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Specifically talking about USAID, that's the biggest erosion of US soft power in the country's history. All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives. And to set a price floor for agricultural products.
By Papazsazsa 2026-02-1914:502 reply 1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.
2. The "biggest erosion" framing ignores what already happened. The geographic combatant commands – AFRICOM, SOUTHCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM – have been absorbing soft power functions for decades & DOD runs parallel programs that often dwarf USAID's budget
3. The agricultural price floor point is dated; that was a Cold War-era mechanism that had already been significantly restructured.
4. Most USAID funding was tied aid – taxpayer money labeled "foreign assistance" that was contractually required to flow back to US contractors, agribusiness, & Beltway NGOs, making it a domestic subsidy laundered through the language of humanitarian aid. Plenty of people inside USAID did genuine work, but the architecture was built to serve multiple masters, and development was frequently the least important one.
> 1. USAID was never purely a soft power instrument and has extensive integration with the IC, including providing cover for destructive and often illegal programs, i.e. clandestine infra.
That's... pretty much a good definition of soft power, and frankly not even a cynical one. Your argument presupposes a world where "clandestine infra" and whatnot simply wouldn't happen if we didn't do it. But obviously it would, it would just serve someone else's interests.
And fine, you think the cold war US was bad, clearly. And maybe it was, but it was better (for the US, but also for the world as a whole) than the alternatives at the time, and it remains so today. China's international aspirations are significantly more impactful (c.f. Taiwan policy, shipping zone violations throughout the pacific rim, denial of access to internal markets, straight up literal genocide in at least one instance) and constrained now only by US "soft power".
The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
By Papazsazsa 2026-02-1916:524 reply USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S., just a highly visible one.
Besides security guarantees/defense aegis, the heaviest lifters in U.S. soft power projection are structural and cultural forces that operate largely independent of government:
- Dollar hegemony & financial infra
- Cultural exports
- Universities & research
- Private sector (including tech)
By natpalmer1776 2026-02-1916:592 reply I'm somewhat ignorant on this subject (by design, my mental health cannot afford too much pondering on that which I cannot control)
but in this instance I can't help but wonder from a game theory standpoint, is there anything GAINED by affecting USAID in a way in which we clearly lose some (relatively small per your comment) amount of soft power?
That is to say, a perfectly played game would involve not making any sacrifices unless it was to gain some value or reduce some loss. What is gained (or not lost) here?
By Papazsazsa 2026-02-1917:13 Two games: Domestic and Foreign
Domestic 'gain' is fiscal + political + transparency. USAID was pass-through where taxpayer dollars flowed to NGOs and contractors whose missions aligned with whatever administration or congressional bloc was in power – but with enough layers of separation to obscure the nature of the spending.
Foreign 'gain' is a move away from liberal internationalism to transactional bilateralism/resetting expectations wrt American largesse. We were being outbid everywhere anyway, and the org was ineffectively doing something DoS should be doing.
By 6510 2026-02-1919:11 Local producers cant compete with the aid (nor in trade). The same scheme China runs in the west. On the receiving end you not just stop development but you actively shut down what you had and forget how to do it.
By mindslight 2026-02-1919:14 Yes, USAID was only one part of US soft power. Everything else you have listed though, the destructionists have done effective jobs of trashing those as well!
In a thread about USAID it makes sense to talk about the damage to USAID. If these other pillars of soft power matter more to you, then try writing productive comments lamenting their destruction rather than downplaying in this discussion.
By Incipient 2026-02-2011:39 I feel like currently, all four of those points you raised have also been significantly eroded too, and will continue to be for the following decades - countries seem to be rolling back US tech, contracts, dollars, and less people are going to the US for study.
By ajross 2026-02-1917:15 >> The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
> USAID is nowhere near the most effective nor the most important source of soft power for the U.S.
And the goalposts move again. Your original point was that soft power was bad. After pushback, now it's "soft power is good but USAID was inefficient".
I submit that neither of these arguments was presented in good faith and that your real goal is just defense of DOGE.
