The geniuses at DOGE are bringing us insights like "I'm not really sure why the tax agency for a country of 330 million people has a larger staff than a midsize bank"
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Who is this Sam Corcos? Not the tech co-founder guy I just found on Linkedin I hope, who's expertise is Node, Express, Next, React, GraphQL, Serverless architecture, ...
Welcome to the world of spoiled brogramers who have never faced actual consequences of their work and believe that if they think something should be done differently it must be a genius disruption and not a stupid, obviously incorrect idea
Just the initial firings are estimated to cost $500 billion in one year or 60% of the DOD budget almost doubling the $700 billion tax gap. What is NOT EFFICIENT! https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/...
F****** wow. That illegitimate department that is absolutely unconstitutional has to be stopped immediately dissolved and held accountable for the crimes that they have already committed each and every single one of them including musk who runs it
I used to work in a big 4 Australian bank we had nearly 200 people in cybersecurity function alone. The Australian Tax Office has like 2000 odd IT people in house and annual overall budget of $33.5B
Who would have thought that a group of uneducated teen boys whose only accomplishment is leveling up on Fortnight and who lack prefrontal cortex development would make poor choices.
Ketamine King is an absolute waste of space, not a genius and should be shot into space never to return. I can see why the Tangerine Taint likes him they're both lying pieces of shit
Trumpist policy is to reduce the numbers required to pay. The idea is to get down to just needing between 1 and 200 staff processing each tax return individually.
probably cuz they not geniuses or they'd know their math and a support system for 340 million or some odd people will take a considerable staff and budget logistics is a thing in reality to all those armchair generals once they bluff is called they left floundering and don't know what the fuck to do
So taking their premise (which is false because the activities of a bank and the IRS are completely different) if a midsized bank was scaled up to the IRS size, it would have 17,500 - 35,000 people: 2-3X as many as the IRS. So it’s the IRS that’s efficient and not the bank.
Space Force was actually kinda needed and had been on the table decades before Trump, though. It wasn't exactly efficient having the Army, Navy, AND Air Force all running their own space operations.
It's Trump's understanding of it that's fucked, so he thought it was going to be like Star Wars.
Instead it's more like "why the hell are all of our satellite networks scattered between different chains of command? Put them in one place, that's stupid."
they have never paid taxes... they have no clue what life is... they live in their infantile worlds with no real world experience... Like their "Boss", the man who never did anything but use people to get what he wanted... money and power..
See, but I also don't want to disparage the Juggalos, who, despite being totally alien to me culturally, are probably the most chill and radically inclusive group of predominantly Midwestern white people I have ever encountered
Same and well said!
I was really prepared for that subculture to be riddled with bigotry, so meeting a few Juggalos was eye opening.
ICP's not my bag, but the enthusiastic Community solidarity they have is astounding.
Script kiddies seems the most appropriate. They can write strings of code to make things happen, but they don't understand the overall structure of things, and how they interact.
All good developers I’ve worked with always were fair minded about the projects they inherited and would never talk like this *at least* until after the migration was complete & bringing back great stats for months.
US Government
The US government employs a large number of network engineers across various agencies and departments. For example, a job posting from February 2025 shows the General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) company was seeking
F5 Network Engineers to support the Joint Service Provider at the Pentagon. The exact total number across all government entities is not readily available but is likely in the thousands given the scale and complexity of government networks.
It's important to note that the number of network engineers required depends on factors such as network complexity, automation levels, and the specific responsibilities of the engineering team.
For instance, a network of 1000+ switches, ~20 routers, and 1000+ wireless APs could potentially be managed by 3-10 engineers, depending on the level of change and complexity involved.
Also, most of what banks do is just transactional and voluntary. The IRS has to actually investigate where all the money is and track people down to get it.
Midsized banks run their operations with commercial software supplied by vendors. Buy it, put your logo on it, run it. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be SpaceX, which I imagine requires very unique code to launch rockets. DOGE is absurd.
This is a common problem with "outside experts." They see anamolies and raise suspicions rather than ask questions and find out that there is usually a reasonable explanation.
I'm 62yo. learned COBOL way back in 1983. I STILL remember it had problems with DOB fields. When Musk came out saying 150yos were getting SS checks I KNEW it was the COBOL program. I was right. Musk is a genius but no common sense to ask any questions first.
Their hypothetical midsize bank has "between 1 and 200 people" - call it 50 people - and a $20 million budget. The IRS has 8,000 people and spends $3.5 billion (respectively 160 times and 175 times more than the bank). Seems to scale OK? What did they expect?
It's very simple, they think the IRS is housed on a mainframe the size of a refrigerator that's kept in the basement and run by an AI with a subservient female voice. I'm dead serious, they think the government has woke J.A.R.V.I.S. and it runs all our lives with no human input.
