I am wondering what will happen at the end of all of this? I see a few possibilities here:
1. Either this project will be a tremendous success for the American people, saving millions and uncovering massive fraud and waste in the government thanks to the audits
2. It will ab a complete failure, nothing of value will get discovered, published and time and money will be wasted for everyone involved (giving the DNC a huge attack vector for the next election)
3. Alternatively, some efforts may yield some positive net results but others will fail to bring anything of value in fruition, this to me, seems to most realistic outcome, but who knows?
This is going to be an interesting experiment for the rest of the world to watch.
There are way more possibilities. And the main one is that any negative effect would only be visible in a long time (let's say 10 years) and by that time it may take 10-20 years again to change course.
For instance say you lower standards for building bridges, how do you assess the success? First you may notice nothing, because all bridges under construction stay with their design, so consequence 0. After a few years, construction costs may go down because the new standard allow to cut some corners. Great! Success! Now 30 years in the future maybe suddenly the bridge has a failure that costs 20x the savings at the time of construction. Well suddenly not great. But changing the standard at that point would not fix all the bridges built over those 30 years.
Evaluating public policies is often very hard and it's sometimes only possible a long time after. I would also say that weather or not a policy is good or has positive impact has little impact on winning or losing elections. Lots of terrible policies can win you voters. Just like building the best product is not the easiest way to make money. For both goods and elections, playing on emotions works a lot better.
The timeline for some things is way longer than 10-20 years and, in cases like data collection, we simply lose out forever.
What we're seeing right now, and it's not just the US, are policies that risk depriving future generations of data that may be critical to solving problems 50 or 100 years from now. If you say that collecting water quality data is a waste of money because we don't have problems with water quality, that's a permanent decision that can't be reversed and will adversely affect future researchers. It's incredibly frustrating.
In the bridge example above, even with bridges failing after 30 years, the average person won't be able to assess whether or not it was a success or a failure. You'd have to know the cost of initial construction, lifetime maintenance costs, replacement cost, the value gained from short term savings, etc.. Coming up with a calculation to categorize it as a success or failure could be difficult if everyone is acting in good faith. Throw in politics, partisan interests, propaganda, etc. and it seems almost impossible.
No matter what side people fall on politically, everyone should consider unbiased, non-partisan data collection a vital government service. If you disagree on how the data should be collected, do it both ways and debate the merits as long as you want. Just make sure the data stays available.
We have examples of this kind of thing happening[1]; in the 1970s Eli Ron invented a new way of making concrete ceilings called Pal-Kal; it was easier, faster and cheaper. Also prone to be weak if done without care and sometimes extremely dangerous. Used a lot around Israel there were some non-fatal failures and a committee setup to investigate it banned it in 1996[2]. In 2001 the Versailles Hall in Jerusalem collapsed killing 23 people. Eli Ron was given four years in prison for manslaughter. There were no good records of every building built with Pal-Kal in Jerusalem to go and check them; now any that are known to use it can be structurally checked every year, and demolished if found unsafe because there isn't a good cheap way to strengthen them, but there may be more of them unknowingly using it.
Another is the Morandi Bridge collapse in Italy in 2018[3], it had been designed as a steel cable suspension bridge with the cables encased in concrete meaning there was no good way to check if they were rusting. The engineer who designed it (click his name in Wikipedia) was calling attention to risks and problems in his design since the 1970s without the responsible companies/government departments taking it seriously enough.
Also see how big Wikipedia's "List of bridge failures" is[4]
I don't really understand how this is an audit? Shutting down departments, getting root access to systems, read/write access to codebases these are hardly the actions of auditors doing a audit. Does a audit really require this level of access?
You seem pretty optimistic. A plausible alternative is that it really ends up hurting the US.
In some way, it has started hurting the US. Ask anyone in the world who is not a US citizen if they think the US is stable. I think the answer has changed a lot in, say, the last 10 years.
I'm thinking 2/3, but the part you're missing is that the process will destroy US influence around the world. Which may be the real point of all this. It's hard to know where Musk's allegiances really lie.
With that said, the US has been in the dominant world position for so long, it's like they forget what it takes to be there. Soft power, by giving people food and support - like USAID does, is part of what helps keep the US in that dominant position.
I hear this argument a lot and I have two thoughts about it:
1. USA is a rich country, and that's why it can afford helping other countries. But what if you overspend? Now your economy is weak, you lag behind, and sooner or later competitors help more than you (if it's really the best thing to do to rule the world). So maybe optimizing spending is in order? And I think one strategy to optimize an overgrown system is to just burn the old, and start from scratch.
2. Does the "soft power" work if people get used to your help? Maybe it's useful to suspend the help every now and then for all the beneficiaries to realize the magnitude of the help? I wonder how much of the negative effects are read as "evil USA stopped giving us money" and how much "oh so it was USA that was helping us all this time!" Finally, if the help resumes after a new president is elected, won't people forgive USA for suspending it, as that was done by Trump, and now there's this new president that we need to be grateful to?
1. If you want to get the budget under control then we have to raise taxes in addition to spending cuts. The Trump tax cuts expire this year and they have said they want to get them extended.
2. No, if the US makes such drastic changes in policy every four years then it's much harder to forge any long term relationships. The vacuum also lets other countries like China step in. Wasn't everyone just losing their mind about a Chinese company working with the Panama Canal?
