I believe that DOGE was just a ruse so they could harvest data on Americans from every department. They were mostly successful. All the rest was a misdirection.
I fully agree that DOGE was an embarrassing failure, but I'd love to have a more fine-grained understanding. There are perhaps 4 separate DOGEs, and the savings from each are different:
1) Genuine fraud (sending checks to dead SS recipients) and waste (in the sense of money could be saved by delivering the same service more efficiently). No idea what abuse is.
2) Poor decision-making by bureaucrats. This is obviously a matter of opinion, but if the administration believes that we shouldn't spend NSF money on legumes research or Gila monsters, it's entirely proper for the administration to spend the money elsewhere (although not impound the moneys, so there shouldn't really be any savings here)
3) (Illegally) firing Federal Employees, saving money as both a direct reduction in payroll expenses and, more significantly, sabotaging the ability of the agencies to spend the money mandated by Congress (e.g. firing the people who answer the phone at Social Security, so new beneficiaries cannot sign up).
4) Simple (illegal) impoundment, e.g. feeding USAID into the wood chippper.
I'd love to know the savings, or, "savings," in each category. Anyone seen such an analysis?
I met Luke Farritor in March. He said his biggest priority was reducing the federal deficit. I asked him if he was familiar with the shape of the budget, and if he really believed it could be done. He said yes. I do not know if he was lying to me, or himself; and in truth I do not know which would have been worse.
I object to the end-- I don't know if Musk's cronies are lazy, but they're certainly stupid. You don't have to do much work to know that there isn't large-scale, systematic waste, fraud and abuse in the government; all you need is a pair of eyes, a few brain cells, and an internet connection.
We could set up a(nother) blue ribbon commission to identify waste in government, and they'll find a few more pennies to pull out from in front of the proverbial bulldozer. Maybe they'll even study overpayments to Medicare Advantage and tax evasion, which are two of the places where there likely are hundreds of billions of annual savings to be found. But that's never what these people actually mean when they talk about waste, fraud, and abuse.
"DOGE has been a font of examples about why it’s often best to listen to the people who know what they’re talking about."
This sentence identifies the core problem, but it is not a simple problem at all.
The print era privileged a particular kind of knowing and thinking. This involved specialized expertise, quantification, objectivity and so on. People with the proper titles and training and certification and intelligence will make things right.
The first problem is that where previously things seemed to be going right, particularly in the years after WWII but also to a lesser extent after the breakup of the USSR, far fewer Americans believe that this remains the case. We can mutter all we like about the motivations of the chief prosecutors in this matter, but there it is.
The second problem is that the print era is kaput. And while it is obvious that the succeeding dominant communications technologies promoted problematic habits of thought, it is also well worth remembering that those values and habits of thought the print era promoted... they are most decidedly NOT natural to human beings.
People do not naturally default to quantification. They do not default to looking for expertise in leaders.
Every year further out we get from print domination of our culture, the weaker those residual effects are on our population.
If the leader who shakes his bloody fist at an assassin says we are going to save a shitload of money, then says we did save a shitload of money, then says this means tax cuts... I think we are going to need something more effective than data analysis to counter that.
In a private company, you often reduce spending with across-the-board layoffs. Every subdivision needs to reduce their headcount by X%, every budget gets cut by X%, go figure out how to do it.
This is basically how Elon did layoffs at Twitter. And many companies do this at different times. It's not rocket science.
DOGE didn't work in this way at all. I don't think it's because Elon Musk didn't want to, I think it's a combination of Trump didn't really care about cutting spending, and legally the executive isn't supposed to be doing this sort of budget cut. But I don't really know.
DOGE made the classic management mistake of doing small layoffs. Not enough to make a significant impact on the budget, but large enough to make many people unhappy.
So all this pain, and the fundamental budget problem of the high deficit is still roughly untouched. I'm guessing one day before too long there will come a budget reckoning that is much worse than these DOGE cuts have been.
Sure, but that doesn’t help you globally. So if you really wanted to cut costs a reasonable first approach would be something like “every category of the federal budget gets a 20% cut” and then the details could be figured out by the appropriate people.
Yeah, I think the simplest explanation of DOGE failing to cut spending is simply that Congress controls spending and Congress didn't want to cut spending!
DOGE didn't cut between $60 billion and $160 billion in waste and fraud. It cut spending by firing people and cancelling contracts. If you you cancel a contract, you don't have to spend the money, but you also don't get the benefits the contract would have paid for. As many other people have observed, the net effect of DOGE on the federal government's fiscal position is almost surely negative.
