DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency

https://www.wired.com/story/doge-tts-fired/

by qwertox • 1 year ago

171 143 1 year ago

wired.com

ch71r22• 1 year ago

https://archive.is/01PIy

lordnacho6• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

Not every fence still has a use, but I hope they have a good think about what they're doing.

justinator4• 1 year ago

They didn't.

SamBam• 1 year ago

I think that they are having a good think about what they are doing, but I believe that, in cutting key agencies that protect consumers from corporations, their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country.

jrussino• 1 year ago

their personal goals are simply not aligned with the goals that would be helping the country.

When people express worry over superhuman-AI alignment on forums like this, I find myself wishing they'd shift focus to the fact that we actually already have a problem with the mis-alignment of super-human entities in the form of large corporations and the billionaires who control them. (And yes, governments too; the whole point of our democratic form of government is that it's supposed to keep that behemoth better aligned with the values and will of "the people".)

To me it seems obvious that keeping a misaligned super-AGI from destroying humanity and keeping billionares and large multinational corporations from destroying humanity with climate change in the long-term or just degrading our quality of life (via pollution, wealth inequality, etc.) in the short term are really just differences of degree and not of kind.

But we actually have the latter problem right now, and, as a bonus, if we can figure out better ways of aligning our carbon-based and economic-legal system "overlords" in the present maybe it helps point us toward a better way of aligning our potential silicon-based "overlords" in the future.

Kapura4• 1 year ago

well good thing we have inspectors general to make sure that people in the government are acting correctly!

oh wait

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_inspectors_...

killerteddybear• 1 year ago

Good example is the CFPB. If they destroy it return all the money to taxpayers as Elon is saying he is doing, it's about 2 dollars to each of us. In return, we have a largely unregulated banking system that can do things like charge structuring for credit cards and checking account to maximize fees or overdrafts in a frankly fraudulent manner. It will cost us billions of dollars as a society to not have those protections anymore. Not to mention things like forced subscriptions that are impossible to cancel that the CFPB has been working against.

I'm pretty sure I would pay 2 dollars to not have to deal with any of those consequences.

SmirkingRevenge2• 1 year ago

It's like hiring Cookie Monster to make the cookie factory more efficient.

He's just going to plant himself at the end of the conveyor belt of fresh cookies with his mouth open, and get rid of everything else.

Musk is going to try and entrench himself so much, that he'll never be able to countenance his opposition winning and removing him. Unless Trump dislodges him first, he's going to be a permanent problem.

dfltr• 1 year ago

The thing that frightens me is that the objective here is the explicit inverse of Chesterton's Fence: In dismantling these agencies, the DOGE team's intent is to cause the exact cascade of dysfunction that Chesterton warned about.

Elon Musk (and the billionaire class he represents) doesn't want a functioning CFPB because it doesn't serve him (or them). It will take a little while for them to fully sabotage the IRS and DOE as well, but they're working their way up to it.

smallmancontrov• 1 year ago

fully sabotage the IRS

Oh, I'm sure the parts that make sure I pay my taxes will function. But yeah, the parts that make sure Elon and Trump pay their taxes? If they aren't broken today, they will definitely be broken tomorrow.

ecocentrik• 1 year ago

They aren't going to dismantle the IRS, not when he and his friends are in a position to benefit from it.

drc372• 1 year ago

Elon's philosophy is the exact opposite. Remove 90% and see what really needs to be added back.

cguess• 1 year ago

The problem here is people die when those things are removed even for a few weeks or months. You don't get to "put back" security for SSN data when it's already been accessed by foreign governments. He's not doing this in good faith, he's convinced he's the smartest man in the world and should literally be a dictator.

coolKid7213• 1 year ago

Here's another chestertonism: There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths.

Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.

hiddencost• 1 year ago

People are already dying, and quite a few more will. You can't turn the clock back on that.

kemayo5• 1 year ago

..."can't put the clock back" doesn't literally mean that you can't change the time on a clock. It's referring to not being able to go back and change things that already happened.

