If I understand DOGE correctly, it has no power...It can't cut anything, all it can do is recommend. Implementation of some of its suggestions might be doable by executive order, but others will probably require legislative action. Republican majorities in both houses are slim; probably will be difficult to push through major changes. "Sound and fury signifying nothing...."
One solutions is to simply maintain some kind of credit system where entities that return money back , get credited with that amount and then that “virtual” credit is used to prioritize any future requests for additional funds .
Yeah, that's an idea. There's probably a number of good ideas that can be considered on how to overhaul the government budgetary process.
After COVID, many got hired on by the airlines making magnitudes more than they made at the FAA and left without even returning to the office to pack up their mug.
Indeed. They [Congress] can start by passing a budget, like they used to do. It's been 25+ years since they did that - they haven't done it this century! Without it, continuing resolutions have become the norm, which are prone to political grandstanding and government shutdowns.
...I have to say that failing seven consecutive audits and being unable to account for almost a trillion dollars is most certainly NOT a reasonable balance of mission and cost control.
I'm not addressing the overall DoD budget, just the O&M expenditures, which is where "use it or lose it" is normal practice.
But with entitlement spending on autopilot, and predicted to grow faster than GDP, it can't stay balanced but will consume the budget. When government spending grows faster than GDP, in the long term no amount of taxes can ever pay for it.
Yup. I will say there’s some technical distinctions entitlements and mandatory spending
Nothing is impossible in politics and laws can he changed. I’d argue the incoming administration is in a unique place with no ability to get re-elected. A rare opportunity exists to butcher sacred cows.
I believe the strategy is to include government in the gdp and just grow that.
Even that won’t solve the problem of entitlements. The SS funding system is fatally flawed - alwasy has been, and always will be. The problem is demographics. Unless everyone retirement eligibility moves back to the original plan assumptions (average 3-4 years of retirement) AND we return to a net population growth trend similar to what we saw in the 1950s, it cannot be solvent without continual tax increases and/or benefit cuts.
I don't think anybody suggests otherwise at the lower levels.
Be careful. This is a very dangerous line of thought. It actually makes sense - too much sense for it to ever be acted upon.
So on January 1 I need to set my budget for the rest of the year based on data from Dec 31?
^^^ This
Most large companies set their annual budgets in Q4 of the preceding year, based on the preceding 12 months (rolling forecasting).
Actually you still want zero based budgets so you have to show you need the money, and the progress was being made to the goals that were set. If you keep feeding in money without milestones and goals you have the very definition of waste.
I worked both sides of the ledger. In the Navy as a 'consumer' (ie using all the parts bought) and as a contractor for BAE that put the submarines refit packages together. Money never entered the equation. If Raytheon said its time for X to be replaced it just got replaced. If GE said there's a new revision of test kits for reactor chemistry testing it was added.
The Falcon 9 was a great success, but not quite that good. NASA provided 278M, which I suspect is where the 300M came from, but in total was 423M (550M in 2024 dollars). And it took more like ten years, because the Falcon 1 was an R&D stepping stone to the 9.
User fees will impede safety by making it more costly to flight plan or maintain currency. My experience with privatizing public services is that they now longer serve the public, but rather prioritize earning profits. Markets do a poor job of delivering inelastic goods, or goods and services where there is no real competition.
Slow flight is WAY below Vg, and landing at the slowest possible speed is quite different from flying at the slowest possible speed.
And what is the difference between all of those?
I think that's generally true, although the existence of BasicMed suggests that some level of risk tolerance exists at the higher levels of leadership. The carnage we're willing to accept on our roads as the price of the minimal training and relative freedoms of driving in the USA are another. The benefits to the individual, at least, would be tremendous if it changes a 1-2 year wait into walking out with a CACI issuance. I think that BasicMed has been a wonderful success, despite some reservations expressed a few years back by some aeromedical colleagues at the FAA.
I mean, the "carnage" on the roads is still 5-10 times safer than small plane GA when talking about autos. Motorcycles are similar to GA and everybody thinks they are death machines. If that was your point, apologies for missing it.
Motorcycles are 27 times more dangerous than cars according to stats. Our flying safety is almost entirely up to us. We chose our level of training and what we fly and when and where we fly. On the highway the best driver can be taken out by a texting idiot.
Sure, and yet there isn't any political impetus to heavily regulate motorcycle use despite the public perception that they're death-traps. In terms of fatality rate, autos are safer than GA aircraft and substantially less safe than airline transportation. In terms of absolute numbers, however, my point was that we accept the annual deaths of over forty thousand Americans in exchange for the speed limits, laws, and level of driver training we have. For example, the UK has a fairly rigorous process for obtaining a driver's license. In many (most?) American states, required driver training is relatively minimal, after which you can drive essentially anything up to a bus-sized RV with just a regular DL. This is reflected in the US having nearly double the per-mile fatality rate compared to the UK. We could absolutely reduce this number with requirements for stringent initial training (and, frankly, recurrent driver training akin to a flight review every five years) but our leadership at the state and federal levels accept the risk because the political cost of reducing it is too great. People would scream bloody murder at the thought of recurrent driver training.
I've never seen a number that large. Do you remember where you read it?
Motorcycle safety is mostly up the rider as well. Something like 75% of of motorcycle accidents are single vehicle or motorcycle at fault.
Motorcycle safety is in part up to the rider - don't be stupid, ride like you're invisible and everyone's trying to kill you. But I wouldn't say "mostly" up to the rider. The fact remains that at any time, a careless driver can kill you in ways that you cannot predict or prevent. This is different from aviation, where your safety is indeed mostly in your own hands. Other people's mistakes (whether pilots or ATC) can kill you, but those situations are less common, your fate is more in your own hands.
