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The New York Times has an alleged list of discrepancies in how DOGE has reported the amount of tax money saved through their cuts. Unusually for the NYT, it's not hidden behind a paywall. The alleged mistakes include:
More specific examples include:
Then there's the separate problem of not properly understanding how "donor-advised funds" work. FWIW, the previous link is very sympathetic to DOGE's work, but it's clear that some of the information being shared on who USAID funded (e.g., Bill Kristol) is misleading.
But really, I'm not sure how much the median voter will care about all this. I think the more volatile and easily exploited political issue are firings of veterans and employees who voted for Trump. They seemed to have focused on probationary employees because they're easier to fire, but that adds a level of arbitrariness to the process that will piss off swing voters come the midterms.
Overall, it seems like things may have been done a bit too hastily when there was probably time to take a more careful approach.
I mean yeah, this is just more of the 2020 "X claimed without evidence, where the evidence was hidden just enough to have plausible deniability and the debunkers made no attempt to ask questions."
The whole nonprofit ecosystem is a scam that needs to be shut down and rebooted with different people in charge
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I’m confused by the contradictions coming in fast from the DOGE critics. On one hand, they argue that no money is really being saved or it’s just a paltry amount. On the other hand, the cuts are severe and devestating and will send us into recession
Clearly only one can be true, but which is it? Who is being dishonest?
These aren't contradictions to me. All things considered, DOGE is cutting peanuts from the federal budget and is unlikely to make even a small dent in the annual deficit. They big leagues don't start until they start cutting Social Security, Medicare, and the defense budget.
At the same time, these cuts may end up being fairly devastating. I don't know that they will be devastating enough to send us into a recession, but they may really gum up the works for people who truly rely on government services. The other thing is with all these cuts to the IRS, it seems likely to me that tax receipts will be much lower this year than in years past, thus contributing even more to the deficit.
That’s not what the critics are claiming though. They say we are headed towards economic catastrophe because welfare recipients may miss a cheque or two
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it is possible for something to be very cheap and at the same time bad to get rid of
Give an example of something like that doge cut
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I don't see the contradiction. Some of the cuts (NIH indirect costs, firing thousands of employees) are real and likely to be devastating. Other cuts (a purported $8B DHS contact) are fake or wildly overstated. There is only a contradiction if one is talking about the same cut.
Even then, the same thing can be inexpensive (as government programs go) and worth keeping. Dropping such a thing wouldn't be likely to cause a recession, but barring cases where they specifically say that, there's nothing wrong with that logic.
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They're just throwing crap at the wall and hoping something sticks. For instance there was some post on dailykos proclaiming that the 150-year-olds on Social Security were there because that's how a missing birthdate was represented in COBOL -- 20 May 1875, the beginning of the international Gregorian Epoch. The article contains howlers like "Early versions [of COBOL] used the standards set in ISO 8601:2004." LOL; that 2004 is a year. That would be a very recent version of COBOL (which dates back to around 1959) indeed. The first version of ISO 8601 was from 1988, still far too new for Social Security. A little Internet research revealed that versions of COBOL which had an epoch usually used January 1, 1601. And if the epoch was a custom one, they sure would have picked something before 1875, since when Social Security was computerized, people older than that were still alive. And then data was released showing no, the records of very old living people didn't all have the same birthdate.
Did anyone change their mind? No, they just found other reasons Elon was "obviously" wrong.
Okay, but the cobol bullshit notwithstanding, there aren't any 150 year olds on SS, to say nothing of the table Elon posted claiming 1.3M of them.
That's a long and excellent post. The executive summary is...
Being marked "alive" in the data doesn't mean they're collecting benefits. It just means they have no evidence that this person is dead.
Though nowadays funeral homes outright report deaths to SSA which immediately terminates benefits.
There are separate processes to follow up on people that are long lived and collecting benefits. One kicks in at 100 and a more aggressive one at 115. There's also periodic audits that kick in if someone does things like draws benefits but hasn't used their Medicare benefits in awhile (since dead people don't go to the doctor).
There's lots of garbage data in the database due to migrations over the years and some records are unfixable due to layers of kludges, but separate systems exist to stop them from getting payments.
There have been proposals to fix all of the records but they've determined the cost outweighs the benefits, which sounds plausible for a government to say (not that I would agree).
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It's not a contradiction; there are plenty of things like this. Just last night, a friend of mine's temperature light went on. She was low on coolant. $5 worth of coolant later she was back on the road, no harm done. Had she not spent this five dollars, she could have overheated her engine, rendering a $20,000 car unrepairably useless and leaving her without transportation indefinitely. Deciding against spending the $5 would have been saving a paltry amount and risking severe and devastating consequences.
