I’d get rid of DOGE.
We already have the Government Accountability Office.
DOGE is going to be the government equivalent of “Nice place you’ve got here, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it…”
They’ll show up at a department with a mandate from Trump to “discuss” efficiency. Then they’ll make it clear to the people in charge; eliminate so many jobs on their own initiative, or they’ll (regrettably, of course!) have to report back to Trump that the department is being uncooperative, and then who knows what will happen to their budget next year? So sad.
If you were the person in charge, would you want to play political chicken with Trump?
No message.
You have clearly never worked for a fortune 50 company.
May I introduce to the discussion the Fallacy of Composition:
I first learned of it while reading a book of Logical Fallacies as I leaned comfortably against Chesterton’s Fence.
And then some jackhole inexplicably tore down the fence, knocking me flat and – far worse spilling my beer.
Here’s his latest idea.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are asking Americans who are “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” and willing to work over 80 hours a week to join their new Department of Government Efficiency – at zero pay.
In a new X post on Thursday that doubled as a job announcement and another one of Musk’s trolling attempts, the account for the newly formed Doge wrote: “We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”
Seems to me responding to this job ad convincingly demonstrates that one fails to satisfy the stated criteria.
Congratulations. I’ve been a member of the Dope for over 20 years. In that time I’ve seen many ignorant and asinine posts. But this is the top. The best. 10/10 no notes.
My god.
I mean, of course you could find inefficiencies, but “let’s cut this department by a round number percentage because I believe conspiracy t heories about Anthony Fauci” is just about the stupidest way you could go about it.
You need to actually
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Define “inefficiency.” Deciding the federal government should not be doing something at all because you think out of principle the states should be doing it is a valid position but it’s not exactly “inefficiency.”
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Determine how to eliminate it and
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Then transition away from the spending.
Eliminating a pointless porkbarrel defense program is an obvious way to save a lot of money. The littoral combat ship program was a brutal example of that. But other forms of inefficiency can be a bit trickier to extract. How do you know if a given department is employing too many people? What’s your performance standard?
I mean, I work with many different companies in my consulting business. You cannot just look at a company and say “let’s make it more efficient by cutting spending by 20 percent” or “let’s cut staff by ten percent, we’ll be more efficient that way.” That’s just mind-bogglingly dumb.
THis is indicative of the problem:
"We should cut X.
Ok, but not Xa because its useful and I work there.
Yes, of course, we won’t cut Xa…so we’ll just make arangements and cut X - Xa
Thanks, but…you know Xb does this too so we probably shouldn’t cut Xb either.
Oh, yes…that’s right…so lets cut X -(Xa +Xb…)
But. lets not forget … ad nauseum
Like if we ever want to get rid of ‘govt workers’ the first thing that’s trotted out are teachers, police and firefighters.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ
My son works from home in a government position. I know if he is not on an official 15 min break or 30 min lunch he is working. If he has to pick the kids up from school he skips his lunch. I don’t know how typical this is but it leads me to believe that working in an office may have more distractions than working from home.
Yet, as far as I can tell, that’s Musk’s usual mode of operation. At least that the impression I got from the Tesla Supercharger department episode.
Yes, I can say that I have worked in almost every environment you can think of. City government, tribal government, federal government, state government (where I work now), small business, large business, massive global business… And it doesn’t matter if you are public or private sector. What drives inefficiency is size. If you work for a massive private entity, it’s going to be as bureaucratic as any government entity.
As far as waste goes, because everything we do costs public funds we require a lot more justification and paperwork to spend money at my state agency. That was never the case for any private entity I’ve worked at.
I’m sure a lot of waste can be trimmed in government as in any large organization, but you don’t look to the private sector for the model of how to do it. That’s like trying to put obedience training into your dog by attempting to make it act like a wolf.
You left out the part where you can LITERALLY only apply for the “job” if you have a paid Twitter account.
This isn’t a government agency, it’s an MLM scheme.
My comment was directed at Balthisar, who said “In the private sector, competition causes us to be efficient”
My point was that my time at the likes of GE tells me what you said is correct: What drives inefficiency is size.
To increase government efficiency I would appoint Milo Minderbinder head of DOGE.
Oh, wait…
The elected people who are hottest to make cuts are also the ones who assume all bureaucrats are crooks, and that the work shouldn’t be funded anyway. So layering multiple multiple layers of costly paperwork and checks (impeding actual work) is by design.
There are a lot of people who are No Value Added in any organization with many thousands of employees, government or not, (see last post by Atamasama). It could be a low percentage and still, absolutely, a lot. Perhaps our disagreement isn’t on the substance of U.S. government inefficiency, but on how to approach what Crafter_Man wrote. I may not agree with the overall thrust, but want to agree with what I can before bringing out areas where I cannot agree.
Vivek Ramalamadingdong has decided it is necessary to cut 75% of Social Security recipients off the program.
Vivek: If your SSN ends in an odd, you’re out. If it ends in an even you’re in. That’s 50% cut right there. Of those who remain, if your SSN starts with an even, you’re in and if it starts with an odd you’re out. That’s 75% reduction.
So this is real? I saw that somewhere else and thought that’s gotta be a parody, nobody could be THAT stupid, could they?