If they go too far cutting they can always bring it back down the road. But there is this idea that we actually need to cut the perfect line with scalpel precision without cutting one cent of “useful spending” (an arbitrary and ambiguous definition that can obviously suit any agenda or any argument).

But of course it just brings out the infantile anti-corporate sentiment. Like these cuts are for some nefarious clandestine reason to drive wealth into the hands of the rich. Which I guess I would call principled if these same people didn’t also advocate for 20 million migrants a year to keep the price of labor in the basement on behalf of corporate interests.

Right, and cutting it with a "scalpel" will never happen. There is too much corruption, and there are too many moving parts. It would be hijacked immediately, and nothing would be cut.

It is either this approach or nothing. There is no alternative.

i hope all the crusaders made a little more money dumping their tesla stock and selling their cars on saturday. i know it was a tough financial decision for them.

It is an impossible standard that is deliberately applied to keep the unsustainable status quo marching forward. Because these people deep down are actually very deeply anxious about anything actually changing in this country.

If you are a believer in the capacity of government to actually accomplish things for the public benefit these cuts present an almost unbelievable chance at a fresh start in the medium term (5-10 year) future. The opportunity to move the federal bureaucracy forward in a new direction unshackled from what has been these last few decades you would think be considered an extraordinary opportunity.

Nah nvm we have to cry about the bullshit American Institute of Peace losing access to their fleet of Gulfstreams.

This is all nonsense of course. You do understand that everything he's doing is just rerouting government money to Musk, correct? The deficit is growing right now, it's not shrinking. There has been nothing in this administration so far for any libertarian to cheer.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

You hit the nail on the head here. Key word being "unsustainable."

I chuckle when people say "will the debt catch up to us one day? Does debt matter?"

It has already caught up with us. It is one of the primary reasons - if not the primary reason - that 90% of citizens are far poorer today than they were just ten years ago.

Not to mention the ever-expanding, unelected federal bureaucracy that is immune from any type of oversight or consequences for any of their actions.

Right, he’s deporting your precious illegals and locking up the border. I’m fully aware how much that upsets libertarians and sends them into spiraling fits.

Elon Musk, insofar as this thing can possibly matter to somebody with as much money as he has, has lost significant amounts of his net worth since this undertaking. A few government contracts (given under your cherished Biden Admin btw) is not some huge scheme to funnel taxpayer money into his bank account. The guy is a retard and yes a bit of a burrito but 1) I thought you loved people like that and 2) he isn’t pulling off some massive heist.

The reason the deficit grows is because we’ve already spent like $100billion more on interest on the national debt in FY25 than in FY24. It’s all the fucking ridiculous borrowing since the virus.

Can we get some more detail on how everything Musk is doing reroutes government money to himself?

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The State Dept bought some electrical cars with the inflation reduction act money, the well known cornerstone legislation of Trump’s second term.

Again, just all utter bullshit

He's deporting illegals yeah. He's also sending American citizens who have done nothing wrong to prison camps in El Salvador. Musk isn't losing any money right now, what he's losing in Tesla stock share he's more than making up in increased federal contracts. The deficit is growing because they aren't actually cutting anything that matters, they are just making shit up and then a day or two later it comes out as all lies.

If they reduced the deficit, or hell even kept it from growing, while shrinking the size and scope of the federal government I'll be the first to applaud and say I was wrong. It's very clear to anyone paying a modicum of attention that none of that is happening, it's all just very out in the open corruption and handling the federal government over to Musk for him to abuse and enrichen himself. So yeah it's pretty understandable why any libertarian would be against what is happening right now.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Elon has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in net worth since taking on this whole thing.

If he was doing it for money, he'd be an awful businessman, which is not the case.

What specific "federal contracts" is Musk "re-directing" to himself? Is there some list out there I'm unaware of?

And how would you expect someone to flip the federal deficit positive when we run an annual deficit of 2 or 3 trillion dollars?

He isn't doing anything correctly because he failed to eliminate $3 trillion in two months?

Source, pls.

Since you think he's such a brilliant businessman, perhaps he knows that what he's doing will in fact increase his net worth?

yeah, saw that too. eager, overeager to pile on.

the maryland man is not an american citizen. i believe he claimed asylum and was given protected status, not citizenship.

as if, trump had all the facts on his desk and decided to....

someone at a low level made a huge mistake. how many filters are there before it got to that?