What in your opinion will have the most devastating effects on the economy (from the cuts - not other trumpian policies like tariffs/foreign policy)
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It's actually stupid how easy it is to find inflation of savings by DOGE. You can do it yourself! This thread walks through an example showing that a claimed savings of $120M at DHS is actually $0. And I was able to find another example of this myself!
There is unfortunately not a way I can find to link directly to a row in the stupid DOGE table of savings so I have to be more rounbdabout. If you go to the main DOGE savings page here and click on the "see more" row at the end of the Contracts page you get a much longer list of contracts cancelled. Pop down to the Department of Commerce section and you'll see a few contracts for $20M to various firms with the description "BLANKET PURCHASE AGREEMENT TO CREATE HIGH-QUALITY EDUCATIONAL AGENCY VIDEO(S)". From either the screenshots or FPDS link copy the "Procurement Identifier" field. Then head over to the contract search on usaspending.gov. Scroll down to the "Award ID" filter and put in the Procurement Identifier from above. Hit "Submit" and you should see 1 result for your ID. Here is one such contract, I see three on the DOGE site.
If you look at these contracts above you can see that all three were awarded Jan 22 2024. That they all have the same potential award amount ($20M) and that no money has actually been spent (Combined Outlayed/Obligated Amounts are 0). The contracts are also still listed as "Open", meaning they have not even been cancelled! $60M dollars in purported savings at the Department of Commerce are for awards that are not actually cancelled and for which no money has been spent in the first ~year. Is it really correct to say all this money was "saved"? It took minutes to find this. Just look for any suspiciously large/round number and you're going to uncover something like this.
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Absolutely none of this is surprising to me whatsoever. In my opinion and definition, the “median voter” is split into two camps; those who voted for Harris, and those who voted for anything else/didn’t vote. Furthering my opinionated answer to your question, the former group already cares and anticipated these developments and so does the latter group, it’s just the latter group doesn’t believe it’s happening, and I don’t think they’ll believe it until a serious, serious recession hits the economy and tanks their income.
In my experience, the Trump voters believed that we were already in a recession or heading there. One happening now will just cement their belief that we were already there.
I will admit to being surprised that DOGE wasn't just shunted off to a room to spout hot air and do nothing. Government budgeting is messy and the real problems are extremely difficult to solve (bad demographics and a basically unreformable healthcare sector; we can't grow our way out of the debt when our post '08 growth has been pitiful compared to Reagan, Clinton, or even Dubya). Are social conservatives brave enough to suggest that MAID is the morally correct conclusion to Boomers and older Xers' fondness for aborting future taxpayers? I doubt it.
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I think this is how voters would take it if there is a recession (which seems at least plausible, IMO, but certainly not guaranteed). On the other hand, I've seen a lot of ink spilled about how "essential" all these roles are, and if there isn't a recession, or worse, there is a period of perceived prosperity, it'll hurt the credibility of the left's messaging with those voters going forward. I'm thinking about how many said Twitter would fall apart without half its employees, and despite a few extra "fail whale" pages it's still online, at least. Or how Reagan effectively won the standoff with the ATC strike.
I don't know if it's "the left's" messaging. I've seen plenty of folks online get fired from the National Park service, for example, which as far as I know is a fairly bi-partisan group of folks.
We're not going to agree about Twitter. Twitter was THE global platform, once such a vital and reliable source of communication health and safety departments of various countries relied on it; now the bar is set to "still online", since Musk's suspension of journalists' accounts, measures like labeling media outlets as "state-affiliated" and restricting their visibility, viral misinformation, hate speech, and antisemitism, statements without evidence such as that Community Notes "is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media" thus he is going to "fix" Community Notes, has completely driven out everyone but reactionary conservatives. Hardly a win in my book.
We might, actually. The doom-selling I remember that I'm calling out as inaccurate was from the technical side regarding site reliability. The cultural side, whether it can maintain relevance and cachet as X, I think you're correct still remains to be seen, and isn't trending great for them (although I think it was previously on a different course, if perhaps slower, for irrelevance by losing the political zeitgeist in the other direction).
Even the technical side isn't great. I've been locked out of my account on desktop for a while now since every time I try to log in I get into some kind of loop where it keeps asking for my login information. I never really used it much, so now I just don't use it at all. I imagine for people who are into it they've figured out all its quirks, but for a casual user like me it just isn't worth it.
That's not so uncommon on other platforms either.
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Musk's? All of those that ngs predate him.
His statement is, of course, cope, but he's the one that set up the Community Notes system to start with, I'd say he deserves credit for that.
