Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

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Here's the heading from the DOGE website about the $55B.

is a combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.

That's not $55B in "savings." That's a choice not to provide services that people want. It's not the same thing.

Notice the term asset sales. This should be a huge red flag. The reason Argentina fucked itself in the 90s (after recovering from fucking themselves in the 50s and 70s) was that they started selling off public assets and calling them "savings" or "revenue." Well, guess what. Eventually they ran out of assets to sell, found themselves in a massive budget hole, and were paying to lease the stuff they had sold.

If they are selling assets and canceling leases, it's almost certainly a pyramid scheme. That's not "savings." That's just unloading assets owned by the United States at firesale prices to rich people -- otherwise known as looting. I thought MAGA really, really hated black people looting.
 
Silence Dogood said:
It was various payments that totaled up to $4.7T
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1. Payments are not assets
2. You still can't hide $4.7T of payments.
3. What actually happened is that a certain database flag wasn't set in line item expenditures. Probably, that database flag was empty because it wasn't being used. I've seen many databases with obsolete columns. Heck, I've programmed them. See, when you design a database, you really need to figure out your data structures before hand. Adding columns to extant tables is really inefficient. Deleting columns is even more so. In every corporate database I've ever seen -- and I worked with SAP and Bristol-Myers-Squibb -- there were unused columns to store certain types of flags. It turned out the flags weren't needed.

That's what Musk doesn't understand because he isn't a data guy and he's relying on teenagers. Databases are ALWAYS full of information that isn't structured the exact way you want. Indeed, it's literally the first thing any database programmer has to do on a new project: learn the data tables and what information is important and what isn't (and why). Musk doesn't know that. I guarantee you that the databases at Tesla are full of data entries that lack values in database columns. Hell, depending on the implementation, merely filling the column with information wastes hard drive storage. So what Musk is going is the literal opposite of efficiency.

Again, if you don't know how any of this works, why are you forming strong opinions about it?
 
I'm not saying I support all of the methods used by Elon/DOGE, but does anyone really believe that there is no fraud and/or no waste in the Federal Government? We're talking about an entity that essentially has no true budget constraints and, presumably, little inherent desire to streamline, save money, etc.
 
Gutting the CDC and the NIH in a world of infectious disease is political suicide. If there's a disease wave (even short of a pandemic), Trump now owns it. It doesn't matter if the CDC funding actually contributed to it. Cut public health funding, and the public will blame you if there's disease.
 
ZenMode said:
I'm not saying I support all of the methods used by Elon/DOGE, but does anyone really believe that there is no fraud and/or no waste in the Federal Government? We're talking about an entity that essentially has no true budget constraints and, presumably, little inherent desire to streamline, save money, etc.
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In the non-DOD federal government? There's essentially no fraud, and little waste. The agencies that spend money absolutely do have budget constraints, and they are often constraining. I can testify to that with personal experience. What people like you just don't understand is that streamlining, in the first instance, *consumes* money. And the agencies rarely have money to spare for that sort of thing. The next thing is that *streamlining* doesn't solve any problems, because most of this isn't "waste." It's public services.

Now, in the world of federal contracting, I don't know but I'd imagine there is quite a bit of fraud and waste. That, of course, is not what DOGE is looking at. They can't. It's not something you can find in a payment system. In defense contracting, there absolutely is tons of waste but they ain't gonna be looking at that, for reasons that surely you can understand.
 
Silence Dogood said:

x.com

x.com x.com

They have a website, check it out. Its transparent.
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The federal government has websites that detail all the spending the government engages in. That's where Musk is getting this supposedly "secret" information.

You may want to reconsider which side is "transparent" and which is not in this circumstance.
 
ZenMode said:
I'm not saying I support all of the methods used by Elon/DOGE, but does anyone really believe that there is no fraud and/or no waste in the Federal Government? We're talking about an entity that essentially has no true budget constraints and, presumably, little inherent desire to streamline, save money, etc.
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Has anyone ever claimed that there's no fraud or waste in the federal government? Of course not. We're talking about an organization that employs millions of people and handles trillions of dollars. It would be literally impossible to create an organization of that size and scope that eliminated the possibility of fraud and waste. That's an impossible and foolish ideal. I do expect that given the size and scope of the government, the amount of fraud and/or waste is likely much smaller in scale than conservatives like to imagine. In part because of the presence of lots of checks in place to deter, investigate, and address fraud and waste - things that Trump and DOGE are now conspicuously eliminating, further driving home that eliminating "fraud and waste" is not their goal.

It would be similarly silly to say that there was no fraud or waste occurring in, say, Amazon or Alphabet or any similarly large company. it is not possible to achieve perfect efficiency or completely deter fraud in any organization of significant size. But at least the people who work for the federal government are sworn to public service, while the people who work for private companies are not.
 
BlooVooDoo said:
Not just Ukraine. Withdrawing US troops from the Baltic states is a major FU to NATO. Russia could invade all 3 of them without direct conflict between US and Russian forces and then Trump could simply ignore Article 5.
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This seems like the Matt Gaetz nomination. Trump is easily convinced. Putin said something to him that convinced him it was the right course of action. I suspect that more responsible people will convince him not to do it. I'm not sure of it, of course, because nobody can be sure of what that man will do (except that it will be destructive), but that's my intuition.
 
