I looked at the screenshot they posted about the 2.23M, which is all they posted. So we know, if I’m correct, absolutely and precisely nothing about this payment? Who was doing the equity assessment, how many people over what time period? What are the details of this, what was the purpose? I went digging briefly and found nothing. Why would I assume this is waste without any clue what it is?

Once you recategorize things you don't like as waste it will make sense.

Because the tech bros said it. Because that's how all tech bro gimmicks over the years went, be it crypto or investments or you name it - they claimed to "disrupt", "improve" and "revolutionize", and your guess how much of that actually happened.

The question is - are they fundamentally altering the function of government agencies.

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.

The cut down full government agencies. Also, Chesterton's fence and second-order effects.

To be fair, the guy I was responding to got flagged so you probably can’t see it. This wasn’t really our argument, and would look more like moving the goalposts.

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?

Oh, they already killed some of the best education research already: https://goodscience.substack.com/p/inexplicable-cuts-at-the-...

Even if we decided that all of these were waste, that's still not even the bulk of their cuts. "Hey we got rid of some wasteful stuff because we closed 95% of the organization and some portion of that stuff was waste" is not sufficient.

> ~$115M

That's $0.70 per taxpayer (assuming 166M US taxpayers).

Was it worth it?

I’m pretty sure they aren’t stopping at just one thing?

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?

It's a damn shame the IRS funding is getting gutted and those billionaire 1% will be getting cuts anyways. Hard to go after those not paying when Daddy Trump and Daddy Musk cut the legs out from under the enforcement and audit folks.

This isn’t even an argument you realize that? “Daddy Musk”?

Can you put together an adult argument?

Strange how you don't reply to any comments that actually give you "adult arguments".

Perhaps because you yourself have none?

Where did you get the '10,000 times' from?

No – but why would you trust their Twitter feed and their Twitter feed only? Elon Musk himself has talked openly about dismantling the CFPB and USAID on his private account; in that case, it's a matter of "agency will no longer do anything".

Oh, they are posting a lot of cancellations, they rarely, if ever show what payments are for, exactly, and whether they are actual waste, or that it doesn't "neatly fits into the function the government agency is supposed to fill".

> 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.

* X isn't an official Government archive of record

* They cut things blindly, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43046466

It's a clown show.

I mean if you elect clowns, you can't really complain when you get a circus.

the problem is labeling anything ideological as “waste”; one can get rid of anything under that cover, quite convenient.

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)