That doesn't surprise me and gives more evidence that Cuban is not dissimilar to Musk, just that he has much better PR.

Musk is cutting things left and right, creating large messes and giving himself hand outs. He is making things less efficient (vs more).

Cuban sees the mess, and an opportunity to make some money while also providing value to the government.

I guess they’re similar in taking advantage of the moment and looking to make money, but I don’t see how Cuban’s proposal is destructive, unlike Musk’s actions.

It's not Musk's ideal scenario I'm sure, but he'd be an awful lot more happy with it as the new status quo than what was there before.

Trump and Musk destroyed USDS and 18F. At worst Cuban is trying to salvage something from the wreckage.

But just another billionaire doing this instead of an organized opposition is not ideal, to say the least. ex 18F workers should get someone they trust more in the mix.

[0] https://www.yourdictionary.com/shadow-government

He's resurrecting it.

If his vision is a privately-ran for-profit contracted agency he's not resurrecting anything.

Oh, you mean about 18F? I’d just keep trying to draw public attention to what appear to be hasty decisions made by this administration that aren’t actually beneficial to the country.

This does nothing. It did nothing in 2016 and would do even less now.

My issue comes from the fact that Cuban is then directly aiding and abetting the process that Musk is putting in place with DOGE, thus my concern.

With that in mind, asking "Well what would you do?" to justify the actions of putting a generally well regarded and good service into the hands of the private sector is a fundamental lack of scope on what's continuing to happen.

The point of asking you "what would you do in their position" is to see if you have an honest alternative for what a wealthy, high profile person could do to help the laid off 18F workers (and the country) in the short term, or if you're throwing stones at Cuban because it's an easy dunk.

I think there are good answers to the question like "Publicly fund and back anti-Trump politicians in Texas" or "Advocate for changes to the constitutional structure that enshrine the existence of independent agencies" or "buy a newspaper and go against the other demigods of America" or "buy every liberal in Texas a gun". That last one is a joke. Kinda.

Unless they were coordinating this, how on earth is it the same?

Pretty sure they have the same PR. Remember when Musk was getting all those cameos and references in various media?

Elon's problem is he's terminally online so he couldn't just let his media manager run his twitter like a normal billionaire, and at this point I think he's on a trip.

You could call it a Big Beautiful Amendment.

My point is just that Cuban is supporting the problem that Musk is creating, albeit without putting himself entirely in a position where he could receive the ire of the public.

And just to reiterate, 18f has done great work, and if this is the only way for them to continue for the time being I guess so be it. I just don't agree with the chain of events that led here.

I'm here for it if we're proposing redistributing the wealth of everyone with 9 figures or more.

in that light, cuban is doing the literal opposite by trying to save one.

I have been reading about what this is (I have not encountered it before) and earnestly fail to see how.

> We don’t get to choose a world where billionaires have no special power. The choice is whether to accept some good from billionaires, or to reject what good they can do because of the harm they do.

If we're discussing fallacies, I'm getting tasting notes of False Dilemma. We, participants in society, can shape, define, and reject what "special powers" means. Not totally, and I imagine the royal we of HN commenters might disagree on how much or in what ways, but I believe it is possible.

I reckon approximately 100% of those people would prefer 18F stay how it is

It's not a solution.

If we're talking about the current administration, there's no way in hell they're going to contract with a consultancy made up of gov't employees they just fired. If they do hire consultants they'll be ones who are loyal to Musk.

If we're talking about a future administration that wants to show intent to repair the damage done to gov't workers and services, why in the world would that admin start by privatizing 18F?

HOWEVER Congress has NOT reduced the budget so everything I just said is bullshit and hypothetical until some of that money starts coming back into our pockets.

But I am trying to remain optimistic. These are challenging times.

Guess it's a good thing we are in the US and there is no tax dollar coercion considering you are free to renounce citizenship and leave the country.

Thus never having to pay the fees required to participate/live in US society. Kinda like if you don't want to pay monthly gym fees, don't--but don't expect to use their gym equipment whenever suits you.

“If you worked for 18F and got fired, Group together to start a consulting company,” wrote Cuban. “It’s just a matter of time before DOGE needs you to fix the mess they inevitably created. They will have to hire your company as a contractor to fix it. But on your terms. I’m happy to invest and/or help.”

Only go back if the management has changed. In this case, that means "If doge is gone".

