The proposed Senate budget includes $150 billion increase in the defense budget, which already was 50% of all discretionary spending (that means after SS and Medicare as that is covered by a separate tax).
This is much more than any DOGE savings, and shows that this isn't about reducing the federal budget, but about cutting services in order to fund two things: military, and corporate tax cuts (which largely benefit the rich).
With cuts to other parts of the federal budget, the defense share of the budget will be even larger than 50%.
I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste, than being spent on the military (which, by the way means that the big defense contractors in the US are _subsidized by tax payers_).
Right, but theres a difference between "economically inefficient because every dollar spent here translates to less than a dollar of direct returns" and "economically inefficient because every dollar spent on this requires spending five dollars more on administering it".
It's absolutely possible for a government to value investing in health care or education or foreign aid in a way that a corporation could never monetize, but still value doing it in a more effective way.
exactly the opposite actually, lets look at medicare, Medicare Part A. and Part B. are administered by the government and of their funding about 98.6% is spent on care with the 1.4% going to administration. Medicare part D is privately administered and replaces part A and B, but 15% is spent on administration and often covers less.
More Perfect Union has good video covering it on youtube
And yet an off the shelf drug purchased by medicaid is often hundreds of times more expensive than when retail buys it. Something is happening and people taking their cut aren’t dumb enough to have it appear as top end administrative cost.
that would be medicaid not medicare which are two different programs and is because they aren't allowed bargain on medication pricing expect on a few select medications
Sure we all know _why_. The question is whether, by the time the money gets to where it needs to go, it was an efficient use of $$. If the government (of all things holy in our society) can’t stop itself from getting royally ripped off when purchasing medication, then what warm blooded taxpayer wouldn’t want the problem fixed. Once you fix the problem the spend goes down literal orders of magnitude. Same with corruption. If the way you fund X is by dumping money into an NGO owned by the government official who authorized program X, and 90% ends up in their kids bank account, that’s got to stop.
Anyway, the topic of this tread, DOGE, is reading the books and asking questions and then recommending areas where fraud/waste/abuse can be cut. They are not directly cutting entire gov’t programs for fun and profit. This whole sub-tread feels like it’s on a different set of tracks headed a loosely similar direction. DOGE isn't cutting medicare.
I think we’re arguing semantics at this point. The leaders of the agencies where actions are taking place are cooperating (or not) with DOGE’s recommendations and executing at their discretion (which may be to accept the full recommendation and apply it immediately). If DOGE is over socializing their “wins” then sure we can agree they could tone it back.
Seems odd to participate in a comment chain, taking it further away from the post topic, and then when you realize you are wrong you say that it is not relevant.
>DOGE isn't cutting medicare.
Let’s follow up in two months to see where this statement stands.
> They are not directly cutting entire gov’t programs for fun and profit.
I mean, that's exactly what they're doing, isn't it? First thing they did was boast about shutting down entire departments at the weekend. Then they started mass layoffs of anyone on probation, with grudging acknowledgement they might have been a bit hasty in firing nuclear safety operatives without asking the question of whether they'd been promoted or recently hired because they were useful. And the subject of this entire thread is them publicly demonstrating lack of basic understanding of the books
You are correct about DOGE being advisory, but also mistaken that anybody other than the president is elected in the executive branch. The president is the only elected official in the entire executive branch and the only elected official elected by the entire country. All the whining about “unelected Elon” is hateful hogwash and betrays a fundamental lack of understanding about how our government works. I was honestly super confused but I guess unsurprised at this point when Warren introduced that rage bait.
They can’t do anything about it now that the Republican Party has sold the country out to deranged white nationalist fascists and an unelected billionaire.
>And yet an off the shelf drug purchased by medicaid is often hundreds of times more expensive than when retail buys it. Something is happening and people taking their cut aren’t dumb enough to have it appear as top end administrative cost.
What "is happening" is that Republicans in the mid-2000s ensured that Medicare and Medicaid would be unable to negotiate drug prices by baking that into the law. Insurance companies can negotiate drug prices.
5:1 sounds absurd but I bet most municipal projects that are largely grant funded are probably somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1.
I cringe when I hear about my town getting $20k-200k grants for stuff that would have cost perhaps half as much were my town simply catering to its own needs rather than trying to optimize for getting the feds to pick up the tab. My town's library, several school programs and several intersection renovations fall into this category. The library in particular is pretty stupid for reasons outside the scope of this comment.