To Bronx Zoo Cobra, I couldn't find the thread where you made the comment about $350,000 per working taxpayer owed but here are all the federal debt numbers: https://usdebtclock.org/?t=o4isprjoeo4ijwv022123
You're counting people who payed INCOME tax (which is close to 100 million, so 3.6 trillion/100 million... sure). But not all people who paid TAX (including payroll tax)
Since payroll tax/SSA are part of the debt/deficit, I don't think you can include the one without the other.
Also, I don’t understand why one would limit the denominator to the people who *currently* pay tax. There’s no reason why those are the only people who *could* pay tax.
Fraudulent Republican budget blueprints go back to Newt Gingrich. Paul Ryan was particularly egregious about it, going so far as to lie about the essence of his Speakership while running for Vice President.
Blueprints are routinely passed that couldn’t possibly add up without cutting most people off Medicaid. Republicans are routinely split between knowing how bad it will harm their constituents, and actively wishing to harm twice as many.
This is the closest we’ve ever come to actually making the harmful cuts, combined with twice as harmful tax cuts that will explode the debt anyway.
It's the lies about the Medicaid cuts that really drive me crazy. They will harm more than just working age slackers. They will harm people with disabilities who currently receive state waivers that make it possible for these people to live at home, like my sons, instead of in a state facility.
The cuts to Medicaid mean that less money will flow to my state (Oklahoma). Because the state initiative that expanded Medicaid passed as a constitutional amendment, the state cannot tinker with reducing its commitment to those who gained Medicaid benefits through that mechanism.
Where will the cuts come from? They will come from Medicaid waiver recipients because the waivers are considered an optional program. (States don't have to fund waivers in order to secure federal Medicaid dollars.) This is not just a possibility; the state cut waiver money back in 2017 when money was tight.
I have emailed my representative (Tom Cole) multiple times about this, as well as my senators. I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper, which was published. I'm just not sure what I can do about this anymore. They keep telling me that the cuts won't harm vulnerable people and I know they will.
As an SSA attorney, I disagree that something needed to be done about the death records - or at least that that should have been a priority for anyone. SSA is so massively underfunded that it’s been running under capacity for decades, appeals take years to be processed, phone wait times frequently last over an hour or lead to disconnections, and sometimes the whole phone system crashes for a week. Our local disability hearings office doesn’t have WiFi or a *disabled-accessible restroom*. This week I’m trying to track down a client to get a new release of information formed signed because SSA rejected the one we submitted because it sat in SSA’s mailbox so long the form expired (over a year).
There are a thousand priority items that would make SSA run more efficiently and instead they focused on this non-impact boondoggle.
If SSA has death records this out of date then this is a sign someone should take a deeper look at cleaning up the agency's IT/tracking processes, which would hopefully _also_ expose most of the problems you mentioned (probably not the lacking restroom)
I mean, that's obviously not what happened... but I think sometimes seeing a problem like that that everyone is kind of working around/ignoring because it's not directly breaking anything can indicate bigger problems(of the sort you mention)
I mean, they could have also just asked anyone who worked at or with Social Security. Stuff like the phone delays gets regular reports. Every Commissioner has highlighted these efficiency issues in front of Congress multiple times. These aren't inefficiencies that need to be exposed, they're already well-known.
This was a hatchet job to invent a problem to bolster the narrative that there's massive fraud happening in the SSA system. It was never a good-faith attempt to reduce inefficiency.
In the specific matter of DOGE, yeah. They ignored tons of recommendations from various IGs, other agencies on how to improve things across a whole host of things.
"an attempt to rehabilitate Tesla’s reputation in a world where Republicans still don’t want to buy electric cars"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 🤣🤣🤣
I know Elon Musk is extremely unlikely to read Matt Y's Substack, but just in case he does, here's my message to him:
Buddy, you're supposed to be an ultra-brilliant genius, a demigod among mere men, so this should be easy for you to understand: You are NOT going to rehabilitate Tesla's reputation. You did not just kill Tesla's reputation with the eco-friendly PMC set and piss on the corpse; you *transmogrified* it in an unholy dark rite.
What now, Mr. Space Genius? What do you expect to happen? The Truck Nutz crowd loves you for shitposting on Xitter but the vast majority of them will never buy a pricey Tesla, and the nice PMC liberals who used to love and admire you (myself and Husband included) are all like "I wouldn't be caught dead driving a Deplorean/Swastikar/Incel Camino/insert your favorite derogatory nickname that hints at your turn to the Dark Side." Enjoy selling your cars to the Curtis Yarvin-curious wealthy tech bros who still want them, i.e., <20% of your original intended market.