As a Dallasite I remember very clearly Mark was angling to run for office before the news came out his Mavericks work culture was rife with sexual deviance and favoritism / help to sweep things under the rug and it tanked his ambitions. Totally serious about this.

1. From the end-user’s perspective, what makes this a quality service? Is it simply better than other government alternatives, or does it compete with equivalent modern services from the private sector?

2. From the technologist's perspective, why is this considered quality software? I see it's an open-source Ruby on Rails app[2] with basic documentation, tests, and monitoring. As a non-RoR developer, I'm curious where this project falls on the spectrum from merely adequate to exceptional, and why.

[1] e.g., in this comment section: “login.gov is one of the few government services that as a private sector techie I'm in awe of”

[2] https://github.com/18F/identity-idp/

I couldn't even login to ssa.gov before it was integrated with login.gov. Every year or two I'd give it a shot, it told me my account was locked, I had to visit a Social Security office to get it unlocked. I tried that once; the local office wasn't able to help. Fast forward a few years and the login process has been delegated to login.gov. I was able to prove my identity in the normal way (asked a bunch of questions from my credit report) and finally login.

So let's start with: it works.

But it's at least as good as any SSO that I use elsewhere (Okta, Apple, Google). It supports multiple factors (security key, passkey, TOTP, etc), something that, e.g., Fidelity only barely offers.

Besides that, it's visually appealing, having a nice modern look.

It was so, so bad.

Maybe don’t look at this through the lens of a tech company or normal business (bc it’s not), but look at I from the perspective of how shite govt tech is. Not sure if you live in the states but you should try apply to unemployment in somewhere like Florida and then report back to me how having a functional login page isn’t a success.

A few years ago they replaced it with a vendor solution (PayIt[1]). It's terrible. The renewal process easily takes 5x as long. The old site was two steps and a couple forms. The new site is this stupid chat bot interface that pretends like it's thinking between the half dozen or so steps it now is. On top of that, I get to pay $3 or something for the privilege of using it.

Annoys me just thinking about it.

I have a whole rant about our local private toll road's web site too. Easily in the bottom 5 sites I have to deal with. I may switch back to MA's EZ Pass just out of spite.

[1]: https://payitgov.com/

Maybe. But in some ways, my experience with it was a heaping turd (registering my identity for the IRS):

"Scan the front and back of your Driver's License."

[upload scan of front of DL @ 200DPI]

"Unable to find a face in the image you uploaded."

[upload scan of front of DL @ 300DPI]

"Unable to find a face in the image you uploaded."

Huh. Maybe I'll try with a lower resolution.

[upload scan of front of DL @ 72DPI]

"Thank you, now please upload the back of your Driver's License."

Hmm, 72DPI worked for the front, so...

[upload scan of back of DL @ 72DPI]

"Unable to read a barcode in the image you uploaded."

[upload scan of back of DL @ 200DPI]

"Unable to read a barcode in the image you uploaded."

[upload scan of back of DL @ 300DPI]

"Thank you for verifying your Driver's License".

Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle ages (or even well before). There will be inept people, waste, corruption, people stealing, etc. but there will also be the vast majority trying to do a good job and feel satisfaction in their work. It doesn't matter if its the federal government or a private corporation, its simply a trade-off of the organization structure. I don't think we, as humans, know of a better/different way to organize that would be more effective.

Regulation is so pervasive it's become a "what the hell is water" situation. People don't even recognize that the dysfunctional companies are protected from failure by the government. Seemingly beneficial regulations create barriers to entry that prevent dysfunctional companies from being replaced. IP law, even copyright (in its current, out-of-control practically perpetual form) is regulation that protects large incumbents in media and tech and other sectors from competition.

Even if that is true, in some areas companies' interests strongly misalign with that of citizens. An insurance company earns more by rejecting customer declarations. An ISP earns more by giving customers less bandwidth for a higher price. A toll road company earns more by doing as little maintenance they can get away with, while keeping prices high.

Yes, in a perfect market, customers will flock to competitors that are better for them. However, in many cases a perfect market is not attainable for various reasons. E.g. because the cost of entry is too high (e.g. making a competing ISP would require you to put your own fiber in the ground) or because there are network effects that are nearly impossible to break.

This is why certain markets need strong regulation or government monopolies -- to protect people from pure profit seeking. Health care is a good example. Health care in Western Europe is much better, while less money is spent on health care. This is because health care is strongly regulated and insurance companies cannot f*ck over customers. The objective function of maximizing profits becomes a constrained optimization problem, which generally leads to other ways to increase profits, like pressuring pharmaceutical companies to lower prices of medicines.

