Right, but theres a difference between "economically inefficient because every dollar spent here translates to less than a dollar of direct returns" and "economically inefficient because every dollar spent on this requires spending five dollars more on administering it".
It's absolutely possible for a government to value investing in health care or education or foreign aid in a way that a corporation could never monetize, but still value doing it in a more effective way.
exactly the opposite actually, lets look at medicare, Medicare Part A. and Part B. are administered by the government and of their funding about 98.6% is spent on care with the 1.4% going to administration. Medicare part D is privately administered and replaces part A and B, but 15% is spent on administration and often covers less.
More Perfect Union has good video covering it on youtube
And yet an off the shelf drug purchased by medicaid is often hundreds of times more expensive than when retail buys it. Something is happening and people taking their cut aren’t dumb enough to have it appear as top end administrative cost.
that would be medicaid not medicare which are two different programs and is because they aren't allowed bargain on medication pricing expect on a few select medications
Sure we all know _why_. The question is whether, by the time the money gets to where it needs to go, it was an efficient use of $$. If the government (of all things holy in our society) can’t stop itself from getting royally ripped off when purchasing medication, then what warm blooded taxpayer wouldn’t want the problem fixed. Once you fix the problem the spend goes down literal orders of magnitude. Same with corruption. If the way you fund X is by dumping money into an NGO owned by the government official who authorized program X, and 90% ends up in their kids bank account, that’s got to stop.
Anyway, the topic of this tread, DOGE, is reading the books and asking questions and then recommending areas where fraud/waste/abuse can be cut. They are not directly cutting entire gov’t programs for fun and profit. This whole sub-tread feels like it’s on a different set of tracks headed a loosely similar direction. DOGE isn't cutting medicare.
I think we’re arguing semantics at this point. The leaders of the agencies where actions are taking place are cooperating (or not) with DOGE’s recommendations and executing at their discretion (which may be to accept the full recommendation and apply it immediately). If DOGE is over socializing their “wins” then sure we can agree they could tone it back.
Seems odd to participate in a comment chain, taking it further away from the post topic, and then when you realize you are wrong you say that it is not relevant.
>DOGE isn't cutting medicare.
Let’s follow up in two months to see where this statement stands.
> They are not directly cutting entire gov’t programs for fun and profit.
I mean, that's exactly what they're doing, isn't it? First thing they did was boast about shutting down entire departments at the weekend. Then they started mass layoffs of anyone on probation, with grudging acknowledgement they might have been a bit hasty in firing nuclear safety operatives without asking the question of whether they'd been promoted or recently hired because they were useful. And the subject of this entire thread is them publicly demonstrating lack of basic understanding of the books
You are correct about DOGE being advisory, but also mistaken that anybody other than the president is elected in the executive branch. The president is the only elected official in the entire executive branch and the only elected official elected by the entire country. All the whining about “unelected Elon” is hateful hogwash and betrays a fundamental lack of understanding about how our government works. I was honestly super confused but I guess unsurprised at this point when Warren introduced that rage bait.
They can’t do anything about it now that the Republican Party has sold the country out to deranged white nationalist fascists and an unelected billionaire.
>And yet an off the shelf drug purchased by medicaid is often hundreds of times more expensive than when retail buys it. Something is happening and people taking their cut aren’t dumb enough to have it appear as top end administrative cost.
What "is happening" is that Republicans in the mid-2000s ensured that Medicare and Medicaid would be unable to negotiate drug prices by baking that into the law. Insurance companies can negotiate drug prices.
5:1 sounds absurd but I bet most municipal projects that are largely grant funded are probably somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1.
I cringe when I hear about my town getting $20k-200k grants for stuff that would have cost perhaps half as much were my town simply catering to its own needs rather than trying to optimize for getting the feds to pick up the tab. My town's library, several school programs and several intersection renovations fall into this category. The library in particular is pretty stupid for reasons outside the scope of this comment.
I’m sure you can find some evidence of that. You also need to find evidence that every department that is getting slashed has those kind of inefficiencies. The government is large and complex. Even inside large companies, which are comparatively smaller you’ll find different departments have different level of inefficiencies.
Which is why a discussion on this topic at such a high level isn't really productive. You need to look at each line item and ask whether it’s fraud/waste/abuse and then make a call. That is exactly what DOGE is doing. If you don’t trust them then you’ll never get to a discussion on meaningful details.