[Pitch Meeting Guy voice] Oh, whoops! Whoopsie!
And don't expect me to feel sorry for you. You said empathy is a weakness of the Western world, did you not? I don't want to be weak.
This is good, but I don't think it really goes far enough. Musk trashed Tesla's reputation as Hyundai/Kia and Ford have come into the EV market with a vengeance. BYD is a massive stormcloud on the horizon.
I don't know how to balance the budget. Or even try to bring the growth of the deficit under control. It will take such difficult choices and compromises that I cant really imagine at this point. But the math is the math. We need to raise taxes and/or lower spending by a large amount. Medicaid, defense, and other spending are vital to our national interests. They certainly do have waste and inefficiencies, some inevitable and irremediable. But even with best assumptions, cuts beyond 5-10% are going to reduce services severely.
Social security and Medicare are still largely funded by dedicated payroll taxes, but the projections show deeper and deeper incursions into the general fund for Medicare and program cuts for Social Security. Increases in dedicated taxes might stabilize the programs but eat into the ability to raise taxes for the general fund. But unless proposals include cutting program spending AND keeping/increasing the dedicated taxes AND redirecting the surplus revenues to other expenses, reductions to Medicare and Social Security won't solve the general budget problem.
Raising general revenues through higher marginal rates is the only realistic solution but something that one of our major political parties has vehemently opposed for many years and the other has obfuscated with sloganeering "solutions" such as targeting billionaires. I'm not sure I've seen a serious proposal discussed in many years and I'm not sure I would call the Simpson-Bowles Commission entirely serious. But I'd like too. Can someone help out?
In 2019 we were spending 4T / yr. Now we are spending over 6T! Is it not possible to go back without mass killing children and poor people?
I believe that DOGE was just a ruse so they could harvest data on Americans from every department. They were mostly successful. All the rest was a misdirection.
I fully agree that DOGE was an embarrassing failure, but I'd love to have a more fine-grained understanding. There are perhaps 4 separate DOGEs, and the savings from each are different:
1) Genuine fraud (sending checks to dead SS recipients) and waste (in the sense of money could be saved by delivering the same service more efficiently). No idea what abuse is.
2) Poor decision-making by bureaucrats. This is obviously a matter of opinion, but if the administration believes that we shouldn't spend NSF money on legumes research or Gila monsters, it's entirely proper for the administration to spend the money elsewhere (although not impound the moneys, so there shouldn't really be any savings here)
3) (Illegally) firing Federal Employees, saving money as both a direct reduction in payroll expenses and, more significantly, sabotaging the ability of the agencies to spend the money mandated by Congress (e.g. firing the people who answer the phone at Social Security, so new beneficiaries cannot sign up).
4) Simple (illegal) impoundment, e.g. feeding USAID into the wood chippper.
I'd love to know the savings, or, "savings," in each category. Anyone seen such an analysis?
I met Luke Farritor in March. He said his biggest priority was reducing the federal deficit. I asked him if he was familiar with the shape of the budget, and if he really believed it could be done. He said yes. I do not know if he was lying to me, or himself; and in truth I do not know which would have been worse.
I object to the end-- I don't know if Musk's cronies are lazy, but they're certainly stupid. You don't have to do much work to know that there isn't large-scale, systematic waste, fraud and abuse in the government; all you need is a pair of eyes, a few brain cells, and an internet connection.
We could set up a(nother) blue ribbon commission to identify waste in government, and they'll find a few more pennies to pull out from in front of the proverbial bulldozer. Maybe they'll even study overpayments to Medicare Advantage and tax evasion, which are two of the places where there likely are hundreds of billions of annual savings to be found. But that's never what these people actually mean when they talk about waste, fraud, and abuse.
"DOGE has been a font of examples about why it’s often best to listen to the people who know what they’re talking about."
This sentence identifies the core problem, but it is not a simple problem at all.
The print era privileged a particular kind of knowing and thinking. This involved specialized expertise, quantification, objectivity and so on. People with the proper titles and training and certification and intelligence will make things right.
The first problem is that where previously things seemed to be going right, particularly in the years after WWII but also to a lesser extent after the breakup of the USSR, far fewer Americans believe that this remains the case. We can mutter all we like about the motivations of the chief prosecutors in this matter, but there it is.
The second problem is that the print era is kaput. And while it is obvious that the succeeding dominant communications technologies promoted problematic habits of thought, it is also well worth remembering that those values and habits of thought the print era promoted... they are most decidedly NOT natural to human beings.
