Government Efficiency (6 Viewers)

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RobF

RobF

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I think this topic deserves its own thread, both to discuss generally the topic of government efficiency, and specifically the so-called 'Department of Government Efficiency' and the incoming Trump administration's aims to "dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies".

The announcements have been covered in the The Trump Cabinet and key post thread, but to recap, Trump has announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will work together on a not-actually-an-official-government-Department of Government Efficiency, which is intended to work with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to "drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before," with the 'Department' to conclude its work "no later than July 4, 2026."

Musk has previously said that the federal budget could be reduced by "at least $2 trillion", and Ramaswarmy, during his presidential campaign, said he would fire more than 75% of the federal work force and disband agencies including the Department of Education and the FBI.
 
So today in an op/ed in WSJ penned by Musk and Vivek, they laid out their outline for what the "Department of Government Efficiency" (which isn't an actual department or even anything formally within the federal government - it's just an advisory to the president) plans to accomplish.

This includes:
- Identifying the minimum number of employees each agency needs to accomplish its required functions (so they can get rid of the rest): a task that will examine each thing every agency does to identify where agencies are carrying on tasks and programs that are no longer authorized or funded, and (using computer analysis) which will then allow them to known who is needed and who isn't;
- Reduce the federal workforce by precipitating voluntary resignations from employees through (1) demanding they be in a federal office five days a week, ending Covid-era telework arrangements, and (2) moving offices away from Washington, DC and accepting resignations of those that don't want to move.

It's so clueless it would be cute if it weren't also likely to be arbitrary and stupid. First, the process of identifying the minimum number of employees each agency needs to accomplish its required functions by examining everything an agency does to match up with required authorization is a massive undertaking. It's honestly not a bad idea in theory, but this isn't work that a computer can do - federal authorization is a morass of programmatic statutes, regulations, and appropriations laws, that can be difficult for lawyers to decipher much less a dang algorithm. And then, after they identify those programs and impacted employees, they will then go to Trump and OMB to begin the work of cutting them out through regulatory change and executive orders. They could go agency by agency to make it more digestible, but it's very likely that the process is going to be massive, heavily resource intensive, and come to arbitrary, flawed conclusions that result in litigation.

The other element of the plan seems equally ignorant as to what they're actually proposing to do. First, the assumption that teleworking employees aren't working is stupid. But more importantly, ending teleworking policies and requiring federal workers to commute to work (that alone is quite a recommendation from an alleged 'efficiency' task force) as a tool to push federal employees out fails to account for the fact that the work they were doing still has to get done. A company choosing to downsize its workforce can make tradeoff analysis about reduced output and the relative results on the balance sheet: you can get leaner and maybe output is less but the cost savings are even greater, so your bottom line is better. It doesn't work that way with government - if you start having less output, the stakeholders in those programs are going to feel that impact. And unlike in a business environment where you can increase pay and bonuses to those you remain to get them to increase their output to make up the slack, that's not really available in the federal workforce.

"Moving federal agencies away from Washington" is an even sillier way to make the government more efficient - relocating a federal agency has got to be massively expensive, is that really going to be a serious proposal?

But what's even more curious is the macro impact. There's about 2.3 million federal employees - and a majority of them are skilled workers from various kinds of engineers and scientists, to office administrators, and professional ranks like lawyers, accountants, and the like. We are currently at 4.1 percent unemployment, which is effectively full employment - it's foolish to presume (like the op/ed actually does) that hundreds of thousands of these workers are going to be easily absorbed into the private workforce.

And what's really the point of all of this? The federal agency budget is found in the discretionary spending section - it's about 26 percent of the budget. Sure, there's some fat in there but this approach is very likely to overdo it, if they're even able to do anything at all . . . but what's the real point? I think it's all about trying reducing the deficit impact of Trump tax cuts, particularly for large corporations and high-wealth individuals.

I dunno, I think they're biting off way more than they realize - coming in with their goofy smiles and plans for advanced technologies is great for op/eds in November. But this is a very big dog they're planning on wrestling. It bears noting here that neither Musk nor Vivek have ever worked a day in the federal government.





www.eenews.net

Musk, Ramaswamy publish plan to slash workforce

The leaders of President-elect Donald Trump’s rule-cutting team outlined their plans Wednesday in an op-ed.
www.eenews.net www.eenews.net
 
Musk is also still joining in dogpiles on random people:

(This MSN version of the article isn't behind a firewall)

This is also illustrative of how very, very, stupid he is. Essentially, someone tweeted about this particular worker, a director of climate diversification at the U.S. International Development Finance Corp, and he instantly jumped to the conclusion that this is a 'fake job'.

The thing is, to know it's not a meaningful job, you'd have to do what it actually is, who the person doing it is and how they're qualified and experienced, and what the benefits are to the US of that person doing that job. I think it's safe to assume he hasn't actually researched any of that, and you could speculate that he just saw the words 'climate' and 'diversification' and leaped to a stupid conclusion.

