It'd be nice if this were a solution to the problem. Instead, they're randomly ruining the lives of tons of families, killing american businesses, and completely kneecapping the ones who are "lucky" enough to remain. "This restaurant has mediocre food and service, burn it to the ground with everybody locked inside!"

They didn't say the entire workforce is essential and there are no redundancies. They said the way DOGE is approaching this isn't designed to effectively identify and deal with actual waste. There are already multiple instances of DOGE having to backtrack because they fired or tried to fire employees who are essential.

So why isn't the charitable interpretation that the system works well, there is even correction built into it, since they backtrack when necessary?

Do you think there are no costs to getting these things wrong?

If your boss fired you today and then called you up next week saying they'd made a mistake and offering you your old job back how charitable would you feel?

When funding for cancer research gets cut, do you think the studies that lost their funding can all suddenly pick up where they left off if funding comes back at some point in the future?

When jobs ensuring safety are cut, even if they're brought back, are you ok with the additional risk during the time period they're off the job?

There are all of those things. DOGE is not finding them. They aren't even trying to find them. There's a real problem (which is extremely minor, proportionally) that this regime is taking advantage of to take absolute control of the country.

> The cuts so far are at best rounding error

The budget is going to be messy. You're going to get a Liz Truss budget, which is definitely going to make a lot of the public unhappy.

> future bipartisan efforts

I think one effect of all this is creating a group of angry Democrats who, in a mirror of the Tea Party, will start primarying any Democrat who uses the word "bipartisan" as anything but a swearword.

yeah I predict that we are headed in four years for a hell of a pendulum swing and the republicans need to remember that any norm they violate, any law they break, all of the insane legal theories of a unbound executive they get passed by their pet supreme court justices will be used as precedent by their opposite to the fullest when that pendulum swing back to the left.

The only way to avoid that requires a lot of very angry people realizing that it's in their own interest to embrace their enemy. That literally never happens. So RIP to the way we were. If only more people valued institutions and heritage, rather than seeing America's value in dynamism singularly. Identity requires long term memory.

obviously some government employees are not providing value for money to the people because that’s just what happens in big organizations (public or private). The point being made by critics of DOGE is not “there’s no waste in the government” it’s that the DOGE goal is to gut government services, whether they’re wasteful or not is immaterial.

I think in addition to what they are doing, they should show a concrete example of say, a post office in some east cost bureaucratic wasteland. And go through everything from the paper cups in the coffee room to the logistics routes to the hiring practices and show how the waste creeps into every single nook and cranny. Then do a "rehab" and show the nominal and percentage increases while still moving the same number of parcels and junk mail.

That’s definitely be much better than what they’re doing but it’s too low-level to make big savings. The things which cost large sums usually go back to high-level policies. In the case of the post office, that’s the congressional mandate to pre-fund employee pensions - they have to pay in your full estimated decades of pensions costs before you retire, whereas normal pension plans assume the company won’t disappear the day you retire – and the expectation that they provide service in rural locations. That’s a public benefit, vital for many people, but the post office can’t book that public benefit on their financial ledger.

A more widespread one is also more familiar to most HN readers: governments need a ton of IT, like everyone else, but are prohibited from offering competitive salaries or hiring staff instead of engaging a few large contracting companies. That has the direct impact of doubling costs and increasing turnover, but even worse is the higher likelihood of failure caused by not having institutional knowledge and expertise: contracting only works when you can provide clear instructions and hold the vendor accountable, but that requires you to have staff capable of doing so. Some agencies have been able to recruit skilled people based on their mission, but those are many of the teams being gutted now and it’ll take many years of better governance to convince people to come back after seeing how their public-spirited predecessors were treated.

That doesn't sound terrible but honestly I don't think DOGE has the right staffing to do this. All the DOGE employees I've heard about are very young and come from programming backgrounds. Do they have any accountants? Anyone with experience in auditing or logistics? At best, any attempt to do what you suggested would end up like a bad reality show and I wouldn't expect long term improvement.

It doesn't need to be DOGE staff. With presidential intervention they could cut through the red tape and completely expose them. Showing the waste on paper is one thing, but going through an entire PO will help relate the concept to more people. An exemplar of waste and how it can be fixed.

I'm sorry, but that's not what OP said. OP didn't say anything about the essential-ness of the entire workforce. They solely spoke to the larger, well documented and endorsed by major SV players, plan to transform our government structure.