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The presumption of competence is a rather... generous for an admin that ran DOGE.
Of course, it's all a hidden 200 IQ play. They're only pretending to be retarded. My opinion is that Minnesota was chosen not because it's an actual hotbed of illegal immigration, but as a show-of-force, to "own the libs".
Why are you holding up DOGE as a example of "incompetence"?
Same question for @curious_straight_ca.
The ... obvious?
There was the DOGE website where they overstated the amount of money they were saving by cancelling contracts by at least 2x in a way that was obvious if you looked at where they claimed to be getting the data and knew how to read. They eventually had to reduce the number. And details that emerged later showed they saved much less than they claimed to. If they had saved as much as they've claimed, it'd show up in overall spending numbers in a way it just hasn't.
There was all the drama over Elon. The thing where he said he'd fire any government employee who didn't write him an email even though he didn't have the authority to do so (discussion before). The claim that "20 million people were receiving Social Security benefits past age 100", which was totally false, because he didn't understand how to interpret the database.
And then eventually:
This wasn't a complete list, just from memory, but DOGE just didn't work. Which is a shame, because I like the broad concept as I said at the time. But it just didn't.
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Their goal was 1 to 2 trillion in budget cuts, they achieved 0.2, maybe maybe as little as 0.1.
I want the federal budget to be cut by 90%. Roads, justice, trade policy, standards of weights and measures, diplomacy, coinage, a post office, a defense force for a regional power and nukes and a Navy to prevent invasions of the US.
Let blackwater or anyone else who wants to have a go at it have a letter of marque to provide freedom of the seas. Pay bounties for the heads of anyone who messes with American flagged shipping. Let private charity or the states deal with the poor (with state taxes).
The executive branch has no power to increase or decrease the federal budget. What they do have is the power to allocate spending. A subtle but important distinction.
That DOGE didn't do what you wanted, is not the same thing as DOGE being incompetent or ineffective.
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100 billion here and there, pretty soon you're talking about real money though -- if it saved more than it cost I wouldn't say it's a failure per se?
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Doge was successful. It didn't cut the budget (which is mostly wealth transfers) but it did cut a lot of sinecures for leftists and disrupt the operations of many taxpayer funded left wing activist organizations.
I agree with your assessment of what they achieved. But why wouldn't they say that's the point of the organization in the first place? Because hurting those who look down their noses at the unwashed masses (cutting sinecures) would surely be red meat for the base. And disrupting the wasteful operation of many taxpayer funded activist organizations would have even broader appeal, regardless of political valance.
I think the reason is because Musk vastly overestimated his own intelligence, skill and worldliness. He really thought he could easily find 1-2 TRILLION dollars because he believed he knew how to run large organizations leanly and easily ferret out inefficiency and waste. And he could do it with a handful of young, techy types. Turns out he didn't understand the several orders of magnitude difference in size and complexity.
And for that reason I can't agree with you that DOGE was successful. I really wish they were. They had some great ideas.
There's also the claim that they really were successful because the entire point of the operation was simply to steal petabytes of protected information and install backdoors throughout the government. The whole cutting waste schtick was a ruse. I don't personally subscribe to that idea, but it has legs.
Was the US government found by DOGE to be irreducibly complex or was it that the swamp was incomprehensibly deep with a vast political and bureaucratic pro-swamp contingent?
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