I also suspect that there really isn't nearly as much "waste" here as Musk is alleging, so we are going to be forced to re-hire people, while still paying a ton of workers for 8 months of no work.
This doesn't seem "efficient" to me, but "efficient" is a word that doesn't actually mean anything without context, which they don't provide.
I suspect that after all these cuts, they're going to realize that some of these things actually are required in order for the American people not to complain too much.
I just remember in Trump's first term, and this is something that has stuck with me since, was how he promised, on day one, to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, only for a few weeks after taking office saying "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated" [1]. It was funny, because pretty much everyone but Donald Trump knew that healthcare could be extremely complicated. The ACA was not repealed, at least not completely, nor was it replaced.
I think a similar thing might happen in a month or two; these departments are going to be cut, there will be lots of delays and complaints and eventually Trump will go out and say "No one knew that these government services were actually necessary". Then they might have to rehire a bunch of the people that left.
I'm skeptical. Most of these federal jobs either marginally improve millions of lives or are completely critical for 10k Americans. The former is so spread out it will be hard to connect the dots; chronic stress of wondering why is everything sus these days. The latter mostly serves the already disenfranchised, e.g. adult daycare cuts.
> Most of these federal jobs either marginally improve millions of lives or are completely critical for 10k Americans.
Firstly, are you basing this assertion on any sort of reality, or are you just 'sus' about it?
Secondly, marginal improvements for millions of people in many different areas is nothing to scoff at - that is precisely what a government is supposed to do - and will add up to very significant improvements very quickly.
I don't think that they're saying that doing marginal improvements for millions of people is anything to scoff at, I that they are saying that it's a lot more difficult to directly quantify.
The only thing that saved the ACA was McCain who saved it as the last great act at the end of his life.
All of the sensible, principled Republicans have died or retired. The modern Republican Party seem willing to go off the cliff with him.
The tech sector is firmly in his pocket and all of the news media are owned by corporate giants who are literally bribing him to get what they want by “settling lawsuits”.
I always thought it was silly when people said they are leaving the country if $x wins even during the first Trump administration. But I’ve never seen anything like this or imagined the complete disregard for the law by either party before and I’m 50.
Yeah, I'll admit it's kind of wishful thinking on my end.
My wife is a Mexican immigrant. She does have a green card, and our attorney has filed the paperwork for her citizenship about four months ago. She's probably fine, but it's scary. I have to keep an ear to the ground for the news, and figure out if we need to evacuate.
Who the hell knows what is going to happen? If Trump signs some sort of order revoking all green cards, even if it gets struck down by some miracle, a lot of damage can still be done in the interim.
We have our immigration attorney's phone number on speed dial. It's depressing that I have to do that, but I'm not sure what else I can do.
He’s already made thousands of Venezuelans illegal immigrants that were here legally under temporary protection status and threaten deportation and tried to revoke birthright citizenship.
He’s definitely going to do his best to keep people out from “shit hole countries that only send rapists and murderers” (if it isn’t clear, I don’t hold that opinion)
I'm gonna wait until the next Presidential election but if it is won by a Trump loyalist I will try very hard to move to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Australia, etc.
A fascist dictatorship? You still need a functioning government for that. (It doesn't function for the people, but it still requires a large number of competent employees.)
Anarchy? Mad Max? Everybody dies, so no government employees are needed?
Takeover by Canada, Mexico, China, or Russia, so it becomes their problem?
Or do you just claim that they're so stupid that they haven't thought past "Hur, let's, like, destroy the government, man"?
Seriously, what do you actually claim that they actually want?
That functioning police force needs a functioning tax collection system to fund it, and a functioning civil society to pay for it. So you need enforcement of contracts, and a functioning financial system, and working roads, and all kinds of stuff. You can't just sit there and say "we've got the police, so none of the civilians can touch us" - not for long, anyway.
If you look how every dictatorship works, they always make sure that the military and police force do well. That and they look the other way when police steal from people.
Sure they do. And to do that, they need a functioning society, at least functioning well enough to produce the things that the military and the police need and want. (And that means that the police can't steal too much from people.)
A dictatorship can't be just a thugocracy. It has to keep society running, perhaps not up to western capitalist standards, but at least above the point of collapse.
