What's wrong? Let me count the ways.

- Much of the spending they're eliminating is good and important (E.g. USAID).

- The way they're cutting is reckless (They accidentally fired nuclear safety workers).

- Many of the workers are Musk sycophants, who were hired from Twitter/Tesla/SpaceX.

- There's a tremendous conflict of interest in this agency being run by a massive government contractor (NASA and the military are both avid SpaceX customers).

- The workers are not experienced with the data they're working with, and misinterpret it constantly in public before verifying it.

- Despite claims of "transparency", Musk asserted that it was illegal to publish the names of his employees.

- Their one product, their government spending portal, is a worse version of a spending portal which already exists, and they didn't even secure their database.

- They say they "use AI" for their decisions. Which AI? Where is confidential data going?

- Do the staff have security clearance?

how does that weigh against the good they are doing? the spending crisis is critical, so of course some collateral damage will be necessary

The only "crisis" in US spending is that each party keeps shutting down the government when they don't like what the other one is doing. That's not going to go away with balanced books, but it sure is a recipe for disaster. It stops being a democracy when the decision making process stops being about majorities and starts being a game of "whoever doesn't blink sets the rules".

The country prints its own money; and right now it's the world reserve currency, giving the US a huge advantage when it comes to borrowing whatever it wants — the biggest threat to continuing to be the world reserve currency right now, is that the scale of cuts being talked about can only be met by cutting at least one of interest payments on government loans or things the US government considers to be "mandatory" such as pensions, social security, etc.

There are both immediate and long term consequences to the debt. In the short term we are paying a large share of revenue into debt servicing. We are all working months a year to pay interest. In the long term, we are impoverishing the next generations.

The govt can debase the currency by printing money. That only impoverishes people , except for the wealthy, causing greater wealth gap.

> There are both immediate and long term consequences to the debt. In the short term we are paying a large share of revenue into debt servicing. We are all working months a year to pay interest. In the long term, we are impoverishing the next generations.

Only if your economy doesn't grow.

> The govt can debase the currency by printing money. That only impoverishes people , except for the wealthy, causing greater wealth gap.

It impoverishes lenders and savers, but not borrowers. It's not as simple as wealthy or poor, as any can be any.

that's not what's happened in the past 5 years. assets have ballooned. cost of living has skyrocketed. wages have not kept pace. Rich got richer, poor got poorer.

How is growing dept a good thing? How is cutting costs a bad thing? Have you seen Argentina example? How did it turn out? Can the same thing be done in USA? Only reason to say no is because someone is directly profiting from not cutting costs. If you know Musk's story then you know why he is the only best candidate to do so.

> How is growing dept a good thing?

You can afford it, it's fairly close to a neutral thing, for a government to have debt.

Right now, the US gets to set the terms for those loans.

> How is cutting costs a bad thing?

Consider weight as an analogy: Most people can do with loosing weight, losing weight by getting enthusiastic amateurs to perform a quadruple amputation is not advisable.

Musk's target can only be met by deleting your entire armed forces.

And then you have to find another $1.2 trillion.

So the military and the entire CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, NASA, Federal Highway Administration, FAA, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, Department of Justice, the Treasury, …

… all that plus the military still doesn't add up to Musk's target.

Unless you want to cut stuff that's considered "mandatory" (like military pensions), or the interest repayments on the very loans you wish you didn't have.

First two points are pretty much the same and ignore all nuance.

Third point is opinion, at best.

Forth point; couldn't this be said about any politician?

Fifth point; So you're saying that no outside group is capable of auditing.

I'll stop there. You've drank the koolaid.

The world’s richest man is gutting the regulatory bodies which were designed to keep him in check, and you’re defending it. I’d say you’ve drank the Kool-aid.

No, seems like you are defending cost cutting and it doesn't make sense why are you so against it? USA is democracy, if after 4 years things go south you can always vote different and get everything back the way it was. Most probable outcome here is financial situation in USA will get better, you make it sound like USA would collapse to stone age era, it wont.

We have a mechanism for that: it's called congress. DOGE is an executive abuse of power that's resulting in national security critical roles being fired and then attempted to be rehired because they're so incompetent.

What happens when Congress is asleep at the wheel or in on the take?

You campaign for other congresspeople and try and get them thrown out. Congressional representatives are very receptive to constituent calls.

