Kinda amusing that the general sentiment so far, in a forum filled with technology expertise, is that there is certainly waste in these budgets. But, when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
The internet comment section “pick a side and deride the other” doesn’t work on these situations.
Two things can be bad at once. The IT consulting can be too expensive. Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences.
Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences. They know they can convince enough people that their bold move was a good thing and that the consequences will diffuse throughout the years on to other people.
This very well could become more expensive to cancel abruptly when you consider the second and third order effects.
> This very well could become more expensive to cancel abruptly when you consider the second and third order effects.
That's the goal. The whole conservative ideology for the past 40 years has been to make the government inefficient so it can complain about government inefficiencies.
What we are seeing is the end game of this idea - turn the government itself into an gigantic inefficient corporation designed to siphon as much money as possible from people.
In this specific situation, these expensive contractors will be replace with even more expensive "AI contractors" that work for companies founded by the Global Elite Tech Bros. So more money spent on on less outcomes. Destroying the system first ensures that there's no direct performance comparisons that can be made between the old expensive, but functional system and the new even more expensive, disfunctional one they created.
> The whole conservative ideology for the past 40 years has been to make the government inefficient so it can complain about government inefficiencies.
People say things like this, but then have trouble explaining California, where the left has had a supermajority for almost as long.
Yea. California’s government delivers a lot of services that protect ecosystems, a healthy economy and quality of life. All three of those examples are mutually beneficial.
You can disagree with some services but that’s because the state does so much, for example I think there is too much wasted on the carceral and military side.
Then why is everyone fleeing to escape the high taxes and crime? California is losing house seats at the present.
Also, I don't know if you can really credit the left's supermajority for the success of SV... CA's politics have pivoted over the years. Look at an election map of CA in 1980 and you'll see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidentia...
Breaking critical systems like SNAP, Medicare/Medicaid, weather forecasting and many many many other systems that people literally depend on for their being alive *kills* people.
Programmers that work on critical systems are actively trained to take into consideration every contingency to not increase the death rate of their systems, to the best of their abilities.
Aggressive, comprehensive and non-robust axing of systems when literal lives are on the line - especially when it's government systems and those lines maintain any semblance of some people's ability to literally be alive - touch and impact more lives than any single Boeing plane or NASA space shuttle's crash. They are even more critical than those systems - though not as flashy when they fail.
What are you on about? The systems I'm referring to are human systems with lots of humans doing human things. Cutting funding, removing departments, those are removing the humans doing human things to solve human problems.
Underfunding and breaking of, for example, unemployment benefits systems causes real harm, real loss of medication, real loss of house, etc.
But that won't make the news in any meaningful way, and the destitute will often be too busy to make loud noises. And the populous at large will sigh and shake their head and say "what a shame", but the loss can be *enormous*.
> I thought we were talking about firing IT consultants? Let
I read this whole thread as being about the broader 'cutting' trend,
OOP: when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
Parent: Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences.
I have experience in technology and biomedical research.
IT consultants, particularly from the large firms, are very overpriced for the value they provide. Blindly cutting NIH grants (even some of the ones that sound silly on paper) and funding for research institutions is doing great harm to progress in modern medicine.
And they got caught by the system already... You can't just snap your fingers, destroy the entire apparatus of academia and get it back again on a whim. It'd be a century or more to rebuild fully if you really did try to start over again.
The impulse to cheat is even exacerbated by thinner funding not fixed by it because you're pressed extremely hard to get results to justify the next grant, and your tenure board in 5 years, and there's basically no grant money for replication and no prestige at all.
What do you mean 'they were caught by the system already'?
Claudine Gay is still employed by Harvard. According to her Wikipedia page, she is the "Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University".
And she wasn't exposed by folks in academia, but by people outside that system.
Tessier-Lavigne only resigned from Stanford’s presidency and remained on the faculty. His case was far worse in my opinion. His research consumed millions of dollars and resulted in the misdirection of further millions downstream. Everyone knew Gay’s work was useless BS, it just also turned out to contain plagiarism.
A second topic which the Scientific Panel examined was Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s management and oversight of his scientific laboratories. Because multiple members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs over the years appear to have manipulated research data and/or fallen short of accepted scientific practices, resulting in at least five publications in prominent journals now requiring retraction or correction, the culture of the labs in which this conduct occurred was considered. The Scientific Panel has concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne created a laboratory culture with many positive attributes, but the unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices from different people, at different times, and in labs at different institutions, suggests that there may have been opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and management.
Haven't you seen the documentary Inside Job covering the 2008 financial crisis? "Burning it all down and starting over" is a very immature and myopic perspective and cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution. The solution is to implement regulation that, very broadly here, enacts mechanisms to make private gain for public loss something incredibly difficult to do.