I’m sure you can find some evidence of that. You also need to find evidence that every department that is getting slashed has those kind of inefficiencies. The government is large and complex. Even inside large companies, which are comparatively smaller you’ll find different departments have different level of inefficiencies.
Which is why a discussion on this topic at such a high level isn't really productive. You need to look at each line item and ask whether it’s fraud/waste/abuse and then make a call. That is exactly what DOGE is doing. If you don’t trust them then you’ll never get to a discussion on meaningful details.
Its not. they are just firing everyone they can. if they were being careful and looking at every line item they would not have accidentally fired the engineers that maintain our nuclear weapon initiating a mad scramble to rehire them. you cant have small team doing that level of audit in the time frames they have been in operation.
They wouldn't have fired them in the first place if they had been doing a line by line audit.
This is the equivalent of flipping every breaker in the box turn off one light in an apartment building. Sure the light turned off but you also turned off everyone's refrigerators, and the oxygen machine the old lady in apartment 3b needs to live. But you turned it back on the breakers of anyone who came down and complained... unfortunately the old lady died but she didn't make it down to complain. the question is who are Doge going to kill with their actions that wont get their complaints heard?
Nothing concerns me less than a quickly remedied mistake.
PS: at many time’s I’ve been successful using the “flip every breaker” strategy. A well designed oxygen machine has a battery and a fridge can tolerate a brief power outage.
> A well designed oxygen machine has a battery and a fridge can tolerate a brief power outage.
Sure, but you would at least do the due diligence to confirm that the case for Mrs Shelby before you YOLO it and wish for the best with her life on the line.
Many of the mistakes they are making are not being remedied, nor will the consequences be obvious in the short term.
There really isn't any upside for anyone in this whole thing except for Trump, Elon and their buddies. And they are breaking the law.
The farce of this whole thing is that none of the destructive cuts they've made will amount to a hill of beans compared to federal spending. They're jumping over hundred dollar bills to chase pennies.
(That's b/c none of this is actually about making government more efficient)
That’s 340,000,000 individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and geographies.
They wake up every morning and go about their lives. Things like planes need to stay in the air, water needs to be clean, trains need to not derail in the middle of towns, dams need to stay not only structurally sounds but in some cases keep producing electricity.
The USA is the fourth largest country by area in the entire world.
To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say.
> To say that the government is too big and complex and it should be smaller and simpler feels like a drastic oversimplification and incredibly simple thing to say.
I can stipulate there must be essential complexity. I think we have to dispute any suggestion that this hypothetically-essential complexity has grown at the same rate as the spending[1].
It's not obvious that fairness, charity, national defense, public health, postage stamps, corn ethanol... [or air traffic control (cough), clean water (cough), non-derailing trains (cough), levees (cough)]..., ad infinitum should require a static percentage of the economy. Essential or not, those costs fundamentally cannot continue to outpace real GDP growth.
Rather, it seems obvious to me that the political class has scope-creeped "governance" into spending as an end in itself.
Practically, and morally, the government is too big and complex, and it should be drastically smaller and simpler.
In any large orgs the more people involved the more deadlocks you have and it can become a policy quagmire. Both meta and twitter achieved more velocity once cuts are in place.
Twitter has turned an incredible profit and launched an AI assistant since almost the entire user base claimed that Elon was going to run the company into the ground.
"Fidelity has again marked down the value of its shares in X Holdings, which the mutual fund giant helped Elon Musk buy for $44 billion when the company was known as Twitter.
By the numbers: Fidelity believes that X is worth 71.5% less than at the time of purchase, according to a new disclosure that runs through the end of November 2023 (Fidelity revalues private shares on a one-month lag).
* This includes a 10.7% cut during November, during which time Musk told boycotting X advertisers to "go f*k yourself" during an on-stage interview with the New York Times.
* In terms of publicly traded comps, Meta stock rose 4.9% in November while Snap shares climbed 38.2%."
I personally think X is worth at least 10x that evaluation as it is now state-sponsored disinformation network which is worth much more than $44bn. it is best investment Elon has ever made
Do you have a source for the assertion that Twitter has "incredible profits?" As a private company I think their financials aren't as widely published any more, but I honestly haven't seen any information on which way their financials are going.
