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gumby 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe they didn’t save any money but they did manage to exfiltrate huge amounts of info on citizens and residents that had been provided under the understanding that it would be held in confidence and that was siloed to event cross-correlation and privacy violations.
So at least they accomplished that even if they failed to accomplish the cover story.
Although it seems to have been a flop in practice, I do appreciate the spirit of making good use of tax dollars. I only wish the program was more carefully guided, since the motive behind it did seem genuine.
If GAO was half serious, it'd have set an expiry date on itself. We know exactly what happens with these things, they eventually just make problems to try to assert a reason for their own existence, and never materially move towards fixing them.
eqvinox 39 minutes ago [-]
That's one of Congress' responsibilities: the GAO is in the legislative branch, it's Congress' job to exercise oversight. (And it's all US citizens' job to elect people who they trust to exercise that oversight. If the GAO isn't closed down when it should be, that's a failure of Congress, no more, no less, and nothing else. But they seem to be doing their job just fine, unless you have some indications otherwise?)
(I don't think the GAO could set an expiry date on itself even if they wanted to, they exist by power of Congress, so only Congress could put an expiry date on them.)
barney54 1 hours ago [-]
Sure there were some people involved in DOGE that had good motives, but overall they assumed that history began yesterday and that they were the only people that had thought about reducing the size of government. This was a recipe for disaster.
rexpop 27 minutes ago [-]
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nxrabl 3 hours ago [-]
What’s notable about this article is not its literal conclusion, which is obvious to any casual observer, it’s the publisher - I haven’t been following it lately, but for decades National Review was the preeminent Limbaugh-school right-wing magazine in America, so for its editors to be taking this position so clearly feels significant. These days the Trump Right has rags like The Epoch Times, so maybe they don’t need Buckley’s soapbox anymore?
litoE 3 hours ago [-]
National Review has been a critic of Trump since before he was elected for his first term in 2016.
goatlover 5 hours ago [-]
But closing USAID did result in lots of deaths around the world as life saving aid was just cutoff with no warning. Was done with no regard to consequences or Congressional approval.
hallole 2 hours ago [-]
So, the U.S. would've had to supply foreign aid for eternity, then? Instead of appreciating the vast sums given by the U.S. and her taxpayers, there's only vitriol for the stream of aid money having been cut off.
alexgieg 5 minutes ago [-]
If the US wants to be the most powerful country in the world, so that if benefits the most from a non-stop flux of wealth moving in from outside, that involves a cost, tiny as it might be.
The US decided that paying that cost of $0.10 in exchange for earning $10 was too much. So now it's saving those $0.10, and watching the $10 stop comming in.
This is an error all Empires commit a few years before falling from imperial status. As the British, themselves self-inflicted victims of the same mistake, say, penny wise, pound foolish.
zzrrt 2 hours ago [-]
There's the soft power argument that it was actually in US's self-interest to help. And for what it's worth, a lot of the vitriol is from taxpayers who supported that aid.
dzhiurgis 2 hours ago [-]
Cool. But sometimes it's ok to invest into some hard power.
zzrrt 1 hours ago [-]
Well we worked real hard on not changing a regime, not disarming a nuclear power, and not protecting a trade route. How's the investment working out? Maybe if we bomb some more schools they'll be too scared to mess with us.
glaslong 58 minutes ago [-]
See and here I thought we were already spending more on our military than the 2nd - 7th highest spending countries combined
jerlam 51 minutes ago [-]
It doesn't really matter how much you spend if the leadership is incompetent.
glaslong 42 minutes ago [-]
Seems like deposing our leadership would be the best investment strategy into hard power then. Maybe DOGE could get on that.
dzhiurgis 39 minutes ago [-]
It's the cost of being world police.
glaslong 36 minutes ago [-]
And that cost was not enough? We needed more investment into hard power head cracking policing, and reduced soft power community policing?
jbs789 1 hours ago [-]
America’s reputation in the world is not great, and deteriorating. Pulling back for these well-perceived/helpful initiatives while building up (and deploying) military force is not helping. It’s really not a well considered strategy, and the decision makers in Washington could really benefit from a more worldly perspective, imo.
friendlyasparag 2 hours ago [-]
What a sad response to the obvious immediate harm done by poorly thought out policy. I thought hackernews was better than this.
arjie 2 hours ago [-]
The steelman argument is that it was the sudden process that people object to. But the steelman against that is that slow processes are used adversarially to prevent action from being taken.
In the end, the only people who seem to get outcomes are the ones who rush things. Everyone talked about getting out of Afghanistan and only President Biden did it. The objections were predictably ones against haste. But we’d been in there for a decade past the time we wanted to get out.
