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Hence why it's a hope and not a certainty.

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I’ve never worked in a behemoth corporate structure but have many friends who have & trying to make even small changes can b met w malaise & obfuscation to the point of standstill

Well said!

Procurement capture is cute but in a post-Chevron world, regulatory capture is the long game.

To be clear, I am not saying environmental remediation should be cut, but generally Congress people will not want to cut money being used to cleanup a former or current base in their district/state. Lot of DoD research money is spent on environment, safety, etc.

I will never forget your posts like these. They are astonishing and will live in infamy.

It's not just that kludgey systems (like procurement, but others as well) are an inconvenience for public servants, or cost taxpayers a little more. I'm okay with both. The desire for disruptive change comes from failure to implement policy. Eg, the impact on Biden legacy: politi.co/3PnSOwJ

Appreciate the correction! I’m years out of the loop on this stuff and am sure there are many such details I don’t fully remember accurately.

elno has his hand in the cookie jar. he’s in it for the crypto scam w/the techbros. he’s a shit stain on humanity.

On the defense spending side, there’s already a huge bipartisan effort to reform the way DOD does budget planning ( ppbereform.senate.gov) I half expected DOGE to just implement and slap a Shiba Inu sticker on it and call it a win — but then the bullying started

Interesting take, Doge does seem to raise some concerns about the intersection of crypto and government influence. I'll definitely give it a read and share my thoughts.

Ah, but he has done it. Bezos sued the Trump admin over a 10B cloud computing contract that he lost even though he was a lower bidder. There was a settlement. The belief was he lost the bid due to WaPo editorials.

Thank you for this. A historical side note is the good old "build the wall with US steel" - this was to capture procurement as well and was literally a story arc in the sitcom Arrested Development. How people still haven't caught on to what they keep trying to do is just mindblowing.

Indeed!

Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud, @anildash.com

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Sometimes an ashtray DOES cost $400 :-) youtu.be/VmdhCaFMyss?...

Very nice. You came close to pointing out that the goal of DOGE is also tax evasion. If you and your friends were people with a huge potential to pay taxes, would you rather focus on the IRS's efficiency or its effectiveness? How about cutting it to size and keeping it busy with a (failing) re-org?

Both were involved in wrestling?

And you were correct to do so…only the defense acquisition nerds or nerd-adjacent (like me) would have noticed, and an even smaller subset (again me) would have been motivated to point it out…:)

I saw the collar and thought the post was going to be very different. I just reckon you're going to be dealing with a bigger Thatcher phase again. Tough lessons will be learned, and my God, hopefully, ya'll vote on anything besides grocery prices.

www.gao.gov/about/what-g... "GAO provides Congress, ... with timely, fact-based, non-partisan information that can be used to improve government and save taxpayers billions of dollars." National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform meeting www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDb5...

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department : efficiency :: ministry : love

In terms of procurement capture, I’m curious which non-DoD areas you see as clear targets. DoT seems to be the most obvious. And FAA. I can see buddies benefiting from some of the Ag and SMB work. But this seems like small potatoes compared to the reg games.

re DOGE bsky.app/profile/jame...

Thank you for writing this

It’s almost like there’s no real care or concern for the veterans they send to do the dirty work of maintaining a capitalist system in the dangerous world.

thanks for the explainer! it’s infuriating.

Thankee.

It's not a cost cutting measure. It's a redirection of government money from the many to the few.

Thank you for writing this Even though Musk is terrible, I would actually feel better about DOGE if he was doing it himself But every dude he brings in (they will all be dudes) will be expert on one arcane issue & will change rules on that issue to benefit his own company. Corruption multiplied