People do not naturally default to quantification. They do not default to looking for expertise in leaders.
Every year further out we get from print domination of our culture, the weaker those residual effects are on our population.
If the leader who shakes his bloody fist at an assassin says we are going to save a shitload of money, then says we did save a shitload of money, then says this means tax cuts... I think we are going to need something more effective than data analysis to counter that.
In a private company, you often reduce spending with across-the-board layoffs. Every subdivision needs to reduce their headcount by X%, every budget gets cut by X%, go figure out how to do it.
This is basically how Elon did layoffs at Twitter. And many companies do this at different times. It's not rocket science.
DOGE didn't work in this way at all. I don't think it's because Elon Musk didn't want to, I think it's a combination of Trump didn't really care about cutting spending, and legally the executive isn't supposed to be doing this sort of budget cut. But I don't really know.
DOGE made the classic management mistake of doing small layoffs. Not enough to make a significant impact on the budget, but large enough to make many people unhappy.
So all this pain, and the fundamental budget problem of the high deficit is still roughly untouched. I'm guessing one day before too long there will come a budget reckoning that is much worse than these DOGE cuts have been.
You could lay off 100% of the workforce in many agencies and it wont make a dent in the deficit
Sure, but that doesn’t help you globally. So if you really wanted to cut costs a reasonable first approach would be something like “every category of the federal budget gets a 20% cut” and then the details could be figured out by the appropriate people.
oh, ok, sure, you could hypothetically cut the budget, but that requires congress to do it
Yeah, I think the simplest explanation of DOGE failing to cut spending is simply that Congress controls spending and Congress didn't want to cut spending!
Why are there so many people on Medicaid in this midzone and why can’t congress solve for that issue?
DOGE didn't cut between $60 billion and $160 billion in waste and fraud. It cut spending by firing people and cancelling contracts. If you you cancel a contract, you don't have to spend the money, but you also don't get the benefits the contract would have paid for. As many other people have observed, the net effect of DOGE on the federal government's fiscal position is almost surely negative.
To Bronx Zoo Cobra, I couldn't find the thread where you made the comment about $350,000 per working taxpayer owed but here are all the federal debt numbers: https://usdebtclock.org/?t=o4isprjoeo4ijwv022123
Ahh I think I see one difference.
You're counting people who payed INCOME tax (which is close to 100 million, so 3.6 trillion/100 million... sure). But not all people who paid TAX (including payroll tax)
Since payroll tax/SSA are part of the debt/deficit, I don't think you can include the one without the other.
Also, I don’t understand why one would limit the denominator to the people who *currently* pay tax. There’s no reason why those are the only people who *could* pay tax.
What does $500 Billion of DOGE Clock mean? Savings of $4502 per tax payer??
Fraudulent Republican budget blueprints go back to Newt Gingrich. Paul Ryan was particularly egregious about it, going so far as to lie about the essence of his Speakership while running for Vice President.
Blueprints are routinely passed that couldn’t possibly add up without cutting most people off Medicaid. Republicans are routinely split between knowing how bad it will harm their constituents, and actively wishing to harm twice as many.
This is the closest we’ve ever come to actually making the harmful cuts, combined with twice as harmful tax cuts that will explode the debt anyway.
All harm, all the time.
It's the lies about the Medicaid cuts that really drive me crazy. They will harm more than just working age slackers. They will harm people with disabilities who currently receive state waivers that make it possible for these people to live at home, like my sons, instead of in a state facility.
The cuts to Medicaid mean that less money will flow to my state (Oklahoma). Because the state initiative that expanded Medicaid passed as a constitutional amendment, the state cannot tinker with reducing its commitment to those who gained Medicaid benefits through that mechanism.
Where will the cuts come from? They will come from Medicaid waiver recipients because the waivers are considered an optional program. (States don't have to fund waivers in order to secure federal Medicaid dollars.) This is not just a possibility; the state cut waiver money back in 2017 when money was tight.
I have emailed my representative (Tom Cole) multiple times about this, as well as my senators. I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper, which was published. I'm just not sure what I can do about this anymore. They keep telling me that the cuts won't harm vulnerable people and I know they will.
The cuts to Medicaid will result in hospital closures. Hospital closures hurt plenty of people not on Medicaid.
This is also true, especially in rural areas of my state which are already underserved.