A lot to unpack there.

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FF was on a roll. He might be making the list of all those monumental costs that can be cut to reduce the budget and not have people complain.

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Elections have consequences.

He is just repeating something he heard on CNN.

This too shall pass.

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It doesn't take a brilliant businessman to see that what he is doing is not for his bottom line. He is alienating the customer base that were the most likely group to purchase Teslas before this.

And if a guy is worth hundreds of billions of dollars (commonly referred to as "richest man in Earth" even though he's not), don't you find it unlikely that his concern is making more money?

We aren't talking about a multi-millionaire or even a hundred-millionaire. We are talking about someone who has more money than one could spend in 1,000 lifetimes.
And he chooses to live in a tiny house near one of his businesses.

But even putting all that to the side, let's say he is doing it for money. Is it unreasonable to ask for a shred of proof? What contracts? What government money is being funneled to him? What specific policies are being implemented to benefit him?

Do you really think that the media would hold back if they had evidence of this?

Trying to find his crayons.

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

No, he is sending unvetted criminals back to El Salvador. If he was sending American citizens who have done nothing wrong then it would be all over the news and this would have been shut down.

They know they have to be very careful about who they send to El Salvador because people like you are waiting in the weeds to hang them if anything goes wrong.

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where is the most obvious place to find waste, fraud and abuse in the highest dollar amount?

The $1,000 hammer/toilet seat has been a running joke since I was a child.

and he only has 150 or so days in this position

this leads me to question whether the priority really is finding waste, fraud and abuse

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Probably eating lead paint or pencils.

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Why does it have to be waste in the highest amount? It can be all waste big and small can’t it? I imagine cutting federal jobs in some percentage adds up to a lot.

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Elections have consequences.

This is exactly why specifics are never provided.

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But it doesn't explain the primal need of some have to let others do their thinking for them.

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How can someone be certain that he is funneling government dollars to himself without a single verifiable example of him doing that?

A lot of those jobs are not waste, though.

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Doge cuts allow Musk to cash in with SpaceX and Starlink contracts, ex-workers warn
Tom Perkins
8–10 minutes

Elon Musk appears to be laying the groundwork to privatize some space and satellite operations now under the authority of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), or steer lucrative contracts toward his SpaceX and Starlink companies, former agency employees say.

They’re sounding the alarm as at least four other federal agencies have reportedly begun pushing new contracts toward Musk’s Starlink satellite internet company. Musk, the world’s richest man, has been tasked by Donald Trump with drastically slashing the federal government workforce and costs.

The situation raises conflict of interest questions for one of Trump’s closest allies who backed him with millions of dollars of funding in the 2024 election. Musk boasts that his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) “slashes spending”, but critics say he’s using his position to steer government funding toward his companies.

Noaa could offer the biggest prizes yet for Musk, presenting the opportunity for SpaceX to have a commanding financial advantage in a commercial US space market expected to grow to a value of nearly $2tn in value over the next decade. Already Doge likely has access to competitors’ confidential business information at Noaa, former employees at the agency say.

More importantly for the public, it would put control of the nation’s communications infrastructure in the hands of a rightwing billionaire. Noaa’s activity quietly touches the basic functions of daily life, and everything from dependable cellphone service to how Americans connect to the internet to weather forecasting is at stake, five former Noaa employees who spoke with the Guardian said.

“There’s a lot of smoke but we’re not sure where the fire is yet,” a former employee said. “We’re waiting to see when the next shoe drops.”

In the wake of a firing spree that gutted some Noaa space operations, Donald Trump Jr’s investment firm stoked speculation by purchasing $50m worth of SpaceX shares. Noaa operates as part of the US commerce department and is responsible for a range of economic activity relied upon by the public. Musk’s Doge team has laid off about 1,300 Noaa staff so far.

SpaceX primarily launches rockets and satellites for Musk and national governments. Starlink, meanwhile, has nearly 6,000 satellites in low-earth orbit and provides satellite broadband internet service and military communications to at least 2.7 million people in 100 countries.

SpaceX is the biggest player in the private space industry and several former Noaa employees praised the company as an often good partner prior to Musk’s attack on the agency. The space technology company had strong momentum prior to the new Trump administration, making it difficult to parse what is legitimate business and what could be construed as corruption, former employees said.