And there is always prison labor that you can depend on. Especially with private prisons. Prison labor is already being used to fight wildfires in LA for instance and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. That’s cheap labor and another benefit it’s all those “drug dealing thugs” anyway.
> Or do you just claim that they're so stupid that they haven't thought past "Hur, let's, like, destroy the government, man"?
I don't think they've thought much past that.
We can look at the US Postal Service as a bit of a microcosm of this entire situation. Conservatives have been complaining about the Post Office my entire life, using that to restrict funding to it, which causes it to operate worse, then use that as justification to reduce funding to the Post Office, in a frustrating cycle. There's probably several reasons to why they do this, but I think the main one is that their goal is to replace it with private, for-profit "equivalents", like FedEx or UPS or DHL.
I suspect that this might be a similar thing. They're wrecking the government by yanking away all funding, causing things to get worse, and then using that as proof that the government does things badly, so they can replace these things with for-profit versions that we contract out.
You act as if any of these people are logical. My best guess is that they want all of the power in the states and to privatize whatever is necessary for their cronies to profit from much like Putin did in Russia.
Some of the Republicans just want to maintain power after Trump is gone.
Trump is stupid and easily led and operates out of grift and animus. Musk is definitely going to get something out of this. Most likely federal contracts.
Also a lot of Trump voters see him as their best defense to maintain their “way of life” and see the trends where the US is becoming a majority/minority, secular country. It was bad enough that this country let an “uppity Black” run the country for 8 years.
I don't think there's really a meaningful "they" as a single entity there.
It might sound weird, but I believe Musk is genuinely on some kind of a megalomaniac mad scientist superproject that requires taking power of the largest world economy to realize, quite possibly involving Mars. The guy is narcissistic to the extreme, and I think he really wants to end up in the textbooks as some kind of messiah figure on a planetary scale.
Trump's political desires are much too primitive and gut-driven to classify as "fascism"; really any authoritarian arrangement will serve him just fine, but if his inner circle arranges full-on fascism for him, he'll take it.
Then you have the Christian nationalists, who have very specific plans about, well, everything, but are also very sure that what they are doing is in accordance with God's plan and desires and therefore by definition great and cannot fail.
Then there's all the big biz tagging along for the sake of deregulation and lower taxes mostly, but also to try to be there to slow things down wrt stuff that hurts them directly like tariffs.
I think that's a legitimate question. I can float a possible explanation, though I can't come up with more than a lot of circumstantial evidence (anyone following this line of politics will be aware of all that).
You mention Russia, and I think it's Russia, but you're wrong that it becomes their problem. It's their opportunity and their revenge for the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR.
Trump's run by them, in some fashion, and doesn't really know anything about the systems he's dismantling. He's just being instructed where to do the most damage, and to run his mouth in any sort of way to provide justification. It doesn't matter if he's believed.
All the stuff he's breaking is fundamental to American power, notably soft power exerted on the world, but also the R&D, the health system, the whole nine yards. Russia wishes all of that to be destroyed and not brought back. They would like it if the dollar is not the world's reserve currency. They'd like it if the world behaved as though Russian claims of the CIA lurking behind every tree overthrowing every government, were accurate and legitimate descriptions of what the USA really is.
So that's Trump and the relatively few people firmly in his corner, 'Freedom Caucus' types who've been known to openly threaten their peers with Russian blackmail, and of course Russia itself which publically made an announcement about how they expected great payback from the help they'd given Trump in this election.
Now, to Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their ilk. Unlike Trump, they are not completely dependent on Russia. In fact some of them like Musk actively collaborate with Russia as equals. There's a catch: Russia doesn't want to deal with equals and won't help people who are too powerful. So, Elon Musk is in some ways going rogue even in this context. He is probably trying to execute Russia's goal of ruining the US because he's imagining some kind of reinvention of society, and he probably believes he'll have Russia's help behind him as he transforms society into some godawful mess he'd like, perhaps like one from his childhood.
He's likely to be horribly surprised to discover that he has not gained Russian trust, even though he's served them well. Trump is completely theirs, but Elon can't be trusted unless he's completely ruined, so what Elon wants is Bond-villain power, and no matter what happens he's not getting that fantasy fulfilled. This is his high point, while he is still doing the damage his allies need. Once that's done, he's on borrowed time.