By CaptWillard 2026-02-1920:031 reply This is all debatably valid, except for the fact that the entrenched system produced massive fraud, money laundering, wagging-the-dog and worst of all, a decade of domestic propaganda and anti-democratic schemes in an attempt to protect the machine from widespread exposure.
By ajross 2026-02-1921:59 Except all of that was widely recognized and reported on at the time. People just didn't care. Lots of people will argue about this stuff until they're blue in the face, but no one is "surprised" by any of the evidence. The malfeasance was going to happen anyway, it's an inevitable consequence of global realpolitik. There's no Rule of Law on the high seas, as it were.
My point really isn't that cynical, it's more optimistic: if you're going to do all that stuff (and let's be honest and admit upfront: we were 100% going to do all that stuff) you might as well feed a bunch of people and garner some good will along the way.
> The world sucks. Whataboutism only makes it worse.
If you believe this, why did you just go "well, what about China?"
By ajross 2026-02-1918:57 There's clearly a difference between "what about" as a distraction technique (introducing an unrelated argument to avoid having to defend the original) and pointing out the existence of a clearly related issue. This is "youforgotaboutism", if you must label it.
Basically: analysis of international relations and influence techniques can only be correct when it treats with the influence of all parties, and not just the US. You agree with that framing, right?
By Papazsazsa 2026-02-1914:571 reply Whether DOGE's motivations were reform, political theater, or budget slashing is irrelevant to whether the underlying problem – IC integration into civilian development infrastructure – is a legitimate issue worth addressing.
For people with operational experience, the concern is real and predates DOGE by decades – USAID cover compromised actual development workers, created force protection problems, and poisoned the well for legitimate civilian programs.
But they aren't addressing it. They just outright ended USAID without any regard for any of the things you continue to type.
Addressing it would be to provide the functions without the IC.
By Papazsazsa 2026-02-1917:161 reply There is no un-poisoning of this well unfortunately. Whatever benefit USAID was offering should have been put under State long ago.
By freejazz 2026-02-1917:32 They did not put it under state. The issue you are talking about has nothing to do with DOGE and the actions they took.
By oblio 2026-02-1916:03 It's never one without the other. Germany had a lot of hardpower in WW1. People forget they won the Eastern Front.
But they lacked soft power and their allies were weak.
The inability of the US to maintain soft power, or any power that isn't rooted in the use of force, will be its international demise. An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible. So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network. Those NGOs end up being so secretive that most of the money disapears in the pockets of the middleman.
Another problem is the US is broke. With a 6% of the GDP deficit, it can't invest abroad. This is the curse of being the reserve currency. Subversion is the only thing the U.S. can afford. Countries around the world knew that about the U.S. and USAID.
By onlyrealcuzzo 2026-02-1915:40 > With a 6% of the GDP deficit
This isn't a problem if the money is well spent.
The problem is that a very small fraction of the money is being spent on anything that can reasonably be considered "an investment".
The most compelling explanation for US soft power is balance of threat theory[0]. Soft power comes from you not being seen as a threat, and you being seen as a way to prevent other threats. Because above all, countries prioritize security.
The status quo in US foreign policy was that as long as you're pliable to US interests, then the US was nice to you. You get democracy and get bounded autonomy, more autonomy than was afforded to subjects under any previous empire, to the extent that people would question whether the US even was an empire. Despite US being incredibly powerful militarily, the US was seen as non-threatening to friendly countries. That was an incredible magic trick, since those two things are usually correlated. This drew countries into its orbit and expanded its influence.
Countries could see the contrast to being in the Soviet Union's orbit and having your grain stolen, your people getting kicked out (Crimea) or being put into a camp.
This theory is a way to conceptualize the problem with Trump's bellicose and volatile attitudes towards Canada and European countries. If everyone sees you as a threat, this theory predicts that they will balance against you. In concrete terms, this theory predicts that countries who aren't threatened by China (due to being far away) will become closer to China if they feel threatened by the US.