The issue with healthcare is that providers have leverage over insurers, not that there is a lack of competition for insurance.

How is a discerning buyer supposed to choose insurance based on anything but price when that is the only information available?

Then there's the entire bureaucracy that is medical billing. You have to know which obscure codes for diagnosis can be used with which, similarly obscure, codes for treatment. None of those codes ever exactly match what is happening to the patient, so you have to choose one that is close enough and hope the insurance agrees.

You ever wonder why it takes 6+ months to get a medical bill? That's why. It has to be processed by the medical billing bureaucracy until it bears only the slightest resemblance to reality and then shuttled back and forth between the provider, the insurance filing system, and the insurance underwriter. Only once that is done can they send you a bill.

How much cheaper could providers offer service if they didn't have to pay dedicated staff to play some perverse game of telephone with the insurance company?

Capitalism just means private people control the capital, rather than the state. Beyond that and you’re in different forms of capitalism. There’s no requirement of competition.

Have we really already forgotten "Too big to fail"? It wasn't that long ago that those words were uttered and the US gov't bailed out failing private companies with taxpayer money.

And on the topic of profitability that pops up in these discussions, what about public transport? Healhcare? Power plants? Nuclear weapons maintenance? Should these be "profitable"? Is profit supposed to be the be-all-end-all state for everything? Because from where I'm standing, profit incentives make the world an actively worse place when it's free from oversight and regulation. If it were up to Nestle, the entire planet would be a giant reservoir only they could draw water from in order to produce soda. If it were up to Chiquita, all of South America would be a giant banana plantation to the point where they funded actual paramilitary organizations to achieve that goal.

The most profitable route for most companies is the route that is objectively worse for everyone involved minus the shareholders that reap the profits from their antisocial, short-term-minded destructive behaviors.

The entirety of the GP's post (other than the part you quoted) addresses that exact point.

Moreover, Eversource has their hands in any solar projects. They drag out the process to approve any installations and fight you tooth and nail to make sure you can’t install a big enough system because they are mandated to buy electricity at the same rate as they sell it. They fully captured the market and are essential to the state’s functioning so whenever there is an issue the government backs them. When there isn’t, they post billions in profits.

What part of that sounds correct to you?

Here's the important part. Regulatory capture and monopolies don't want or need things to be implemented well, because that leads to alternative options.

No, there are not. You can't have 15 different companies running 15 different cables over 15 different sets of electric poles into a house, each competing on delivery of electricity (or water, or sewage, or...).

Well, you can, but there's nothing good or efficient about it.

First you claim oversimplification and then you write a sentence that feels like a "but when implemented well".

Tell me how this is a market in a reasonably sized city, and how many parallel electric lines, water and sewer pipes you can run for the market to be well implemented?

Bonus question: how many competing power lines can be run from a single power plant? 1? 2? 10?

Of course a privately-owned one doesn't work either, because there's no competition.

Yes, the participants of those markets are various degrees of willingness. No, I do not agree that makes them efficient.

It's especially ironic because if markets actually worked the way the "free market" dogma supposes they do, central planning would also work.

Spend a few mil on something of marginal utility, politicaly controversial, or funding a study for something that seems obvious? Congratulations! Fox News found it on USASpending.gov (maybe not now that 18F is dead), and is drumming up outrage. Now your fielding phone calls from senators who are looking to grandstand by reducing your budget.

Waste a few million on a Salesforce implementation that never works, never does what it promised and never gains adoption and is finally quietly abandoned? Doesn't even make the Shareholder meeting and the exec in question gets even more influence for his ability to lead large projects.

No, it was all publicly debated and passed by Congress, and openly available for anyone to see.

It just never served anyone's political agenda to nitpick and distort and publicize it until the current Administration.

If your talking things like their "org chart"* maybe, sort of. There's nothing there that wasn't already available pretty easily via OPM, but one could argue it's a nicer interface. To the extent that it's actually revealed anything to anyone is argue that it has more to do with it being the trending news so people actually bother to look, rather than it being "hidden" before.

https://doge.gov/workforce?orgId=69ee18bc-9ac8-467e-84b0-106...

The US healthcare system is evidence that this is an overly simplistic view.

In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, and we work to decrease it.

In a for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered shareholder value, and we work to increase it.

Wouldn't the largest private health insurer just buy up all the smaller ones, and then how exactly would competition work?