Fidelity saying (in 2023) that X isn't worth what Elon paid for it does not mean it’s not making money and building product (in 2025). Allegedly it’s worth 44B again (:
> "economically inefficient because every dollar spent on this requires spending five dollars more on administering it".
could you say a few words on how you think dodge making it harder for anything to happen without going through them is going to make it cost less to spend on the useful things?
It's important to recognize that a large part of the inefficiencies are due to the private sector and having to work around that.
A single payer healthcare system is, by every measure, more efficient than private healthcare. There's 1 system. You don't need hundreds of billing analysts. You don't need administrators on top of administrators. You don't need constant tug of war.
Part of the reason Medicaid is so inefficient is because there's other things that are not Medicaid.
In addition to that, to spend on things that produce net positive returns for society, but whose benefits are diffuse enough that every smaller entity isn't incentivized enough to do it.
Also, to adjust market dynamics to shift things toward long-term good when short-term incentives won't necessarily produce the same result.
And don't worry, the House is ready to extend and expand tax cuts to more than extinguish any potential "savings" - to the tune of over $3 trillion in extra deficit spending. But don't worry, they've planned for that- just increase the debt limit by $4 trillion to cover the difference!
After all, now that the Democrats aren't in charge any longer, increasing the debt limit is no biggie - we'll just grow ourselves out of the hole! Once we enact those tax cuts, it'll be hard to justify even more debt spending on such silly things like "education" and "research". We've got to pay the interest on the money we borrowed to provide those tax cuts after all.
Wait, I thought the GOP was the party of fiscal conservatism and reducing the deficit? Shouldn't they be reducing the debt ceiling rather than raising it?
> Wait, I thought the GOP was the party of fiscal conservatism and reducing the deficit?
This has not been true since Reagan. The US political right has been selling economic bullshit since the 1980s:
> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[21][22] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[23] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[23][24][25]
They’re the party of saying that, but then cutting taxes and launching insanely expensive very-optional wars paid for by credit card. This is just what they in-fact do when given a chance.
They claim to want to reduce the deficit, but are also committed to pretending that the best and least-painful ways to do that just don’t exist. So. Kinda hard to actually do it.
They only care about deficits when a democrat wants to pay for sick children’s medicine or something.
If you think that, then they've been successful at their usual smokescreen: blame Democrats for deficit spending, and then when the GOP is back in power, they do... more deficit spending. Sometimes even more deficit spending. Somehow a lot of people seem not to notice that.
No need to worry about running deficits when the tax cuts realized by the richest individuals and corporations “trickles down” to the rest of us. Still waiting for that magic rain…
They absolutely should be. The legislature is not representing the will of the voters and refusing to do what's right for society as a whole and pass term limits for themselves. It's not complicated. Those who vote yes are reasonable, ethical, moral people, and those who vote no leave behind a permanent legacy of boundless self-interest.
That solves a symptom, not the problem. You need stronger legislation against lobbying, campaign financing, and investing by representatives.
If that works, the incentive to be a representative is reduced and there won’t be people who make it into a profitable career against the interests of the people.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think addressing any of these - term limits, lobbying, campaign finance reform, congressional insider trading - is a good thing and we should be wanting to address all of them. RepresentUs had a really good platform for this up until COVID, then seemingly all of their credibility around genuine bipartisanship disappeared and the old open-minded, respectful, cross-aisle cooperative spirit was just thrown straight out the window. I was very disappointed by this.
Public sector liabilities are private sector assets. GOP is the party of billionaires and billionaires want more money, so they demand lower taxes and greater deficits.
I'm not sure if this is true any more, or if it is it's nominally true. But Democrats certainly have a lot of wealth - Kamala Harris raised about $1.4bn to Trump's $700m in her campaign, and in record time.
Well… technically the Democrats and the GOP changed sides on things such as civil rights and slavery, so it’s hard to say they always were like that. The people yes, but not the label.
> Well… technically the Democrats and the GOP changed sides on things such as civil rights and slavery, so it’s hard to say they always were like that.
Pre-1960s the racists were mixed between the two parties to a varying degree. In the 1960s the GOP decide to actually go after / court the racist voter.
I believe it was more complicated than that, with some moving around since the 1930’s at least. I think the 1960’s civil rights movement just made it painfully obvious.