> And I think one strategy to optimize an overgrown system is to just burn the old, and start from scratch.
To avoid overspending and crashing the economy (I don't think the govt spending tax money crashes the economy but I'm no economist either), allowing competitors to help more and gaining more influence, "one strategy" is to simply destroy US influence around the world? To "start from scratch"?
No, I don't think that is a viable, even credible strategy. Like "saving human consciousness" by going to Mars: if we are under threat to destroy ourselves (and that is the real imminent threat, not asteroids), then whatever we need to learn to avoid that we can learn much better on Earth, than on a colony that.... depends on Earth. It's not even a serious proposal when it comes to benefiting humanity, maybe the idea is to live on Mars for a few decades as humanity is withers.
And in the same way, firing countless US government workers nilly-willy, even out of some vendetta (FBI agents that just did their job? hello?), immediately creates a LOT of pressure on the economy (if you don't just view it as a big number that a handful of dudes own most of, and care about the people in it). Whatever you want to "start from scratch" (all of it you could also have done without burning everything down first), you now have less resources to do that, because, well, everything is on fire. The saved money is supposed to go to tax cuts for the rich after all, right? At any rate I'm confident it's not going to be spend on more efficient social programs, but simply less or none. And people who can do these jobs well will not be keen to be re-hired by the same government that fired them, either.
If someone wants to talk you into knocking down your house so you save rent and can build a new one quicker, and has something to gain from it, at best they're insane, at worst they're playing dumber than they are, since they stand to gain from it.
> Does the "soft power" work if people get used to your help?
I'd say the longer you interact and cooperate with others the better the relationship usually gets, all else being equal.
> I wonder how much of the negative effects are read as "evil USA stopped giving us money" and how much "oh so it was USA that was helping us all this time!"
You are so very vastly underestimating the impacts these knee-jerk, unilateral activities have.
> This is horrific. Freezing clinical trials means that people with experimental medicine - participating in studies that benefit us all - may be left without access to healthcare, we won’t know their outcomes, they may even have experimental medical devices left inside of their body.
A critical subversion of cybersecurity in the United States that leads to decades of compromised computer systems throughout our society -- from infrastructure to military to banking. I heard someone refer to this as a speedrun of the fall of the roman empire, and given the lack of ethics at the top levels of this administration I wouldn't be surprised.
"giving the DNC a huge attack vector..." -- I think you're mistaking an attack vector for a realization that this regime is incompetent and against the safety and security of the United States population.
It's going to be used to amass more power. "The President" makes baseless claims that everything is fraud now. "So much fraud, fraud, fraud". Everything he says is a projection.
In all of those scenarios you still have to deal with the impact of shutting down agencies like USAID.
Elon says things like USAID is a ball of worms, it needs to be scrapped, and if they cut too much they'll roll it back. How? The people getting fired aren't going to stick around waiting for a roll back and, if they're wrong about it being 100% waste, the people that die because they're reliant on those outreach programs can't be brought back to life. It's not software. You can't roll back mistakes that have an immediate human impact.
The risk and fallout of being wrong are so significant that they way they're going about it is reckless. There's also a risk they'll simply claim they were 100% right and no one has any way of verifying it. It's like Bush standing in front of the Mission Accomplished banner. What was the mission and how was it determined to be a success?
And that's the main issue. There's no objective measure for success. That makes debunking false claims of success extremely difficult and time consuming. It takes 5 minutes for Musk to do an interview saying they cut $4 billion of waste by shutting down USAID and an extraordinary amount of work for anyone trying to prove the worth of what they're doing.
That's even more true for anything that's subjective like the value of good will or for anything that seems so obviously beneficial that you never thought you'd need to justify, so didn't keep data proving the value. It's like being accused of being a criminal and having the burden of proof fall on you to prove you've never committed a crime. How do you account for your entire life?
I could be swayed by the argument that security clearances and controlled access to information could be abused to prevent scrutiny, so there's probably some merit in trying to short circuit that stuff, but the way it's done matters. For example, issue an executive order to expedite security clearances for the outsiders you want on the team or create a new class of security clearance where those people get blanket access but have to adhere to controls that prevent data exfiltration.
We have the technology to make sure data isn't tampered with. The DOGE team could be working on-site, creating and digitally signing reports on waste they want to see cut, sending those reports to congress, and auditing to make sure congress sees every report they've signed.
I can see the value in outsider access to data with the intent of bypassing entrenched interests, but unilaterally shutting things down without any oversight or debate is a step too far. At a minimum, those shutdowns should be accompanied by transparent reports detailing the waste, especially when the determination that something is wasteful is subjective.
If you mean that literally they might have success with that but overall American government spending is a pretty boring affair[1], with about 9 out of 10 dollars going to defense, healthcare, interest, social security and the likes. Trying to chase down "woke" fifth columns in the department of education (2% of the budget) is not going to save you a lot of dough. I'd be willing to make a bet they're not going to touch the categories that matter.
1. Either this project will be a tremendous success for the American people, saving millions and uncovering massive fraud and waste in the government thanks to the audits
2. It will ab a complete failure, nothing of value will get discovered, published and time and money will be wasted for everyone involved (giving the DNC a huge attack vector for the next election)
3. Alternatively, some efforts may yield some positive net results but others will fail to bring anything of value in fruition, this to me, seems to most realistic outcome, but who knows?
This is going to be an interesting experiment for the rest of the world to watch.