That’s cute. But the reality is often closer to this version:

In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, so we give it to ourselves and find a way to call it patient care.

That's not hard...

US is the richest nation with poor healthcare. Think about that...

Can you share some significant real-world examples of this happening?

For example, in western Pennsylvania, there is UPMC. According to court documents, UPMC acquired 28 competitors between 1996 and 2018. According to the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office, in 2011 UPMC announced it would stop accepting patients insured by its competitor, Highmark. This prompted the PA government to "enter into consent decrees with both UPMC and Highmark to protect access to care." Which, again according to the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office, UPMC continued to violate. This has lead to, among other things, a recent antitrust lawsuit supported by the US Justice Dept. [1] [2]

[1] https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/upmc/

[2] https://www.wesa.fm/health-science-tech/2024-10-03/justice-d...

Yes, that is corruption. However, it is being punished!

If a for-profit insurance/hospital group does this in the USA, taking money from patient care to profit... there is no punishment. Instead, it is encouraged. Correct?

> Yes, that is corruption. However, it is being punished!

In the example I shared, the evidence suggests that the punishment, as you call it, has not been adequate to solve the problem. And that problem has been ongoing for a decade and a half. And still continues.

I wonder if there are examples of this type of thing happening in places outside the USA, like Western Europe for example.

In Spain it is the privatization of the healthcare that is "given to themselves and call it patient care", making politician friends (and politicians themselves) richer and corrupt, and selling it as a way to "fix the healthcare" that they are breaking.

For profit: While company A keeps the profit, company B lowers its prices instead. Now customers are going to company B instead of A.

Im not saying that this is how it's done, but in the real world, things are not that simple.

Google search is nothing but ads but the majority still use it.

A clue to why this dysfunctional market exists is all the tech CEOs pay homage to the Oval Office and shove monies into untraceable PACs thanks to Citizens United.

Only—and this is a critical detail—if the market is competitive.

Otherwise, a government entity answerable to elected officials at some level is more efficient.

Are either of those endeavors necessary? Are they profitable? Should they be profitable?

Like health care and higher education?

However, if you are implying that only companies, and not nations, can fail and be replaced, I'd disagree. This has happened many times in the past.

I really liked this history video on the topic, which is rooted in how the founders of the USA were very familiar with a theory about how that happens called anacyclosis and they had originally designed the constitution to avoid that, where the theory proposes that democracies tend to dissolve when a populist demagogue takes over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton both very much feared that allowing the public to vote for more than members of the House of Representatives would eventually lead to the "uninformed, overly emotional public" to elect a demagogue.

You can say this is due to corporatism, which is often true as well, but gov't regulation is required for natural monopolies.

This is to avoid issues like the early railroad boom where they hugely overbuilt, a lot of them went under and/or eventually coalesced into a few monopolies, which needed regulation to prevent them squeezing their customers to death.

The best markets are sensibly regulated. It's a balance, not a binary.

Maybe they can, but they just as often don't. How much 'waste and useless things' do you think is at Microsoft or Google, yet is financially insulated due to their outrageous success elsewhere.

I would argue that replacing a private company that performs a critical government function poorly is actually more difficult than eliminating and reforming an agency like USAID or ICE.

Canada and Mexico will be happy to buy some of your failed states.

All the new HOV lanes around DC are public-private partnerships with flex tolls that are paid by the mile. And have revenue protection for the private entity built in.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund

Unfortunately, there isn't enough competition for this to be true. In many markets the largest incumbents are able to build a moat to stop smaller, smarter companies from competing. Sometimes this is regulatory capture, but it can also be that the market is a natural winner-take-all market, and in that case well-thought-out regulation can be necessary to enforce competition.

Venture capitalists shy away from funding companies that want to compete in a well established market. They view it as a race to the bottom with no huge payout.

Once a company is large and well established, it can be as bloated and inefficient as any government, and it will extract rent with it's IP, real-estate, and means-of-production for decades before it has to worry about failure.

I (and many others) have worked for, contracted for, interacted with, and/or closely observed government for decades. The only “reflexive” thing here is your argument that people who disagree with the you are the victims of propaganda.

You can certainly quibble with the details on how to deliver government efficiency (and I highly encourage people to sincerely scrutinize any efforts to do so - it should produce better results), but there are good and valid reality-based reasons that the “DOGE” mission has broad support.

Government is what we make it. A snapshot in time of your own experience does not define government and its capabilities.

