alt Hacker NewsThe complete lack of wanting to rein in federal spending by some people is mind boggling to me. The number of employees in some departments of the government almost doubled in 5 years, with nothing to show except a huge budget.
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A man cuts back on his budget for vegetables and other healthy groceries to save money while also 10xing his spend on alcohol which he likes ice cold, surpassing the food budget by far.
Most people: “hey dude that’s a huge mistake for xy and z reasons”
There’s always one: “most Americans spend too much and save too little, we should applaud this guy!”
—- Edit - to head off any nit picking, 10x is illustrative not exact - It’s 3x up to $28B for ice while the usaid spend was either $22B for pure usaid spend, or $35B with co-managed other state dept stuff as of 2024. So depending on accounting, ice either far surpassed it or at least countered all cuts since the spend wasn’t fully eliminated . (And that’s not even touching on the moral turpitude of simply letting hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medicine rot as a consequence of the cuts as warned by the relevant inspector general before I’m assuming they were fired)
One thing that could really help your position would be to speak specifically about one that doubled and why you believe it was wasteful besides HC/Budget. Were they not delivering value proportional (or better) to their growth?
> The number of employees in some departments of the government almost doubled in 5 years
Which ones? By how many employees? If a department went from 2 to 4 people that isn't prima facie outrageous.
I can't believe anyone still believes DOGE was actually about cutting federal spending. The current party in power has spent the past year massively increasing the federal deficit and future debt. If they are serious about anything it certainly isn't balancing the federal budget.
You've set up a strawman, or are arguing against a position that's not relevant here. One can absolutely believe that spending should be made more efficient AND DOGE was a destructive and harmful disruption to essential spending.
Do you know how much money this administration is spending on ICE and the military?
Trump fired a bunch of people in his first term that’s why the numbers went back up under Biden. There seems to be a huge 4 year gap in peoples memories as well as no concept of what an acceptable number of government employees actually is. Just a whole bunch of “that’s a big number!”
The same thing happened with NY Times headline about spending $6B over 3 years on immigration services. Too much money! Now here we are $40B deep in one year for Dhs et al. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. Trump’s spending on Dhs alone is expected to hit $480B by the end of his term. How’s that for reigning in spending?
We could have had healthcare, instead people chose hate, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
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The vast majority of federal spending is tied to programs like social security, Medicare, and the DoD which DOGE didn’t cut.
DOGE actions appear to have been largely based on the chaotic whims of Elon in response to perceived slights and tweets sent to him and did not have any significant effect on the budget. They chased after ghosts previously investigated by IGs and found insignificant, such as dead people on the social security rolls.
Real budget reform proposals remain out there from CRFB and others, and perhaps some future administration will undertake them when social security becomes insolvent in a few years.