I agree, but what was fair and effective in 1970 might not be anymore, right?

Do you agree that these processes need to evolve over time?

And if so, what if they haven't been evolving as fast as the rest of the world and have fallen behind?

What is a leader to do, when many processes no longer are in anyone's best interest other than the people who maintain them and those have learned to exploit them?

The government doesn't seem like a machine to me, more like society's nervous system. It's a very scary idea that it has become so rigid and so outdated that a massive overhaul is necessary. It does seem like an opening for extremism (fascism, tyranny), which I'm sure we both fear. I just find it very hard to tell whether disrupting the system or letting it continue will lead to a better outcome for Americans.

Yeah, structural changes don't happen slowly and by the rules. What people don't like is what they think the new system is going to look like. But we don't know what that is going to be because Trump seems to be better at destroying than at building. It will depend on his successor(s) being good at building institutions. Or it may fail and the old system regenerates.

This seems accurate to me. They are destroying many US institutions, and what replaces them may be better or may be worse. I am not sure anyone can tell right now.

This wouldn't be happening if everyone was happy with the status quo, if the US was in a golden era, but it wasn't. Many things clearly weren't working. Sometimes it's easier to tear something down and rebuild it than fix it (not always, but sometimes).

I'm not convinced things were as bad as people claim. The right wing has been conducting a concerted propaganda war for the last 20 years to make people scared.

Fair and transparent are arguable. I have never met someone who deals with the government on a regular basis that has ever described it as effective, and at this point I am willing to sacrifice some fairness and transparency for effectiveness.

In a fairly recent interview where he was asked about DOGE, Bill Gates estimated 10-15% waste in government spending. Saving that amount is not worth all the collateral long term damage Trump is doing.

You may not put much stock in another billionaire's opinion, but personally I think he's been engaged with our system enough to have a good perspective on things.

That doesn't mean every government operations are 90% efficient, but I'd rather walk the side of slowness and bureaucracy than graft and corruption, let alone Trump's outright fascism.

And by the way, my father worked at a federal manufacturing plant so I've heard plenty of stories, good and bad.

First of all, my comment has nothing to do with Trump, so let's leave him out of it.

I would doubt Gates's number because I have never been in a company that had 15% or less waste. e.g I don't think you could find a tech company out there that couldn't reduce its AWS bill by 15% without any service degradation, but it's just not a priority.

But the meaning of "waste" is highly subjective so some people wouldn't count that type of inefficiency as "waste". It may take a lot of resources to follow the process that the government mandates or use the ancient technology that it uses, and if the government efficiently follows the process with the existing tech, then it's not "wasteful." But I would call the process itself and the failure to upgrade the tech waste.

As for corruption vs bureaucratic inefficiency, why should I favor one over the other except by cost comparison? If the government pays $100 million to build a road that really costs $50 million because the contractor is owned by the governors cousin, that's a lot better for me than paying $200 million for the same road because the bureaucratic process to keep the governors cousin from unfairly getting the contract costs $150 million. And that's not even getting into the fact that the bureaucratic path also costs more in terms of time.

IMO the process is just as much graft as the nepotism. All those lawyers and consultants and government employees that consume the $150 million are just as much the recipients of ill gotten gains as the governor's cousin. I recognize that this can't be eliminated, so I simply would choose whichever one was cheaper. And in the US I think we are in a situation where the bureaucracy consumes much more than would be taken by corruption. China is quite corrupt and yet their government gets a lot more done for a lot less money, and in a lot less time than ours does.

I'm not totally disagreeing. But the problem is that there is not just the dollar cost of contracts.

If the governor's cousin cuts corners to save money, it puts lives at risk. Or the thing doesn't last as long and costs more money later. The cost difference is rarely just pure price gouging.

A cop planting evidence to make an expedient trial is also a form of cost cutting that I really don't want. But when people see corruption or legal corner cutting they will believe it's acceptable to do themselves. There is a broken windows or slippery slope situation.

Legible but inefficient systems can be corrected through sensible redesign. Corrupt systems are a cancer that spreads as good actors are pushed out.

I would be supportive of a DOGE style effort that actually looked carefully and critically at systems to rearchitect them. But accepting illegality will simply produce a low-trust society with many bigger problems.

I don't really see the bureaucracy as preventing that sort of thing. The $800 million Obamacare website was both a complete waste of money and it didn't work. A corrupt contract might even be less likely to be a failure because the governors cousin knows that if he fails to deliver there will be a public outrage and he could go to jail. Whereas there are almost no consequences when a government contractor screws up after having gone through the legal process.