Everyone should watch the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government workers:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
They don't actually know who the bureaucrats are that they want to traumatize. Anyone calling a product manager, UX designer, or software developer at 18F a "bureaucrat" simply has no idea what they actually do. They are just demonizing the scapegoat du jour.
Also among these so call "bureaucrats" are psychologists at the VA helping veterans with PTSD; search and rescue professionals working for forest service, park service, fema, etc; undercover FBI agents trying to stop organized crime; NOAA scientists predicting hurricanes, the list goes on.
The demonization of the civil servants of this country is a story that people who want power are telling the country in order to gain said power. It's a story as old as time.
Many of Gary's videos on the economy shed light on what's happening in the US right now. A lot of sleight of hand to convince the general population that the villains are immigrants, government employees, anyone on welfare, etc. I found this one to be most poignant on the topic.
> They don't actually know who the bureaucrats are that they want to traumatize. Anyone calling a product manager, UX designer, or software developer at 18F a "bureaucrat" simply has no idea what they actually do.
"Bureaucrat" is always a pejorative for a professional person who works in a bureaucracy. It doesn't mean anything.
100%, when I hear it, I hear "small enough to drown in a bathtub" for a new era.
A lot of people got away with saying a lot of BS for a while Vague thought-terminating cliches, and we are observing one of these formless things decay, in real time, to the point they're outré.
I grew up in the DC area 30 years ago. Civil servants declaring “Resistance” to the agenda of the duly elected president would have been unthinkable then. That destroys the premise of a civil service that is a machine that processes paperwork and doesn’t think for itself.
Yes, I firmly believe that Trump was elected to punish the current political class in the US for failing to serve the interests of his voter base (largely working class men). The whole election and his sad little mandate is about tearing down the permanent bureaucracy in the executive branch, not about fixing anything or really even changing any systems.
Don’t forget us minorities! Net 20 point swing among both asians and hispanics. Little Bangladesh—note that bangladesh is literally a socialist country—in Queens, NYC swung a net 55 points to the right.
And those working class men will suffer the most for the consequences of their actions. cutting off a nose to spite their face.
The silver lining is that it's not too late for those people to get some upcoming elections to swing and push to a congress that will kick out Trump before it's too late.
The Limits to Growth predicted (in 1972) a collapse of industrialization caused by exponential growth well before 2100. Since then we've only accelerated our rate of growth. I think we have far less than 75 years left before things go very badly.
Far worse. They've crossed the rubicon. We'll have a nasty period of civil unrest and conflict. I'd put 50/50 odds on a military junta within the decade.
Wouldn't he be Lenin, the guy who turned the country into a cynical police state? Rather than Gorbachev, the guy who won a Nobel Peace Prize and started to end totalitarianism in Russia and the Soviet empire?
California here - completely agree that one-sided media clips are a universal occurrence in the modern US media; secondly, completely agree that full speeches, primary sources and thinking for yourself are first-order ingredients in forming real insights and opinions.
There's not a full clip, probably because it was taken from private speeches. But the article does a good job of putting it into context, and discussing how his private rhetoric is just a scarier, more insulting version of stuff he says in public all the time: https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
What kind of context do you think would excuse that sentiment? Given his extensive public record, would you argue that this is somehow out of character for him? It seems rather consistent based on the rest of his career:
Bad result for America, as at least the two that I've been familiar with have both been dramatically better website implementations than much of the federal government.
Huge amounts of data about how government websites are used including: locations (cities, countries), languages, referral sources, media sources, devices, browsers, OS, website destination, and top file accesses.
Really thorough breakdown of government spending from 2017 onward, with per month, per quarter, and year spending totals by budget function and agency. Divable categories so you can look at the $1,400,000,000,000 in National Defense spending, and actually find out a little about where it all goes to each year.
The goal is to make government as dysfunctional as possible (beside the part that enforces corruption [for your side]), so people want it to get smaller and smaller (except for the corrupt parts that benefit exclusively them), so that it costs less, so that they pay less taxes, so that they have even more money (that they don't need).
They definitely do not care if this "makes things worse". Often, it's intended.
The motivation behind DOGE didn't make sense to me until I also realized the money saved on government employees could be used to justify reducing taxes on corporations or the very wealthy.