There need to be checks against people in positions of great wealth, power, and influence because people cannot be trusted to self-regulate and Do the Right Thing when large sums of money are on the table. "Self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest."
> cannot be taken seriously as a workable solution
... in your opinion. More regulation will just lead to more and more ineffectual bureaucracy. "More regulation" as an answer is why nothing gets built in California. "More regulation" is why the Vogtle Unit 4 in Georgia took 20 years to permit and complete, whereas the same can be done in under 5 years in China. "More regulation" is why it takes 10 years and $3 billion dollars to bring a pharmaceutical to market in the U.S.
More regulation simply empowers the parasitical lawyers to gum up the works even further. It doesn't produce better outcomes, it produces far fewer outcomes.
Burn it down. Send Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Bharat Aggarwal, Ching-Shih Chen, Carlo M. Croce, Andrew Jess Dannenberg, John Darsee, etc etc etc to prison. Start over again clean.
People who resist this idea act as if we're realizing incredible progress and all that would be lost. We aren't. Science and medicine are very, very stagnant, sclerotic, and riddled with fraud. The liberal arts are almost entirely useless (from a taxpayer's perspective).
So what is your actual meaning when you say burn it down? Fire some university president heads who've been caught or what? You're language is vague but grandiose.
The whole academic pipeline is actually quite delicate if we're talking massive disruptions, the current funding shake up is threatening to screw a whole class of graduates because PIs and Universities don't know if they'll be able to pay new graduate students so many are massively cutting back the number of admissions they're taking or skipping a year entirely. That has a knock on effect of screwing up new professors who're still setting up their labs because they can't get research started quickly to get new grants which can screw up their entire careers too. All that to find replace the word diversity or because a few high placed people faked some data?
China has been building nuclear successfully and worked out the kinks. The US basically paused all production and was trying to start over. You can't seriously blame it all on bureaucracy, when a lot of what was lost is institutional knowledge. Kind of like how your "burn it all down" approach would work for academia.
Despite how things could be structured better, in medicine and science we are making progress. Maybe we could do better, but I certainly think we could be doing much worse.
It would help further a good-faith discussion if you were first more precise in defining what you mean. Please be specific with your premise and what you would do to fix the flaws you see.
Maybe start with the part where you say "science and medicine are stagnant", therefore "we should burn it all down and start over". This is how misinterpretations and assumptions start and does not benefit mutual intellectual understanding.
This approach has an abysmal track record historically and I expect history will repeat itself here. Burning complex systems down is many orders of magnitude easier than building them up, and much less fun for the people who like burning things down. So the predictable effect is that blunt wide-scale destruction almost always makes things worse.
Yes Academia and government could be vastly more efficient. Almost everyone agrees on that and a lot of work has been put into improving things. But doing that in a way that's net good requires patience and competence, traits the current people running the government openly disdain.
Don’t hate the player hate the game. Academia has been perforated with metric driven nonsense from administration at all levels of funding and the university. It is not possible to quantify how much work it takes to generate a new idea that will downstream benefit humanity. This metric driven academic reality has led to two outcomes. An over production of papers on every topic. And the reduction of research into predictable outcomes that cannot be considered science because it is trodding well worn paths knowing it will produce yet another paper. Meanwhile funding agencies, job rules and laws, etc. all incentivize hiring PhDs over all other kinds of positions because it’s usually rather impossible to create lots of forever tenure track professor and research scientist positions since no one has funding for the next 40 years of a persons career. It was wrong that they cheated and they should be removed but i understand why they did it.
I do hate the game. That’s why I wrote, “burn it down and start over again clean”. It is a broken, sclerotic system who misincentives have metastasized (ie all the issues you’ve just described).
That is certainly one viewpoint. Personally I try to make changes in the place that i work and with the people i work with to push the culture in a different direction.
They were both caught by "outsiders" in spite of holding extremely high titles at both institutions, which would ostensibly entail rigorous vetting. Gay is even still a professor at Harvard.
They are merely exemplars chosen because they were the leaders of their institutions. The list is very, very long. I invite you to look into the issue further if you think I'm wrong.
Claudine Gay was Harvard's president. Harvard receives >$2B from the federal government each year, including $100Ms in NIH funding. What does it say about an organization when the choose a charlatan and plagiarist to lead it? Why should taxpayer's give that organization a single dime?
"Academia is all rotten! Here are my 2 cherry-picked examples!"
Of course, burning these institutions down and running them like businesses will work well. After all, we all know fraud doesn't happen in business, and if it did, the market would soon sort that out, right?