By heisgone 2026-02-1915:04 Very well put. As a Canadian, what I see is Trump's attitude gave the green card for Canadian politicians to take a stand, sacrifice short term goals for long terms strategies, and indeed, we end up seeing China as less dangerous comparatively, it being true or not. Trump made overt what was happening covertly (and also objectively hurt allied relationships).
"politically impossible" is giving up on Americans ability to perceive the national advantage as well as the moral good.
Similarly, the deficit probably has solutions if the electorate is willing to approach thoughtfully and consider the revenue as well as expenditure side.
This may be another way of saying it's impossible, at least until it isn't.
By Schlagbohrer 2026-02-1915:08 "You'll never go broke betting against the american people" -Matthew Cushman
By openasocket 2026-02-1915:282 reply > An American belt and road initiative would be politically impossible.
I think you misunderstand soft power if you think the belt and road initiative is better. The belt and road initiative largely builds infrastructure to aid Chinese interests and locks countries into loans, while providing minimal employment to the locals.
Go to any Sub-Saharan African country, for example, that have benefited from the belt and road initiative and poll them on their opinions of the United States and China. It's not even a competition.
> So instead, you have those timid humanitarian aids program which largely served as intelligence and subvertion network.
Those programs have saved millions of lives. Hell, PEPFAR alone (Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is estimated to have saved 25 million lives. Millions of vaccines have been delivered, millions of children provided childhood nutrition.
> Another problem is the US is broke.
USAID cost next to nothing compared to everything else in the budget, these arguments about tightening our belt is disingenuous at best. The USAID budget was less than $45B a year. If we paid for that with a flat tax distributed evenly across all US taxpayers (the least fair way to do it!), that would come out to ... $24.50/month/taxpayer.
I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective. The justification outlined for USAID is that it was "softpower". While this is true, we have to admit it's limitations. As you said, it was only 45B. You don't shape the world with such small amount of money. So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID.
By openasocket 2026-02-1916:571 reply > I'm not saying it's "better" in the moral sense, but from the point of view of the dominant, it's definitely more effective
By what metric does the Belt and Road Initiative provide more soft power than USAID? Do you have any evidence of this?
> So, you do the next best thing which is to plant covert agents in NGOs. That's was the real purpose of USAID
That’s offensive to the men and women who worked hard as part of USAID and other foreign aid programs to help others. My wife didn’t spend 2 years in the middle of nowhere in Zambia teaching children to spy on them. My friends didn’t spend 4 years in Mongolia to spy on them.
It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.
The Belt and Road Initiative is reputed to be 7 times bigger than the Marshall plan in today's dollar. It's getting hard for the US to compete with that.
By openasocket 2026-02-1920:45 > It indeed sucks for the honest workers like your friends who are losing funding because the CIA can't help itself.
So you find an organization filled with aid workers who are dedicating themselves to saving lives, with some instances of CIA infiltration. And the Trump administration, which is fully in charge of both the CIA and USAID, decides the right thing to do is ... get rid of the aid workers?
What do you think is the moral thing to do here?
By bjourne 2026-02-1916:15 What polls are your referring to? Can you cite any?
It's quite likely that, sprinkled in among the idealistic helpers of the third world, were some number of CIA agents. For good or ill.
(the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of the State Department, and in turn Hilary Clinton. I'm sure someone can unravel the alleged thought process there)
By estearum 2026-02-1914:25 USAID is considered instrumental in ending Apartheid in South Africa.
Given the timeline of the Musk family's arrival and departure... one might believe they viewed the end of Apartheid as a bit troublesome.
By ImPostingOnHN 2026-02-1914:24 It's also quite likely that the reincarnations of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Jesus are sprinkled among the same idealistic helpers.
> the hatred of USAID seems to be tied into hatred of...
...foreigners, people of different races, and multiculturalism in general. There, I unraveled their primary thought process for you.