Having said that, Americans seem to be extremely pragmatic when it comes to voting, not ruling out someone for being a terrible human being if their policy proposals make sense to the voter. I wish Americans would be more ideological and principled in that situation.
Interesting. Coming from a country where most people vote purely based on their ideologies, I wish they would vote more for policies. Grass, green, etc, I suppose.
DOGE isn't really cutting things to fund others. Many of their cuts are going to be net revenue negative. Many will cost taxpayers more of their money.
It's about gutting the civil service and staffing them with loyalists that will do what Trump or Musk want, despite what the law says. It's consolidation of power and corruption. Musk is also crippling many of the agencies that enforce regulations on his businesses.
The most obvious case is the CFPB, which returns roughly twice its cost to taxpayers. I would argue that's honestly very inefficient, I'd like to see the CFPB returning a multiple of its cost to taxpayers... but nonetheless it is obvious shutting it down will cost taxpayers more.
We only see what it's directly returning to customers, not the damage it prevents to happen in the first place by a) forcing companies to change their behaviour and b) possibly influencing legislation and policy making.
Your point is spot on, but I think it actually does have better returns for consumers on paper than that. IIRC, it saves consumers 10s of billions for < 1 billion of expenses.
The CFPB claims to have recovered $19 billion for consumers, total, since 2011. Which is 14 years ago. So maybe it recovers 1.4 billion a year.
It's budget is around 600 million a year. So yeah, it probably recovers a little over double what it costs to operate.
That sounds okay, but bear in mind the recovered funds are... taxpayer dollars that we unfairly paid. And when you factor in the cost in taxes we pay for CFPB, that means... we're only getting a little more than half our money back. That's certainly better than not getting anything back, but I'd hesitate to call it "efficient".
The challenge is that this doesn’t take into account harm prevented. How many companies changed their policies as a result of CFPB enforcement / to avoid CFPB involvement?
Based on the hijinks we have still been seeing day to day, I am not sure I think the CFPB has been scaring companies into good behavior on any significant scale. I am sure there's some, but I think the penalties are clearly too low if half of the recovery amount is operational costs for the CFPB itself.
Anecdotally, I work for a very large tech company and the CFPB is mentioned frequently as an important regulator. It has (had) an outsized impact where it regulated and definitely caused companies to change their behavior or at least be more continuous.
> based on murders we have still been seeing day to day, I’m not sure prosecutors have been scaring criminals into good behavior on any significant scale.
If the benchmark is perfection, no one can meet that standard. On top of the 20B in recovered consumer relief, they’ve levied another 5B in fines. It’s also important to look at their progress [1] where they’ve taken > 350 enforcement actions since they started. They were on track to be quite successful at enforcement actions until Trump’s first term when he started trying to cripple them. Same with penalty relief btw. Most of the dollars returned were under Democratic presidents.
No agency within the government can do well when the administration is purposefully trying to cripple you in the first place.
Why doesn’t anyone do anything? They risk ending up as the rest of the world according to this, and everything they do is talking 1k+ threads. If everything people say here is true, US is in its own version of Perestroika.
Your question contains a clue to the answer: "Why doesn't anyone do anything". Specifically, what? I've been asking myself this since at least 2016 and I'm sure many other people have too. I've made phone calls, donated money, volunteered for campaigns and gone door-to-door. None of that has made any difference.
The problem is in figuring out WHAT to do.
In 2018 the Democrats retook the house, which threw a spanner in the works of the second half of Trump’s first term. I’m guessing that’s about as much as we can hope for in the current term.
Let's take the other two branches that could theoretically stop the executive from doing what it does:
- the legislative (Congress): both chambers have a Republican majority, and all Trump critics in the Republican party have long since been eliminated or have retired. Democrats are currently debating whether they should use the upcoming funding bill to force the Republicans to make concessions via inducing a government shutdown (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/15/democrats-co...), but many fear this could backfire (e.g. Trump could say something along the lines of "these bad Democrats are forcing me to fire even more people because I can't pay them anymore").
- the judicial: some courts have ruled against some of the actions of DOGE (as well as other executive orders), but Trump is mostly ignoring them. It remains to be seen how the supreme court (with its 6-3 conservative majority) will decide when these cases (eventually) bubble up to them.