In this event, considering that most of this aid has not been replaced since by other participants one can only conclude that it would have taken at least this long in a slow rollout. Even an emergency of unbelievable proportions did not incentivize other nations to act. It’s unlikely they would have acted when faced with what looks like yet another austerity project that is going to be inevitably rolled back.
In such a universe, if USAID was going, it was only going to go fast. If it wasn’t going to go fast, it was staying.
And it’s generally true that people subscribe to the famous Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Once we started providing AIDS treatment we were responsible, in their eyes, forever.
Given that, I think future charitable efforts should be evaluated in terms of such 50 year costs or so on. To save all the lives that US funding on PEPFAR saved we had to forgo an amount that would domestically have given us CA HSR. I think if you ask most Californians they’d rather have CA HSR than any charity program directed outside so in some respect we are just treating these people as our sin eaters.
litoE 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not rich, but I give a lot of money every year to charity, to try to help those who need help. The United States is the richest country in the world. It was also giving to charity to help those who badly needed help. It was a small amount compared to its budget, and we called it USAID. To protect the money from being scammed by those running the countries we were helping, the US itself administered those programs as much as possible. We know how much Trump donates to charity: bupkis (read about the Donald J. Trump Foundation) and I have a pretty good inkling that Musk donates even less.
snehk 1 hours ago [-]
You're spending your own money. I'm pretty sure that if there was one member of your family that didn't have money for food or medicine, you'd spend it there instead of donating it, wouldn't you?
ShinyLeftPad 41 minutes ago [-]
People against usaid should ask basic questions:
would US (and therefore its individual taxpayers) be globally wealthy without the rest of the world?
does US benefit from disease and death in other countries?
dc396 2 hours ago [-]
This is a troll, right?
pstuart 2 hours ago [-]
It was never about saving money. It was about sabotaging programs they were ideologically opposed to, stealing data, and possibly messing with internal investigations into Musks "unsavory" business practices.
There already is a "DOGE", it's called the GAO.
And lastly, if anybody is actually concerned about government efficiency, they should be prepared to have it audit favored programs as well. Let's not forget that the Pentagon has never truly been audited.
It's weird that serial liars have such a rabid fanbase. Keep it up!
maxlin 1 hours ago [-]
By GAO, lol. The only reason they'd do the reports is because DOGE isn't there to respond. Because it was in DOGE's design to not become just an instrument of furthering the problem it was designed to combat, unlike GAO!
The spirit of DOGE lives on though. The basics of just having to at least have a reason what an expense is for did wonders, and DOGE did save a ton, even if it'd benefited from more freedom. Another time.
So at least they accomplished that even if they failed to accomplish the cover story.
(I don't think the GAO could set an expiry date on itself even if they wanted to, they exist by power of Congress, so only Congress could put an expiry date on them.)
The US decided that paying that cost of $0.10 in exchange for earning $10 was too much. So now it's saving those $0.10, and watching the $10 stop comming in.
This is an error all Empires commit a few years before falling from imperial status. As the British, themselves self-inflicted victims of the same mistake, say, penny wise, pound foolish.
In the end, the only people who seem to get outcomes are the ones who rush things. Everyone talked about getting out of Afghanistan and only President Biden did it. The objections were predictably ones against haste. But we’d been in there for a decade past the time we wanted to get out.
In this event, considering that most of this aid has not been replaced since by other participants one can only conclude that it would have taken at least this long in a slow rollout. Even an emergency of unbelievable proportions did not incentivize other nations to act. It’s unlikely they would have acted when faced with what looks like yet another austerity project that is going to be inevitably rolled back.
In such a universe, if USAID was going, it was only going to go fast. If it wasn’t going to go fast, it was staying.
And it’s generally true that people subscribe to the famous Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Once we started providing AIDS treatment we were responsible, in their eyes, forever.
Given that, I think future charitable efforts should be evaluated in terms of such 50 year costs or so on. To save all the lives that US funding on PEPFAR saved we had to forgo an amount that would domestically have given us CA HSR. I think if you ask most Californians they’d rather have CA HSR than any charity program directed outside so in some respect we are just treating these people as our sin eaters.
would US (and therefore its individual taxpayers) be globally wealthy without the rest of the world?
does US benefit from disease and death in other countries?
There already is a "DOGE", it's called the GAO.
And lastly, if anybody is actually concerned about government efficiency, they should be prepared to have it audit favored programs as well. Let's not forget that the Pentagon has never truly been audited.
One of countless cases of "trust me bro!": https://www.cnbc.com/2011/10/26/The-$40-Billion-Iraqi-Money-...
The spirit of DOGE lives on though. The basics of just having to at least have a reason what an expense is for did wonders, and DOGE did save a ton, even if it'd benefited from more freedom. Another time.