Remember, we're talking about administration officials who probably couldn't spell USAID, who say immigrants "poison our blood", and who have no problem spending billions on other countries when the money goes towards hurting them instead of helping them (see: Venezuela, Iran, etc.).
By ourmandave 2026-02-1915:451 reply It's how we found Osama Bin Laden. CIA posing as Doctors Without Borders going door-to-door pretending to vaccinate locals.
They actually did vaccinations until they found him and then quit, leaving a bunch of people with only the first dose.
And a complete distrust for Doctors Without Borders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...
By mrguyorama 2026-02-1917:481 reply >It's how we found Osama Bin Laden.
>The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden.
Your cite disagrees
By ourmandave 2026-02-1919:48 Well, damn. Things I read before implied it worked and they'd keep committing the same f*ckery. Like vaccine denial isn't bad enough already. =[
By sedawkgrep 2026-02-1914:164 reply Do you have any source for any of this?
By ChrisMarshallNY 2026-02-1914:261 reply NPOs are traditional places for CIA agents.
Tends to make them targets of suspicion.
Source: My father[0] was in the CIA, and worked at an NPO, in Africa.
>Increasingly, he found his cover work more engaging and important than his intelligence-gathering.
Your father was a great man.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2026-02-1915:54 Agreed. He left the CIA, because they became something he couldn't reconcile with himself.
By irl_zebra 2026-02-1914:23 If nothing else, the "Political Operations Abroad" section of USAID's wiki has some links and background.
By pjc50 2026-02-1914:30 Source for Top Secret info? No, but I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_... (not USAID, a different organization)
By heisgone 2026-02-1914:46 If you don't mind listening to right-wing adjacent commentators, Mike Benz document those links extensively on his podcast. For exemple:
By Isamu 2026-02-1917:39 >All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives.
You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor.
It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot.
It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.
By drstewart 2026-02-1916:16 >it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives
A check of pretty much any UN vote shows that this was a completely and utterly ineffective method then.
Example: https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overw...
By jameskilton 2026-02-1914:052 reply [flagged]
>but many US farmers were USAID farmers 100% of their crop and all of their income was tied to USAID.
Got a source for this? I wanna read on this.
By throw0101a 2026-02-1914:15 It's about USD 2B worth of purchases:
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2...
* https://theconversation.com/american-farmers-who-once-fed-th...
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2025/02/13/mus...
* https://betterworldcampaign.org/blog/what-us-farmers-get-fro...
And in addition to farmers, a lot of companies/non-profits (for, e.g., logistics) were paid by USAID programs, as well as researchers for things like global health initiatives.
By jeffbee 2026-02-1914:17 There are crops that USAID bought that have literally no other market, like milo.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5296876/trying-to-keep-...
By sedawkgrep 2026-02-1914:13 Googling turns up a multitude. Quick Look says in 2025 $2B worth of us crops went to USAID.
More info here.
https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/usaid-dismantling...
By naasking 2026-02-1915:33 > Not only has USAID's destruction permanently destroyed US reputation in many place and will be responsible for the deaths of millions, including children, but many US farmers were USAID farmers. 100% of their crop and all of their income was tied to USAID.
I predict that these predictions will mostly not happen.
By sedawkgrep 2026-02-1914:163 reply [flagged]
By seanhunter 2026-02-1914:34 If you take a look at the data[1] you can see that it was nowhere near the top, then there was one big chunk in 2022-23 then it came back down again, and that aid was 67% military with the DoD providing 13B. So whatever you're trying to insinuate, the simple explanation is they received a lot of aid (mainly military) because they had been invaded. That's is fully supported by the evidence.
By throw0101a 2026-02-1914:271 reply > The #1 recipient of USAID assistance was Ukraine.
UA started being at the top in 2022: care to guess what humanitarian disaster started at that time?
After them, we have DRC, Jordan, Ethiopia, West Bank and Gaza, Sudan, ….
By pocksuppet 2026-02-1915:28 > Gaza
Oh. That's why.
