Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to Lead Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

"The announcement of Ramaswamy and particularly Musk, who leads companies with existing, lucrative government contracts, raises immediate questions about potential conflicts of interest"

Absolutely no conflict of interest, between this and SpaceX. You can bet that he will try to cut grants and any programs designed to boost competition in rockets & space.

So I've listened to Vivek in interviews, and its clear to me at least that he

1) Doesn't like poor immigrants, considers them a net drain on national resources. 2) Believes that the profile of a desirable immigrant is Educated, English Speaking, Westernized (As far as American civics/ideals are concerned). 3) Doesn't think Americans are culturally capable of upskilling and retooling to bring back the semiconductor industry.

So given the above. What does his appointment spell for the tech industry. Do we expect an uptick in H1b-visa workers? Are we onshoring the semiconductor industry in the US?

Also primary source (interview): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

What I love about this is that it has a defined mission and an expiration date. Everything should have this. Instead once they accomplish their original mission their only goal is to survive and the best way to do that is to grow and manage more things unrelated to the original goal.

I’m not sure DOGE is successful but the concept of creating a program where the goal is to delete itself by accomplishing a specific mission by a specific time is great.

It's a nice idea because there's certainly a lot of inefficiency in the federal government, however I'm skeptical a separate external commission of outsiders (no matter how smart and motivated) will be able to accomplish much in the ~6 months it will exist. Senior career bureaucrats inside large federal agencies are apex grand masters of manipulation, camouflage and political hostage-taking. They'll deploy malicious compliance, weaponized policy farming and media leaks in ways so viciously devious it'll make Alien Xenomorphs look like Care Bears.

Does Elon need to divest his business holdings to run a government agency that can directly affect his investment?

What's the difference between this and the GAO? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...

Javier Gerardo Milei (President of Argentina) has managed to do this simply by eliminating entire agencies.

This will simply be an opportunity to further their political aims by de-funding things they don’t like: FBI investigated trump for illegally retaining secret records. I guarantee there will be a review of their funding. EPA gets in elons way by requiring that he not poison wildlife and people. That agency will be axed or gutted or beheaded.

Starve the beast has been a republican strategy for decades. It doesn’t mean lower spending or financial prudence. It means starve the government programs you don’t like because they conflict with your ideology.

Note that trillions of dollars of spending on weapon systems is off the table. Things like the Abrams tanks the army doesn’t want or need. The trillion dollar boondoggle of the f35 1.7 trillion to upgrade nuclear weapon systems (the only purpose of which is to eliminate all human life)

This will be the biggest shit-show our country has ever seen. It’ll be an austerity program run by insane ideologues. We’ll be luck if it’s just a joke. But it’ll probably lead to a recession by July of 2025.

The government is going to be brutally gutted like Twitter. Our nation’s deep institutional knowledge destroyed for no good reason. Sad.

As in do(d)ge Tesla cars after Musk removes all safety regulations for self driving cars?

R U shittn me?!

DOGE?

Of all things?

Such pork-barrels. Much wow!

( https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=dogecoin&iax=images&ia=imag... )

If any entity needs some effort put into process streamlining and efficiency, it's the US government. But, seriously... Why, oh why, did it have to be called "DOGE"?

if the focus is actually eliminating “fraud and improper payments” then i’m all for it. but i don’t expect they’ll try to or be able to accomplish anything that practical.

I’ve already nicknames this the “Department of Government Efficiency Department” in my head.

Original announcement: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1134728848747...

Elon runs an efficient and innovative business off of government contracts. He is probably the right person to define what those contracts should look like.

Cost-plus is garbage.

Once, I mentioned to a friend that if you were to list all US counties by average income, the two northern Virginia counties would be in the top 5. He said 'that's because the government has never had a recession.' I guess that might finally happen soon, and if it does, a lot of resentful people are going to have schadenfreude at rich bureaucrats losing their jobs.