If you want to use the "private sector lense" (which I do not think is valid for a govenenent bureaucracy), there's a reason why when I've participated in M&A events, we would spend a year doing due diligence and understanding the organizational and financial structure before initiating an event.

By haphazardly doing these kinds of initiatives without even understanding regulations and laws means any potential savings will be burnt in litigation and cleaning up messes.

Having an government organization underfunded and understaffed to fulfill its mission leads to more waste, both on the public and private side.

For example, the solution isnt to fire employees, it is to simplify the tax code.

That doesn't follow at all. Plenty of cost and waste arises while carrying out things that are solidly within the scope of a federal government in the eyes of belief system but anarchism and other forms of extreme heterodoxy. To "provide for the common defense" is literally in the Constitution, yet the DoD is a black hole of funding, while soldiers eat powdered eggs on base.

Exactly!

If you want to actually improve governance (and we really should because it is in fact often quite dysfunctional), you don't come in with the notion that it is intrinsically rotten to the core and the very idea of governance is flawed by nature.

You start by motivating people to improve. Which you don't do by accusing them of graft, corruption and incompetence.

It's all very disingenuous.

So if there were policy and organizational changes they wanted to make, they now have the power to do it, through passing laws.

But they're not doing that. Which really draws attention to the fact that it's not the manner in which government is being run that is a problem to them. It's government itself.

I'm not sure what you mean by the following statement:

>manner in which government is being run that is a problem to them. It's government itself.

Where are you drawing the distinction? I imagine someone could disagree with both what government does and what it is.

If all you have is insinuations and hearsay... Well, can't help you.

But one does not run a decent poultry farm by putting foxes in charge of the hen house.

Sure, maybe there is broad support for making government more efficient, but that is not in any way what Elon Musk is trying to do. So if there is broad support for DOGE those people are entirely wrong to believe they are aligned with Elon, and entirely wrong about supporting DOGE as the means to achieve their goals.

That being the case, these same people cannot be trusted to understand our government and how it functions and where the inefficiencies are. If you support the DOGE mission you do not actually support making the government more efficient, so alluding to that support is a red herring. Worse than a red herring, it shows that their anti-government views are not based in reality and facts.

"To the board: if you have this level of distrust for my management, you should fire me immediately. This request is out of line, and shows great disrespect for our employees as well as myself. If you are dissatisfied with the information you receive about the company's operations and performance, you can talk to me and my staff about that. I will not allow you to display such callous disregard for the people under my leadership."

You would write "Ask HN: my company has thousands of employees, a board member showed up in Slack and told everyone to write him a weekly summary, or we'll be fired, what to do?" and everybody would be like "WTF that's beyond stupid, name the company, also it's time to polish your resume!" yada yada.

Don't be obtuse.

And it’s not the board that send the emails, it’s a committee created by the board.

It’s unclear whether OPM has the authority to order employees to do anything.

The real way to do this. If it was what they actually wanted to happen was for the president to issue an executive order requiring everyone to logon to a secure site and fill out a form. Then give some kind of reasonable deadline that makes allowances for people on PTO or leave.

If a board wants something done, they can urge the CEO to implement it, but they do not hold unilateral power to dictate internal operations. They can vote to remove the CEO if they feel that they aren’t producing the desired result, but again, this is an indirect action.

DOGE are not the boss of most (any?) government departments. Its entire purpose, legally, is to improve software: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...

So once again, who are they to ask this, legally? Who are they to fire employees from other departments who rightfully deny this request?

What a wild take!

Only some of sooo many reports all over the media 5-6 days ago that you somehow missed:

"Key US agencies tell staff not to answer Musk email on what they did last week"

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0qrj20g5vo

"Elon Musk’s Federal Worker Emails: Agency Leaders Can Decide If Employees Must Reply, White House Says"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/02/25/elon-mu...

And the latest from today:

"Some government employees are instructed — again — to not respond to 5 things email as Musk doubles down"

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/5-things-email-nati...

They answer directly to the President. The email was sent by someone at OPM who also answers directly to the President.

The President has issued no formal orders regarding these emails. He did issue an executive order telling employees to comply with DOGE requests but this email came from OPM not DOGE.

There whole thing is an unclear clusterfuck.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/27/opm-firing-probatio...

> A judge ruled Thursday that the Office of Personnel Management — the central human resources office for the federal government — broke the law when it ordered other federal agencies to terminate thousands of “probationary” employees.

> “OPM does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees within another agency,” the judge said.

