How is firing large amounts of people on a whim going to solve the problem of people not caring about their work?

From what it sounds like (w.r.t Project 47/2025) DOGE is fund seeking for massive planned programs, not returning money to the citizenry or restructuring for efficiency.

It sounds like they are illegally looting agencies and programs that congress already funded, so they can fund the admin's proposed plans (virtual social cleansing, mass deportations, homeless relocation, freedom cities, etc).

It doesn't look like DOGE is trying to fund anything; at this stage my guess is they're trying to hack off the propaganda arm of the CIA/NSA and the web of NGOs on the theory that it is funding anti-Trump messaging. Otherwise targeting USAID for savings early is a bit pointless; what is $50 billion a year to the US government? They're $36 trillion in debt with no plausible path out of the hole. Annual deficit is around $2 trillion.

Or it might be a propaganda effort to make Team Trump look busy. Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.

There are some hints toward this, like with recent reporting :

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-gop-panel-ap...

> Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said she has expressed “concerns” to leaders about the prospect of steep spending cuts and told reporters that, before she agrees to vote for the budget resolution, she wants “better clarity” about the next stage — especially when it comes to cuts. “$4.5 trillion doesn’t leave a lot of room for the president’s priorities,” Malliotakis said

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Also, why else would you directly reclaim funds as the executive? As a party, if you wanted to correct spending, you would do it in a budget. As the executive, if you wanted to get money without congressional approval, you would reclaim money that has already been appropriated. There are other ways (emergency orders), but they might not be popular with the party or a target voting base (in this case, more net spending).

It is the US Government. Nobody has minded funding their schemes since 1970. They're going to keep borrowing until something so terrible happens that they literally cannot borrow any more. It is a bipartisan consensus position that spans multiple powerful governing ideologies.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is much more likely to be using rhetoric than predicting how the situation will develop. If the Republicans as a party actually cared about the debt or intended to make meaningful improvements to the situation we'd have seen evidence of it in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s or 10s.

I'd love to be wrong, but there is pretty strong evidence here that they're going to tut-tut; maybe wag a finger or even in extreme situations someone will write a strongly worded letter. Then the government will borrow whatever they need to to pay for whatever hare-brained scheme is flavour of the month.

The problem here is that gilt rates have been on the rise for a year (most likely as a reaction to Trump's manifesto), meaning borrowing is getting more and more expensive. You can print more money, but that devalues the currency, which the USD has managed to shirk off by being the main reserve currency of the planet. Except, that might change soon - because of the seeming chaos of the Trump administration (based on experiences of the previous administration), people are eyeing up EUR as a safer place, and gold prices are moving in a direction that suggests people want out of dollars (even if gold is normally denominated in USD for most people).

Trump has therefore caused gilt rates to rise, borrowing costs to rise, and a potential currency devaluation.

If you want to see how that works out when people finally lose their confidence, see what happened to the Truss government in the UK: it's not pretty. The UK is still paying for that on multiple fronts, but we were able to end the experiment in 49 days - that's not possible in the US.

I don't think what has worked for the last 50 years - waving budget appropriations through, shrugging at the national debt - is going to hold up for too much longer, for multiple reasons. And when it falls, it's going to fall fast, and very hard.

I made this comment before digging deeper into appropriations impoundment.

However, it still seems plausible (in my limited understanding) that this strategy could still be the goal, if the goal is to first push appropriations impoundment to SCOTUS.

Here is the best cited and approachable article I found on the subject within the context of these events:

https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/the-overlooked-conundrums-of-imp...

Most likely the whole point is to destabilise and eliminate government structures with the goal of filling the resulting power vacuum with privately owned services. That's what Thiel and his ilk are all about.

The first part of this plan - destruction - is easier than the second half - creation. If they're successful with the second half, people will be worse off because it's a big step towards neofeudalism /strengthening oligarchy. If they fail, people will be a lot worse off because the structures they're destroying are actually doing important work.

> it might be a propaganda effort to make Team Trump look busy

this. the optics are important for the Trump base

>Hard to say without more visibility into what they're doing.

They want to fund corporate tax cuts. the cut from 22 to 15 percent is estsimated to be worth 100-200b dollars of income for the government per year. That's about the yearly funding of the DoED.

So we aren't saving money nor paying off debt. we are just funding corporate profits.

None of these people were let go because of the quality of their work. What incentive would they have to do their job well if their continued employment is not based on merit?

They don't get paid more because the government is not a profit center. It gets money from the citizens and then appropriates those funds. raises and promotions need to be a strict process because all government workers have public salaries. They can probably pay a little more, but not anything close to competitive.

>The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.

blame the incentive structure, not the players. Government being efficient and saving money results in less budget next time. They are punished for their improvement. If Musk wanted governent efficiency, that's the angle to approach. Protecting against lower budgets after a high performance review would do wonders.