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0 pointsspankalee1y ago0 comments

> actually address and fix systematic problems with the US government

I wonder if you could even name what some of these critical problems are? Or have you just been told that there are problems that justify this chaos?

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InTheArena1y ago

I'm happy to, thought the end of your statement strongly suggestions that you have are not acting in honest faith by asking this question. 1) All positions have become partisan, which political ideology being as critical to promotion in high level positions. 2) Congress refuses to act as the constitution intends, and have delegated their budget making authority to the executive branch. 3) The government specific procurement system is almost as expensive as what is being procured. 4) Auditing the government is almost impossible. 5) The debt load on the government is becoming unsustainable. 6) The lack of "digital transformation" (what we called it in banking) means poor service. 7) The unfunded liabilities (mostly at a state level) will swamp budgets in a few years. 8) Most large contracts should be fixed contracts, not cost plus contracts. Companies can do bilk the government for things that are a order of magnitude cheaper to the outside world. 9) Medicare refuses to lower health care costs (by reducing rates) due to political pressure. 10) No rationalization of government spending or revenue has occured since the post world war 2 era.

mrtesthah1y ago

1. Making all positions partisan is a fascist tactic to challenge objective truth.

2. Congress as a whole isn’t a single entity —- one party refuses to compromise in any way while the other plays by the rules.

3. Doesn’t matter. Cost reform needs to go through existing legal routes.

4. What constitutes “auditing” the government? Because we had plenty of non partisan positions overseeing and auditing all parts of the government. DOGE fired those people.

5. Again, go through the legal route.

6. A lack of “digital transformation” is the vaguest most unconvincing point in this entire justification.

7. These budget issues need to be decided on through constitutional processes and with oversight, as before.

8. Ditto.

9. Medicare can lower health costs by other means, such as being available universally to all and setting limits on what they pay to providers based on procedure.

10. Do you watch CSPAN?

dralley1y ago

All of your points can be summed up as "Congress refuses to do their job".

Breaking all the laws to bypass the government does not "actually address and fix systematic problems with the US government", that is an absurd position. Caesar did not fix the Roman Republic.

And opposition to DOGE is not on the basis that people don't care about government efficiency. It's on the basis that the shit they're doing has nothing to do with government efficiency. There's not even a pretense of trying to calculate the "benefit" part of the cost-benefit equation with the cuts they are doing, they are just slashing and burning without any concern for outcomes as a power play and messaging tool. Elon is famous for doing this at Tesla and Twitter and all evidence points to it being incredibly harmful.

This isn't efficient! https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/02/15/return-to...

And not everything is about efficiency. Laying off veteran's crisis hotline workers or refusing to pay for the USAID employees you've just abandoned to be extracted (or in one case, medevac'd after a medical emergency) from the places they were sent to is just cruel (and again, illegal).

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