No, your thread's title isn't any more deserving of attention that anybody else's. Mind your manners.
Excellent.
L
No, your thread's title isn't any more deserving of attention that anybody else's. Mind your manners.
(b) Review of Covered Contracts and Grants. Each Agency Head, in consultation with the agency’s DOGE Team Lead, shall review all existing covered contracts and grants and, where appropriate and consistent with applicable law, terminate or modify (including through renegotiation) such covered contracts and grants to reduce overall Federal spending or reallocate spending to promote efficiency and advance the policies of my Administration. This process shall commence immediately and shall prioritize the review of funds disbursed under covered contracts and grants to educational institutions and foreign entities for waste, fraud, and abuse.The reviewers could say "Nope, no waste, fraud or abuse in my area."
The right question should be "Are we doing the right things? Should the government be doing this at all? Can we eliminate this entire program?"
I was concerned at the get-go that this whole DOGE effort would just try to improve efficiency at the margins for all existing work. We want the government doing only one third of what it is doing now! Not looking for efficiency improvements in things it shouldn't be doing at all.
At least in the DOD, some of this stuff is already SOP. For example:
Once an agency’s system is in place, the Agency Head shall prohibit agency employees from engaging in federally funded travel for conferences or other non-essential purposes unless the travel-approving official has submitted a brief, written justification for the federally funded travel within such system.
We would go to conferences--they are an opportunity for scientists to catch up on continuing education, as well as network with other scientists, talk to vendors about new products, and catch up with developments in our field. We had to write a justification for each conference; for example, why I had to go to a conference on ethically conducting research with human subjects.
I suppose the justification that the employee submits when requesting to go to the conference would be sent up to DOGE to meet this requirement.
And about reviewing contracts. The DOD has a very extensive contract process. Some contract negotiations take quite a while. And, in order to have anything to do with the contracting process, it is required to take a course on contract law. I never thought that I'd have to take law courses as a scientist PhD, but that's what I had to do.
I was involved in downsizing at two of my units. At the one, we lost a large number of people (but were still expected to stay on top of our mission). At the other, our budget was cut drastically and we had to cut entire research projects and reorganize our staff. With all of that downsizing at the DOD, I have to assume that the federal bloat is happening at other agencies. (And are all of those agencies even necessary? There are lots of redundant agencies, in my opinion.)
Trump is awesome.
Elon...the memo...we're looking to see if there's a pulse and 2 neurons....lol
Bkmk
Without Elon I’d imagine that any type of this DOGE type operation would have a $100 million dollar budget and years of committee wrangling.
Amazing what Elon Musk has done in this regard.
I’ve never seen nor heard of anything like it in my lifetime.