By wheelerwj 2026-02-1914:22 [flagged]
Did you look at specifically some of the items the money was being wasted on?
By CursedSilicon 2026-02-1914:50 Let me guess. Was it the "trans surgery for immigrants"
By kube-system 2026-02-1917:28 Taking those line items at face value is just a bunch of Dunning-Kruger. The government isn't like a tech company with a single product that can be understood well by one person. It produces many thousands of different specialized products and services.
When the National Partnership for Reinventing Government successfully cut spending in the 90s, they took 5 years to carefully evaluate what the government was doing and why, followed legal processes to propose improvements, and saved a lot of money simply by finding ways to streamline processes and procedures.
DOGE has taken a completely different approach, slashing and burning without understanding the consequences of their actions (or potentially, not caring), and intentionally doing it without involving other stakeholders. Many of the things they've cut that they thought were stupid were immediately found to be important and reversed. Some of the other things they’ve cut we’ll be finding were important for decades to come.
DOGE is just Chesterton’s Fence as a service.
Pretty much every example of flagrant waste I've seen brought up by DOGE -- regardless of how insane the line item sounded -- actually ended up reading as more and more valuable the more I read about it.
Unfortunately DOGE and its boosters are some of the most intellectually lazy and fundamentally uncurious ever to walk the earth, base sociopathy aside.
Government spending and the deficit has increased by approximately $800 billion since Trump came into office. It certainly hasn't gone down. Weird that none of the DOGE apologists seem to care anymore. Trump adding billions of dollars to the deficit in increased military spending in 2026? Not a peep.
Even if one assumes DOGE was doing exactly what they claimed to be doing (they were not) and take the government's most generous claim of how much "waste" they cut and how much they saved at face value ($150 billion, which is nonsense - the verified estimates I've seen cite maybe $1.5 billion at the most) and ignore the actual cost of DOGE (unknown, but estimated at at least $10 billion to cover paid leave for employees, other estimates I've seen go as high as $135 billion) then it was still entirely pointless.
But it doesn't matter to them because they don't actually care about cutting government waste, they care about cutting "woke" and "DEI" and anything they can associate with leftists or Democrats. Elon Musk literally described DOGE as "dismantling the radical-left shadow government"[0]. It was never about money, it was always about entrenching right-authoritarianism and purging the government of wrongthink.
By kube-system 2026-02-1917:401 reply The whole thing is a sham. The real purpose of DOGE is to enact radical ideological changes that Congress has been unwilling to implement, by strategically sabotaging parts of the executive branch that the Heritage Foundation has a problem with.
By autoexec 2026-02-1920:27 That and to funnel more private data held by the government into private hands (and probably AI models)
By estearum 2026-02-1917:38 +1 to all
DOGE was an exercise in vice signaling.
Which is a real shame because there was a real opportunity to inject a fresh set of eyes on what is surely a problem-rich environment.
It will unfortunately serve as discredit to all future efforts that look anything similar.
Was the statement that over 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?
It’s clear that just like the California-spent billions on the homeless, a large amount of the money was going to support the nephews and cousins etc of the connected in cushy jobs.
By xnx 2026-02-1916:38 > 50% of the money from USAID never left the country, ever shown to be false?
Yes, in as much as that is a nonsense phrase meant to sound bad. If USAID buys wheat from American farmers, the money stays in the US and the wheat is exported.
By mistrial9 2026-02-1916:36 add the recent public meeting with CA Gov's office in San Francisco, delivering 9 figures of new money to the homeless situation in CA.. with Democrat figures emphatically and pointedly declaring all the money legitimate and accountable.. at the very same moment that news headlines are showing court documents of the opposite at a large scale in multiple jurisdictions .. mostly Los Angeles to be clear
#-- Governor Gavin Newsom met with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on January 16, 2026, to announce over $419 million in new state funding for homelessness and mental health efforts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The funding comes from the sixth round of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) program and includes $39.9 million for San Francisco to support shelter operations, navigation centers, and services through June 2029.