The article goes on to say a bit about the employee and position:

With engineering, business and water science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford, Thomas spent years doing field work in Africa and writing research papers such as one on a technology that can help extract water from air in arid countries, according to her past tweets.​
​
She eventually went to work as the agency’s director of climate diversification in 2023, when federal personnel records show she earned $172,075 a year.​
​
An agency official said the climate diversification portfolio is highly technical and is focused on identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.​
​
Now to me, that sounds like a highly qualified person doing some pretty important and increasingly essential work, given the increasing frequency and impact of extreme weather events and the importance of, y'know, food. It's entirely possible, and perhaps probable, that an objective assessment would find that this is work worth funding.

But it's clearly not going to be an objective assessment and I think it's very likely these demonstrably stupid people are going to reach some stupid, and potentially highly damaging, conclusions.

The question is what will happen with those conclusions. It's advisory. So a normal administration would dismiss them as, for example, wildly impractical, inviting litigation, and counter-productive, but I can think of a few reasons why that might not happen:

1) The administration isn't remotely normal.
2) Politically, they'd lose face with their fanatics; they've made a big deal out of this, if they then turned around and went, "We're not going to do any of that," that might be a tough sell. They may not care of course, but that brings us to:
3) There's potentially a lot of money to be made 'dismantling the federal bureaucracy', where that actually means, "transferring a lot of work and money to the private sector, specifically our part and our cronies' part of the private sector."

So I think for a host of bad reasons - including but not limited to greed, retaliation, hubris, and stupidity - they'll probably do something. But whether it'll be a token, "look, we built that wall!" where the wall is actually a short bit of fencing, or something a lot more damaging, I think that's hard to say.
 
He’s mentally unstable and purportedly a drug abuser. I have a hard time seeing anything he touches having a positive outcome. He also seems emotionally stunted, like he never emotionally advanced beyond middle school.
 
This entire brouhaha is an example of the failure of consultancy/media/industrial complex.

An entire segment of business has been created called consultancies. The business media has pumped up consultancies as actually having value. Basically, consultancies contribute nothing to improving business because the lack institutional knowledge of the businesses they claim they can help.

The same applies to Musk and Ramaswamy.
 
IMG_9230.jpeg
 
MTG in charge of or overseeing anything is bat shirt crazy
======================================


Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been tapped to lead a House subcommittee connected to the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has named her targets for investigation and defunding. They include: NPR, "toilets in Africa," "sex apps in Malaysia," sanctuary cities, and the Pentagon.

In a Sunday interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo, Greene said America has been "really spoiled for a long time," calling the federal government "one of the worst abusers of American's tax dollars and the American people's trust."

She promised to comb through "every single government department, program, grant programs, contracts" to identify what she deems as waste.

"When we look into a deep dive into this massive problem that's caused America to be 36 trillion dollars in debt, we're going to have to go into all kinds of buckets. And that's how I'll be separating things on the oversight subcommittee on DOGE," she said.............


www.rollingstone.com

MTG Calls America 'Spoiled,' Threatens to Defund NPR and 'Toilets in Africa'

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene vowed to investigate “every government department, program, grant programs, contracts” to identify what she deems waste.
www.rollingstone.com www.rollingstone.com
 
Optimus Prime said:
MTG in charge of or overseeing anything is bat shirt crazy
======================================


Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been tapped to lead a House subcommittee connected to the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has named her targets for investigation and defunding. They include: NPR, "toilets in Africa," "sex apps in Malaysia," sanctuary cities, and the Pentagon.

In a Sunday interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo, Greene said America has been "really spoiled for a long time," calling the federal government "one of the worst abusers of American's tax dollars and the American people's trust."

She promised to comb through "every single government department, program, grant programs, contracts" to identify what she deems as waste.

"When we look into a deep dive into this massive problem that's caused America to be 36 trillion dollars in debt, we're going to have to go into all kinds of buckets. And that's how I'll be separating things on the oversight subcommittee on DOGE," she said.............


www.rollingstone.com

MTG Calls America 'Spoiled,' Threatens to Defund NPR and 'Toilets in Africa'

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene vowed to investigate “every government department, program, grant programs, contracts” to identify what she deems waste.
www.rollingstone.com www.rollingstone.com
Click to expand...
I don’t really see a problem with someone taking a look at government waste, fraud and abuse with the goal of looking for ways to operate government more efficiently and effectively.

But there is a way to go about that process so that the solution isn’t worse than the problem to begin with. There are people who do this kind of thing for a living. Professionals. Not politicians. They have no axe to grind. They analyze and make recommendations. It’s a process. An orderly process.

That is what I would like to see. I’m not interested in someone welding an ideological axe to programs they don’t like. That doesn’t mean there won’t be cuts. There probably will be. But at least there is a basis and a reasoning behind that decision.
 
Optimus Prime said:
MTG in charge of or overseeing anything is bat shirt crazy
======================================


Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been tapped to lead a House subcommittee connected to the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has named her targets for investigation and defunding. They include: NPR, "toilets in Africa," "sex apps in Malaysia," sanctuary cities, and the Pentagon.