Once again, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

This is entirely false. This is so incredibly false that I am actually shocked you were willing to post it. It is hard for me to imagine anything more absurd and untrue someone could have said about this topic. I tremble with fear thinking about what your media diet must look like in order for you to believe this absolute nonsense.

(Edit: I accidentally pulled this from a different article not about 18F, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/02/24/musk-doge-fe... . I believe my broader point still true, but I'll elaborate more below.)

This email came AFTER thousands of layoffs!

You have implied every laid-off employee was given a chance to reply to the email and didn’t, which is contrary to TFA.

2nd “what did you do” email came Friday, 28, Feb.

1st “what did you do” email came Saturday 22 Feb.

Some other points:

* The second email came "late Friday" and the layoffs happened hours later at 1 am on Saturday, so it's not reasonable to count the second email as a warning or genuine attempt to find the "good" employees. I'm guessing it was just blasted out and happened to land in their inboxes before the firing notice did.

* Based on https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/general-services-ad... it appears the entire 18F unit was cut, so this doesn't seem targeted or predicated on email responses. Also, I'm not a leader, but if 100% of my organization didn't comply with an order, cutting them all is probably a much less effective decision than trying to meet them half-way. I guess if they've truly been doing nothing for years, there would be no loss, but that seems unlikely to be true in most cases including 18F's.

* Your initial comment appeared to be speaking generally on DOGE cuts, so it is fair for us to be responding accordingly. 18F seems to have been pretty small, but part of the reason this story is interesting is everything else DOGE is doing. As we've said, plenty of cuts happened before and independent of any email. Personally I'm doubtful that responding does much, but I'd be interested in any reporting on employee's experiences or what DOGE is saying about responses and how it affects their decisions.

Like I said above, I don't think TFA mentioned 18F's responses and there's not really a good reason to assume that the layoffs were due to no response.

They were asked first last last week. And then again on Friday.

——

> According to Politico, the emails — prompting employees to list their weekly accomplishments by Monday — were widely distributed across multiple agencies, including the State Department, the IRS, and the NIH.

I’m not making this shit up…

If the real purpose, as Musk later stated, was to see who would respond and who would not, with no consideration of content, why deceive? Be direct: "This is a test of government employee email deliverability and responsiveness. Please reply to this email when you receive it. An empty reply is fine, you do not need to put anything in the email."

If you want to know what people are working on, you work with the management chains because those are the people whose job it is to know what their people are working on. You take your time to dig into the data, talk to people at all levels, understand the structure and the work. This request, in the way and fashion it was made, shows an incredible lack of disrespect, distrust, and disregard for federal employees across the board. If I were a government employee and received that mail, I would be unable to avoid expressing my own disrespect and distrust in my reply.

These emails sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy where government fails to serve the people. Some people leave public service. Others stay but are disillusioned and checked out because they know their actual job performance no longer matters, the whims of a billionaire who voted with his wallet to make himself co-president can destroy their livelihood at any moment. Over time, you have people who are unable to leave and thus will do what they're told out of fear, and unqualified loyalists who just do what they're told.

I can never know what I’d do when faced with a position where I believed some of my budget was going to pay dead and inactive employees, and where members of the management chain were insubordinate and unwilling to help identify the issue and even complicit. I’d guess I’d just fire them all. Is that more humane?

At the team level, that is of course quite reasonable.

Doing this from a top-down approach in an organization at any real scale is fucking insane.

Reductions in force due to mission/budget/etc. changes, etc., which are based on seniority, not firings, which are (where civil service protections apply) exclusively for documented misconduct or incompetence and have due process protections.

It’s true that private industry (at least outside of unionized workplaces) leverage at-will employment to blur the line between mission/budget-based staffing reductions and for-cause firings, but the civil service isn’t at will and the line is a sharp legal distinction.

And yet you act like he is.

Who is he to order DoD or DoJ employees to write this email?

It doesn’t matter either way. The President has the authority to order employees to perform certain tasks but he has to do it through proper channels.

OPM doesn’t have the authority to order non-OPM employees to perform specific duties. They never have in the past. And the President has issued no executive orders stating that OPM has this authority now.

Is bureaucrary inevitable? A side effect of organizational psychology?

I have no clue.

But until someone divines a better way to coordinate humans, we just have to suck it up.

Looking at federal spending as a percentage of GDP [1] it seems we've been hovering around 20% for most of post-WW2. There was a huge spike for COVID and a smaller spike for the GFC. (It was pretty surprising this chart doesn't also show a huge spike for the response to 9/11.)