This is true. There are things that, once done, cannot be undone. You can try to fix their consequences. You can change what you do going forward, so that the thing would not be done that way again. But you can't, say, un-kill an executed innocent.

richardw• 1 year ago

No. There are many things that are path dependent and much harder to fix if you do it wrong the first time. People resign and move on, and it can take decades to build up the skills again. For example: if Trump breaks Ukraine, how do you fix that later? Deals are signed. The war stops. China is now emboldened to have a shot at Taiwan.

lordnacho6• 1 year ago

Chesterton primarily meant that in terms of traditional morality or other things that have largely already been totally rejected, he denied the existence of divorce because it presumes the state can dissolve oaths which is just to reject the existence of oaths.
Artificial institutions that have existed for a matter of decades don't make sense to apply the fence idea to, that's more about things that have been timeless in humanity that we recently started to reject.

It matters a little bit what he originally meant, but not a whole lot. What we mean with the fence is simply that you should do a bit of due diligence before making changes. That applies to all sorts of systems, government or IT, or anything else.

kemayo5• 1 year ago

The most charitable interpretation is that Musk's doing what he did at Twitter -- wildly cutting back, and then backing off and repairing when he finds that something he threw away was actually necessary.

I'm not convinced that this is a good strategy when dealing with something with higher stakes than "posting dank memes", though. "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.

That is, as you said, sometimes the fence-that-is-inefficient-processes exists for a reason.

EDIT TO BE LESS SUBTLE BASED ON REPLIES: I think this is bad. Even in the most-charitable interpretation, it is bad. Particularly for the government, but even at Twitter it succeeded at making it smaller but approximately-nobody thinks Twitter is better now.

ravetcofx• 1 year ago

except when things break, actual people in the country get harmed, and "Repairing" in this case will be privatization

meowkit• 1 year ago

Its not really an interpretation- he has literally talked about this as his playbook dozens of times.

One step in the playbook is reduce - “if you dont break things 10% of the time then you are not reducing enough” is almost verbatim what he has said, and done, for all of his companies.

I strongly disagree with my fellow Americans that government systems should be immune to this process or that people will be harmed. This sensitivity to perceived harm is a problem in and of itself.

tbatchelli• 1 year ago

A key difference is that twitter has (had) users, and users can move to e.g. bluesky once twitter's CEO decides to wreck it. The US has citizens instead, not users, not customers, but citizens, and citizens can't move if they don't like what Elon is doing. There is no Bluesky equivalent of the USA, and citizenship is not a free market.

A country is not a private company in a free market. For some this is hard to understand.

outside1234• 1 year ago

The challenge is that he is following his values and not the values of the country.

The Twitter analogy is that racist and disinformation posts are perfectly fine to Musk so after gutting all of the teams looking after these things, he was perfectly fine with the large increase in both.*

We shouldn't expect a different outcome with his changes to the government. We should expect large increases in abuses by banks (because regulation was gutted), large increases in racism and disparity in Alabama public schools (because the Department of Education was gutted), etc. etc.

* https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-02-13/hate-speech...

Kapura4• 1 year ago

Why are we giving these people charitable interpretations any more? Elon Musk did a full on nazi salute at the inauguration rally; since then he and his cronies have extralegally tried to insert themselves inside the entire american government to cripple the regulations that prevent him and other techno-fascists doing exactly what they want with their effectively infinite money.

You need to call a spade a spade. Occam's razor is being held to the neck of this country.

moolcool• 1 year ago

Of course there's a lot of factors, but the people who defend his cutbacks at twitter often ignore just how crappy the platform has gotten under his relatively tenure.

oceanplexian• 1 year ago

The thing about Charleston's fence is you don't know why the fence was erected. But we do. The government created it, and the government can remove it.

A wild and ruthless cut would mean that the US Government would revert to a similar relative size it was in say, 1990. Back then Debt to GDP was about 60%, now it's over 120%, for measurably worse outcomes, wage stagnation, housing costs, healthcare, education, etc. One vocal group seems to think that we could solve it by spending more money and creating more programs. You know what they say about repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results.

SAI_Peregrinus• 1 year ago

"Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.

That depends on your perspective. I'm sure there are people out there who think that since social security goes to people who aren't economically productive that it's not a thing that matters. I disagree with those people, but defining what matters is critical, and for Musk & co "what matters" is only anything that enriches Musk & co.

ljm• 1 year ago

It's usually said in business that you should spend your first 100 days getting the lay of the land before you start making big decisions. It might even be more ideal to give it 12 months before you tear up the playbook and bring your own.

