Comment by lucasyvas 3 days ago
Big Balls, man? Really? This dude is vetted to make this change? Come on.
The kid wouldn’t be an unpaid intern at most companies. He wouldn’t pass the HR screen.
Regardless of politics, they don’t have the credentials.
No, they're hiring people with no relevant experience who in one case was fired from a previous job for leaking confidential information. Another is an unapologetic cartoonishly not-subtle racist.
It's amazing to me how every time DOGE is challenged its supporters come back with "I'm sure they're doing the right thing" despite all evidence to the contrary.
I'm starting to think this ends with DOGE cutting like a few hundred million dollars of random stuff, taking out even more debt to cut everyone $5000 checks, swamp every media channel with bogus "WE CUT FIFTY TRILLION DOLLARS TO GIVE BACK TO THE PEOPLE!!!" and you guys will just lap it up without question.
It’s worse than that. They’re going to give themselves $4T in tax cuts for the 1%, cut Medicaid for $800 billion, and claim DOGE will make up the balance, even though it won’t make a dent.
The debt will go up $3T, the savings will never come (again), poor people will lose healthcare, and when people wisen up, Republicans will revert to talking about how Democrats just want to “tax and spend”.
MAGA will blow up in their faces. When health care and benefits disappear the US is suddenly going to have millions of angry, desperate, stupid and/or brainwashed volatile people waving their 2nd Amendments at Washington.
This has Musk's name stamped on it. No amount of lying and misdirection is going to change that.
https://www.muskwatch.com/p/doge-teen-ran-image-sharing-site
He has a lot of relevant experience in criminal behavior, actually.
>despite all evidence to the contrary.
What evidence? Be specific.
Lots of things here with links:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/10/elon-mus...
How much time you got? I'll keep it high level because I'm pretty sure I'd crash Hacker News if I spent all day typing out every last specific issue for you, and I don't have time to do that anyway.
- A multitude of errors in basic math in the claimed savings, like claiming 55 billion in savings when the "receipts" posted on their own site to back up those numbers did not add up to 55 billion even assuming they were accurate. Diving deeper, they clearly misunderstand how government contracts work, claiming they saved the full value of contracts they cut despite said contracts having been partially paid out. In one case they claimed 8 billion in savings for a contract that was worth 8 million, and then apparently tried to change the data to cover up their mistake when called out.
Here's a twitter thread with some more specific examples: https://x.com/electricfutures/status/1892432354016202831
- And here's all the contracts they claim to have canceled: https://doge.gov/savings No verifiable reasons have been given for why these specific contracts were chosen. What made these more wasteful than other contracts? How will canceling them improve efficiency? Nothing more than "Trust us bro", I doubt they know themselves; they certainly haven't had the time or the staff or the expertise to investigate anything with any detail.
- Elon's companies are recipients of massive government contracts and were under investigation by some of the agencies he is attempting to cut. An insane conflict of interest that has not been accounted for beyond "trust us". There is no politically independent oversight of any nature.
- The shutdown of USAID was done so incompetently that employees were left stranded overseas locked out of government networks without support.
- The wholesale gutting of the CFPB, a program which actually made more money for taxpayers than it cost, while claiming to care about financial efficiency.
- Avoidable accidental firings of critical personnel across government agencies. Re-hiring is a non-trivial cost on top the immediate disruption and you won't get a 100% return rate. Complete waste of time of and money while disrupting mission critical activities.
These are not the actions of serious people trying to curtail government waste, fraud and abuse. If they are, they're a sign of rank incompetence. These are the actions of people who, even if given the benefit of the doubt, are falsely convinced that the government does no good whatsoever and they can cut programs and grants with no consequences that matter except to their political enemies.
This isn't even getting into the legality of what they're doing, but DOGE supporters have made it quite clear at this point that they view the law as the enemy, or at the very least irrelevant.
Someone mixed of Billion/million, some USAID employees were inconvenienced, and some firees had to be rehired, ergo DOGE is obviously acting in bad faith? C'mon. Trivial mistakes aren't evidence of bad faith.
> I’m sure DOGE is not just hiring random bums off the street
The fact that there isn't any transparency about their hiring process is a big flashing red light that there was no hiring process.
These people are against DEI "because we should only be hiring the best, not focusing on race/etc."
So be transparent and show the damn receipts to prove you hired the best. Who did they screen. How was it that Big Balls beat out a pool of qualified applicants.
I'll wager they can't show their receipts because they don't have them. These anti-DEI people really just want to lazily revert back to a good ol' boys network, hiring only from their in-group or just hiring the very first candidate they personally like, regardless of their actual qualifications. The hiring process went something like this: "this kid was recommended by some billionaire's brother-in-law, and he went to an elite school so obviously he's qualified. The End."
[flagged]