And the rhetoric that the reason the working class have lower quality of life now than 20 years ago being due to immigrants and the poor ... is a way to focus attention elsewhere instead of increasing taxes on the rich.
Their web dev guides - especially for a11y - are high quality, and were taken offline this morning. I stood up a copy (slightly modified) at https://guides.18f.kmr.me/
Hopefully the GitHub repos stick around; I forked and cloned a few and suggest folks browse through them and grab anything that looks interesting in case they disappear.
All that wonderful transparency and analytics, yet failed to uncover this here multimillion dollar Uniparty/DeepState money laundering scheme (one of many!): https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1889172190282821690. Uncovered by just one deaf, nonverbal, female hacker working part time (until she was doxxed, she's full time now).
This is hilariously bad analysis. She doesn’t even get the names right, let alone anything else of substance.
This is perfectly emblematic of our national decline: a person with little interest in doing the work to understand things, spoon feeding their mistakes over social media to an audience with little interest in doing the work to know whether the things they read are real.
Ah yes, our favorite partisan actors, who can’t be bothered to mention how much her benefactor spent just this year doing same thing.
Also, that chart is just magical, did she inflate the numbers by repeatedly adding same money being shuffled around (represented by those arrows between entities)?
Amazing how the idea of being able to file tax returns online, without paying for a commercial service to do it, is considered far-left extremism in the US.
You’d think that simplifying tax returns and reducing costs in the taxation system would be something the right could get behind?
They claim that if the government could calculate taxes for you, then it would be too easy for the left to add new taxes that you wouldn't notice.
The real kicker of course is that if you don't file your taxes, they actually do calculate your taxes for you, and send you a bill. It just includes the non-payment penalty and doesn't include donations.
I don’t remember the exact amount but after I filed my taxes last year I got a refund from the IRS for under 1 dollar because I had mistakenly put a small typo while entering a 1099 and they automatically corrected my return and sent me a few cents of a refund.
The fact that they are capable of doing that implies how much time we all have to waste doing our taxes.
Then the right thing to do would be to remove tax deduction at source from payroll. People will notice how much they are paying in taxes when they have to write a check every month to the government and start asking questions.
For most people, taxes are more than the next 3 biggest expenses.
There’s no way the IRS can track and calculate many large, important features of the tax code.
EITC eligibility, for example, depends on the aggregate employment and spending patterns of your household. The IRS does not (and shouldn’t) track when you moved in with your boyfriend.
The home mortgage interest deduction depends on your primary residence; if you have more than one, that means tracking how much time you spend at each.
> They claim that if the government could calculate taxes for you, then it would be too easy... to add new taxes that you wouldn't notice.
As a non-American whose country break out the VAT into a separate line item, with the explicit intent to inform consumers how much tax they are paying, and who has shopped in countries where they roll it all into one, I can say that this 'claim' is absolutely what happens in practice.
It's not TurboTax, it's Grover Norquist. Republicans are already ideologically against easy tax filing because they're against taxes, they don't need corporate backing for that.
Using OpenSecrets in particular is misleading because it shows you donations fron "employees of corporations" to political campaigns and then people pretend it's donations from "corporations", which is obviously not the same thing. (and not allowed either)
They want everything to be privatized so they can rake in that sweet, sweet lobbyist money.
There's zero reason why taxes, for the majority of citizens, isn't just a postcard you get in the mail and confirm against your own earnings records. It should not cost me hours of my own life and/or dollars of my own money to file my taxes. I don't mind paying them (if they're used for something actually constructive like public infrastructure) but gosh they sure make it hard.
I have heard of this argument many times but it doesn't make sense to me. Most often, the ways to lower taxes come from things like finding new deductions and credits that you didn't know apply to you. This is what the difficult part is. Otherwise, taxes are simple if you just have some W-2 and 1099-INT or 1099-DIV, and claim the standard deduction.
Indeed if taxes are too difficult or painful, a reasonable person would demand that the government simplify taxes, and that's not the same as reducing taxes. But then again maybe they are banking on the masses conflating simplifying taxes and reducing taxes.
I don't think that far-left was primarily only written because of the tax returns. I followed some links in the article and came to this twitter thread which might explain where that notion comes from: https://x.com/lukerosiak/status/1885523747425399247
(Disclaimer: I don't live in the US and don't want to take any political stance with this)
Far-left is having some affinity groups at work, hiring people who happen to be queer, and being inclusive to people with disabilities?
