So lets flip this around, Lets say Harris had won and Mark Cuban was appointed to lead a similar government efficiency program. He starts auditing government programs and departments with his young tech geniuses, with all full security clearances necessary to review sensitive information (like Musk and the DOGE team), and finds all kinds of opportunities to reduce government spending, which President Harris is happy to cut. Are we equally as upset at Mark Cuban and his team of young tech geniuses?
Or do we not want any spending cuts or audits of government programs looking for savings opportunities?
I want to know, are we upset with the messenger (Musk and DOGE) or the message (we have a $2 trillion dollar annual federal budget deficit that is a hair on fire spending emergency)?
This feels like a hair on fire debt emergency, per MMM himself. The federal debt is currently $36 Trillion with annual revenue of $5 trillion with spending of $7 trillion. Imagine a case study with a family in $360k of debt, making $50k a year and spending $70k a year, they would be absolutely roasted and ripped to shreds. What would we want to see to help them with their case study? A line by line accounting of their spending looking for opportunities to cut spending and then look for ways to increase their income.
This isn't what's happening. There's no team of tech geniuses making informed decisions.
Musk has a bunch of people who are young and inexperienced and naive and have nothing to lose and will just do whatever he tells them to do. And they are proceeding, largely randomly, and definitely illegally, to just eliminate things they feel like eliminating for whatever reason (or no reason).
Mass firings aren't about saving money. They are about eliminating the ability of the government to function. Employees are 6% of federal expense. It's not going to move the needle at all.
Trump/Musk/Republicans don't care about the debt/deficit at all. The Republican House just voted (almost unanimously on party lines) to *increase* the deficit beyond what would have happened if they just did nothing. They voted to cut taxes by trillions more than they voted to cut spending.
There's no grand plan to make the budget sustainable. There is an active effort to gut the government so that perpetual-lawbreaker Musk can do whatever he wants with little resistance.
Exactly. The persistent willful gullibility being exhibited by a few people on this message board buying the b.s. that this is about government efficiency is goddamn pathetic and embarrassing.
There are effective, legal, efficient ways to reduce government spending and the size of the government workforce while minimizing impact to effective accomplishment of government mission statements. None of them are being followed; that is not the goal.
Not only that, but people are failing to see how devastatingly expensive these things will be to fix.
I posted earlier, I think in another thread about the Canadian Phoenix pay system fiasco in Canada.
It was an effort to create efficiency through technology. It was a smart thing to do, the software that was purchased works very well, on the surface, it should have saved a lot of money.
Instead, it's cost many, many, many times the amount it was supposed to save, and after more than a decade of trying to fix it has been deemed unfixable.
So what went wrong? How did replacing am archaic, inefficient system with a modern, well designed software fail so badly?? Well, it failed because they lost too much corporate memory when they centralized the service.
When systems are archaic and inefficient, that makes the humans who do the work MORE valuable, not less.
The folks who implemented Phoenix ignored warnings that moving too quickly would cause problems, and they had the same antipathy towards '"large government" and the same corporate philosophy that cutting humans would create more efficiency.
But that's now how governments work.
In a private corporation, a company can make mistakes and break systems by trying to economize, and that's okay, because they can pivot and adjust to new realities. But a government can't. They need systems to work
as they're supposed to.When you need things to work the way they are supposed to, corporate memory of human beings is extremely valuable and needs to be transferred over to automated systems extremely carefully.
This is WHY it's so hard to modernize government systems. It's incredibly expensive and most governments aren't willing to foot the bill to do it properly.
It's unfathomable hubris for two business moguls with zero experience in government and quite a bit of experience fucking up systems in companies to think that they somehow are the first people to think "hmm...this would be more efficient if it was automated."
Oh wow...what a revolutionary concept.
But there's a reason governments don't modernize as easily as companies, and there's a reason they don't engage in chaotic staff cutting measures.
Can governments be modernized? Of course, but it takes a committed, organized, systematic, careful, and EXPENSIVE plan to make it happen without creating problems that end up costing an absolute fortune.
In a corporation, if someone made an error as catastrophic as the implementation of the Phoenix pay system, the company would have to totally restructure. But a government can't just restructure.
A government can't just lose market share and target different markets, it has no customers. It's job is to consistently serve everyone, all the time. When systems break, that responsibility doesn't just go away. They have to pay whatever it costs to fix the system.
The Phoenix pay system only covers payments for 300K staff. That's it. It was supposed save 78M per year, and the final tally of what it cost the Canadian tax payers will be in excess of 10B.
Anyone who thinks that these careless cuts to important systems is going to save money just doesn't understand how governments work. This could cost the American public an unfathomable amount of tax dollars to fix moving forward.
This could be the single most expensive government in the history of the country, by a massive margin.
If your systems are anything like Canada's systems, you're in for 10-20 years of repair work.
