zlacker

>>karako+(OP)
How should one orient themselves and their career if they wanted to work to increase funding to scientific development? Outside the obvious "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself"

Editing to clarify: this is not a hypothetical. This is something that I've been trying to do previously and am interested in doing a better job at in the future.

>>ghjv+c9
Combating funding drains in other areas that aren't productive, are secretive or are potentially even fraudulent so that more money is available for the things that matter.

Essentially what DOGE has been trying to do.

>>bright+Rb
That DOGE was so ineffective in the most DOGE-friendly political climate possible (Trump admin, republican control) kinda torpedoed the hypothesis that there's so much wasteful spending in the US government.

Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.

>>hombre+dk
DOGE never had any strong legal mandate or financing by congress, it was rushed in and a small team operated on the edges of what OBM/federal heads were allowed to do... which wasn't much, so they did a lot of flashy mostly meaningless stuff.

It was an idea that was never earnestly pursued and highly constrained by not being a formal agency with real power (see: reforming DoD or untouchable golden eggs), and all the transparency that comes with being a real agency with an explicit mandate... So it burned public trust pretty quickly.