DOGE Track (dogetrack.info)

> 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.

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> 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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_threat

"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.

> 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.

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.

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.).

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_...

Do you have any source for any of this?

>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.

> 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.

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.

[1] https://foreignassistance.gov/cd/ukraine/

> 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, ….

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Let me guess. Was it the "trans surgery for immigrants"

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

This much is true, like most things coming from Trump this move mainly benefited Russia and China while actively harming US interests.

> 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...

> 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

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

Far from it. There has already been ample reporting on how inflated and distorted DOGE's savings are (for instance, they made rudimentary errors in understanding how blanket purchase agreements work and also counted the whole amounts of contracts as savings when they canceled ones that were already mostly disbursed). You can probably search for coverage by ProPublica or David Farenthold if you want to see what I mean, but I would guess you don't want to.

Instead, I have been focusing my efforts on tracking DOGE's staffing in agencies and their activities and system access there. DOGE has not been transparent at all. Rather, they have abused the Vacancies Act and government detailing to hide their activities and skirt many of the laws around government ethics, privacy and data security in the process. And they have been doing a lot of damage in the process, claiming to be doing "IT Modernization" but doing many things outside of the scope of the Executive Order that established them and also the separation of powers that gives Congress the power over appropriations.

Judging by your comment history, you might be Elon Musk's fiercest warrior!

I've heard of one professor summarizing it as "would you want to take an airplane flight that has only exactly the amount of fuel needed to get to your destination? What about if the fuselage didn't have any extra rivets? Really, you need more than one engine?"

Maximizing efficiency is a canard when government is supposed to be there as a backstop for disasters and economic downturns. Unlike businesses, governments can't choose who they serve as customers, and often have to be there for the neediest and most vulnerable. The Founders understood this (there are several states that call themselves Commonwealths for instance), but a strident faction has been trying to replace "we're all in this together" with "you're on your own, sucker"

Absolutely it can be done, but this kind of slash and burn cuts from people who come in from outside and have no understanding of how anything works are always going to be counterproductive.

> If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts

It'd be better to audit them to make sure that the money was being used smartly and that those agencies were accomplishing what there were created for. Arbitrary cuts would mean that agencies that were well functioning and lean would be suddenly unable to do the job we've been paying them for and it could encourage them to push for more funding than they need just so that they can survive the random cuts every 5-10 years.

We don't need to intentionally cause a crisis that will impact the lives of Americans who depend on the services their taxes fund. There are smarter ways to identify waste and hold accountable any people mismanaging funds. Government shouldn't be run like business, but honestly I'd also question the wisdom of companies who acted that way.

It sounds like you are proposing some of the oversight already done by the Government Accountability Office.

I hear where you are coming from, but the whole point of the Constitution is that a king does not get to determine how the budget is allocated. Congress has the sole power of the purse, and the responsibility and blame for how money is appropriated belongs there. Congress could potentially enact measures lke this to sunset expenditures unless they are re-authorized, but I think that would likely turn out to be a chaotic disaster in its own right, given that Congress currently is struggling to pass budgets.

In any event, I think hungry children is a problem, and I don't need the media to tell me that, so that's my perspective.

The federal workforce shrunk by 20% under Clinton and it wasn't a clusterfuck like doge. Just like the tariffs situation this administration only hires incompetent sycophants and clowns and are unable to do anything anything correctly.

I'm not both siding this, I heavily dislike DOGE and consequently the 45-47 presidency.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43624536#43625085

It calls DOGE workers "wreckers" and it lists all the staffers related with the DOGE project with a detailed description of how they're related and what they've done recently. They even have a page just for revealing anonymous staffers in court documents: https://dogetrack.info/people/aliases/

I agree DOGE is destructive but is it productive to reveal all the names and history of every staffer, contractor, lawyer, etc... related to the DOGE project?

The above is why I see it as "biased and emotionally charged".

This website very well could've gone without the extensive list of people related. Which is why I see this as more of a harassment list.

I haven’t looked at it in almost a year, but was that the site that was full of basic errors and misleading info that was clearly designed to expose “waste, fraud, and abuse” that actually wasn’t any of those things? Yeah, I don’t know why we wouldn’t trust them…

Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization

18F was founded during the Obama administration, so absolutely no one in MAGA-world will ever have considered it apolitical.

One of the many fired IGs last year was investigating Neurolink - so noone in Musk-world will have considered them apolitical either.

Nothing government-related or government-adjacent will ever be broadly accepted as apolitical again in the US, regardless of intent or truth. Its very depressing.

The Georgia ballot theft, the SAVE Act, gerrymandering mandates, and promises of voter intimidation are all about stealing the next election. Oh and PACs and crypto enable bribery.

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Common trend with online activists is that they clearly don't want to risk jail themselves, but they like to actively encourage others to get violent.

real change is difficult.

look how many people in the US just post on facebook and think they have done enough.

Note the parent said non-peaceful. They did not say violent.

You can have non-violent, non-peaceful protest. (E.g., making a ton of noise at specific places to disrupt their ability to work there isn't peaceful, see also blockading businesses and roads.)

A lot of civil disobedience fits in non-peaceful (not calm, not orderly) and non violent.

Violence sometimes absolutely is the right response. Let me quote some George Orwell:

"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. "

source: https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/pacifism/english/e_pa...

How do you think the USA was made?

Rejecting violence is un-american lol.

Trump is the massive fraud.

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Right, and the vast majority of most people’s budgets are their mortgage/rent. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t cut out that streaming subscription they don’t need when they’re accruing debt every year. Every bit helps.

It's very common for politicians to point to federal staffing levels as some sort of measure of waste and bloat, but those numbers have been increasingly deceptive since the era of Reagan. Essentially, government has grown in its budget and scope but staffing numbers have not matched that increase because many agencies have instead staffed projects and roles with contractors instead.

This is worst in all accounts: there is no accurate count of how many contractors work for the federal govt (vs. federal employees), they generally are more expensive to hire than staffers and they get trained up on the public's dime and then walk out the door to other projects meaning the agency doesn't benefit from their upskilling like they would if they were internal employees.

With 18F, USDS and digital services within agencies, the government had been trying to reverse its dependency on external contractors to ship code. DOGE eliminated many of those people – you could argue one of its goals was to make government more dependent on vendors and contractors. There is now a new Tech Force initiative, but it seems like it's mainly a way for companies like Palantir to embed junior staff within agencies to find new places to sell software.

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