The right is deranged with intolerance. All the talk about "free speech" and they can't stand that someone might not think or act like them.
The "anti-woke" crusaders are honestly more unbearable than any social justice warrior type I've met because they will not shut up about it and it colors their whole life.
It's just another flavor of identity politics with in and out groups.
Simplify the tax code, don't add even more complex bureaucracy in a misguided attempt to make the awful tax code understandable.
Citizens need to understand the tax code themselves, they shouldn't need an entire government division to write software that is the only way to understand it.
This is commonly repeated but incorrect. The Nyquist pledge is a far more powerful force keeping tax filing complex than Intuit lobbying. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is a stated practice of Americans for Tax Reform, the anti-tax conservative group.
The people in charge are intentionally ignorant of things that _already exist in government_, like the OIG, 18F/USDS, etc. And since their actual goal is to slash and burn the government so that it's literally unable to function, thus justifying its total collapse since it no longer has capacity, they have to take out the people who actually look for corruption, look into social security fraud, improve government technology systems, etc who would see through and call this shit out.
It's never been about making government more effect or efficient-- it's the managerial equivalent of the "starve the beast" mentality.
This thing was always underutilized even by the last 2 administrations. For all of the purported DOGE savings, these folks actually legitimately saved money from agencies, which is why big contractor shops were so opposed. They didn't take Congressional appropriations and charged agencies for work, but couldn't just go to agencies and pitch business, they had to be reached out to.
Can't imagine how much better the thing had been if it'd been allowed to fully blossom, but given all the stuff they deal with it, it wasn't perfect but it was a really good experiment.
USDS has been co-opted and they don't want competition. I would expect nothing less. 18F and USDS used to have some very smart, dedicated people, and it's sad to see these agencies go this way.
New York Times wrote [1] a pretty extensive expose on how the government takeover has happened. Basically Musk started infiltrating the government with his agents a couple of years ago so by the time inauguration happened he had access to all the passwords. I am not sure which laws were broken but if they were I hope the administration that comes in 2029 will not overlook these people's contribution.
It's somewhat interesting that the NYT acts all outraged while the refused to report on the orange guy's numerous conflicts of interest/crimes/dubious connections, and all out penchant for fascism before the election...
Readit News
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH9TmeJN_M
18F are the bureaucrats they want to traumatize.
Also among these so call "bureaucrats" are psychologists at the VA helping veterans with PTSD; search and rescue professionals working for forest service, park service, fema, etc; undercover FBI agents trying to stop organized crime; NOAA scientists predicting hurricanes, the list goes on.
The demonization of the civil servants of this country is a story that people who want power are telling the country in order to gain said power. It's a story as old as time.
https://youtu.be/wPoXOwiEfrQ?si=K58Pa-JQhdIvQzrw
"Bureaucrat" is always a pejorative for a professional person who works in a bureaucracy. It doesn't mean anything.
A lot of people got away with saying a lot of BS for a while Vague thought-terminating cliches, and we are observing one of these formless things decay, in real time, to the point they're outré.
The based to cringe pipeline, if you will
I grew up in the DC area 30 years ago. Civil servants declaring “Resistance” to the agenda of the duly elected president would have been unthinkable then. That destroys the premise of a civil service that is a machine that processes paperwork and doesn’t think for itself.
The silver lining is that it's not too late for those people to get some upcoming elections to swing and push to a congress that will kick out Trump before it's too late.
EVs and all that stuff were nothing more than a toy to play the charged up games the barons / slavers play
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/03/russ-voug...
GSA, Digital Analytics Program: https://analytics.usa.gov/
Huge amounts of data about how government websites are used including: locations (cities, countries), languages, referral sources, media sources, devices, browsers, OS, website destination, and top file accesses.
Treasury, Government Spending Explorer: https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
Really thorough breakdown of government spending from 2017 onward, with per month, per quarter, and year spending totals by budget function and agency. Divable categories so you can look at the $1,400,000,000,000 in National Defense spending, and actually find out a little about where it all goes to each year.