Obviously, for a government staffed with experienced people, you'll be working with people who know how things work, and an incoming administration will have spent plenty of time outlining a plan of action well in advance of coming into office.

Does that apply to a notorious shitposting edgelord like Musk who is storming around like a bull in a china shop and sees the US as his new plaything? I doubt it - I certainly doubt any level of thinking is involved.

skeeter20202• 1 year ago

This administration (at least) thinks they spent an entire term learning, and now ith a 4-year gap are "hitting the ground running". The people were promised "we will quicky change and fix everything"; this is "we will quickly change everything", declare mission accomplished and hope they get lucky or maybe the dropped words won't be noticed.

caminante2• 1 year ago

Without more color, aren't you guilty of "tearing down their fence?"

Seems like a forced meta critique.

fny• 1 year ago

And yesterday I learned they’re shielded from FOIA despite whatever transparency was promised.

crote• 1 year ago

I hope they have a good think about what they're doing.

They probably did, if you look at it from a perspective of deliberately ruining the government. It looks like they are trying to reduce the government to nothing more than the IRS. Everything else will either get permanently trashed (any kind of consumer protection), sold off for parts, or contracted out to a private company started by one of their buddies.

Yeah, it might result in a very chaotic transition period, but these people don't care. They are rich enough that it's not going to personally affect them, and in the end they'll end up even richer. The entire goal right now is to do so much damage that it is going to take decades to restore - if it's even possible at all.

eszed2• 1 year ago

They especially want to gut the IRS. Look at how understaffed their enforcement division has been, for years.

rsynnott• 1 year ago

I mean, it's not really a valid case of Chesterton's Fence if you're doing it _maliciously_. I don't _really_ buy the "they are merely terribly incompetent and demolishing a lot of Chesterton's fences", at this point.

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

It's a variation on "never change a winning team". Which is valid. As long as the team is winning. Doing more of the same is not going to fix things if it stops winning.

It's a problem with bureaucracies. They bloat. They grow. They never shrink.

Byzantine bureaucracies refer to the notion that this got out of hand shortly before the collapse of what remained of the Roman empire at that point. Bureaucracies are also sometimes referred to as Kafkaesque to indicate how nonsensical, illogical, and absurdist bureaucracies can become.

Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people. It's complicated, vast, and very change resistant. The task of doing something about that is so intimidating that no recent previous government has had the nerve to do anything significant about that. They all chickened out and instead just added their own layers of more bureaucracy to the mix. It's easier to add stuff to the pile than to take stuff away from it. So, after a few centuries of that, there's probably a lot of stuff there that barely makes sense to anyone.

The department highlighted in the article strikes me like a good example of a product of such a bureaucracy.

The article barely explains why this apparently very large, expensive, and richly staffed department exist, what it does, and why that is so important. It also fails to outline what kind of budget it has and what the intended purpose of that budget is.

I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing.

That chat bot that they highlight doesn't strike me as "key technology". Quite the opposite actually. The article raises more questions than it answers here. What was that thing supposed to do? Who was it for? Who backed/approved this? Why? How much did that cost? What else do people in that department do? All reasonable questions to ask.

bryanlarsen• 1 year ago

Anyway, the US federal bureaucracy is enormous. It employs massive amounts of people

At < 3 million people this is substantially under its peak and at about its level in the 1960's, and a smaller fraction of the workforce than pretty much everywhere. Wages are 0.9 per cent of the federal budget.

ModernMech2• 1 year ago

I can't really judge based on this article whether taking a sledge hammer to that department is a good thing or not. The article seems to suggest it isn't but I can't say it's very convincing.

Right, exactly. And neither can Musk, really. So at this point, the answer isn't to just go ahead and take a sledge hammer to it. The correct course would be to actually go through the Congress and ask those very reasonable questions you pose. But Musk doesn't even want to work with with the Congressional DOGE Committee he set up. That's highly concerning.

tmaly• 1 year ago

I wish there was a good solution to Chesterton's fence.

lfmunoz4• 1 year ago

Is this article written by AI? Seems poorly written, few real details and substance, short so that it is within its context window. More like trying to market instead of report.

dmazin2• 1 year ago

What are you talking about? Wired, Verge, 404 suddenly find themselves covering life-or-death stuff for the US, and they're doing a great job.

ripjaygn3• 1 year ago

No, they don't even mention that TTS hired 150 new employees just in the past year. It's all one sided partisan biased clickbait and FUD, just like all their stories. It's not journalism meant to inform.

largeLunchMeal• 1 year ago

It does say "This is a developing story, please check back for updates."

caminante2• 1 year ago

It's paywalled. Someone posted a snapshot [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037571

josefritzishere• 1 year ago

President Musk is clearing house. It kind of feels illegal though.

isx726552• 1 year ago

They keep claiming to find “fraud” but to me it just looks like spending on things they don’t like.

justinator4• 1 year ago

They're getting the fox out of the hen house by burning the hen house.