Who? the democrats? they are a minority party in both houses of congress ass such they cant force anything through committees bring bills to the floor or call witnesses in official congressional investigations.
the federal workers union? they got told they don't have standing in a recent court case only the workers can bring a case despite the fact that the whole point of the union is to represent said workers.
the workers well being fired and told by the court their union can't help they are pretty much out of luck they don't have the money as they had paid it to the union that isn't being allowed to do its job.
the courts? maybe some but thanks to Mitch McConal leading the republicans to block filling many of the open judicial seats as possible they were left unfilled for much of the Obama administration allowing Trump to pack the federal judicial system with supporters during his first administration.
we are in the middle of an auto-coup
at this point the only thing that can stop in the shortish term is the democrats winning the next three special elections and having a 1 vote majority then having no defectors in any consequential vote. but even then that will only allowing the to block legislation not pass any as the republicans will still control the senate.
> at this point the only thing that can stop in the shortish term is the democrats winning the next three special elections
The two Florida congressional districts holding a special election in April are Trump +34 and Trump +37 from the last election. So yeah, that’s not happening.
It's congresses job to reign in the executive here, but the R's in charge have decided to let Trump usurp their power.
Courts are doing their thing, but they are slow. Republicans are already starting campaigns against judges and threatening impeachment against those that rule against them, and we're still all unsure at what point the Trump admin will defy courts and go full rogue. I think it's inevitable.
It's basically up to us now. If you have any Republican politicians representing you, blow them up on the phone, emails. Confront them in town halls and public appearances. They need to feel the backlash. We're seeing a little bit of this the past couple of days:
I don’t think it’s about the budget at all. It’s just an excuse to purge the civil service, since it’s overwhelmingly liberals in it, so that they can swing it more republican. Deficits are just a cover.
While there is certainly a wide range of individual viewpoint in the military, compared to the general population I would not describe it as "overwhelmingly liberal".
.
There is evidence that DOGE has targeted Federal agencies perceived as "liberal":
Here’s one, maybe “overwhelmingly” is a bit too extreme but we’re talking double or more the number of registered dems on average, with some departments being much more lopsided:
It's also about weakening the federal government. Cutting regulations and throwing everything into chaos. It took some time for me to buy into the Techno-authoritarian theories, but the evidence is overwhelming.
I understand why big corp would want to get rid of regulations to increase their profits. But chaos? That seems bad for business. I don't track the logic there.
> I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste, than being spent on the military (which, by the way means that the big defense contractors in the US are _subsidized by tax payers_).
I would rather not spend taxpayers money on any of these and especially on military.
DOGE is a complete farce and has been from the beginning. The fact that so many people are okay with regular folks being laid off and plunged into chaos is beyond me. I guess since we're all living through screens these days, it's easy to remove yourself from the heartache and turmoil that goes into being fired, without real cause. But it's okay, these are just federal workers, not real people. They don't have real jobs. They're all the same stereotypical DMV workers we've come to make caricatures out of.
A bit off topic: end result and how to measure it is often the point against DOGE - that their “move fast and break things” approach would in fact break things, causing unexpected and excessive long term costs.
I get your point, they are still active and there will be more to evaluate.
He doesn’t need to say it if he acts like it. At least this is what nbc news claims:
> Musk has embraced Silicon Valley’s most notorious instincts to “move fast and break things” in a lightning battle to muscle into the computer systems and power structures of federal agencies.
Me: Has Elon Musk ever used the phrase "move fast and break things"?
ChatGPT: No, “Move fast and break things” is a phrase famously associated with Mark Zuckerberg, not Elon Musk. It was Facebook’s internal motto for many years, reflecting their approach to rapid innovation and iteration, even at the cost of breaking things along the way.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, has used phrases like:
• “The best part is no part” (referring to simplifying engineering designs)
• “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”
• “Move fast and fix things” (sometimes attributed to Tesla/SpaceX as a counter to Zuckerberg’s phrase)
Musk does value speed and iteration, but he tends to focus on engineering precision and iterative improvements, rather than outright breaking things recklessly.
DOGE cut all the easier stuff first -- such as firing employees on probationary status, shuttering USAID. To achieve any meaningful cuts they have to gut Social Security/Medicare, Medicaid or the Military. SS/Medicare is off limits. Cutting Medicaid would not only break Trump's promise to "not touch Medicaid", but would directly hit his prime voter base. And cutting the Military won't be allowed by Congress (who as I mentioned, wants to raise, not lower, the defense budget).
