing government efficiency or saving money, they are smashing it all.
As far as I'm concerned, "medical debt" is effectively extortion.
If I have some sort of major medical issue, such as cancer, it's absolutely fucked that my choices are to either die or to rack up an extreme amount of medical debt that I might not ever recover from. In either case, my life is ruined.
Among many other reasons:
Subsidizing demand increases prices. When you subsidize university education, you increase the price of it. The metoric rise in inflation-adjusted cost of university education since the 70's or so is strong evidence of this.
If someone wants to major in feminist dance therapy, that should be on their own dime. Using my tax money to fund it is immoral.
>Why not also defund high school and middle school as well? After all, by the end of the 5th grade you should be able to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. Anything beyond that you can fund yourself, right?
I'm actually not entirely unsympathetic to drastically cutting down how much mandatory education we have for kids. There is very little (if any) correlation between the funding amount and actual results. See Abbott districts in Bew Jersey for a stark example of this.
And if they want to major in economics, chemistry, physics, engineering?
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying wholesale, but "I don't like this tiny corner so throw the whole thing in the trash" is immature, foolish, and self-destructive.
Those at least serve a practical purpose to society as a whole, but even then I still would question taking other people's money by force to fund it.
If you dig deep enough, subjective experience is what we’re often trying to improve. Both science and art contribute to that.
Why is that immoral?
"taking other people's money by threat of lethal force" in the form of taxes is seen as necessary for running society by most people, not a moral failing.
And we are not talking about "party vacations" we are talking about education. Maybe this is a commentary on the state of higher education today, but there are plenty of institutions that offer a quality educational experience here; America has the #1 university system in the world.
"a degree in something useless"
Who determines what is useless? You? Are arts degrees for instance useless? Artists don't think so. They are not typically profitable but that's a different conversation, your qualification was "useless". What makes a degree useless, who determines that, and how?
And even if we just assume a topic useless, how is giving people scholarships to study it immoral?
Presumably the people actually footing the bill
If someone is footing the bill, does that not imply a certain amount of "we don't think this is useless"?
That's a vanishingly small list
The government is doing that, not the dancer. If you consider general taxation immoral, fair enough, but then you're going to have to explain how a country can function without it.
> to pursue a 4 year party vacation
Boy, have I got bad news for you about a lot of students on what you'd consider more worthwhile courses.
> getting a degree in something [THAT I, PERSONALLY, CONSIDER] useless
Fixed that for you.
Subsidizing also increases creates more utilization. You seem to be of the mind that more education is a bad thing. I’m not sure we all agree.
Yes, you lose some. But not all. And that's how you start.
One manager asked, “What if we train them and they leave!?”
To which a more senior manager quipped, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”
Y'all have the delulu American exceptionalism brain. People will leave if they don't like living here. A loan eill not stop them.
The amount of money and effort required to extradite a person far outweighs the average student loan. Not only that, it is not really a "crime" to not pay your debts. It is a civil violation. The court can seize your property, in limits. You can't seize someones house in some states, and some don't even allow you to seize cars. Even if they can, any given student loan holder may not have either.
"But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said the agencies Musk and Trump have targeted to date account for a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget ...
They are not going to go into agencies that are doing things they like. They are going into agencies they disagree with," Holtz-Eakin, who has participated in past tax and spending negotiations in Congress, told Reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-cuts-based-more-politi...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/upshot/nih-tr...
Trump and Musk are poised to destroy science research in America. Actual scientists are all scrambling to save their jobs and research.
Also, plastic straws don't harm the environment. Oooh, science!
Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?
Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.
Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.
And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.
So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.
Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.
1) Headline is interesting, I follow the link to 404media, ah they want me to sign up and give over personal info to read this. Screw that let's go to doge.gov and see if it's hacked.
2) Doesn't appear to be, never checked out their website before, what is there?
3) Basically a list of Tweets, showing that the executive branch has cancelled one DEI expenditure after another. Basically all these expenditures are DEI. It's government grants and contracts that have things like Diversity, Equity, and/or Inclusion in the name. Which they claim the executive branch has just cancelled. (Are they lying?)
Now here I will confess to one bias, I don't think any public money whatsoever needs to go to DEI. Not a single penny. So as far as I can tell a lot of this is good, we can agree to disagree, if we debate it we'll probably never agree. But like a lot of Americans, I 100% support public money never going to DEI initiatives. If you are promoting race education or gender sensitivity or whatever, nope not with government funds. Find the money for it privately.
So all the claims in this thread include stuff like "The executive branch can't actually cancel contracts," which that website says they are doing now. And it says "the problem is such and such about bureaucracy and corruption," well yeah I don't like those either, and I'd agree this isn't obviously anti-corruption work being done here, but again, at face value:
A) It looks like these guys are eliminating public spending on DEI
B) Ergo it looks like they are doing exactly what the public elected Donald Trump to do
Flame away, downvote if you think the government should fund DEI, it's all good - but really what am I missing here?