If anyone believes that USAID was primarily foreign aid, then they have fallen for the lie.
If they believe that foreign countries should have the ability to control their own destinies without interference from the US and being manipulated into doing what is best for the US and not for that country, you would be 100% against USAID.
By ajross 2026-02-1915:52 > control their own destinies without interference from the US
Not on the menu. The question is do you want them controlled by the US or by China?
By Swenrekcah 2026-02-1915:26 This much is true, like most things coming from Trump this move mainly benefited Russia and China while actively harming US interests.
The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet. Not to mention the background level of problems like the Purdue Pharma one.
This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen end up also not getting any credit to the institutions and regulators, so on the budget it feels (to uninformed voters) that these departments are simply wasting taxpayer money.
By throw0101a 2026-02-1914:211 reply > This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
> On the big scale, like in gov't, the disasters that did not happen […]
Michael Lewis (of The Big Short fame) has two books on the things that government(s) do that no one else (often) can, either because they're too big, too expensive/unprofitable, or a co-ordination problem where it effects many actors simultaneously:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Risk
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788713/who-is-govern...
By wwweston 2026-02-1915:00 I haven't read _Who is Government_ yet (in spite of the fact that it has a better title!) but _The Fifth Risk_ was a fantastically illuminating paradigm-shifting read for me.
"What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?"
By JohnMakin 2026-02-1916:58 > This is the macroscopic outcome that also play out in a company microcosm - people who _prevent_ disasters and fix problems _before_ they occur get no credit, and on the balance sheet it looks like they're just a waste of resources.
This is one of the more frustrating things working in SRE/ops/infra. Yes, if you have really good metrics and monitoring you can show to some egghead exec that might care that your numbers are improving - but lots of times that visibility doesn't exist, or no one cares very much. I've been advised more than once in my career to just "let it break" so when I come to fix it after I had warned about it breaking, it makes me more visible, when I easily could have prevented it in the first place. This mindset is rampant, in my own career anyway. I think it's really idiotic.
I'm looking forward to 2038.
After all, Y2K came and nothing happened. What a hoax! /s
By Corrado 2026-02-206:49 Thank you for reminding me of Y2K! It's the perfect example of what happens when you forget about the people keeping things together.
My team and I worked really hard for several years to make sure that Y2K didn't have any effect, or at least a dramatically downsized one. It worked but I did hear from several people that they were annoyed that we spent so much money, time, and resources on something that turned out to be "not that big of a deal". Arrrgggghh!!
By pjc50 2026-02-1914:31 It's nicely timed that I can spend the last few years before my retirement charging people inflated amounts to convert int to long.
By palmotea 2026-02-1917:27 > The sad thing is that people don't miss the administrative state until it's too late.
> I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal ; one side effect was people importing baby formula to China from Australia, because they trusted the Australian food safety authorities more than the Chinese ones.
It's a problem with libertarian thinking, generally. Most of the things libertarians rail against exist for good reason, and the libertarian "solution" is actually the thing that already failed in the past.
Your typical libertarian becomes one by reading a ~300 page propaganda book as a teenager or young adult that outlines the problems with Soviet central planning, adds in some legitimate gripes about present-day government rough edges, then lays out a compellingly-neat libertarian free-market fantasy. It's very black and white, offering a stark, false choice between Soviet central planning or minimal government libertarianism.
It doesn't prompt anyone to think about history before the complained about government functions arose: e.g. how was food and drug safety before the FDA? How did that work out for the people then? Were people really better off being able to buy radium water to try to cure what ails them?
It's also very selective. I've never seen any libertarian advocate the abolition of all the government bureaucracy and regulation that protect property rights.
>The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet.
It's a neat trick to pull to say something is a terrible disaster but also that you won't show why and that's by design. Impossible to refute.
By lukeschlather 2026-02-1916:421 reply They fired a lot of people at the FDA and also deliberately made it harder for the FDA to regulate. That is likely to cause problems for our food and medicine supply, the FDA has been the world standard for a long time.
