DOGE was an attack on every agency that MAGA didn't like.

The goal was never to save money. The deficit is the largest its ever been.

IMHO, DOGE's result wasn't an engineering strategy to run a country, it was a businessperson's approach to running country.

"Data grab" is easier to write.

At best doge was engineered cost cutting.

Engineers are builders - not cost cutters.

Anyone can be a cost cutter. The reason China is ahead is that they're building like crazy. They made and continue making long term capital investments in education, infrastructure, and energy. Guaranteed success. US is basically all in on AI right now for anything long term, and it's not even clear that AI will be something that will be a net benefit to the middle or working classes.

Don't mean to sound like a doomed or China glazer, but if the AI calls don't print when the debt collectors come knocking, it's gonna be serious trouble.

>Engineers are builders - not cost cutters.

that's too much of a blanket statement.

as bushbaba said in a sibling comment, (paraphrasing), engineers can be both builders and cost cutters. and engineering is about tradeoffs of various kinds, even if they don't involve cost cutting.

ever heard of:

- value engineering

or

- frugal engineering

?

google them.

my dad was an engineer. not a software one, but a mechanical and electrical engineer. he did a double degree, from a well known US university. and worked for a few years in the US. then he came back to India and work for a single US multinational for the rest of his career.

once when I was a teenager, I saw him reading a book titled "value engineering". a us publication.

i think he mentioned it to me and said it was a good book.

I also read parts of it and found it interesting.

edited for grammar.

Yes I wasn't specific enough and contradicted myself.

I said anyone can be a cost cutter, and that includes engineers.

Where engineers are unique is in their ability and training to be efficiency and value creators. They are productivity increasers.

Their value comes from productivity increases - not their ability to cut budgets. Cutting a budget might be a side effect of a productivity increase, but the profitability increases that finance first leaders push for is often at the expense of long term productivity rather than because of it.

Hope that makes more sense!

Engineers are cost cutters. Half of engineering is making decisions on how to build within budget. Building within tolerances and not overly engineering things

Well DOGE also ran into a lot of obstructionism, and had to also move quickly due to the short political cycles America has. That doesn’t mean the concept itself is fundamentally bad.

If DOGE was actually trying to make things more efficient, it would have made very different choices. Firing thousands of workers that you still have to pay for half a year is not efficiency, it's massive waste. Not only did DOGE not actually save money, it burnt a ton of money breaking things our government now has to fix.

Even if they had taken an extra month to learn the systems they were cutting into, would've saved many months of wasted employee-hours with what happened.

I suspect, strongly, that we disagree on the fundamentals of what DOGE's aim was.

doge is a purposely incompetent and corrupt shitshow.

The concept was fundamentally bad though.

You cannot even say for certain what DOGE did, your only source is being politically biased.