Having observed and been part of contracts involving these companies, it would take a lot to convince me that at least 80% of them don’t cost an order of magnitude (or more) more than they should.
It’s not usually the type of work, it’s the specific commercial model and mode of engagement with them that’s generally at fault, often aided and abetted by procurement processes.
> it would take a lot to convince me that at least 80% of them don’t cost an order of magnitude (or more) more than they should.
I have enough friends who work in University systems and government roles (both similarly heavy in red tape) to know that many of these institutions would also spend an order of magnitude doing it in house.
It’s misleading to compare to an idealistic efficient organization with no red tape, because government jobs are very heavy on red tape. That’s where most of the inefficiency gets spent, whether it’s done in house or by consultants.
they're a order of magnitude higher for some reasons though. I work in consulting, and occasionally larger enterprises approach our firm. We almost always decline because their requirements from vendor screening, to change review boards, to just the amount of sheer meetings it takes to enact a change to a title change on the website home page - its not worth it.
A couple times we made the mistake of giving a 'go away' number and they took it, and then i had to deal with the insanity of F500 business...
Basically, but with big companies with on hand lawyer litigation is much more likely. They want things like contingency plans, licensing information, even asking what our own financials look like. We just walk and focus on clients who don't have so much risk
Yep, the procurement process (and related) requires a lot be baked into pricing. I’d also be curious what the fully burdened rate of in-house staff is compared to consultants. I’ve seen situations in the gov (not DoD) where despite high consulting rates, the full cost of hiring was even higher per hour.
But I’m loath to defend the big firms. Generally, quality plus the ever push for expanding scope leaves a sensation of waste. The solution is just going to need more than simply tossing them out.
Seems pretty consistent to me. People were also upset when IT employees got fired.
The general rule that employees good, contractors bad still holds. Even though people seem obsessed with the belief that firing public employees and replacing them with private contractors will make the government more “efficient”.
I think part of it's probably that the military is the largest discretionary spending in the US, and it's not especially popular, unlike say NASA or the NPS.
Yes, the scale is a huge part of it. If some program has a $1mil budget and you were to tell me that 25% of it was wasted. Well who cares? $250k in the US budget is a rounding error on a rounding error.
But if you were to tell me that 25% of the Pentagon's budget was waste? That's a big deal.
Yet somehow a certain segment of our population tends to focus on the small fries.
25% waste on single million is not bad. 25% waste on all millions spend is very bad... And that 25% is likely under estimated in many cases. Or at least some more from 75% is inefficiently used.
I admit probably not 25% of all millions is wasted. But even if that is half that would be 12.5% wasted... Or fourth 6.25%. Fixing of which would still be huge long term effect.
So my take is that this needs to be fixed on all levels and on all places.
There's ways to do that that aren't the mindless slash and burn that's happening right now. If it were done thoughtfully I'm sure there's places that some fat could be trimmed. (And if you're looking for places to do that look at the Pentagon who hasn't passed an audit in living memory...)
Would it be worth the extra hurdles required to actually catch that waste/fraud though? My bet is on probably not, it's like the many many attempts to drug test welfare recipients, they all wind up costing far more than they save because the actual rate is pretty low so catching those is far more expensive than what you save.
i think we are approximately 30T beyond "slow and thoughtful approach to cutting". if you want your program to be considered carefully, pass it with the necessary tax increases to fund it. don't just punt the tax receipts problem to the next guy.
of course, if Trump is doing this all so he can pass his tax cuts as seems almost certain, he is no better. but frankly yes, the US needs deep cuts and concordant tax receipts increases to maintain a sustainable debt trajectory and price stability/productivity for the middle/working class.
You have to absolutely think about what you're actually cutting loads of programs and spending end up with positive net effects. If you just demand across the board cuts you're killing those positive EV programs which leave you worse off than before.
The debt boogey man is exactly that a nearly imaginary number, most US debt is held by Americans or US companies in the end too.
> The debt boogey man is exactly that a nearly imaginary number, most US debt is held by Americans or US companies in the end too.
I agree that the problem with debt is not that there are foreign holders of US treasuries. But higher debt crowds out private investment & borrowing in the repo markets, which harms productivity, makes goods more expensive, hurts aggregate supply in the long run, and makes the poor even poorer.
It also means that the US has to pay increasingly high amounts of money on interest financing and the Fed has far less room to effectively maneuver to combat inflation and ensure sustainable employment levels, as we've been seeing in the last few years. Debt is absolutely not an imaginary number and anyone who is telling you that perhaps doesn't understand the economic weight.