Pre-2020 spending was ~20% of GDP, pre-2018 was more like ~18% - 19%.

There's definitely more government spending than there used to be.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

Which is the original definition of the "Deep state" until it was hijacked by conspiracy theorists and Republicans who do bad shit.

These are defensible positions based on various world views, but they should not be accepted automatically. But I see here and other places people speaking as if this is just "obvious fact."

This was not the case in the past. Civic duty, the need for a functioning civil service, the notion of a commonwealth and/or social contract, etc are all foundational notions coming out of the enlightenment and were at least formerly mainstream.

The Ayn Rand types have always been around. And they're welcome to their positions. I'm concerned about how we get here now that this is a default position for people to take in North American society. I certainly don't agree with it. And I suspect if you force the majority of "mainstream" people to go through the arguments piece by piece, they wouldn't either.

I'd also argue that decades of corroding the public service's effectiveness through economic and ideological warfare has in fact made the public service look like exactly the thing its enemies claim it is. If you make the civil sector into a partisan battle, and play games with its funding, and spread cynicism about its motives... surprise you're going to get a partisan, inefficient, and cynical public service.

I remember when this was considered essential to being an American Citizen. We had classes on this in K-12.

Sometime in the last decade or so, it's become synonymous with "communist."

Which is pretty rich, considering what's going on, these days.

Both Abe Lincoln and Joe McCarthy are doing 3200 RPM, right now. That's pretty crazy.

So, no, it's not "communist" to advocate a functioning civil sector.

I was raised in the Cold War "Red Menace" days, and Civic Duty was considered "Red-Blooded American." My father[0] was in the CIA. He was a Harvard LLB, and could have been quite wealthy, but chose what he considered his Civic Duty, as a career (which wasn't really rewarded well).

I've never been particularly extreme, myself (very centrist -a vanishing species), but Civic Duty has always been important to me, and to my family, for generations.

That no longer seems to be the case.

[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm

And yet every single time Communists (Lenin included) have gotten into power...

(I don't throw the baby out with the bathwater though. There are theoreticians who have added a lot more nuance here, especially Poulantzas)

"Gotcha" hypocrisy arguments about personal behaviour I don't think are great taken from either left nor right.

Which, perhaps ironically, shows that welfare works as intended, even for morons that want to see it dismantled.

The goal of any profit seeking company selling to the government is to extract as much value as possible. The goal is not just to provide X service which was initially requested at a price that undercuts your competition. The goal is to win the contract for X for year 1, and then to under-deliver it in a way that the customer is basically forced to buy X for year 2, because it would be a massive lift to shift to a different service, but probably the customer needs to buy Xv2 to actually accomplish anything and by the way Xv2 works best if you also buy services Y and Z. Perhaps you do some "study" to determine that actually the problem is larger than what the customer initially described and several other expensive problems must be tackled to fully solve it. Efficient use of tax-dollars to solve the problem within the scope described is not the goal of government contractors. These companies grade themselves based on their revenue and margins, not on what they deliver to the tax payers. They're profit-seeking companies and they do just that.

By contrast, when government agencies are working well, they do what they're chartered to do by Congress. Whether that goal is good or not may be a matter of perspective (e.g. do we need a separate SEC and CFTC and CFPB? Could there be a single financial products/services regulator?) but to the degree their stated missions are incoherent, that's at least partly a failure of Congress, which the people have an indirect way of correcting.

Private sector entities can have less “dead wood” because it is easier to get rid of people, and because there is a stronger incentive to do so - reducing salary/wage expenditure increases profit. Yes there will always be some in both, but having worked in both public and private sectors, you see more of it in the public sector.

A few days ago I was talking to the employees of a homelessness charity at a social event, one of whom was telling me he felt NGOs waste money more than for-profit businesses, but not as much as the public sector. The reason he said it, was his employer was still paying rent on an office building despite it being uninhabitable due to mould and water damage - my question was if the building was uninhabitable why not cancel the lease, surely that would give justifiable grounds to do so, and then they’d have more money to spend on the homeless (or, he added, pay their employees more)

It is incredibly hard to understand what people are doing, and how that works out in a complex organization!

The effort and likelihood of reasonable success is a precondition for your argument.

I have been in a lot of companies, and I have seen soooo much useless busy work. Including my own well-paid IT consultant job, not infrequently.

