Along with what others have said, you might want to recognize that Congress controls the purse. They dictate how much the executive should spend on each item, though that can be nuanced (as in "up to this much" vs "exactly this much")

So the upper management is composed of political appointments. And like any other organization, the upper management has considerable discretion in setting priorities.

re: "politically selective law enforcement" is not a good thing, because laws are one of the things that are supposed to constrain politicians.

In theory it does, that is the whole idea and genius of the constitution.

In fact at the moment it does not, because Trump has so captured the Republican party that the legislature has almost no power to stand up to him. The Supreme Court has a long history of judges aligning with the political party that seated them, and Trump put 3 of them into their seat.

this alarming trend seems to coincide with DOGE’s unrestricted access to federal networks.

the first 2 paragraphs: Beginning on January 8, 2025, a surge of U.S. government infrastructure began appearing on what’s known as “the search engine of Internet-connected devices,” Shodan.io.

Federal agencies typically secure their systems behind multiple layers of protection, ensuring that critical services – such as mail servers, directory services, VPNs, internal IP addresses, and remote access gateways – remain isolated from public access.

Now is this conclusive proof that DOGE did it? Hardly. However, can you think of anything else that changed since 8 Jan that would override decades of policy in the matter of hours?

These posts have a high political index, which given America's current culture wars tends to bring out the kind of behavior which none of us want on HN.

It's a damn tough balancing act.

Also, look at my post history, I'm pretty strongly anti-DOGE. I'm defending Dang because I love HN and appreciate what he is doing under extremely tough conditions.

Every time the administration changes, the heads of all the departments change, and the incoming people are typically pretty ignorant of what the department does. How would a corporation work if every 4 years you rotated the C-suite and 2 levels down, with people from a completely different business sector?

Meanwhile, funding is shifted even more often. Or is just outright cut once every few years.

Meanwhile, every action they take is an official government action. Which means it is LEGALLY REQUIRED to happen in certain ways based on laws written by people who don't think about consequences or how they are enacted.

And it is 2.2 Million people. There are economies of scale here.

So I wonder how this compares to current Google, current Facebook. I've heard people here talking about how messed up those companies are, projects started/stopped at whim, massive investments that get abandoned 2 years later, etc.

Or to banks. Banks don't modernize their software because they can't, not because they don't want to. No wonder the US government has similar issues.

Because that would NEVER happen in the US, certainly no government agency would fire its own people for having following legally enacted government policy just because that policy was no longer in fashion (though still legal government policy, because Congress hadn't yet changed the law).

However, your views read like propaganda.

The "internal resistance" you refer to is simply people trying to follow the law, while being constantly whipsawed by changing political winds. We see similar stories here on HN about work in large corporations. What do you think it is like in an org with 2.2 MILLION employees, where their actions have the power of government behind them often including access to extremely sensitive information?

HN talked about leaking any Youtuber's contact information for 10K, with suggestions that Google should better protect people's data.

HN frequently talks about the dangers of non-accountability for police. Would you like that same non-accountabilty spread to all aspects of the Federal government? (if so, merry christmas because now you have it)

If you cannot find any steel-man arguments against DOGE, may I suggest that you read the remainder of this HN article?

https://oig.usaid.gov/node/6814

Going after the Treasury, given that X is moving into finance?

https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/elon-musk-doge-cfpb-x-payment...

re: mandate to audit government. If this was a serious audit, then DOGE would have put serious data privacy controls in place.

An audit without proper data protection IS a cyberattack; an exfiltration of protected data.

Tesla's valuation is 10x the rest of the Magnificent 7, obviously investors think his ties to government are worth something.

(edit- valuation means i.e. P/E ratio; I saw the chart about 2 weeks ago so forget the exact valuation metric)

Maybe because in many ways it can be?

Unexpected medical condition -> crushing debt

Police stop goes bad

Job loss for reasons outside of your control

Wildfires burn your house down, or some other natural disaster

There, fixed it for you

and found: The reason the U.S.’s strong performance on cancer comes as a shock is because access to care in the country is notoriously unequal. But, it turns out, that's far less true of the elderly.

Age 65 is when virtually everyone in the U.S. qualifies for Medicare — America’s national, taxpayer-subsidized, government-run (dare we say socialized), comprehensive health insurance program.

in other words, the data you are arguing with shows that EU style socialized medicine produced better outcomes.

re: cancer survival. Are you referring to this work from 2020, showing that the US has more cancer than the EU, even though odds of survival are better?

The US Has Higher Incidence, Survival of Rare Cancers Compared With Europe (2020) https://www.ajmc.com/view/the-us-has-higher-incidence-surviv...

and shows that Age-adjusted incidence for all rare cancers combined was 17 percentage points higher in the United States than in Europe. The 5-year net survival for all rare cancers was significantly higher in the United States compared with Europe (54% vs 48%).

so 17% more likely to have it and a 6% increase in survival.

Can we talk about cherry picking?

There, fixed it for you.

You are forgetting about the influence of government subsidies. What would the housing market be like if home mortgage interest payments were not, and had never been deductible? Think back to the 70s, when mortgages had double-digit rates.

Would the US be swamped in HFCS, would we be producing ethanol, were it not for subsidies?

I agree with you on the importance of education. However, incentives matter, and government can incentivize both to the positive and negative.