Progressives got so used to total control of speech, that not having it will always look like "everyone but reactionary conservatives being driven out".
Can you show me evidence that previous Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal did those things? Because I can show you evidence that Musk did all of those things. And what do you mean, exactly, by "progressives got so used to total control of speech"? Who are the progressives, what are the parameters of total control, and by speech are you including verbal?
Wait, you were talking about what a given CEO did on the platform, rather than it's hat was happening under their reign? Why?
That speech that would go against their preferred narrative would be reliably removed or throttled.
What are you asking here? The ideological of what qualifies and disqualifies one as progressive?
Mostly what I stated previously - that stating an alternative viewpoint would get one reliably banned, their content taken down, and/or their reach throttled
Until Spaces, Twitter wasn't much of a verbal communications platform, so no.
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Did they focus on probationary employees, or employees in probationary positions? I've heard a lot of claims that there are employees who got a probationary promotion, but the probationary status of "depending on performance the promotion might become permanent or you might be returned to your old job" was just replaced by "you don't have any job now".
It's interesting to ponder the selection effects, if that's true. We'd be keeping the "so obviously capable that we can't imagine undoing their promotion" employees, but also the "so obviously incapable that we wouldn't even offer a probationary promotion" ones, while hollowing out the middle a bit.
It was their union that negotiated the contracts to set up these incentives.
If you’re looking to cut budgets and have one class of employees that will be difficult to terminate and another class that are essentially at-will, of course you will focus on the latter group.
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In the government, you are typically in a probationary status in three situations:
When you are first hired. Most agencies have a probationary period of 1 year (some are 2). The reason for this being that it's statutorily harder to fire civil servants who have tenure, so you want to make sure someone is a suitable employee before making them permanent. In theory, probationary employees can be let go at any time for substandard performance, though most agencies have rules about how much notification and opportunity to improve probies must be given. (Even more so than with private companies, the onboarding and training period is expensive so it's really not cost effective to be casually churning employees.) DOGE is discarding the "theory" and just mandating that all probationary (i.e, can be legally fired at will) employees be cut.
When you switch agencies. This is what's biting a lot of long-term government employees. You might have 15 years in civil service, but for whatever reason you switch from one agency to another. You are once again in a probationary period in your new agency. Usually this is a formality, but suddenly people who recently switched agencies are being cut just like new employees.
When you are elevated to the Senior Executive Service. This isn't a regular promotion in the GS levels; SESs are division chiefs or VP equivalents. They're senior decision makers, and again, they are put in a probationary period in their new position. Previously, a senior who failed probation for whatever reason (which is, unsurprisingly, rare) would just be returned to a GS15 position, but now DOGE is taking advantage of their "probationary" status to summarily fire them too.
I'm barely following this whole DOGE saga, but you make it sound like they're purely trying to maximize the number of people fired, with no consideration for merit or political allegiance. Is this the case?
That appears to be the case, yes. What they want to do is simply fire everyone from every agency they don't think should exist. The law doesn't actually allow them to do that, so instead they're firing all the employees they believe can be legally terminated without process.
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Sort of yes. They think with technology they can make enough efficiency gains that even if they fire the more competent people the efficiency gains will offset the productivity lost from the fired employees. So basically the thesis is we can cut government costs (eg payroll) without cutting government productivity.
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Great insight, thanks.
Latest update is Musk instructing people to respond to an email or be fired:
Does Musk have the authority to (I assume) instruct agency heads to fire people who don't respond to this email? And what's the timeline for responding?
Let's assume tens of thousands of people call his bluff and don't actually respond, and tens of thousands of others just miss the email. Are they really all going to be fired, and if not, does Musk then look impotent?
Musk has no authority except what the President gives him, and the President cannot simply say "Everything Elon Musk says is a lawful order."
The President also cannot sack federal employees with tenure like this. For probationary employees it's... debatable whether what they are doing right now will hold up in court. But the civil service reforms that ended the patronage system explicitly prohibit the executive branch from simply firing civil servants at will. Congress can withhold funding and the President can perhaps abolish certain programs, but federal agencies have to follow a prescribed RIF procedure. They can't just arbitrarily fire people without cause like this.
Elon Musk sending an email saying "If you don't reply, you're fired" is absurd to the extreme. And how will that even work? Who is going to be reading the hundreds of thousands of emails federal employees send in reply? Are they going to do this every week?
It is unworkable and makes no sense. There is no way this can withstand any legal scrutiny.
That said, it appears the administration is operating on the principle of "legal is what you can get away with." Many people here seem to like this, so I can only assume those who do are operating on the assumption that Trump and his successors will never lose power again.