Employees and managers on all levels try very hard to justify their existence. When they are under-employed they may also start looking for new projects themselves, which the next level of management is okay with because it appears that they are doing something useful, and they don't have to deal with that problem.

Overall, I will claim that your argument is far too simplistic and ignores the complexity of humans and their organizations.

Its not though, its the same layers of documentation, paperwork, upper management approvals, legal and HR approvals. The only exception being blatant policy violations like drug use, etc. where immediate dismissal can be done.

If you are talking about mass layoffs, for large corporations they still have to file paperwork for the WARN act, look at laws in various states around employment, get legal, HR, etc. involved.

I've seen both mass layoff and single individual layoff first hand and the only thing that might be different with Federal employees is a union. And in that case a union operates mostly the same if its serving a large corp or a government entity.

What we’re missing is a willingness/ability to break up overreaching corporations and states. We used to be better about it - see 19th-century Europe, especially France - but fighting back obviously has costs.

Centralized power isn’t great at supporting human life, but it’s very good at dominating human life. So large corporations and states have been bedfellows and dominated us for the last century or so by greatly elevating the cost of actually fighting back against their united power.

Yes, well said. Also, when you are serious about trying to make it more efficient, you need to understand how things work and why and what incentives are in place and how that relates to what the stated purpose is, and a bunch of other things. You can't come in and make random cuts over the course of a few days and expect things to go well.

It's guaranteed the federal government is going to have waste and be very difficult to change because you cannot let it fail.

For example, the only way not to waste any food whatsoever, is not to eat. It is inevitable there will be some small portion of food wasted.

Chasing perfect efficiency is a fool's errand, since humans are not perfect.

Just off the top of my head here’s a list of what that it means to run something like a business: enshitification, make everything a subscription, policies implemented by bots that can not be appealed, dark pattern UI, force people to give up their data by saying it’s necessary and then sell their data, train AI on copyrighted data if it means a snowball’s chance in hell that you can fire your employees, but do this only after spending decades harassing people who think there should essentially be a global library (call it “piracy!”), customer’s don’t own or control their devices, make healthcare about profit, give bailouts to businesses that simply were bad at their core competencies, and I could go on… so could anyone else on HN.

The truth is there is simply more to life than the bottom line, but that no longer stands to be the case when you run the country like a business… because that is the point of the business (the bottom line). Regardless, even if you believe the contrary, that there is nothing else in life beyond the bottom line, then the question remains at how many businesses are simply awful at what they purport to do.

Why anyone would want to exchange the system that has created the most prosperous nation in history for the likes of those who can only compete by not charging for their product is beyond my comprehension. Something tells me though that the issue at hand is not that we, as in the USA, are lacking in prosperity but something deeper and that’s the real reason why everyone’s searching for change.

I won’t be the one to say what it is, as I’d much rather hear what other people think, but I do want to beg the question. Perhaps there is a deeper problem, and perhaps we’re being guided to embrace a solution that will actually make things much worse for most.

It's even harder to reach a certain type of "thinker" or "skeptic" who sees such a dividing line between private orgs and governmental orgs because they already style themselves as being critical or intellectual.

Some government entities are great, really efficient, some seem nearly like startups.

Some are nearly all deadweight. A majority of the senior older folks working for in one of the state governments, would eat breakfast, read the newspaper, have lunch, and then try to do something for a couple of hours before going home. I was rather shocked.

I was less so when I encountered it in other places.

The government is an enormous group of entities. Some work well, most I think work ok, and some are horrors. (from a taxpayer perspective, not from the people who work there s perspective)

There is a lot of dead weight in the private sector. The worst examples I have encountered are places where nepotism is king. Older companies seem to accrue dead weight over time. Especially with strong unions¹,

But at some point some new CEO or some such makes attempts to clean house, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I am a huge supporter of unions and I think they are one of the only ways to try to get the US back on track again if enough people are unionized. BUt that is not a silver bullet either.

They were paying $300/hr for a fresh out of college grad working on their first project. The money was allocated, so they didn’t care how much it cost. Anyone with any motivation left employment by the state and became a contractor for 5-10x what their salary was when working for the state. It was disgusting.

Meanwhile in the private sector, companies or deoartments that don’t make money cease to exist after a while. The government can bankroll a failed department with negative outcomes to their purpose indefinitely (and then get more money for to fix their own broken outcomes).

I’m not proposing solutions, and I have recently worked with entrenched utility monopolies with the same segment capture behave the same way. There are, however, significantly more efficient private companies operating at larger scale than some governments.