By drstewart 2026-02-1916:50 [flagged]
By hamdingers 2026-02-1915:262 reply The true purpose of DOGE was to exfiltrate sensitive data from the IRS, SSA, Medicaid, and other agencies. We may never know what all they have done/are doing with it, but it's certainly playing a role in the current immigration crackdowns.
Long term it will affect us all, likely more than the cuts the news prefers to focus on (tragic though they may be).
Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending (especially spending viewed as ideological) doing far more harm than good?
By unclad5968 2026-02-1916:272 reply Government salaries are such a small percentage (less than 5% is what I'm seeing in cursory searches) of spending that it doesnt make a lot of sense to me that DOGE was a genuine attempt at cutting spending. I work in defense, and at least a few times a year, I see government contract money that could pay a dozen salaries wasted on equipment that never even gets installed. We have a government bought tool that cost $2million 8 years ago, and we plug it in when senators come tour our facility so we can pretend we use it. If anyone in the government cared about reducing costs, I don't think they would care too much about payroll. Its the equivalent of taking all the appliances out of your house because your electric bill was $200 when you take home $5k.
I won't pretend to know what the actual motives were, but financial "efficiency" seems suspect to me.
By Sparyjerry 2026-02-1918:391 reply Doge did far more than cutting salaries, the salary cutting was almost entirely voluntary and actually a tiny fraction of what they were cutting. Mostly it actually is third party contracts being cut. You can see all the contracts being cut here: https://doge.gov/
Please don’t cite doge itself as if it’s a reliable source.
Citing doge as a source shows that your viewpoint is built on provenly bad info.
And Frankly it’s insulting to HN readers that it’s being cited given how well published it was that their estimates were grossly inflated, unreliable, and kept trying to claim credit for cutting things that were already ended.
By Sparyjerry 2026-02-200:191 reply Doge has not been proven unreliable anywhere I've seen, if you have data to show that please provide it. I have seen the kind of anti-doge news articles you are referring to but if you viewed the authors of those articles it was always folks who post entirely anti-elon or anti-republican articles like they are an attack ad placed by the democrat party and were debunked quickly.
Okay… well it was extensively reported like everywhere so I don’t know what you’ve been doing but it’s sure not reading the NYT, NPR, CBS or the similar.
Okay so you somehow haven’t seen any of the many many accounts of doge being extremely unreliable but today you’ve seen people tell you they are unreliable.
After hearing that, to you, surprising new info did you consider googling it or cross check it in anyway before replying?
have you so much as tried googling “are doge estimates reliable?” After hearing other people call them into question?
Anyway here’s the AI google summary for you to get you started:
Based on analyses of the "wall of receipts" posted by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in early 2025, their savings estimates are not considered reliable by budget experts, government contractors, and media outlets. Investigations have revealed that the claimed savings are heavily overstated, often misleading, and sometimes factually incorrect.
By Sparyjerry 2026-02-2021:561 reply DOGE already address all of those political hit piece articles. The claims made in them were spurious such as that they could not use the full amount of the contract. DOGE addressed this criticism by saying over 99% of contracts end up fulfilling their full amount. I'd be wary of what you read in the news especially when it relates to politics. Those news sites even thought Elon Musk was saluting a long dead genocidal maniac when he waved to the crowd - but specifically only Elon Musk and not any other person who made similar waves - why would that be?
Noice, defending musks hitler salute.
Tesla is a meme stock and will one day explode like a game of hot potato.
Going online and defending every poor decision musk makes won’t change the reality that these days musk is a drugged out buffoon with a penchant for white nationalism who pays people to cheat at videos games for him.
His main selling point these days is how He has a loyal core group of cheerleaders that sticks with him no matter what. It’s prolonging the inevitable.
By Sparyjerry 2026-02-2023:561 reply Yep, he definitely was pledging allegiance to a long dead person while at the same time wearing a necklace honoring jews. yep. you got him.
I’ll defer to the majority of German newspapers - Germany is kind of an authority on this topic - it was a nazi salute.
