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Yes, DOGE efforts are highly irregular, and massively disruptive to government agencies. That’s kinda the point. Your analysis of the email thing is somewhat superfluous, because we already knew that the DOGE exists precisely to get the government out of the ruts it’s been stuck following. And, of course, nobody is surprised that many employees don’t like it.
Sounds like an attempt at percussive maintenance. I thought the whole point of DOGE was to get a team of smart outsiders led by a certified genius to fix government inefficiency - this is the opposite.
How do you know that this is opposite? How do you know that it is not the best, or even not a good way to tackle this problem? This sort of argument would be more convincing if there was an alternative way of going about doing this that was clearly better. Do you know any? I don’t. On the other hand, I know that Elon Musk has a track record of using very similar procedures across his companies, and in these cases, they apparently have been very successful.
I think that we will find out quite soon whether this was a good plan or not.
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What do you think a 'certified genius' leading a team of 'smart outsiders' fixing government efficiency should look like?
I'm not sure, but I don't think it would all that distinguishable from what we are observing.
The guy already tested this approach in his Twitter takeover, it obviously worked (i.e. made Twitter VASTLY more efficient) there despite him having to adjust course a few times.
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There's a great Patio11 Twitter thread about the repeated failures of government payroll modernization inititives.
You can't "play by the rules" and get anything done. Every inefficiency is someone's personal cutout. The agency will not simply allow DOGE to cut waste. DOGE has to force the agency to do it.
The best way to do that would be to devise the appropriate plan and then get the head of the agency, the one selected by Trump, to supervise and execute it.
DOGE has to force the agency to do it and the worst conceivable way to force it would be by not having the direct leadership of the agency on board.
I feel that 'appropriate plan' is hiding a gargantuan amount of assumptions where you ask the civil service to reduce headcount and they return to you and say that they need to hire more. It's a Yes, Minister bit, but it would be exactly what would happen. If the civil service had the ability to de-bloat itself we wouldn't have a ketamine-fueled billionaire taking a chainsaw to the institutions. There is no 'best way' to do it: you're going to be Washington Monument'd for a papercut, you might as well go for the head.
I mean, there is this institution called Congress that can set funding and headcount and whatnot. In this respect, the Presidency is much unlike a modern CEO who has both supervisory and fiscal authority.
When the dust settles, if this all fails, the blame will be placed on the blob rather than on the ham-fisted execution. So it goes.
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I'm not sure they are necessarily at odds. Musk seems pretty famous for prioritizing speed over getting things right the first time and yet this doesn't stop him from not only getting things right but getting them right faster than others. For instance, IIRC he spent millions on complex machinery for Starship before deciding that it should be made out of stainless steel and had to basically eat the loss; Starship is still poised to be the heaviest-lift reusable rocket ever built at a time when other reusable rockets are still struggling to compete with Starship's smaller predecessors.
Anyway, I don't take for granted that Musk is necessarily making the best decisions or the right ones in his newest venture, but I also don't think that "smart outsiders led by a certified genius" and "percussive maintenance" are at odds inherently.
OK, I've been a bit negative about this elsewhere in the thread, but this is understandable.
Still, if DOGE are prioritizing speed over getting things right, then it has to be open to feedback in order to get on the right track, even if it means eating the L. Much of the criticism here can be reframed that way -- hey they are quickly iterating and look, here's a strategy that didn't work.
Open to feedback from who though?
Should he take feedback from Democrats who want the project to fail? Federal employees losing their do-nothing job? Random internet commenters who've never run a lemonade stand? Presumably, Elon is taking feedback from people who he trusts.
I'm kind of in the awkward position of thinking "Gee, this looks bad", but then realizing that there's a reason where Elon is where he is and I'm not. I wouldn't bet against him.
Oh sure. But part of that is "Elon is willing to do the wrong thing in order to more quickly iterate to find the right thing".
That is not at all contradictory to the thought of "gee this looks wrong".
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Yes, 100%. And it sounds like Elon is probably getting said feedback by the way agency directors are handling it.
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I'm a huge fan of this Musk philosophy in his engineering ventures. Testing often-too-flawed engineering ideas as fast as you can is much cheaper and much faster than trying to come up with something flawless on the first try, and seemingly-ironically it tends to give you a less flawed final product too. I'm not sure how well that works with people rather than objects The fourth Falcon 1 wasn't working while scared that mistakes had been made that blew up the first three. The Falcon 9 landing engines weren't going to change careers because SpaceX tried out parachutes first. The machine-welded stainless steel Starship tanks aren't going to quit and find a job where composite tanks and hand-welded steel tanks don't get abused and wrecked.
I'm not sure how well the philosophy works with people. Federal government work in many cases is seen as a tradeoff: lower compensation than equivalent skills would get you in the private sector, but with better job security to make up for it. If he significantly cuts headcount without cutting output (or if Congress follows up with more deliberate cuts) then maybe making that deal worse is still fine? We'll have fewer interested applicants, but we'll also have fewer jobs we need to fill, so we won't have to raise pay to compensate for the drop in supply? But this isn't like an engineering experiment where the experimenter is the only one who learns something and failure is just one of the things we can learn; here the experimentees are learning too and failure can have more lasting consequences.
The DC suburbs are the richest in the country. What part of that indicates lower compensation?
It seems more like, instead of lower compensation, it's simply lower standards, and the job security incentivizes the layabouts, the malingerers, and the otherwise unsuitable who could not command anywhere near the same remuneration anywhere else.
The DC suburbs are indeed very rich relative to a lot of the country, but it's not the federal employees who are holding up that average. The most a typical federal employee can make in DC is $191,900 as a GS15 Step 7-10 (note that $191,900 is a hard cap government wide and DC has one of the highest locality pay adjustments of any city in the country). That's a great salary by most standards, but bear in mind that GS15 positions are rare (most feds will retire never having reached a GS15 position) and you may gain one step a year after earning the position (OPM claims it takes on average 18 years to reach Step 10).
On top of that, as you say the DC suburbs are some of the richest in the country, and it's consequently incredibly expensive to live here. So while that $191,900 looks good, it's just getting into the range where you could comfortably buy a non-"fixer upper" house inside the Beltway without needing a contribution from your spouse's salary.
There are numerous industries in DC where you could make more with less experience like tech, law, defense contracting, lobbying, general federal contracting etc. Consider that those last three are all industries whose existence is predicated on their ability to suckle from the federal teat. If there's any villain in the story of modern government inefficiency I'd suggest we look at the contractors before we start vilifying the feds.
Federal pay scale for DC: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2024/DCB.pdf
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Yes, yes, yes! People aren't engineering, although sometimes similar principles may apply.
It's interesting, low government pay is a complaint I've heard articulated before, and I think there might actually be something to substantially slashing personnel roles while increasing personnel pay.
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