Edit: Here's their Github and 1200 repositories: https://github.com/orgs/18F/repositories
If I had enough money to hire them, I'd snap their employees up quickly.
They definitely do not care if this "makes things worse". Often, it's intended.
And the rhetoric that the reason the working class have lower quality of life now than 20 years ago being due to immigrants and the poor ... is a way to focus attention elsewhere instead of increasing taxes on the rich.
It’s about regulation. The only thing that can counteract the super rich are government regulators.
...So it's easier to justify to the people when they tear it down completely and then "rescue" the country by replacing it with a true corpocracy.
Dead Comment
Hopefully the GitHub repos stick around; I forked and cloned a few and suggest folks browse through them and grab anything that looks interesting in case they disappear.
This is perfectly emblematic of our national decline: a person with little interest in doing the work to understand things, spoon feeding their mistakes over social media to an audience with little interest in doing the work to know whether the things they read are real.
Also, that chart is just magical, did she inflate the numbers by repeatedly adding same money being shuffled around (represented by those arrows between entities)?
You’d think that simplifying tax returns and reducing costs in the taxation system would be something the right could get behind?
The real kicker of course is that if you don't file your taxes, they actually do calculate your taxes for you, and send you a bill. It just includes the non-payment penalty and doesn't include donations.
The fact that they are capable of doing that implies how much time we all have to waste doing our taxes.
For most people, taxes are more than the next 3 biggest expenses.
EITC eligibility, for example, depends on the aggregate employment and spending patterns of your household. The IRS does not (and shouldn’t) track when you moved in with your boyfriend.
The home mortgage interest deduction depends on your primary residence; if you have more than one, that means tracking how much time you spend at each.
As a non-American whose country break out the VAT into a separate line item, with the explicit intent to inform consumers how much tax they are paying, and who has shopped in countries where they roll it all into one, I can say that this 'claim' is absolutely what happens in practice.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/search?q=TurboTax&type=site#gsc....
Using OpenSecrets in particular is misleading because it shows you donations fron "employees of corporations" to political campaigns and then people pretend it's donations from "corporations", which is obviously not the same thing. (and not allowed either)
There's zero reason why taxes, for the majority of citizens, isn't just a postcard you get in the mail and confirm against your own earnings records. It should not cost me hours of my own life and/or dollars of my own money to file my taxes. I don't mind paying them (if they're used for something actually constructive like public infrastructure) but gosh they sure make it hard.
Indeed if taxes are too difficult or painful, a reasonable person would demand that the government simplify taxes, and that's not the same as reducing taxes. But then again maybe they are banking on the masses conflating simplifying taxes and reducing taxes.
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It just does not believe in a federal government that it is not in control of.
(Disclaimer: I don't live in the US and don't want to take any political stance with this)
The right is deranged with intolerance. All the talk about "free speech" and they can't stand that someone might not think or act like them.
The "anti-woke" crusaders are honestly more unbearable than any social justice warrior type I've met because they will not shut up about it and it colors their whole life.
It's just another flavor of identity politics with in and out groups.
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Citizens need to understand the tax code themselves, they shouldn't need an entire government division to write software that is the only way to understand it.
And until that happens, helping people file their taxes for free is a benefit to everyone (except tax prep companies).
Dead Comment
https://18f.gsa.gov/our-work/
https://www.govtech.com/civic/what-is-18f.html
Key Projects:
Beta.FEC.gov: Revamped the Federal Election Commission's website for easier record access.
MyUSCIS: Simplified the immigration process for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
USCIS ICAM Development: Developed a login and identity verification system for USCIS users.
eRegulations Platform: Made regulations more accessible and understandable.
College Scorecard: Provided clear data on college costs, graduation rates, debt, and post-college earnings.
Cloud.gov: Offers a platform for government teams to develop and manage web applications efficiently.
U.S. Web Design Standards: Created open-source UI components for consistent federal website experiences16.
It's never been about making government more effect or efficient-- it's the managerial equivalent of the "starve the beast" mentality.
Can't imagine how much better the thing had been if it'd been allowed to fully blossom, but given all the stuff they deal with it, it wasn't perfect but it was a really good experiment.
[1] https://archive.ph/oJRrI
if we leave the current crop of democrats in place, they will overlook it. current democrat leadership is spineless and useless
Dead Comment