The son of the apartheid, musk, even literally videoed in to Germany’s modern day extremist party, the afd, that same day.
Not a coincidence - musk is a racist white nationalist.
By Sparyjerry 2026-02-260:441 reply The Germans tabloids hate him because he was destroying the German auto industry with better vehicles and isn't supporting their liberal party. Musk has never done anything racist ever.
By mint5 2026-02-261:26 You’re right! Elon musks is gods gift to man, an infallible modern day Einstein who’s absolutely not racist or off the deep end.
How did I not realize the thousands of reports suggesting otherwise were actually all examples of nefarious propaganda by the consortium or haters. How unjust! We must reject anything that paints the angel in bad light!
I sincerely appreciate being enlightened!
By cindyllm 2026-02-2023:13 [dead]
I was talking to an applications engineer one night at the bar in a restaurant. The company he works for makes equipment for mass producing the large armament shell cylinders. One of the clients that bought their equipment was a missile manufacturer. He went on site and found the machine had incorrect tolerance and was producing deformed products. They also lied about the thickness of the material they planed on using. Finally when the DOD general asked him point blank, "Will this help us produce X missiles a year?" he said no and why. Turns out the contractor directly lied about their capability and yet retained the contact because they are one of the few companies that produces missiles. He never got a call back from the company because they wanted him to lie to the general.
This is the actual waste that needs to be looked before the checks are even signed. No way in hell DOGE or anyone in the current administration will actually look at bad spending. Specially now this administration likes the name Department of War. These are the same companies that bribe ... I mean donate to politicians to retain this corrupt funding.
There's an old HBO movie called "The Pentagon Wars" that's worth checking out
By yndoendo 2026-02-211:12 I have and watched it about four months ago.
Israel wouldn't take the Bradley Fighting vehicle because this know it was bad just by looking at it but the Pentagon doubled down and flawed designs.
Reminds me not to get tunnel focused with-in a company and keep looking around to see what outsiders are doing.
The talk about the AR-15 being flawed but not why. 1) Sold as a firearm that did not need to be cleaned and maintained which is 100% false. 2) It was a gas based system that push the debris in the barrow into the chamber. This is why Vietnam solders would place condoms over the end of the barrow. It took years to move it to the gas piston system which people use now.
By Supermancho 2026-02-1915:51 > Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
I think this is obvious. It was one of many goals, that aligned under an umbrella of activities. Asking for specific data creates a paper trail and triggers regulation. Restricting access, taking outright possession of hardware, and firing people along the way, helps shield the activity.
> Can't it simply be a case of aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending
aka "Aww shucks, we were just doin our best."
No rational organization would take many of the actions that were taken, if one of their primary goals was accountability. It was a smash and grab (disorganized would be fair to say), with an ad-hoc rationalization that was never reasoned.
By PopAlongKid 2026-02-1915:47 >Why on earth would they need something as visible and aggressive as DOGE to extract data?
To hide the true purpose behind a curtain of "aggressive and overoptimistic attempts to cut spending".
No, because there is evidence DOGE did exfiltrate a vast amount of data, illegally, and gave it to Palantir and possibly others.
Maybe they were naive and useful idiots, but that doesn't just happen by accident.
By jacob_harris 2026-02-202:31 There definitely has been a pattern of shoddy behavior, but it's been difficult to find a smoking gun of DOGE exfiltrating the data at many agencies. I am looking to see if there are more revelations to come out of DOGE's activities at SSA for instance.
That said, lack of evidence isn't necessarily exonerating. DOGE's MO has often been to take over the CIO and/or front office of the agency to ensure there is nothing to monitor them. It's basically like if the CEO of the bank sends all the security guards home and lets robbers in through the side door. You can't prove they took anything necessarily (my bank metaphor falls flat here, because data can be copied but if money were stolen, you could count it), but also it IS often shady as hell too.
By mvdtnz 2026-02-200:11 This is a conspiracy theory
