Should we be concerned about the government shakeup?

I think that there are several parts to this question. The DOGE is starting by identifying mainly waste, fraud and abuse. An example is the treasury book keeping. There was a line for showing what budget item a payment was made for. Most of these were blank. Over $4T in money that was paid out with no actual reason being given. We don’t know what any of that money was for. That is a horrible way to run a business. Basically we were seeing that money was going out but had no way of knowing if it was budgeted or not. The other thing is identifying things that are just made up by bureaucrats. Most of what they seem to be doing is looking at where money was spent and asking the questions: “Who is this going to?”, “What is it doing?”, “What is the traceability of the money?”, and “Is this something that really needs to be done?” All of these, to me, are valid questions that really shouldn’t even have to be asked.

In the end, it is plain to everyone that our government wastes tons of money. It has been that way for decades and no one ever wanted to really look under the hood. We are doing that now and it is something that should be done periodically. I hope Congress sets a law to have audits like this done every 5 years or so.

The other part of the question seems to be whether the POTUS should be able to surround himself with people that are loyal to him. I think this is a no-brainer. The answer should be a resounding “Yes!”. We already saw what happens when that doesn’t occur. During President Trump’s first term in office, he did exactly what you were suggesting…leaving people in place, assuming they would follow along, that they were going to do their jobs. What we saw was people that were undermining him at every turn because they were either loyal to the opposition party or to the rampant bureaucracy. This has some perfect examples of that. Bureaucracies are not peopled with elected officials. They are peopled with individuals who let their own personal interests or biases decide how they will work with the elected officials and what they will or won’t do. So to suggest it is somehow wrong or nefarious for President Trump to surround himself with people he can trust is disingenuous…childish even. History killed that worry. And to say these people will forsake the Constitution is likewise disingenuous. There is zero proof of that. Most of those surrounding the POTUS have to be nominated by the POTUS and approved by the Senate. If the Senate cannot come up with any rational reason to keep that person out of office, then it isn’t for us to suddenly make claims they will violate the Constitution

Of course we should. It’s essentially an attempt to install Trump/Musk/plutocrats as kings, and eradicate all potential obstacles to doing so. It’s pretty clear and they’re not really even trying to hide it. It’s already done massive damage and it should be stopped as soon as possible.

@seawulf575 You stated The DOGE is starting by identifying mainly waste, fraud and abuse

They are not identifying anything. They are just blatantly cutting things, making mistakes, and not caring how they do it, who they affect including the security of the US and it’s citizens.
Even a 4th Grader can do what they are doing.

So far the DOGE has identified costs and has not looked at revenue from the departments that were cut or benefits. The departments paid their way or benefited people in need.

40% of contract cuts will not give any savings because the money has been spent. https://apnews.com/article/doge-federal-contracts-canceled-musk-trump-cuts-a65976a725412934ad686389889db0df

Congress is, by the Constitution, controls the country’s purse strings. (U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 9, clause 7). Not a foreigner with conflict of interests,

FAA just signed a contract with Starlink (run by Musk). Bet you Musk won’t cancel that contract.

No. It’s a positive thing so relax.

I’ve heard Trump say things that they supposedly found, but haven’t seen any proof of anything.

I’m very leery of having these people (Musk’s people) having access to everyone’s personal information. Who are these people? Their loyalty is to Musk, nobody else.

I have the feeling that they’re slashing and burning and going to be putting out fires as they occur, which is not the way to run things. Evaluate, assess, then cut, not cut and then see the shit hit the fan.

@Forever_Free You say even a 4th grader can do what they are doing. So why hasn’t anyone done it…ever? Or are you suggesting the government had no waste, fraud or abuse? That every dollar that was spent can easily be tracked? That it was done to support budget items?

I find it funny that so many jellies on Fluther squawk about “the rich paying their fair share!” yet they are defending not looking at the waste in the government.

I think looking at waste in government is great, but the Trump/Musk method is not the appropriate way.

Now there are conflicting messages from Tulsi Gabbard and others, telling their employees not to answer Musk’s request because it could mean classified information is leaked. You would think Musk might have thought of that but it appears that putting out fires is his way.

Jon Stewart says it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utl2uLh1wVI

The e-mail that was sent out said:

“Please respond to this e-mail with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.

Please do not send any classified information, links or attachments.”

This really shouldn’t be difficult to do, even if you work with classified or sensitive material.

Example: (1) I worked on an investigation. Please see my manager for details (2) I completed background investigation with another investigation. Please see my manager for details.

This would complete the assignment and wouldn’t give any specific details that could be construed as classified or sensitive. The manager could then review the information (they were supposed to be cc’d) and verify it to be true or not. No secrets released, yet the purpose of the exercise is met.