In a Sunday interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo, Greene said America has been "really spoiled for a long time," calling the federal government "one of the worst abusers of American's tax dollars and the American people's trust."

She promised to comb through "every single government department, program, grant programs, contracts" to identify what she deems as waste.

"When we look into a deep dive into this massive problem that's caused America to be 36 trillion dollars in debt, we're going to have to go into all kinds of buckets. And that's how I'll be separating things on the oversight subcommittee on DOGE," she said.............


www.rollingstone.com

MTG Calls America 'Spoiled,' Threatens to Defund NPR and 'Toilets in Africa'

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene vowed to investigate “every government department, program, grant programs, contracts” to identify what she deems waste.
www.rollingstone.com www.rollingstone.com
Click to expand...
Toilets in Africa and sex apps in Malaysia seem like legitimate targets, but those shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath or document as NPR, that is one of the best remaining news sources. It may seem left of center, but that's because the truth is left of center, since the right is infested with lies. Simply telling the truth seems left. NPR will survive without federal funds, since it is a very small share of its budget, due to corporate, endowments and individual contributions, but it is despicable to undermine such a national treasure. PBS gets a slightly larger share, so it would be hurt even more, but so much of PBS is non-political children's and artistic programming, that it is also a treasure.
 
Why is this even a thing? So that we can give more tax breaks to the super wealthy and corporations?
Warren Buffet recently said that if the super wealthy and corporations pay their share of taxes, then we can cut into the national deficit since we will have a budget surplus. Jaime Dimon also says the same thing.
The US tax codes need to bec changed but neither party has the balls to touch that issue because they are paid for.
 
Lapaz said:
Toilets in Africa and sex apps in Malaysia seem like legitimate targets, but those shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath or document as NPR, that is one of the best remaining news sources. It may seem left of center, but that's because the truth is left of center, since the right is infested with lies. Simply telling the truth seems left. NPR will survive without federal funds, since it is a very small share of its budget, due to corporate, endowments and individual contributions, but it is despicable to undermine such a national treasure. PBS gets a slightly larger share, so it would be hurt even more, but so much of PBS is non-political children's and artistic programming, that it is also a treasure.
Click to expand...
I am indifferent to NPR but my question to you is this. If NPR can survive without federal funds, why shouldn’t it? I mean other news organizations and non profits survive without federal funds.
 
TampaJoe said:
I am indifferent to NPR but my question to you is this. If NPR can survive without federal funds, why shouldn’t it? I mean other news organizations and non profits survive without federal funds.
Click to expand...
:freak7:
The National Public Radio organization is not a private organization.

Public Broadcasting Act of 1967

Download the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, as amended, in PDF format. Subpart D — Corporation for Public Broadcasting Sec. 396. [47 U.S.C.
cpb.org cpb.org
 
DJ1BigTymer said:
:freak7:
The National Public Radio organization is not a private organization.

Public Broadcasting Act of 1967

Download the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, as amended, in PDF format. Subpart D — Corporation for Public Broadcasting Sec. 396. [47 U.S.C.
cpb.org cpb.org
Click to expand...
Yes it is.

Says so in the link.

“
(10) a private corporation should be created to facilitate the development of public telecommunications and to afford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.

(b) Establishment of Corporation; application of District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act—There is authorized to be established a nonprofit corporation, to be known as the "Corporation for Public Broadcasting," which will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government. The Corporation shall be subject to the provisions of this section, and, to the extent consistent with this section, to the District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act.”


Also this.

 
Sendai said:
Yes it is.

Says so in the link.

“
(10) a private corporation should be created to facilitate the development of public telecommunications and to afford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.

(b) Establishment of Corporation; application of District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act—There is authorized to be established a nonprofit corporation, to be known as the "Corporation for Public Broadcasting," which will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government. The Corporation shall be subject to the provisions of this section, and, to the extent consistent with this section, to the District of Columbia Nonprofit Corporation Act.”


Also this.

Click to expand...
They were created and privately owned by The United States. Their Board of Directors are appointed by POTUS.
 
DJ1BigTymer said:
They were created and privately owned by The United States. Their Board of Directors are appointed by POTUS.
Click to expand...
Not owned by the United States.

“Each local public television and radio station is independently owned and operated and can choose to be a member of PBS or NPR, but doesn't have to be.”

“WHAT IS THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING?

A private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, committed toproviding high-quality content and telecommunications services that are commercial free and free of charge.

WHAT DOES THE CPB DO?

The CPB manages the money that is appropriated for public broadcasting (currently around $450 million annually)”

DOESN’T THE MONEY JUST GO STRAIGHT TO PBS AND NPR?

No. PBS and NPR are independent entities, and they are NOT the only organizations that receive money from the CPB. Other distributors include American Public Television, The Independent Television Service, Public Radio Exchange, Public Radio International and American Public Media.”

www.pbs.org

How do federal $$$ get to your local station?

It's not that simple.
www.pbs.org www.pbs.org
 

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