He could touch social security/Medicare or Medicaid by purging the rolls of the deceased
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/elon-musk-says-millions-soc...
Elon Musk says millions in Social Security database are between ages of 100 and 159. If they purged millions of 120-160 year olds from the social security database and limited it to only people who were currently alive they could make progress
> I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste, than being spent on the military (which, by the way means that the big defense contractors in the US are _subsidized by tax payers_).
We all would, but given that Russia, Iran, China, and NK are aggressive states and all actively claim that the US is the enemy, and that the relative world order expired in 2022, we cannot have nice things. The peace dividend expired years ago
you could cut the US military budget substantially and it would still be the largest military power in the world and well able to defend itself
it might not longer be able to be the "undisputed global power" but, as someone who has lived abroad most of my life and seen American foreign policy from the other side, I don't know that's a bad thing
Although it is worth noting that the war spending the US does do also doesn't translate into being an undisputed global power. They burned a trillion or few in Afghanistan and I doubt that impressed anyone in particular. They didn't achieve anything. Challengers to the global hegemony multiplied in the aftermath.
If they hadn't wasted the resources they'd just be better off with no downsides.
Well they both are across the large ocean and it's difficult to invade US from their location (especially for NK which probably doesn't even have ships). US is surrounded by weak, peaceful countries and separated by oceans from not-so-peaceful ones. It could cut the military spending completely and still be safe.
They won’t have any choice soon enough - all that wishy washy they are not our enemy bullshit goes out the window with the first missile/shell/drone flying over.
If you remember Putin is a spy by training, and a damn good one at that, you must consider spies really don’t want to change things when they are advantageous to them. Right now he knows very well what levers to pull to make things happen the way he wants. He won’t change that.
I fail to see how the cuts as being implemented actually make US citizens safer from Russia, Iran, China, and NK. Can you elaborate on how they do that?
The only thing that we _need_ is ICBMs with nuclear warheads, which we already have plenty of. The rest of it is essentially optional. Even conceding the need for a large conventional military force (soldiers/tanks/boats/aircraft/drones/etc), the US military is way overfunded, and significant budget cuts would actually be on the table if DOGE were a sincere effort to reduce government spending.
Clearly false. Nukes are just not that useful in about anything except the end of the world. If you're fighting a Ukraine-style war, nukes are worthless.
Ukraine is only fighting an Ukraine-style war because it lacked nukes to begin with. Which, btw, they lack because we agreed to defend them from Russia if they agreed to not develop nukes.[1]
Yes it did, the Cold War had just ended but Russia and USSR was still seen as the enemy by the US. It’s not that different from now. The difference is Ukraine was basically considered to be a part of Russia back then.
That was true before the US government was captured by a Russian asset elected via Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns. Now, the US has joined the bad guys.
Even though it indeed doesn't look great, I think it's still too early to call US like that. Trump is behaving not unlike Biden insofar that his mind has clearly degraded over the last few years significantly.
It's up to the people supporting him and about who talks to him just before he issues actual orders. Recently, it has been people like Putin which is reflected on his output. Others wilö talk to him too.
Ukraine only exists as a post Soviet country because we agreed with Russia that they (Ukraine) would never have nukes nor be a part of NATO. They otherwise would never have allowed the formation of a separate government.
The insane rhetoric of Biden and Zelensky and specifically entertaining the idea of Ukraine joining NATO is what led to this tragedy.
It’d be like Mexico joining the USSR. Do you think the USA would simply let that happen?
> Ukraine only exists as a post Soviet country because we agreed with Russia that they (Ukraine) would never have nukes nor be a part of NATO.
There was never such a deal. Quite the opposite: Russia and the US reiterated in several agreements a commitment to respect Ukraine's borders and sovereignty, including the right to freely choose allies. This traces back to the 1975 Helsinki Conference, where representatives of all European countries agreed on common principles for security and cooperation in Europe, which are often referenced in later treaties.
> In early February 1990, U.S. leaders made the Soviets an offer. According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on Feb. 9, then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, U.S. could make “iron-clad guarantees” that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.
Whether they were written down and signed is nowhere near as relevant as whether they were actually promised. The word of the counterparty is what makes and enforces a diplomatic deal, not some piece of paper.