Cut and pasted from the NY TImes: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/upshot/doge-spending-cuts-changed.html

DOGE quietly deletes the 5 biggest spending cuts that it posted last week:

Last week, Elon Musk’s government cost-slashing initiative, dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, posted an online “wall of receipts,” celebrating how much it had saved by canceling federal contracts.

Now the organization, which is also known as the U.S. DOGE Service, has deleted all of the five biggest “savings” on that original list, after The New York Times and other media outlets pointed out they were riddled with errors.

The last of the original top five disappeared from the site in the early hours of Tuesday, even as the group claimed in its latest update that its savings to date had increased to $65 billion. The website offered no explanation for why it removed some items or how it arrived at the higher total. Neither the U.S. DOGE Service nor the White House responded to questions Tuesday morning.

The “wall of receipts” is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work. The scale of that ledger’s errors — and the misunderstandings and poor quality control that seemed to underlie them — has raised questions about the effort’s broader work, which has led to mass firings and cutbacks across the federal government.

These were the original five largest savings on its list:

An $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The actual contract in question was worth $8 million. The mistake seemed to stem from an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database. But contracting experts said that the service should have known better: ICE’s entire budget is about $8 billion, making it implausible that one contract could be so large. The U.S. DOGE Service adjusted the figure on the site after The Times wrote about it, and said in a post on Mr. Musk’s X platform that it had “always used the correct $8M in its calculations.”

Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was actually a single cut that was erroneously counted three times, as first reported by CBS News. That mistake also seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the way government contracts work; they sometimes have “ceiling values” far in excess of what will be spent. Experts said this cancellation was unlikely to produce anything close to $655 million in savings even once. Now, the site lists a much smaller savings for these three cancellations: $18 million in total.

A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. Here, Mr. Musk’s organization appeared to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as reported by The Intercept, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project to let users mark their gender as “X.” The DOGE site now shows that small cut instead.

Some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to make some of the same types of errors.

The largest savings on the latest version of its list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department. But The Times reported last week that this contract was canceled last fall, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president — and when DOGE did not yet exist.

@seawulf575 Every organization is responsible for reconciling their budget and their work at efficiencies. It has been performed in the past and made available.
They just don’t create the turmoil and pontificate they are doing something, when they actually are only creating havoc without delivering any statistics.

Nice dodge of the question. Where are the statistics of what they are actually saving. Every efficiency project is goaled by reporting what they actually did and saved. DOGE is actually dodging that part. Further proof that it is smoke, mirrors, and lies to the public.

@jca2 and @Forever_Free . . . so DOGE is a Fraud and a Con – - – SURPRISE SURPRISE SURPRISE ! !

^^ Rather dodgy and a facade.

We knew “doge” was a scam before they even started.

An unconstitutional mess.

someone needs to tabulate for how much musk has defrauded the government with his failing rocket.

@seawulf575 “So why hasn’t anyone done it…ever?”
– Because what they’ve been doing is highly illegal, destructive, chaotic, and would be stupid unless one was trying to cause chaos and destruction.

Is there government waste? Absolutely, but not in the way they think.The problem is a budget is agencies ask for a certain amount of money to run operations and usually its not for just one year. Its usually set ahead for future spending. So they have to guess how much they will need based on projections of future cost and what they need for projects. So what does this do. It forces them to ask for more than they may need because they don’t want to come under the actual funds. This is then divided in the years they projected for. So say they asked for 4 billion for the next 4 years. This will be divided in the next 4 years for 1 billion each. Say they used 750 million. So great. Thats 250 million left as savings. If they don’t use it, than that 250 millions is a loss to the agency. They can’t keep it and the following year they get 750 million instead of a billion. Can they keep the 250 to make that billion. No.

So next year. Cost was higher. It was now 900 million. So things fall behind because they have to wait till the end of the year to tap into more funds. So what they do is hold onto the saving and spend it on stupid stuff or stuff that is more expensive but not necessarily better, so the following year they get the allotted billion.
My point is the Congress sets up the system to punish saving.

Absolutely. No one in the U.S. should have absolute power and trump and musk think they have the right to fire thousands of people without cause. Musk on stage holding a chainsaw gleefully proclaiming how wonderful he is by firing people.
How would any of us react to getting an email that we no longer would be getting a paycheck? Unless you have a good sized savings account, and most people don’t, you would be horrified. Your first thoughts would be how do I feed my family, pay for insurance and medical needs, pay my rent or house payments?
I agree that waste needs to be addressed, but there MUST be a research process and not just firing whole groups or departments of people.
And oh, oops, didn’t mean to fire those people who were top nuclear experts. Got trigger happy there.