(also they're foxes too).

giarc2• 1 year ago

Bingo. What's amazing to me is how fast the sentiment can change by his follows (or Trumps followers). Musk simply tweets that "XYZ agency if criminal" and all of a sudden you see tons of comments across the internet that "XYZ agency needs to go" "It's been so corrupt for so long". These agencies have existed forever, but all of a sudden tens of millions of people have these opinions on it? They don't actually know the first thing about how it works, but because some billionaire with a large following says so, they believe it.

fx1994• 1 year ago

Make people unemployed and desparate so they will work for some other private company like Amazon or Tesla for pennies. It works fine in Russia, literally millions are volunteering to kill people in Ukraine for money, so why not try it in USA?

ck2• 1 year ago

Every time each one of these actions finally appears in front of a court, it is almost always stopped in whole or part.

There's a growing list I don't have handy but easy to google

I get part of the strategy is exhaustion and make sure no-one wants to ever work for federal government again but what exactly happens when they run out of agencies to destroy and refuse court orders to restore?

fncypants• 1 year ago

And what happens when they're successful even in part and we dump a lot of unemployed workers all at once into the job market in the private sector? Measured and calculated reform is one things. Smashing things without addressing what happens next is just kindergarten level stupidity.

But then again, maybe crashing the job market with masses of unemployed, which will drive down wages and labor bargaining power, is exactly their strategy.

6stringmerc• 1 year ago

Very good perspective and I’m genuinely curious how this - in time - may interact with the H1B / skilled worker Visa programs in the US. For all the discussions about re-training for workforce needs, I see a genuinely human conflict perhaps around the corner.

justinator4• 1 year ago

There's a growing list I don't have handy but easy to google

If you wanna talk about it, please make this list.

Unless your theory of compliance via exhaustion applies to you too.

And in that case they won. And we're all going to lose.

bodhi_mind• 1 year ago

https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal...

inciampati• 1 year ago

To date there is no evidence that any court order has been respected. The crisis continues.

dmazin2• 1 year ago

I am just praying for the day that Musk takes on the Pentagon.

They will destroy him. (There's a reason Bannon is egging him on to do it.)

And if they don't... well, Pentagon is one agency where we know the financial inefficiency is legendary.

drc372• 1 year ago

Actually, most of the items that an activist judge initially blocked have since been overturned and allowed to progress through higher-court judges.

freejazz3• 1 year ago

There's several judges that have made decisions adverse to Elon's actions and I'm not sure why you think they are activist aside from Elon's self-serving description of them. Where did you see that their decisions were overturned, I have not seen that anywhere. The last I did see on the issue is that Elon is calling for all of them to be impeached.

singleshot_• 1 year ago

Would you mind providing a caption for such an appeal that the administration has won? I’d love to read it. Right now I’m only finding the CA1 upholding the funding freeze, and CA9 is about to take up the birthright citizenship order.

ARandumGuy• 1 year ago

I get part of the strategy is exhaustion and make sure no-one wants to ever work for federal government again

It's difficult to tell what their strategy is. There's so much chaos going on that it's impossible to say for sure what the end game is. But we can make some guesses.

They could be assuming the supreme court overturns the lower courts, allowing them to do everything unopposed. They may be trying to overwhelm the system, allowing at least some stuff to get through. They may be trying to drive out federal employees, weakening the federal bureaucracy. Or they might just be idiots who are moving fast without stopping to consider the consequences of their actions.