The marginal dollar of US govt spending is generally not more welfare enhancing than the alternative of not having that debt, not crowding out private investment, etc. - particularly when we are in expansionary times (as we have up until very recently). With our current debt trajectory, we should be raising non-distortionary taxes and aggressively limiting spending that is not obviously growth enhancing or with strong social justice justification. We are starting to see real structural problems already emerging from our current debt trajectory.
Sure. But the point is that the people who advocate cutting the waste never propose going after the big wins first. Instead we cut all the little things that actually helps people and use arguments to the effect that the waste was adding up in the aggregate. OR, we could just not spend a trillion dollars on the military.
And/or they decide on cuts by ^F "diversity" or "transition" cutting of programs like the US seed vault which stores a lot of different crop seed varieties so we can restart our agriculture if there's a blight that knocks out our massive monocultures but it's getting axed now because it protects crop _diversity_... and that's suddenly a kill word for funding because we're being run by ideologues and idiots.
The opinion here isn't homogenous. You'll find a wide range of opinion. It will shift based on which posters are active at a given time, or even from minor nuances in the story.
I, too, find it bothersome when people refer to an opinion written in a post and generalizes as if it were the opinion of an entire community. HN is not one person and it's incorrect to refer to it as if it is.
I don't think the majority view is so much there is no waste in the other areas. With most people I talk to, the objection is mostly with the methods employed and the lack of accountability.
For me, I wouldn't have objected to Musk / DOGE going in and actually doing an audit of everything to look for waste, fraud and abuse. And if actual waste, fraud and abuse are found, where evidence and details are provided, I'd personally celebrate that.
This is basically a tautology. The question is what’s actually being funded in the name of public health. Wasting money in pursuit of public health which doesn’t help the public is bad actually,
How do you define waste? If research isn't harmful, but doesn't produce results, is that waste? Are inconclusive results wasteful? What ratio of public utility to cost would you consider non-wasteful spending? What about the benefits of effectively subsidizing your biotech sector by keeping biologists in-demand?
There is more upside (globally) to public health spending than maintaining a global empire that deals death and destruction. Trying to nitpick is missing the point entirely.
I get that there's a discussion here over the minutae to be had in good faith. I am not qualified enough for that discussion. My point is that funding a genocidal empire is inherently bad whereas public health funding can have inefficiencies but is overall a net good.
The discussion is moot however because the agencies aren't being gutted over concerns of efficiency, but because of an ideological commitment to free market shock therapy. It's like arguing if you should order the fish or chicken while the Titanic is sinking. Sure there's an argument to be had, it's just not relevant right now.
To be fair, no one wants their job to go away. The government contracting gravy train is massive and has been seemingly never ending for a very long time.
This is a misframing of the sentiment. No one believes there isn't waste in government. We just don't believe 5 under 20 year olds, some with criminal backgrounds, others whose only qualification is Elon Musk likes them, are good at identifying what's waste and what's important.
And we would like to see a measured approach to reducing waste, with some findings released to the people about what the plan is going forward and why the cuts make sense, rather than "just fire every probational employee" or "just 50% slash the SEC" or whatever else they are doing currently.
What's occupying my mindshare is that we are firing hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately veterans, while at the same time raising prices of everything artificially. Welcome to stagflation.
EDIT: Also, should anyone with a criminal background be in charge of what they're currently doing? I'd say no. That's just me
Yes, I agree. The consultants are certainly wasteful, but I am personally aware of many employees for the government who literally have to do nothing and are actually not allowed to do any real work. We need to clean up the waste everywhere.
Yep. The budget for the Department of War has been too bloated for too long and needs to be more efficient. Let’s not privilege a series of pet projects for a bunch of bureaucrats over the reset of government.
Yep, the image portrayed of every other government department is scientists in white coats looking at cancer cells in a microscope, or doctors bandaging soldiers coming off the battle field.
Amusing that a newly minted federal department of tech-bro adjacent yahoos declares that there is waste but clearly does not have any of the expertise—which would probably need to be wide-ranging—to be able to actually get rid of the waste itself and not just cut indescriminately.
You could get an oncologist to admit that the patient had some cells that needed to be removed, due to the advanced cancer. But the layman chose to get rid of a couple of perfectly healthy, cancer-free limbs.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”
I read the news to judge what the propagandist want me to know, not to actually learn things.
I find skimming NYT’s and FOX’s headlines are perfectly satisfactory. If anything peaks my interest I do independent analysis, putting weight on primary sources. I often try to listen in on experts discussing the matter among themselves.
It maybe consumes 1-3 hours a week to skim headlines. More research as needed, and mostly focused on matters I have a direct interest in (interest as in money on the line) so it counts as work.
