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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 6 Mar \ on: Exclusive: NIH to terminate hundreds of active research grants science
It is a pain for those researchers, for sure, but these are public monies and one administration isn't allowed to make financial commitments for the next. The legislature can, and is supposed to manage financial matters, but they've been shirking that responsibility this entire century.
What's happening, I think(hope), is they're attempting to zero-base government spending. Every accountability assessment concludes that very large shares of the US budget are wasteful. It never gets addressed, though, because spending has always rolled over from year to year. Making agencies justify all of their expenses from scratch is potentially a way to not renew all of the graft, corruption, and waste.
So you mean, no public money can be committed for periods spanning longer than 4 years? No long-term planning? I am probably misunderstanding, giving your comment on the legislature right after.
As for zero-basing government spending, yes, that makes sense under the premise that graft, corruption, and waste is going on. Not disputing that. However, if so, I'd like to see it happen regardless of party lines. Then, it would give credence to the goal of removing waste. If it's just DEI stuff and left-wing woke stuff, then it's more ideological than improving government efficiency.
Is DOGE going to make sure there is no government spending waste going on in terms of
- military funding?
- police funding?
- farming subsidies?
- prison funding?
- subsidies for religious organizations?
- etc
(just listed random points that I would imagine the "right" would be ok to spend government money on... the examples are not the point, i guess you see what I'm trying to say)
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Financial planning is constitutionally the purview of Congress. However, Congress has largely abdicated this responsibility, because they discovered that politically it's better to not have your name on anything that your opponent can campaign against.
So, there can be long-term financial commitments imposed on the Executive Branch. However, even those can be undone by the next Congress. Nothing else is compatible with the idea of representative government. There has to be a mechanism for the public will to be manifest in policy change.
DOGE is looking into everything (supposedly). They've already started digging through the military, justice department (American police and prisons aren't primarily federal), and agriculture programs. We don't have subsidies for religious organizations.
There's almost certainly going to be more Democrat corruption exposed for the simple reason that over 90% of the federal workforce are Democrats. They just have way more opportunity to get away with stuff.
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Very interesting. You clearly know more about it than I do~~
Are churches still tax-exempt in the US?
By definition, those are not subsidies, but one could argue that they provide financial support akin to subsidies by not taking away some of their revenue.
But yeah, this specific example wasn't my point, nor your point. It's good to learn that DOGE is looking into everything. It's not going to be easy though to judge "objectively" what is waste (corruption is probably easier to define). Good that not every government money relates to controversial topics and it'll be easier to find and deal with waste and corruption in those non-controversial topics.
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It's an example of the tradeoff between type I and type II errors. The old system flagged almost nothing as waste/fraud/etc. and as such generated almost no false positives (inappropriate cuts).
A properly balanced system wouldn't have zero errors, which means it will generate more false positives, while reducing false negatives (things that should have been cut but weren't).
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