The DOGE Hit List, Vol. 1: Office of Space Commerce

Traditionally, “waste, fraud and abuse” is where government careers go to die. It turns out that most (although of course not all) of the “waste” is either legally required or putatively oriented towards some idea of “fairness”. Outright fraud is comparatively rare, or a de facto set of payoffs to a constituency that was able to extract them, and thus possesses the Mandate of Heaven to take Casimir Pulaski Day as off-the-books vacation, and why would you decide to pick a fight with them over this in particular? And “abuse” – well, the government has established that the first rule of dealing with the government is that the government wins.

Journeys into refactoring are even more fraught, because every useless office was set up to manage some set of punishments for the enemy’s constituencies or gimmes for your own, which reshuffling threatens. Yes, the payoff might be minimal compared to the costs, or even at this point nonexistent – but why would you trade away the optionality that they might do something eventually, without getting something in return?

This explains why, generally, nothing gets done – but none of this actually matters if you have the actual authority to decide, no, we’re going to do it this way because this advances my interests, I have power, and I am willing to take or ignore whatever game-theoretic retaliation you would ordinarily dish out.

RTWT @ American Sun

In space no one can hear the smoke detector chirp 😂