Ultimately, regardless of their specific end goal, the best course to stop them is to try and slow them down at every opportunity. We may not be able to fully stop them, but the more we can slow them down, the more we can minimize the damage.

freejazz3• 1 year ago

Elon is calling for any judge that opposes his actions to be impeached.

dragonwriter2• 1 year ago

He can call for that all day, its not going to matter. A major reason they are relying on executive fiat protected by a passive Congress is that even a Republican Congress doesn't want recorded votes on most of their agenda, good luck getting their political retaliation through a process that takes a majority in the House followed by a supermajority that would require substantial Democratic support in the Senate.

keernan• 1 year ago

JD Vance has made clear they are following the pre-election script:

The Judiciary does not have the constitutional authority to compel the Executive to do, or stop doing, anything. They are simply going to ignore SCOTUS and, since SCOTUS has zero enforcement mechanism, there is nothing SCOTUS can do about it.

PS US Marshals are part of the Executive Branch.

kevin_thibedeau• 1 year ago

focusing on AI, automating different internal processes, and centralizing data from across the federal government.

So billions are going to be wasted with nothing to show for it in the end.

Rastonbury• 1 year ago

xAI and all his friends are going to have fat pockets at least!

pluc• 1 year ago

No billions will be wasted, Elon is gonna get a new lucrative contract.

Kapura4• 1 year ago

I mean, it won't be nothing; there will be craters where the government used to be. People will be studying exactly what the hell happened here for decades to come.

black_puppydog• 1 year ago

If only Elon knew that all he's building is the careers of generations of humanities researchers to come! (That is, assuming we can still afford luxuries like humanities studies once he's finished)

i_love_retros2• 1 year ago

It feels like america is being run by reddit memeing snickering schoolboys.

krapp3• 1 year ago

Because it is. The "government agency" which is the subject of this thread was named after a Reddit meme, and it's run by a redpilled cringelord shitposter who uses terms like "woke mind virus" and "shadow government," and some tech-bro incels who trade Nazi memes on Discord.

There is nothing about the American government that is serious anymore. The US is not a serious country run by serious people, it's a clownshow and a kleptocracy.

i_love_retros2• 1 year ago

I know.

I kind of wish people would pronounce it dee oh gee ee instead of doge just to piss of musk and ruin his pathetic joke

tflinton• 1 year ago

I'd go as far as say 4-chan rather than reddit, but yeah, pretty much.

SmirkingRevenge2• 1 year ago

And a dash of kiwi farms as well

demosthanos3• 1 year ago

It’s unclear how many people are being let go, but multiple sources tell WIRED that list could be upwards of 70 if not more. Prior, there were around 650 TTS employees.

So the worst case scenario that anyone can imagine numbers for is that this department gets hit with 10% layoffs. That's not fun for anyone involved, but it's also not exactly crisis mode yet, and it seems like there are bigger things that this administration is doing to focus our pitchforks on?

There's a very real risk of burning out people's ability to be indignant if we get up in arms about every obscure department that suffers moderate layoffs. Let's save our outrage for the really important things.

Kapura4• 1 year ago

To characterize this as a "department [getting] hit with 10% layoffs" is completely disingenuous. This isn't a department cutting staff; it's an unelected body going around and firing people out of the government for reasons spanning malice, cronyism, and corruption.

demosthanos3• 1 year ago

This executive branch department is cutting staff on the orders of the chief executive who is taking advice from a body he put together to find places to cut. They may have ulterior motives for giving that advice, but what is happening is technically perfectly legal because Trump is (unfortunately) the elected chief executive and is ultimately all of these people's boss.

I don't like Trump any more than you do, but mischaracterizing what is happening isn't helping the situation. The people who are pro-Trump or in the middle see through it, and the people who are already anti-Trump already agree with you.

bufferoverflow2• 1 year ago

Trump has been talking openly about starting DOGE during his campaign. People voted for it.

ripjaygn3• 1 year ago

TTS hired 150 new employees just in the past year but that's never mentioned in these "news" stories because biased "journalism".

seltzered_• 1 year ago

Since not everyone remembers the Great American Recession or the origins of Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), I link to a Nov. 2008 piece in Harper's magazine by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi "Protect Financial Consumers": http://archive.harpers.org/2008/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2008-...

"For most of the country’s history, state and lo- cal usury laws imposed modest consumer protec- tions by setting caps on interest rates and fees. But in 1978, a federal statute was used to bypass these laws. Creditors quickly rewrote the rules, issuing un- intelligible contracts that increased fees, penal- ties, and interest rates. The fragmented financial regulatory bodies that remain have operated as if their main goal were lender profitability."

[...]