@Pandora – businesses run that way too: you predicted $1B but used $750M this year, so obviously you’ll use the same amount next year. That’s what they’ll give you for next year. If you then needed the $1B you originally predicted, you’d get in trouble for going over the $750M they just gave you. That incentivizes spending more than $750M so that you have some cushion in the next year’s allocation. At work if I had extra budget left in the year, I’d transfer some to another budget in our group that was running under. Then I’d get brownie points with my colleague and still not show a big under-run.

If you have access to The Atlantic, read this. It is the most apt and comprehensible explanation of the Trump phenomenon that I have seen anywhere. And extremely chilling.

I find a lot of what I read in The Atlantic to be illuminating.

Are we missing the point? Sure thr DDS/DOGE activities have shaken up the government.

But what most Americans (and the world, for that matter!) fail to see is the systematic replacement of chiefs of departments that involve the use of force, replacing constitutional loyalists with personal or ideological loyalists!

I’ve been watching that, @Strauss, with growing horror. I thought it was blatantly and terrifyingly obvious, with paralyzing implications for our citizenry.

It is now imaginable that we may see foreign troops on American soil. Beyond the imaginable should be the possibility that they may be invited by our president. But suddenly I can entertain the prospect, with a sick, cold pain in the pit of my stomach.

@Strauss In case you missed it the constitutional loyalists are what conspiracy theorists and MAGA cult members call the Deep State.

What is most concerning is the crazy intensity of rage and hate that trump, musk and their minions are assaulting the US government with.

They are treating American government workers like vermin and having a blast doing it. Concerning and downright disturbing.

@Jeruba Replacing the bureaucracy with partisan loyalists is a classic move in the history of totalitarianism. One goal of Project 2025 appears to be to wipe out all bureaucracy created by the Progressive Movement, which began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.

@mazingerz88 The “Deep State is definitely the bureaucracy that keeps government running in spite of partisan changes!

Do please read the article I cited.

An excerpt:

Patrimonlialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business. It can be found in many countries, but its main contemporary exponent—at least until January 20, 2025—has been Vladimir Putin. In the first portion of his rule, he ran the Russian state as a personal racket. State bureaucracies and private companies continued to operate, but the real governing principle was Stay on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s good side … or else.

—Jonathan Rausch, “One Word Describes Donald Trump.” The Atlantic, February 2025.

A program on German Television: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBzZHIZdrZU (enable captions for english subtitles)

@ragingloli you have to go to settings and change the language to English

So the amount that Musk has milked from the state so far is 38 billion (that we know of), with an additional 112 billion in the coming years.
https://www.rawstory.com/elon-musk-government-contracts/

Maybe “doge” should cut that particular waste and fraud.

@ragingloli, @Tropical_Willie, I can’t see how to enable English captions.

Here’s the video with English subtitles.

@Brian1946, I don’t see the subtitles.

I am picking out a few more words each time I listen, though. I think I’m up to about 5 iterations.

I see them, and I saw them with my other account.

They’re in white text against a black background, near the bottom center of the screen.

First phrases are, “Yes, the wind in changing. But where is this country heading? Less cosmopolitan, less diverse, less liberal?”

Click on:

the square labeled CC so that it’s underlined in red.

the white gear wheel to the right > Subtitles/CC > Auto-translate > English

There’s no CC square. There’s no white gear wheel. This is very frustrating. Thanks for trying to help.

Sorry, @Strauss, for sidetracking your thread.

@Jeruba I see, on the bottom of the video, once you click on it to play, a white rectangle with two “cc” in the rectangle. You don’t have that?

@Jeruba

You should see those features if you move your cursor onto the screen.

pure corruption:
While Elon Musk hacks away at the federal bureaucracy in the name of “efficiency,” his company Starlink appears poised to steal a multibillion-dollar government contract from Verizon. The Federal Aviation Administration is on the cusp of canceling a $2.4 billion contract to overhaul the communication system for the nation’s air traffic control system and handing it to the SpaceX subsidiary instead, The Washington Post reports, citing two unnamed sources briefed on the plans. The news was also confirmed by Bloomberg and The Associated Press.

@Brian1946, Thanks for taking the trouble. Oddly, the link takes me to a dfferent place now (i.e., the beginning), and it does have all those customary features. I am familiar with them. They just weren’t there, and the report was not starting at the beginning.

@Jeruba no worries! I ran into a paywall when I followed your link. But your excerpt was excellent! I got my first real job in Illinois in 1968 through the patronage system. I was told if I wanted a job with the state, it was highly recommended that I do some volunteer work for a political organization. I probably would have volunteered with the organization anyway, but there was definitely a quid-pro-quo!