I mean, we could also do your plan and just hand off essentially dictatorial power over spending to the richest man in the country.

Seriously the number of people willing to burn down the whole government over grievances that often haven’t even impacted them is incredibly scary.

You do not throw out the baby with the bath water.

Everyone in the United States is impacted by government insolvency and the economic collapse it will inevitably lead to if unchecked.

Everyone is impacted by the fact that money-printer-fueled government spending crowds out private spending / investment / growth.

and your solution is empowering a dictator and... hoping it goes well?

Article 2 says “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” That means the power to “enforce laws, manage national affairs, and oversee government agencies.”

It’s Congress’s role to allocate funds to certain purposes, and the President’s to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” including overseeing the bureaucracy that implements them.

The President already has dictatorial power over the bureaucracy, as per the Constitution.

Not over spending, which Elon's seizure of payments infrastructure has made.

Unless you extend it to that, in which case why have courts? Its not like they have enforcement power and the president can stretch discretion to the limit.

I don't think that's what DOGE is doing. Seems extremely vindictive and ideological in the way it's acting and time will tell but I would not be surprised if it ends costing the taxpayers more in the long run.

Wouldn't Argentina be a good example of what is DOGE doing now? Financially it has been a good experiment for Argentina. What are the cons?

Argentina and US are very different countries, starting these cuts with very different economic realities. For example, 55% of all registered workers are employed by the government in Argentina. Although not a directly comparable metric (since in the US you also need to account for state and local civil workers), the US federal government employs around 3 million people. That's just 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce.

Again, DOGE operates from the premise that the federal government is bloated. Although this is a very popular message, I'd love to see some more objective data to support this and I doubt that CDC or USAID are the agencies where the bloat is. Like I said, their actions seem vindictive and careless. Also, likely to result in legal cases that will drag for years and end up costing taxpayer more than the supposed savings.

The main con is that once you fire the workers that you thought you didn't need (but that you did indeed need) hiring them back becomes more expensive and a lengthy process. Some of the firings are already causing chaos in vital teams among several agencies and have forced DOGE to try to reverse course (bird flu monitoring, nuclear response...).

And that's not to mention the dire situation you put the people you are firing in. Laying off people from their jobs is never "an experiment" unless you are willing to suspend every trace of empathy.

Eliminating waste is a great idea. But it’s unclear that that’s all he’s doing, it’s unclear how or how well it’s being done, he’s brought in people without security review (which means they, and the systems they are opening up and creating, can be more easily compromised by our enemies), and he has enormous conflicts of interest.

Eliminating superfluous bureaucracy is fine.

Note that DOGE fired, and is struggling to rehire, the team whose job was to mainain America's nuclear arsenal.

Also note that the stated goal of DOGE, $2T, exceeds the entire discretionary budget of the federal government, even though half the discretionary budget is your entire active military.

Even treating $2T as a stretch goal, eliminating literally everything but the military from the discretionary budget doesn't reach the lower $1T that Musk says he has a "good shot" at.

Cuts on this scale directly, all by themselves, even aside from all the other economic diasters that America expressly chose to vote for as a package deal with this, will shrink the US economy about 6%.

There's nothing wrong with it. Our current deficit is increasing something like 1 trillion every 3 months. Getting creative to reduce government spending seems necessary at this point.

All the hysteria over this is just partisan politics as usual.

Doge disrupts everything except for spending: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/12/e...

stop falling for branding and actually concentrate on the numbers: spending is going up, not down, and only touching entitlement programs, the military, or offsetting monetary loosening (via debt interest) will change that.

US Americans seem quite green, have never had this done to them before on such a scale and so haven't seen the trick before. The art of the hostile takeover. [0] Curtis documents it well, but at tedious length unless you're British, on the Slater, Goldsmith and Rowland gang. "Efficiency" is an entry point, a common bullshit word that's a perfect cover for hostile takeover, because nobody argues with it - it's a "STFU and agree" word [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayfair_Set

[1] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/efficiency/

Well.

Only announce things your opponents do or even lie about it and spread the hate.

I'm 100% sure he won't direct the subsidies during COVID-19 for the hospitality sector, which Trump was quite happy about during his reign.

Or the expensive hotel stays for his security at trump hotels :)