A new emergency Freedom of Information Act request for communications among Noaa offices and Doge in part seeks to shine some light on those questions. The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) request noted that privatization of the agency has long been a goal of the right and was called for in the Project 2025 rightwing playbook. The move “is driven by greed and corruption”, Peer’s executive director, Tim Whitehouse, said.

“The danger is that Musk’s enterprises could morph into government-sponsored monopolies that would operate with no fear of antitrust prosecution,” Whitehouse added.
New contracts for Starlink

Leadership for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered staff in February to find tens of millions of dollars in funding for new Starlink contracts, Rolling Stone reported. The FAA is in the process of updating ageing air traffic control networks and last year awarded a $2.4bn contract to Verizon, but Starlink has already edged into the process.

At the US Government Services Administration, Doge ordered federal staff to use Starlink for internet services, an employee told NBC News. Another agency plans to contract with Starlink, according to a federal employee familiar with the situation who spoke with NBC News. Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection recently authorized an evaluation of Starlink to help monitor the border.

Gutting space traffic control

The nascent space traffic coordination program manages thousands of satellites, debris and spacecraft, and helps prevent up to 50,000 near-collisions, called conjunctions, daily. Starlink accounts for a large number of those.

Called the Traffic Coordination System for Space (Traccs), the program would also eventually provide launch and re-entry services for commercial satellites and spacecraft, former employees said. Musk’s company already works closely with Traccs, but the program has avoided “vendor lock” and contracts with multiple companies, in no small part because Musk’s agenda may not always align with the nation’s, one former official said.

“SpaceX is a great service provider, but as long as he’s in control of the company it’s not anything that can be counted on,” a former Noaa employee said.

Those who spoke with the Guardian said it didn’t appear that SpaceX had any interest in privatizing or taking over Traccs prior to Trump’s re-election, but Musk’s Doge fired all but one Traccs member – in effect crippling a sorely needed operation. That could open the door for privatization, and SpaceX is best positioned.

“They discover something is broken and conveniently say: ‘Oh, we can fix this,’” a former Noaa employee said.
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Weather forecast privatization

Noaa satellites in lower-earth orbit are largely utilized to forecast weather three to seven days out, and the data is given for free to weather forecasting providers such as AccuWeather, and utilized in aviation, shipping, defense and other critical industries.

Some companies want to profit off the data, and few are better positioned than Musk’s to land contracts or take over. But private industry’s data and forecasts are of extremely poor quality compared to those from the Noaa, a former employee said.

Noaa weather satellites have redundancies and fail-safes intentionally built in, and huge effort is put into calibrating them with weather on earth: Noaa flies planes into storms to confirm that the data its satellites are providing is accurate, for example.

The data is “highly reliable, 24/7, no breakdowns, no ifs, ands or buts”, a former agency employee said. If Noaa satellites fail, explode or crash, they added, then people who rely on that data may die, or serious economic damage may be inflicted.

“The risk of having outages is so significant because that data is used all the time for everything, and for far more than people realize,” a former employee said.

Musk, by contrast, has a mission of eliminating redundancies and finding efficiencies, and former agency employees noted his rockets and satellites have a history of crashing and exploding.

Meanwhile, Noaa monitors space weather, including solar flares, coronas and radiation, and geomagnetic storms that can damage the electric grid and telecommunications on earth and beyond. That could have implications for Musk’s well-known plans to colonize Mars.

“If you’re serious about sending people to Mars, then you have to be able to monitor and respond to space weather,” an employee said.
Radio frequency

SpaceX, telecom giants and other industries are lobbying the federal government to auction off valuable bands on the radio frequency spectrum – the electromagnetic waves that enable wireless communication, including among the military, the CIA, Noaa and their satellites.

The obscure function is essential to a wide range of commercial activities, such as cellphone use, and industry “wants to get their hands on all that they can” because it’s a finite resource, a former agency employee said.

A large part of Noaa’s forecasts stem from its satellites monitoring water vapor movement in the atmosphere, and the agency owns the radio frequencies at which vapor vibrates. If the Musk-aligned FCC sells bands too close to that frequency, potential interference could impede satellite function and disrupt reliable weather forecasting and cellphone use.

“Starlink wants more and more spectrum, and you hope [the FCC] would not be stupid enough to auction off the bands next to where water vibrates, but … I wouldn’t put it past anybody,” an employee said.

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