It was sent out Saturday night and has a deadline on Monday night. There could be people who work Saturdays and have Mondays off who will not see it until too late.
I can get behind the idea of explaining what you do and how it serves a specific directive from Congress (everyone should be able to explain this much). I have to send my boss a similar missive every week. But the way Musk is doing this seems solely for the purpose of upsetting people without thinking it through.
Doing it for your boss who you know is one thing, the point here is that you're doing it for someone a million levels above you with no context or two-way communication whatsoever. I would find it absurd to reply at all, whether I was a high or low functioning employee, so I agree with you the manner Musk is doing this is likely intended just to annoy people.
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Of course the idea of having to explain what you did this week to your boss is not absurd. Elon Musk is not the boss of anyone in the government, though, and people who won't see the email are just the beginning of why this is a stupid idea. What about employees who are on leave? Out sick? Working jobs without email access? (Lots of government jobs involve being out in the field for extended periods.) Working on classified networks? One could charitably assume that Musk intended such obvious cases to be exceptions to the "Everyone must answer by Monday midnight" edict, but he indicated no such exceptions or even awareness that such might exist. Moreover, I can only assume he intends to use some kind of AI to process these emails since he can't possibly have enough employees in DOGE to read them. On Twitter he's shit-posting about how "All you have to do is use words that make sense about what you're doing- such a low bar!" Yeah bro, so how is your LLM going to individually judge each and every response and decide if it was adequate? If it flags it as "insufficient" does a human review it, or has he set up an automated system to send out termination letters? Which I would not put past him, and which is, also, illegal, because Musk has no legal authority to terminate civil servants.
It's so ridiculous, I am starting to wonder if he is just... unwell.
Did you catch any of the "Musk ranting at the astronauts calling out his lies"
TwitterX drama last week? How about the baby mama drama?He's got to be unwell. The best case scenario is that he's irresponsibly upped his ketamine dosage or gotten sucked into other drugs but not yet enough to suffer permanent damage, if only there's someone (his mom??) who could intervene and not be ignored. The worst case scenarios are that either his genes have betrayed him ("Quite an astute engineer, although he's gone a little crazy later in life. I don't think he has all his cookies in the jar." - Elon Musk discussing his father Errol in 2008, and hopefully not foreshadowing anything) or that politics and memes alone are able to do this much damage.
As an American and a person worried about climate change, space exploration, AI, social media, etc., I think the "Musk genes just broke him" hypothesis is the most worrying one. E.g. although I'm sure Gwynne Shotwell would handle SpaceX just fine if Musk retired tomorrow, I'm not sure what would happen if he just kept spiraling intellectually while not abdicating any control.
As a fond long-time user of The Motte, I think the "politics memes alone just broke him" hypothesis is the terrifying one, even if it might not be irrecoverable. I pride myself on being able to read at much wilder places than this, both to learn about how others think and to sift through the dross for an occasional real insight ... but do I need to retreat, soon, before just a little bit more aging renders my brain vulnerable to even mid-quality propaganda? I'd like to think I'm not one of the typical engineer-brains who thinks logically about one field but drops rationality elsewhere, but I have to admit that the most straightforward rationalist take on this topic is probably still "Politics Is The Mind-Killer", and now I'm wondering how much of that title is an exaggeration for a cute Dune reference vs a literal description of what I've been watching happen to many once-sane people.
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We are operating under the assumption that the executive controls the executive and the idea for example that the president cannot send emails to his subordinates or fire them is absurd. Government sector unions should be per se illegal.
You may feel that the idea that the executive cannot arbitrarily fire any civil servant he wants to is absurd, but that is actually the law right now. Likewise, government sector unions are legal. Change the law if you don't like it. Schoolhouse Rock told me that's what Congress is supposed to do, but apparently we don't care about that anymore, so uncharted waters ahoy. My point was that the wheel turns.
Let’s challenge that in the courts. The executive power cannot be vested in the president if he cannot fire people who attempt to block his exercise of the executive power.
There might be statutes but that doesn’t make them law. Maybe you need a refund from schoolhouse rock
So your argument is that the Civil Service Reform Act is unconstitutional, and Trump should simply ignore it and do an Andrew Johnson? I mean, that's a coherent argument, but I'll return to my question about whether you are okay with the next (Democratic) president doing the same thing?
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It has Elon’s fingerprints all over it. This is his style after all, like when he bought Twitter. Just come in like a wrecking ball, fire fast and loose, and deal with the fallout later. It’s an approach that works very successfully in business but government is a different beast so we will see how things shake out
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