Ancestors

Toot

Written by Anil Dash on 2025-01-05 at 16:13

Here's a quick piece I wrote up on how to understand DOGE as a very blatant attempt at procurement capture, a simple way of making government spending corrupt to benefit the tycoons. Please do pass it along & share any feedback! https://www.anildash.com/2025/01/04/DOGE-procurement-capture/

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Descendants

Written by Andy Sherwood on 2025-01-05 at 16:28

@anildash Former govt employee here. The procurement process is so difficult that many people will do anything they can to make it less painful, even at the expense of constituents. Re: capture, it also looks like to me like the Three Comma Club thinks “If I don’t purchase the government I want, they might make my crimes illegal.”

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Written by hyperific on 2025-01-05 at 17:57

@anildash

What needs to be stated is that procurement isn’t always awarded based strictly on cost, so Musk could steer business to himself that he wouldn’t have otherwise won by making cost the only factor. Reliability, materials, experience, overall quality, timeliness, efficiencies and synergies with other contracts and projects…there are many other things that can be taken into account in awarding a contract. If DOGE aims to self-deal, they only need to overlook this basic fact.

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Written by praxis7 on 2025-01-05 at 18:17

@anildash I wonder what made the CEOs of Boeing and Intel step down after the election?

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Written by Jake Hamby on 2025-01-17 at 16:13

@praxis7 @anildash I don't know about Intel, but the CEO of Boeing's days were numbered after all the problems they've had. Too much Jack Welch / GE influence over there.

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Written by Curious Magpie on 2025-01-05 at 18:25

@anildash Every time you choose to use the acronym doge, you are giving free advertising to musk’s crypto and you are legitimizing this travesty.

As Sherilynn Ifill says in her newsletter today: “Musk and Ramaswamy are leading at best a “project on government accountability.” … It is not a “Department” which is a legal term for federal agencies.“

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Written by Anil Dash on 2025-01-05 at 18:51

@CuriousMagpie I literally cover that in the second paragraph of the piece.

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Written by Anil Dash on 2025-01-05 at 18:51

@CuriousMagpie and dogecoin predates Musk’s interest in that currency by years, fwiw

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Written by Curious Magpie on 2025-01-05 at 19:01

@anildash and yet you still choose to use it in the headline for clucks - it behooves good journalists to be thoughtful about the words they choose.

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Written by Sören on 2025-01-05 at 21:38

@CuriousMagpie @anildash it behooves good journalists to speak in a language they understand.

They also use “MAGA”, even though there is little agreement of what “great” means or evidence that Trump has achieved its supposed goal.

Until and unless a better term arrives, “DOGE” is an appropriate choice.

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Written by Curious Magpie on 2025-01-05 at 21:51

@chucker

=> View attached media

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Written by Old Man in the Shoe on 2025-01-17 at 15:41

@CuriousMagpie @chucker ironic

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Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-05 at 19:04

@anildash I don’t disagree with anything there, but it’s worth noting that spending too much money because of political silliness masquerading as ‘efficiency’ isn’t new. Two jobs ago, I was funded by DARPA. Every six months, they organised a meeting for people on the same grant to meet, alternating east and west coasts. The west one was usually in San Jose, because it was cheap and had a good airport connection.

A few years into the project, there was a lot of fuss over GSA organising conferences in holiday locations (which usually happened because these places were big enough venues to handle the events and were cheap in the off season). As a result, a directive came down that nowhere with pictures of a beach on its web site could be used for a conference, because a congressional staffer would spend 10 seconds looking at the web site for each venue and raise a fuss if it looked like fun and not work. There were two options for the venue in San Jose (that met all of the other requirements, ability to take government money, available at about the right time, big enough, and so on). One was on the beach. The other was quite a lot more expensive. We all went to the expensive one to avoid political ‘oversight’ complaining about waste.

If someone complains about government waste and has not been through the procurement process, I have no time for them. If they have been through the procurement process and made a lot of money from it, I might listen to the, but only if they’re enumerating the loopholes that they exploited.

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Written by Michael B. Johnson on 2025-01-05 at 19:27

@anildash enjoying the article.

A nit: “wroth” instead of “worth”

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Written by mark on 2025-01-05 at 19:27

@anildash thank you for calling out that this isn't real from the very beginning. I'm so tired of seeing people repeat the name uncritically. It isn't a legal entity, it's not part of our govt. I don't expect the media to actually ignore this and make it irrelevant while rich people LARP at being responsible, but I also don't expect them to play along so easily

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Written by Toni Aittoniemi on 2025-01-05 at 20:17

@anildash The old truth:

With leaders, do not watch what what they say. Always watch what they do instead.

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Written by TK on 2025-01-05 at 21:01

@anildash a couple things: GSA isn’t in charge of procurement per se, and “procurement process requires them to go with the lowest bidder” is inaccurate

Source: I’m an 11 year 1102.

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Written by Anil Dash on 2025-01-06 at 07:00

@CrucialTK yeah I knew the lowest bidder part was reductive, and a couple of folks pointed out the GSA error. I’ll update soon! Thanks.

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Written by COD on 2025-01-05 at 22:21

@anildash @waldoj - I imagine you saw this, but in case not, since it is very relevant to your interests...

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Written by Luna chan on 2025-01-06 at 02:10

@anildash DOGE is so stupid it should not even been seenas asetious concept its just the vanity project of an arrogant and vain individual.

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Written by Quentin Zervaas on 2025-01-06 at 04:55

@anildash @siracusa or it’s the way Elon leverages X into the US version of WeChat / a financial services company that citizens are required to use.

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Written by Eric Schutte on 2025-01-06 at 07:07

@anildash Please read this and take your time to really understand what will happen when DOGE takes over.

Why do people want this ? Why did America vote for this?

Dear Americans and dear world, open your eyes please.

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Written by Arena Cops 🇺🇦✌ on 2025-01-08 at 18:02

@anildash Musk's (& his fellow-oligarchs') main interest is to evade taxation & any regulations limiting his pathological impulses to rake in as much wealth as possible, no matter the cost to human lives & society, to nation, state & government.

It's pure robber baronry.

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Written by Andreas K on 2025-01-17 at 07:39

@anildash

It's called removing the inefficiencies out of the outdated tender process.

@clive

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Written by Clive Thompson on 2025-01-17 at 14:21

@yacc143 @anildash

Woof, yes

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Written by Jake Hamby on 2025-01-17 at 16:17

@anildash One practical example of inefficient procurement that DOGE has no free market solution for is what do you do about a company that acquires a bunch of other companies to become a single-source supplier for military aerospace components, and then raises prices accordingly to cheat taxpayers?

Let's just say that TransDigm Group has an interesting business model.

https://quartr.com/insights/company-research/transdigm-the-story-of-the-controversial-aerospace-giant

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Written by Jake Hamby on 2025-01-17 at 17:19

@anildash

I can't help but think that by 1976, no matter who won the election, we were going to get free-market Powell Memo-style policies. It's ironic that Richard Nixon was the last President who could get away with just setting the prices for what the U.S. government was willing to pay for a bolt or a hinge.

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