It’s small potatoes for time, most people spend way more on television and social media.
well we need to find a way to make these programs sustainable then. frankly, medicare is extremely friggin expensive because it encourages overutilization - which raises costs a ton for everyone.
we simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically unheard of levels of money at the elderly without raising taxes significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of our current fiscal situation.
You know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Medicare is EXTREMELY CHEAP compared to private insurance. You're comparing Medicare in a vaccuum when you should look at private insurance.
> we simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically unheard of levels of money at the elderly without raising taxes significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of our current fiscal situation
Oh wow, we can't raise taxes on the rich? only significantly the middle class? Why not the rich?
Medicare is extremely expensive from the perspective of the government/taxpayer. That it is extremely cheap and allows people to bid up the price of care on the consumer side is part of the problem, there is no triage or disincentive from overutilization because of how little cost share there is.
Lol so yeah, you're not comparing it to private insurance which is what TAXPAYERS actually pay themselves. You're just a right-wing hack.
"Medicare is BAD because it costs money and is cheaper than private insurance. Private insurance is GOOD because it costs even more money than we'd pay with Medicare!!"
Your position is "medicare is too expensive" but expensive compared to what??
Cool. Go back to thinking we can only raise taxes on the middle class to pay for medicare and ignoring any taxes on the wealthy like you said in your first post. ( we simply cannot afford to be yeeting historically unheard of levels of money at the elderly without raising taxes significantly on the middle-class, that is the rub of our current fiscal situation
)
Your current fiscal situation is only right-wing talking points.
the vast majority of economists agree that there is simply not enough income among the wealthy that we can reach a fiscally sustainable path solely by raising taxes on the wealthy. i favor raising taxes on the wealthy significantly, but there are also hard truths about tax receipts and current spending.
You just posted a poll. From 2015 Of not even 50 economists. That’s not “the vast majority” of economists in any sense. They did no statistical analysis of who said what, so this isn’t even statistically valid poll. It’s just raw numbers, with self-selection bias.
They also vary widely in their comments on what they agree with. Even if you think I’m uncharitably reading your words, you’re entirely misreading the poll and the site you posted. You’re putting your words in their mouths.
“Long run fiscal sustainability in the US will require some combination of cuts in currently promised Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits and/or tax increases that include higher taxes on households with incomes below $250,000.”
This poll question is biased and doesn’t include anything about whether taxes on those above $250k need to be increased. You’re, again, misreading the question that asked and adding in your own words about wealthy tax. There is nothing in that question that allows you to posit these polled economists don’t believe “that we can reach a fiscally sustainable path solely by raising taxes on the wealthy.”
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." - Major General Smedley Butler
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." - President Eisenhower
* Permanent extension of all Bush-era tax cuts: 0.35 Source: Moody's Analytics model, Cbpp
Dollar-for-dollar, social program spending consistently produces higher economic returns than military spending or tax cuts, especially tax cuts for the wealthy.
$1 billion spent on education or transit creates more than twice as many jobs (17,687-19,795) as the same amount spent on defense (8,555). -Cigionline
In fact, military spending can actually slow economic growth over time; a 1% military spending increase can reduce economic growth by 9% over 20 years.
Zandi's analysis of 2010 tax legislation found that 90% of economic growth and job creation came from unemployment insurance extensions and targeted tax credits, while high-end tax cuts had "only very small economic impacts." - Cbpp
I know a lot of people who love to quote Smedley and Eisenhower's farewell address, and to a person they support military intervention in Ukraine. Also, people who unironically were saying "The USA shouldn't be the world police!" 10 years ago.
It's almost like supporting an ally whose sovereign territory is being violated is some kind of different situation than the US unilaterally performing military actions in a variety of locations. Amazing!
Probably not, since most of what we sent over was existing stock. The money had already been turned into weapons of war years ago. You can't really turn a gun or rocket into a loaf of bread.
Then why are you arguing with me? I was pointing out the contradiction of people who do that. I feel like you think I'm saying the US shouldn't support Ukraine. I'm all on board with the US supporting Ukraine. I'm saying the US needs a powerful military if you want it to support Ukraine, which is at odds with people who are fully behind the quotes that come from Butler and Eisenhower's farewell address.
> I am saying that support for Ukraine is pretty different from the kinds of behaviors that make people say "the USA shouldn't be the world police!"
And yet, to even consider helping Ukraine in any meaningful way, the US needs an extremely strong, modern military.
It is unfortunate but most users here are just partizans fueled with propaganda. I do not remember this place being such an echo chamber 10 years ago...