Actually, there is no record of that. None whatsoever.
All top Soviets have refuted this. When the German ZDF channel asked Gorbachev about it in 2014 when Russia used this as a pretext for invading Crimea, he directly called it a myth on camera. So did his minister of defense Yazov and minister of foreign affairs Shevardnadze.
Gorbachev even explained that claims of such promise make no sense. Elected leaders of democracies cannot promise what their successors will or will not do. Voters set the direction. Trump is not bound by what Biden, Obama, Bush or Clinton allegedly promised someone in private decades ago. "Had we had an agreement, we would have written it down", he summed it up.
Shevardnadze went further and explained how this myth misrepresents the actual talks they held in 1990 regarding German reunification. The talks were about placement of foreign troops in East Germany before the Soviet forces had left East Germany. They agreed that only West German Bundeswehr would enter East Germany and take command alone to avoid getting multinational foreign NATO forces intermixed with Soviet forces. This was to prevent any potential misunderstandings that could spiral out of control during the handover. Germans upheld their part and everything went as they had agreed.
Shevardnadze said that during his tenure (1985-1991), the question of Eastern Europe joining NATO was not discussed even once with Western representatives, Warsaw Pact countries, or in the communist party circles in Moscow. Why would they discuss it if they didn't expect Warsaw Pact to dissolve? It came as a surprise. Nobody expected that the USSR itself would disintegrate, and parts of it would declare independence and join NATO.
Gorbachev, Yazov and Shevardnadze have passed away, but Shevardnadze's successor who was in charge of Russian foreign affairs from 1990 to 1996 is still around and active on social media. If you're not convinced, you can contact him directly and let him explain this myth personally: https://x.com/andreivkozyrev/ Putin's senior advisor from 2000 to 2005, who departed over disagreements with Putin's increasingly authoritarian style, is also active and recently published a video where he tears the myth apart (in Russian, sadly): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFCNwGjko54
This myth is rather unique because three different generations of officials have refuted it: the Soviet representatives (late 1980s / early 1990s), people from Yeltsin's tenure (1990s), and people from early Putin's admin (early 2000s). Rarely do myths get so strongly refuted. No paper trail exist either. Western countries make a huge military commitment, but it doesn't get mentioned anywhere in internal Soviet meeting notes, private diaries, or other sources? That's hard to believe.
I find this myth a very good subject for a case study of a hoax. It is internally coherent and derived from an actual fact (the talks about German reunification), but doesn't connect to anything else. It floats around in isolation.
As if neither Trump nor Putin has reneged on a deal before.
For fucks sake, who gives a shit about what Russia thinks? They suppress democracy and political opposition. They poison journalists outside of Russia. They jail and kill public interest figures. They kidnap and jail Americans on false pretexts.
False equivalency, comparing the aggressor Russia with a country that's in a literal fight for its survival. Straight up Kremlin talking points. Not food for thought.
> comparing the aggressor Russia with a country that's in a literal fight for its survival. Straight up Kremlin talking points. Not food for thought.
I'm sure Russia feels the same when considering the prospect of a neighbor joining an nuclear armed international alliance constructed specifically to oppose it's power and existence.
My goto analogy for this is the hypothetical of Mexico joining the USSR. Sure it sounds far fetched, but how do you think the USA would react to that type of situation?
I think you need to lookup the definition of the word hypothetical. The point of the exercise is to imagine a scenario where the players are reversed to imagine how they would react.
Oh lordy. I only ever hear this on the internet and I always find it bizarre. Who is telling people this? University professors? Where and in what subjects? Prime time news programs? Again, in what countries? I've been in the military for 20 years and I've never heard an NCO or officer utter these words. Because it's nonsense. Defense pacts don't conduct totally-offensive air campaigns against countries that none of their members are at war with.[1] There is no formal legal mechanism for NATO as an organization to act as an enforcement arm for UN Resolutions, by the way. If there was, NATO probably should have been bombing Israel since UN Resolution 497 in 1981.
First off, youre misquoting me. Thats just despicable.
Second, you have shown us three examples of Ukraine fending off Russian aggression.
I dont know why you are advancing Russian propaganda, but the fact that you are provides moe than enough justification to completely ignore your claims.
> First off, youre misquoting me. Thats just despicable.