As an SSA attorney, I disagree that something needed to be done about the death records - or at least that that should have been a priority for anyone. SSA is so massively underfunded that it’s been running under capacity for decades, appeals take years to be processed, phone wait times frequently last over an hour or lead to disconnections, and sometimes the whole phone system crashes for a week. Our local disability hearings office doesn’t have WiFi or a *disabled-accessible restroom*. This week I’m trying to track down a client to get a new release of information formed signed because SSA rejected the one we submitted because it sat in SSA’s mailbox so long the form expired (over a year).
There are a thousand priority items that would make SSA run more efficiently and instead they focused on this non-impact boondoggle.
Generously:
If SSA has death records this out of date then this is a sign someone should take a deeper look at cleaning up the agency's IT/tracking processes, which would hopefully _also_ expose most of the problems you mentioned (probably not the lacking restroom)
I mean, that's obviously not what happened... but I think sometimes seeing a problem like that that everyone is kind of working around/ignoring because it's not directly breaking anything can indicate bigger problems(of the sort you mention)
I mean, they could have also just asked anyone who worked at or with Social Security. Stuff like the phone delays gets regular reports. Every Commissioner has highlighted these efficiency issues in front of Congress multiple times. These aren't inefficiencies that need to be exposed, they're already well-known.
This was a hatchet job to invent a problem to bolster the narrative that there's massive fraud happening in the SSA system. It was never a good-faith attempt to reduce inefficiency.
In the specific matter of DOGE, yeah. They ignored tons of recommendations from various IGs, other agencies on how to improve things across a whole host of things.
"an attempt to rehabilitate Tesla’s reputation in a world where Republicans still don’t want to buy electric cars"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 🤣🤣🤣
I know Elon Musk is extremely unlikely to read Matt Y's Substack, but just in case he does, here's my message to him:
Buddy, you're supposed to be an ultra-brilliant genius, a demigod among mere men, so this should be easy for you to understand: You are NOT going to rehabilitate Tesla's reputation. You did not just kill Tesla's reputation with the eco-friendly PMC set and piss on the corpse; you *transmogrified* it in an unholy dark rite.
What now, Mr. Space Genius? What do you expect to happen? The Truck Nutz crowd loves you for shitposting on Xitter but the vast majority of them will never buy a pricey Tesla, and the nice PMC liberals who used to love and admire you (myself and Husband included) are all like "I wouldn't be caught dead driving a Deplorean/Swastikar/Incel Camino/insert your favorite derogatory nickname that hints at your turn to the Dark Side." Enjoy selling your cars to the Curtis Yarvin-curious wealthy tech bros who still want them, i.e., <20% of your original intended market.
[Pitch Meeting Guy voice] Oh, whoops! Whoopsie!
And don't expect me to feel sorry for you. You said empathy is a weakness of the Western world, did you not? I don't want to be weak.
[sad trombone outro]
This is good, but I don't think it really goes far enough. Musk trashed Tesla's reputation as Hyundai/Kia and Ford have come into the EV market with a vengeance. BYD is a massive stormcloud on the horizon.
The timing is awful.
Saying that "It seems like he actually ended up cutting between $60 billion and $160 billion. " is an exaggeration.
An independent tracker, Musk Watch - DOGE Tracker, has found only $16 Billion in "verifiable canceled funding".
https://doge.muskwatch.com/
The fact is that the damage DOGE did to the IRS may well COST hundreds of billions in lost revenue.
It's more accurate to say that DOGE has COST more than the fake "savings" they claim.
I don't know how to balance the budget. Or even try to bring the growth of the deficit under control. It will take such difficult choices and compromises that I cant really imagine at this point. But the math is the math. We need to raise taxes and/or lower spending by a large amount. Medicaid, defense, and other spending are vital to our national interests. They certainly do have waste and inefficiencies, some inevitable and irremediable. But even with best assumptions, cuts beyond 5-10% are going to reduce services severely.
Social security and Medicare are still largely funded by dedicated payroll taxes, but the projections show deeper and deeper incursions into the general fund for Medicare and program cuts for Social Security. Increases in dedicated taxes might stabilize the programs but eat into the ability to raise taxes for the general fund. But unless proposals include cutting program spending AND keeping/increasing the dedicated taxes AND redirecting the surplus revenues to other expenses, reductions to Medicare and Social Security won't solve the general budget problem.
Raising general revenues through higher marginal rates is the only realistic solution but something that one of our major political parties has vehemently opposed for many years and the other has obfuscated with sloganeering "solutions" such as targeting billionaires. I'm not sure I've seen a serious proposal discussed in many years and I'm not sure I would call the Simpson-Bowles Commission entirely serious. But I'd like too. Can someone help out?