Silence Dogood said:
Wait, your mad DOGE is just getting started and 55 billion isn't enough for you to think why something wasn't done sooner? Do you hear yourself? Tax cuts don't just increase the deficit. Why are you brainwashed that big govt is our savior? Tax cuts promote economic growth.
So far there isn't any concrete evidence. You're playing gotcha games knowing full well its hard to prove that. Even if they did you would still say they lied about the proof. Why isnt anyone inside the govt providing any rebuttal evidence? Again its weird you love defending the status quo and broken systems.
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You getting tired shoving the goalposts around?
 
ZenMode said:
I'm not saying I support all of the methods used by Elon/DOGE, but does anyone really believe that there is no fraud and/or no waste in the Federal Government? We're talking about an entity that essentially has no true budget constraints and, presumably, little inherent desire to streamline, save money, etc.
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Sure there is some, but it’s certainly less than the fantastical numbers being thrown around by DOGE. The question is how much is acceptable and what practicable steps can be taken to reduce it.
 
Hey you guys remember when Elon claimed we spent $58 million on condoms for Gaza?

Then it turned out the "Gaza" in question was a region in Africa, not the one in the Middle East?

Then it turned out that we didn't spend $58 million on condoms just for that one region, but that was actually the amount we spent worldwide?

Then it turned out that the $58 million spent worldwide wasn't just for condoms, but in fact was the total worldwide spend for all forms of contraception?

Elon and DOGE have no credibility and literally everything they say should be treated with skepticism until it is backed up with proof. Treating their claims in any different way is illogical and dishonest.
 
rodoheel said:
Has anyone ever claimed that there's no fraud or waste in the federal government? Of course not. We're talking about an organization that employs millions of people and handles trillions of dollars. It would be literally impossible to create an organization of that size and scope that eliminated the possibility of fraud and waste. That's an impossible and foolish ideal. I do expect that given the size and scope of the government, the amount of fraud and/or waste is likely much smaller in scale than conservatives like to imagine. In part because of the presence of lots of checks in place to deter, investigate, and address fraud and waste - things that Trump and DOGE are now conspicuously eliminating, further driving home that eliminating "fraud and waste" is not their goal.

It would be similarly silly to say that there was no fraud or waste occurring in, say, Amazon or Alphabet or any similarly large company. it is not possible to achieve perfect efficiency or completely deter fraud in any organization of significant size. But at least the people who work for the federal government are sworn to public service, while the people who work for private companies are not.
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My experience is that there's little waste within the government itself. Elon thinks this is the first "find government inefficiency" rodeo. It very much is not. These things pop up every few years, where some politician says he will go "line by line" through the federal government. That's in addition to the ordinary inspection/audit processes.

What happens in the realm of federal contracting is a completely different story. I know little about the details. I summered at Covington and Burling, which at the time had a very robust federal contracting practice. Boy, did I hear some stories. But again, that's outside the government and the government has little insight as to how to control that. And of course, most of it is in the defense contractors.
 
superrific said:
In the non-DOD federal government? There's essentially no fraud, and little waste. The agencies that spend money absolutely do have budget constraints, and they are often constraining. I can testify to that with personal experience. What people like you just don't understand is that streamlining, in the first instance, *consumes* money. And the agencies rarely have money to spare for that sort of thing. The next thing is that *streamlining* doesn't solve any problems, because most of this isn't "waste." It's public services.

Now, in the world of federal contracting, I don't know but I'd imagine there is quite a bit of fraud and waste. That, of course, is not what DOGE is looking at. They can't. It's not something you can find in a payment system. In defense contracting, there absolutely is tons of waste but they ain't gonna be looking at that, for reasons that surely you can understand.
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I work in the world of fed contracting. The number of reviews that a defense contract goes through before any money is paid is staggering. There are 7 or 8 independent sets of eyes looking at every single defense contract and I review their reviews for data and accounting accuracy EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. If fraud does occur it's on the private side when contractors over inflate their costs and it goes unnoticed bc it's not super obvious.
 
rodoheel said:
The federal government has websites that detail all the spending the government engages in. That's where Musk is getting this supposedly "secret" information.

You may want to reconsider which side is "transparent" and which is not in this circumstance.
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they need to reconsider using silence dogood as their screen name bc they are neither as smart as Franklin nor stand for the same democratic values as he did.
 
There is absolutely fraud, waste, abuse and inefficiencies in government and the US Government is no exception. This is why Trump is benefitting from DOGE politically. Because whether it's a scalpel, a knife or a sledgehammer - attacking fraud or waste (or being perceived to do so) is popular. So, regardless of the merits of the "cuts" or the chaos engendered by it, he and Elon are on the popular side of the ledger here. Why do you think USAID was targeted first? Because it was uniquely wasteful or corrupt or represented a genuinely meaningful portion of the budget .... or because foreign aid, generally, is not very popular with voters (and particularly his base).

If folks were serious, you would be having a genuine forensic audit happening. Not Elon live-tweeting for ***** and giggles. And, as we've seen, at times making erroneous or wild claims. But all that feeds the beast and is a calculated approach.

I'd also note that one role of government should be to safeguard against market efficiencies that have external costs for society. Medicare and Medicaid (in large part tho far from perfectly) are examples of this.

I think Dems have been poorly prepared to deal with DOGE. Instead, they've gotten cornered into defending the status quo (or so it feels). The defense of institutions can't necessarily be a defense of those institutions as they are. But the importance of institutions as they should be.
 
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