The purpose is to demonstrate that the complaints have no morally universal application. Despicable actions by Ukraine are given a carte blanche. I find it bizarre that people hold it up as some sort of beacon of liberal democracy.
>Second, you have shown us three examples of Ukraine fending off Russian aggression.
So the ends justify the means? Anyone who feels they are "fending off aggression" can kill civilians with carbombs and fatally abuse American citizens in their prisons? That's your position?
>I dont know why you are advancing Russian propaganda
Are you saying that NPR and the Helsinki Times are Russian propaganda outlets? That strikes me as completely irrational, but nevertheless a very common viewpoint among European warhawks. It's no surprise that Europe wasn't invited to the peace talks in Saudi Arabia.
Think about it. Would you be willing to end the world if your neighboring country just took one town? How about a city? A region? Countries need more than nukes to defend themselves because it's not credible or sensible to threaten to end the world over what could be just a border dispute.
its not a end of world scenario until you get to superpower vs superpower even then the southern hemisphere would probably hold up fairly well if Russia and NATO went all out.
If you like you can modify the calculus to 'destroy and poison the vast majority of our cities and people' and the calculus holds. Countries need non-nuclear deterrence.
would you invade your neighbor if it meant they would nuke you capital and largest population centers. its called mutually assured destruction and its what got us through the cold war alive neither side would face the other head on as they both would be turned to molten slag a few minutes latter you just make clear you have low bar to initiate the Samson option.
as long a they believe you would nuke them for taking a single town they wont do it, so you won't have to.
and wars can be led in such ways that it never seems like the enemy is attacking the thing over which you would be willing to end the world. aka salami tactics
The list of wars that countries with nuclear weapons have lost against countries without nuclear weapons is pretty much all the wars those countries have list since 1945. It's a very long list.
On their own ground, deep in the heart of their most populated cities, using their own civilian aircraft, knowing they're unlikely to destroy their own cities and believing that your vision of God is on your side .. sure.
Nobody can use Nuclear bombs without serious repercussions.
Putin considered using new, smaller tactical nukes on Ukraine and that set off huge international opposition. The mere mention of nukes is extremely counter productive to whatever a state is trying to accomplish.
By some estimates Israel dropped 4 Hiroshimas worth of explosives on Gaza.
I think governments are afraid of nukes not because of the destructive power. Nukes are the only weapons that put the actual people in charge in danger, not just the civilians or the military. People in charge are afraid for their lives, not for the people they are supposed to protect.
The senators and president will be OK, they have plans to evac to a huge bunker with everything they need. I don't know about you but I don't seem to have a taxpayer funded mega bunker.
I don’t find it simplistic, but realistic. Their asses are pretty safe and they can play their soldier games from the deep bunkers until the atom starts speaking. People in charge are rarely heroes and everything revolves around their safety, by design.
Sure, but my point is that "suffering personal shame for the good of millions of other people" is an option. Not very Trumpy, but a feasible option available to him.
> Not very Trumpy, but a feasible option available to him.
For someone who is (I would suggest) a malignant narcissist / borderline sociopath like Trump, "suffering personal shame for someone else's benefit" is not an option because it just wouldn't occur to them. Even if you sat down and patiently explained it, the concept just doesn't make sense to them, like, eg., the concept of a flat earth doesn't make sense to non-lunatics.
The US spent more than twice (and almost three times) what Russia, China, and Iran spent on their military combined in 2023. If we can't match up with them by spending twice as much as them then maybe the military is the first place we should be looking for inefficency.
American needs an enemy. Drugs, communism, terrorism, China. I guess without something to fear it would be hard to justify spending trillions on their military.
Generally I think most american military/state department people dont want China as an enemy but see a high chance of conflict if they invade Taiwan. Though under Trump I'm not sure we would defend Taiwan, we seem to be betraying Ukraine and other european allies
This is much more than any DOGE savings, and shows that this isn't about reducing the federal budget, but about cutting services in order to fund two things: military, and corporate tax cuts (which largely benefit the rich).
With cuts to other parts of the federal budget, the defense share of the budget will be even larger than 50%.
I'd much rather my money being spent on education, foreign assistance, scientific research, etc., even if there is some inefficiencies and waste, than being spent on the military (which, by the way means that the big defense contractors in the US are _subsidized by tax payers_).