It seems to me DOGE is an entity created to eliminate DEI funding, at the behest of a duly elected American public official who is doing what his constituents elected him to do, and they are succeeding. Is this wrong?
(Spare me any arguments in favor of DEI as they will fall on deaf ears.)
They're cutting a lot more than that, this has been all over the media. One example would be biomedical research via NIH/NSF. This is not just DEI (in whatever overly broad and vague definition they use), but a lot more.
What about this argument people are making in this thread that they're not actually doing any real cutting because they're not Congress? That seems like a stretch.
That preventing a repeat of the damage done to America cities by the national highway system[1], which was used mechanism to literally segregate American cities is also a waste of time and money.
Most of the US significant racial atrocities committed against its own citizens, where either committed by, or with the direct assistance of, the U.S. government (at both state and federal level).
There probably a good discussion to be had on how much should be spent on DEI efforts. But the idea that spending zero really doesn’t make much sense, we know what the consequences of allowing the U.S. government to become entirely occupied by white men. Ultimately a monoculture of people results in a monoculture of ideas, and monocultures never last, something comes along finding some critical weakness that common to every agent in the monoculture, and utterly destroys the organism (in the case of the U.S. government, that might be Trump and Musk). DEI is strategically important because diverse systems are more robust, produce better ideas, and are better capable of surviving extreme shocks. All attributes people should want in their government.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-...
I would also still support the ADA and its enforcement.
These two ideas are not in conflict. No one is trying to strip the legal rights of deaf people, nor will it happen. That is a straw man/hyperbole.
“ Sec. 2. Implementation. (a) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”
So… not exactly a strawman.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
The reality is that DEI is a campaign to get people aware of implicit bias. It's been proven time and time again that resumes with a name like "Shaniqua" are more likely to be rejected over one with a "John" even when all the qualifications are the same.
But now, of course, with the current political climate, if you're a woman or PoC, you have to be a perfect worker. If you make any kind of mistake, you'll be accused of being a DEI hire.
I suspect we're gonna start seeing this XKCD linked more often over the next 4 years: https://xkcd.com/385/
So how about we start by purging the Senate.
This is an incredibly sweeping generalization. There are a lot of people who voted for Trump because of their perception of his merit/qualifications/plans vs Harris. Pretending they are all brainwashed simpletons not only alienates them but also sets up for future failures. There's a reason these people voted for him. What is that reason? Treating is as some temporary hysteria is just going to keep getting people like Trump (or worse) elected over and over.
These people are insane. Conservatism needs to be officially recognized as a mental disorder.
If saving money was the goal surely there's be discussion akin to "let's cut the military budget". That's how you'd know they're serious. But as it stands it is clearly just an ideological axe grinder.
(I should note I'm not American, just watching bemused from the sidelines)
No one is serious about “saving money”. It’s just to justify the corporate tax cut.
This is why DOGE is staffed with young people.
It's easy to convince inexperienced people there's a 2-step plan:
Step 1. Destroy the old.
Step 2. Build the new.
Yet people with experience know that Step 2 requires orders of magnitude more effort and time than Step 1.
So, you have ignorant people breaking things, congratulating themselves on how quickly they're making progress... and then hit Step 2. And realize it's hard. And get bored. And so just, not.
Thus in the end, you're left with a broken pile of what came before, and nothing new to replace it.
Unfortunately (for all of us, including for their base) this isn’t actually what people want or need, except the ideologues pushing it with a clear understanding of the expected outcomes. The base just infers that the ruin of these “inefficient” programs is a noble end in itself, because their supposed inefficiency is the problem with the programs themselves.
So at least we're not invading Iraq?
Step 1. Destroy the old
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!
"Build the new" doesn't even seem to be on the table at this point. There's no proposals to replace any of this. At least not public anyway, we know they are replacing all of this with for-profit scams.
Step 2. See? The government doesn't work! Just like we said!
Step 3. "Fix" the problems created from Step 1
Step 4. MAGA eventually realizes the swamp was enlarged and made worse, not drained
Anyone doing this kind of work is not merely ignorant.
The experience of bricklaying will help you think about the future times when you'll have to lay the bricks. Without that experience you may not ever consider those times, especially in a scenario which has you excited about what you are currently doing.
I wonder if the DOGE kids will be also sent off to the countryside once they're not useful anymore...
> Step 1. Destroy the old.
> Step 2. Build the new.
Feels very 'cultural revolution'-y
And also that the steps here should be reversed. Sure if you are tearing down a building you destroy before creating, but systems aren't buildings. If you are going to create a new system to run the cash registers for your business you don't tear out the old one and worry about building the new one later. First you have the replacement ready THEN remove the old one.
I can't really understand that as it seems obvious to me that they're just destroying parts of the government they don't like. And while there is certainly room for improvement in many areas, whatever they're doing is not going to improve anything, it's only destruction.