Recent quotes:

Thanks to DOGE, Gumroad’s founder has a second job with the VA - Fast Company

Now that he’s there, he says he finds himself surrounded by people who “love their jobs,” who came to the government with a sense of mission driving their work. “In a sense, that makes the DOGE agenda a little bit more complicated, because if half the government took [a buyout offer], then we wouldn’t have to do much more,” he says, implying software can replace departing employees. “We’d just basically use software to plug holes. But that’s not what’s happening.” Lavingia’s skills with automation, which have helped keep Gumroad lean, are what he hopes to bring to the VA. But when it comes down to it, what he’s found is a machine that largely functions, though it doesn’t make decisions as fast as a startup might. “I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” he says. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”
#trump #DOGE - fastcompany.com

Opinion | The White House Tech Bros Owe Their Fortunes to the Research They’re Killing - The New York Times

The geographic centers of venture capital and the industries it has spawned overlap precisely with the locations of our great research universities. Think of Cambridge and Route 128 in Massachusetts (Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard), or the stretch from San Jose to San Francisco (Stanford and University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley). This is no accident. It’s why world leaders visit these places to understand how we do it. It is also why Mr. Vance left Ohio for Yale and then high-tailed it to Silicon Valley for a job.
#trump #DOGE - nytimes.com

‘Time for It to Die’: The Chaotic Killing Off of the Government

Let’s start with the weather. The Verge reports that the Trump administration is canceling leases for facilities crucial to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s many missions, and plans to lay off half of its employees. One cancellation on the list is the National Weather Service’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction in College Park, Maryland. There are nine centers specializing in hurricanes, storm predictions, flight safety, weather forecasts, and other essential information (and I hope those nine links are still active by the time you read this). One of them, the Environmental Modeling Center, is the data nerve center that produces daily forecasts for meteorologists and consumers. I’d like to keep those, thank you very much.
#DOGE - thebulwark.com

Cutting Government Is Easy... If You Go After McKinsey

Why take on management consultants? Well, for starters, the government spends far too much on people giving it advice. In it's 2024 budget, the Biden administration requested $70 billion for management consulting, aka “professional services,” which is 5% of all discretionary spending. The Defense Department alone asked for $32.9 billion. So just cutting all management consulting would be a big chunk of savings. But it goes beyond just the raw spend on consultants, to how consultants misdirect other monies. An important study in 2023 on what it costs to resurface roads at a state level - a very simply and standard need everywhere - showed why procurement waste in America is so persistent. A key reason is consultant bloat. It turns out, when you hire government employees for long-term planning, costs go down, but when you use third party consultants, they go up.
#USAUSA #consulting #DOGE - thebignewsletter.com