That's what they want. None of them expect it to be 'a functioning government' for various reasons.
A large part of the GOP playbook around their goal of smaller government is to make the government work worse then use that to argue government can't do the job and it shouldn't do it or it needs to be privatized. "We can't give immigrants their due process before deporting them that takes forever! (We also refuse to expand the number of judges serving those cases)" "Public schools are horrible and don't work! (We've been choking their budget for decades)" etc etc.
Well, it depends on what goals Trump and Musk consider worthwhile. Just hypothetically, if they dont consider healthcare for all a worthwhile goal - possibly every dollar spent on Obamacare is waste from their perspective.
I think they will find a lot of waste - question is if people in the USA will agree.
Well that's what I mean, "efficiency" is a term that doesn't mean anything in isolation, and because of that they can define it to mean whatever they want it to mean and declare victory as a result.
I also think there might be some shady math going on; they're counting every canceled thing as "savings", but I don't think they're going to count the cost of rehiring the lost workers and redoing these contracts.
A lot of federal workers spend their time overseeing projects run by the private sector. Whether or not those projects are worth doing, funds have been appropriated and the private sector will get their day in court and get their funding. Now with no oversight from some useless bureaucrat (our project manager defending our interests).
> Well that's what I mean, "efficiency" is a term that doesn't mean anything in isolation, and because of that they can define it to mean whatever they want it to mean and declare victory as a result.
Efficiency does have a sensible definition in isolation: an efficient system is one in which there are no more Pareto improvements. From the government perspective, you could consider this in terms of the cost/service frontier, and actions which move the government towards that frontier improve efficiency.
However, I do agree with your practical concern that 'efficiency' is being used without regard at all for the services being delivered. This seems particularly likely since the government is attempting to eliminate whole departments or agencies by executive order, implying it gives no value to said services.
Pareto Efficiency should not be the be-all-end-all (and only one subset of "efficiency", so your definition is only useful in isolation to Pareto Efficient). It only guarantees nothing is worse off, but that's only a relative comparison. A result of 99% of the wealth goes to 1 individual and 1% of the wealth is with everyone else is Pareto Efficient but not a good world! Efficiency can also be used amorally, e.g., Death Camps are an efficient way to kill undesirables!
> Efficiency does have a sensible definition in isolation: an efficient system is one in which there are no more Pareto improvements. From the government perspective, you could consider this in terms of the cost/service frontier, and actions which move the government towards that frontier improve efficiency.
I had to look up Pareto improvement, and I don't think that many systems exist where improvements are better in "every way" like the definition suggests.
For example, most big tech companies will use something like Kubernetes (or an equivalent) to deploy multiple instances of a service and then load balance between them, even when none of them have reached full capacity.
In one sense, this is "inefficient", in that we have computers sitting idle that could be doing work, but it's also efficient in another sense, which is to minimize downtime; if one of the computers or service crash, you won't experience much (or any) downtime because one of the replicas will handle requests.
Someone could get rid of all the replicas and then claim victory in that they made things "more efficient" by reducing the cost, but that will come at the expense of possible downtime.
Every system is different, and figuring out where on the spectrum you draw that line is rarely clear-cut, and there is almost always tradeoffs no matter what decision you make. Sometimes you can live with more downtime and it's better to cut the costs of the extra computers, sometimes downtime is not an option and you need a ton of redundancy.
Humans are not computers, so it's not the best analogy in the world, but I think it still mostly holds; it looks like in a hand-wavey way they're just defining efficiency as "spending less money", but that really doesn't make any sense unless you can show that you're getting comparable results while spending less cash.
I'm not saying that the government is perfect with spending money, obviously, and it's entirely possible that DOGE will find something that really should be eliminated. I'm just saying that it's rarely cut and dry, and it's very rare that cutting something is just a universal net improvement.
Well you can be sure the billionaire aligned media will only tell the part of the story in their best interest, so who knows how much of the actual story will be told to any portion of the population.
This doesn't seem "efficient" to me, but "efficient" is a word that doesn't actually mean anything without context, which they don't provide.