"The ever-widening information imbalance between consumers and creditors has only made borrowers easier marks. In a Federal Trade Commission study conducted last year, for instance, nine in ten mort- gage customers examining relatively straightforward fixed-rate loan agreements could not figure out the up-front costs on the loan; half could not iden- tify the loan amount. Of all the borrowers who were sold subprime mortgages in the past five years, nearly 60 percent would have qualified for prime mortgages if brokers had offered them; the sub- prime mortgages carried so many rate escalators, prepayment penalties, and other traps that even would-be prime borrowers defaulted."

Elizabeth Warren back in this era was also famous for talking about the twin-income trap, here's a 2004 talk about 'The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A&feature=youtu.be

EcommerceFlow• 1 year ago

I read the entire article and it doesn't mention what this "key" US tech agency even does.

karaterobot• 1 year ago

I think they probably should have given it a sentence or two. Apparently the GSA does operational things like leasing office space for other agencies, purchasing supplies, buying vehicles, etc.

tim333• 1 year ago

It kind suggests that maybe some of what they do isn't that necessary and a 10% staff cut not so bad?

I looked on their website and it says they do digital.gov, and on that site there is stuff like

An introduction to digital governance. Understand how and why to implement digital governance
Case study At the General Services Administration (GSA), we operate a Digital Experience Executive Board, supported by an agency-wide Digital Council. The Board is composed of senior executives who provide high-level direction, and Council members coordinate implementation of digital initiatives within their business line. We also have an Enterprise Digital Experience team to coordinate enterprise improvements to our agency’s digital experience. Read more about digital governance at GSA.
We also defined the work of a website manager and identified one website manager for each digital property at GSA. Then, we updated their position descriptions... https://digital.gov/resources/an-introduction-to-digital-gov...

It doesn't sound that lean and mean.

alephnerd• 1 year ago

IMO, I'd ignore the AI part.

The really scary thing is FedRAMP is part of the TTS (the affected agency).

FedRAMP is the program used to procure Cloud and Cybersecurity services for federal agencies.

With TTS in flux, that means FedRAMP is in flux as well - which means tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in Cloud and Cybersecurity spend is on the line.

I have significant qualms about FedRAMP, but it was at least better than nothing.

FedRAMP was also one of the last tethers for the Cloud and Cybersecurity industry to remain in the US. Otherwise, the entire center of gravity is in Israel, India, and Eastern Europe (as I have mentioned multiple times).

cadamsdotcom2• 1 year ago

To anyone sad about this:

The alternative offered was Kamala Harris. Thanks DNC.

First-past-the-post voting practically guarantees a two party system emerges over time: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

The US gov has been worn way at for decades by unscrupulous people seeking power and made so unpleasant to work in that few young people want to go into political leadership - and those that do don’t get far enough to have impact (eg. Buttigieg).. hence, old ass presidents.

Truly impactful movers and shakers have easy access to capital in the US, can keep their companies and lives private, and achieve a very comfortable life. Why would anyone choose politics over that?

Finally, the US gov system of checks and balances was designed assuming it could be perfected incrementally, but long-lived systems also need cycles of renewal - think of a forest. That design flaw is showing up now as key systems are getting cracked open by opportunists.

LastTrain• 1 year ago

What was wrong with Kamala Harris?

krapp3• 1 year ago

Other than the very obvious fact that she wasn't an incumbent President with an established political record and bully pulpit, and thus was starting from a position of weakness late in the game, running against someone who managed to maintain a position as frontrunner despite having not been in public view for four years?

She did very little to separate herself from Biden and alienated her base trying too hard to appeal to the right. She wouldn't even take a stance against genocide.

One of the biggest dysfunctions (possibly intentional) in America's two party system is that the "left" isn't really leftist. Both parties are pro police, pro military, pro American imperialism, pro oligarchy and anti labor, and the politics of both drift to the right. The red team just happens to be far more right than the blue team.

And Kamala Harris didn't prove an exception to the rule. Voters didn't want to vote for the status quo, no one really liked Biden, he was just the only option besides Trump. But that's all she represented. Just "not Trump."

ashoeafoot2• 1 year ago

Wait till dodge guts darpa

egberts1• 1 year ago

Now shuttered CFPB its primary mission which was then to protect consumers’ money from fraud, waste, and abuse … by the US government.

DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency

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