Its not. they are just firing everyone they can. if they were being careful and looking at every line item they would not have accidentally fired the engineers that maintain our nuclear weapon initiating a mad scramble to rehire them. you cant have small team doing that level of audit in the time frames they have been in operation.
They wouldn't have fired them in the first place if they had been doing a line by line audit.
This is the equivalent of flipping every breaker in the box turn off one light in an apartment building. Sure the light turned off but you also turned off everyone's refrigerators, and the oxygen machine the old lady in apartment 3b needs to live. But you turned it back on the breakers of anyone who came down and complained... unfortunately the old lady died but she didn't make it down to complain. the question is who are Doge going to kill with their actions that wont get their complaints heard?
Nothing concerns me less than a quickly remedied mistake.
PS: at many time’s I’ve been successful using the “flip every breaker” strategy. A well designed oxygen machine has a battery and a fridge can tolerate a brief power outage.
> A well designed oxygen machine has a battery and a fridge can tolerate a brief power outage.
Sure, but you would at least do the due diligence to confirm that the case for Mrs Shelby before you YOLO it and wish for the best with her life on the line.
Many of the mistakes they are making are not being remedied, nor will the consequences be obvious in the short term.
There really isn't any upside for anyone in this whole thing except for Trump, Elon and their buddies. And they are breaking the law.
The farce of this whole thing is that none of the destructive cuts they've made will amount to a hill of beans compared to federal spending. They're jumping over hundred dollar bills to chase pennies.
(That's b/c none of this is actually about making government more efficient)
That’s 340,000,000 individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and geographies.
They wake up every morning and go about their lives. Things like planes need to stay in the air, water needs to be clean, trains need to not derail in the middle of towns, dams need to stay not only structurally sounds but in some cases keep producing electricity.
The USA is the fourth largest country by area in the entire world.
To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say.
> To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say.
I can stipulate there must be essential complexity. I think we have to dispute any suggestion that this hypothetically-essential complexity has grown at the same rate as the spending[1].
It's not obvious that fairness, charity, national defense, public health, postage stamps, corn ethanol... [or air traffic control (cough), clean water (cough), non-derailing trains (cough), levees (cough)]..., ad infinitum should require a static percentage of the economy. Essential or not, those costs fundamentally cannot continue to outpace real GDP growth.
Rather, it seems obvious to me that the political class has scope-creeped "governance" into spending as an end in itself.
Practically, and morally, the government is too big and complex, and it should be drastically smaller and simpler.
In any large orgs the more people involved the more deadlocks you have and it can become a policy quagmire. Both meta and twitter achieved more velocity once cuts are in place.
Twitter has turned an incredible profit and launched an AI assistant since almost the entire user base claimed that Elon was going to run the company into the ground.
"Fidelity has again marked down the value of its shares in X Holdings, which the mutual fund giant helped Elon Musk buy for $44 billion when the company was known as Twitter.
By the numbers: Fidelity believes that X is worth 71.5% less than at the time of purchase, according to a new disclosure that runs through the end of November 2023 (Fidelity revalues private shares on a one-month lag).
* This includes a 10.7% cut during November, during which time Musk told boycotting X advertisers to "go f*k yourself" during an on-stage interview with the New York Times.
* In terms of publicly traded comps, Meta stock rose 4.9% in November while Snap shares climbed 38.2%."
I personally think X is worth at least 10x that evaluation as it is now state-sponsored disinformation network which is worth much more than $44bn. it is best investment Elon has ever made
Do you have a source for the assertion that Twitter has "incredible profits?" As a private company I think their financials aren't as widely published any more, but I honestly haven't seen any information on which way their financials are going.
Fidelity saying (in 2023) that X isn't worth what Elon paid for it does not mean it’s not making money and building product (in 2025). Allegedly it’s worth 44B again (:
> "economically inefficient because every dollar spent on this requires spending five dollars more on administering it".
could you say a few words on how you think dodge making it harder for anything to happen without going through them is going to make it cost less to spend on the useful things?
It's important to recognize that a large part of the inefficiencies are due to the private sector and having to work around that.
A single payer healthcare system is, by every measure, more efficient than private healthcare. There's 1 system. You don't need hundreds of billing analysts. You don't need administrators on top of administrators. You don't need constant tug of war.
Part of the reason Medicaid is so inefficient is because there's other things that are not Medicaid.
It's absolutely possible for a government to value investing in health care or education or foreign aid in a way that a corporation could never monetize, but still value doing it in a more effective way.