What’s more comical is the $ amount ($3.5 billion) that DOGE seems to call into question as being “waste, fraud and abuse” when they could easily find some of that at the DoD.
Wait, so their complaint is comparing up to 200 people per 20 million dollars in budget vs 8,000 people for a 3.5 billion budget? ... But that's 175 people per 20 million dollars in budget.
I mean, the base premise is stupid already. But even using it, that's- well within the range they praised.
why compare it to a midsized bank and not a national bank? Chase had 300k employees. Because the geniuses already know, and they are just pushing a grift.
And Elon Musk has never run any large enterprise level company. So he has no idea what’s required. Anytime he’s had the chance, he just fires everyone saying they aren’t necessary. And we’ve seen the results of that.
Welcome to a world where the richest man, a self-styled deity of disruption, swings a chainsaw at democracy—until, oh dear, the woodchips fight back! Empathy? Weakness. Accountability? Unthinkable.
Watch as the titan of toughness meets his match-consequences. Turns out,even gods can throw tantrums.
Elon Musk is a profoundly sad and ridiculous figure. No one would pay him any attention if he weren't obscenely wealthy. And let’s be honest, his fortune didn’t spring from genius. It was built on a hefty head start from Daddy and taking credit for the hard work of others.
Also, and this is very funny, their estimate for the IT staff of the midsize bank spans 2.3 orders of magnitude and the IT staff for the IRS is only 1.6 orders higher—the IRS is actually closer to their range than the range is to itself.
WRONG, as per @vibesynthesist.bsky.social below this is a transcription error; it should read “one to two hundred”, or more explicitly “100–200”. The original utterance is just stupid in the regular way James identifies and not in the two clever by half double bankshot way I was going for.
A midsize bank services how many people? Maybe a million? So 330 times 200 is 66,000. IT seems that the IRS is more efficient when it comes to their IT department.
Tesla have supply chains right across Canada & Mexico. Elon Musk is supporting a President whose tariffs will cost his company billions. DOGE isn’t playing 4D chess, this is a organisation run by a Team of Idiots.
lol my dad is a tax attorney and I remember how every change in the tax code meant he had to read like, 3-10 massive tomes in small print. So so so heavy. So yes.
They know the DOGE believers are nitwits who are incapable of reason. The regime's messaging isn't trying to convert the logical, it is designed to fortify the faithful.
I noticed this same kind of thing w/the Ctrs for Medicare & Medicaid: 6,000 employees who serve >160 million people. United Healthcare has 440,000 employees serving 52 million people. But the govt is inefficient? This whole scheme is exposing how efficient govt is while being woefully understaffed.
Yah, prior to now Government services were surviving and (mostly) functioning IN SPITE of being cut to the bone, you can't cut that further without actually breaking shit.
Thank you for the facts! I don’t have facts, but would add that ignoring the massive differences in the data flowing through the systems is a really, really weak practice for folks with this responsibility. This could have been amazing if they relied on people who had at least a clue or two.
Time to stop saying the DOGE is not helping efficiency. Efficiency is not the objective, it's just a smoke screen.
Dismantling the gov and intimidating the population is the objective.
Population aside, how many systems does a government have compared to a bank? A lot! Banks don't have a military (thank god), a court system, a healthcare system, education etc... to run. DOGE thinks of America as their personal bank and forget that it does things other than pay them.
I once worked for a premier of the largest province in Canada. A cousin of mine was just nasty in criticism of his Keynesian economic policies (during the Great Recession in the 1990s).she had NO idea of the size or complexities of the economy. Critics need to get an education.
Remembering that time a department head (not mine, thank god) fired all the data scientists on his team because he thought he could do their job better than they could. Three days later he called me to his office and asked "I'm looking through all their old notes... what is 'python' by the way?"
The IRS does not just collect taxes. It is responsible for creating the tax code. When Congress makes a law that has tax implications, the IRS has to issue new regulations. No midsize bank has that responsibility.
To be fair it's only 150 million who are old enough and not retired that even deal with the IRS but compare that to a midsize bank whose customers number at most maybe 100 thousand? You're witnessing idiocracy. I'm not gonna defend the IRS but I am gonna say the situation is ripe for revolt.
"The federal tax code is incredibly complex—so complex that it covers 6,871 pages. If you add in the U.S. tax regulations, which are the U.S. Treasury's official interpretation of the tax code, to that, you'd be up to 75,000 pages."
The IRS takes in 20,000x as much revenue as the $250m of this company, and does it on a budget about 15x the size. Obviously, apples to oranges, but based on the comparison this guy is making, it's a very impressive feat for the government.
This can help him
ChatGPT response :
It sounds like you're comparing a typical midsize bank's IT operations and maintenance (O&M) budget to your organization’s O&M budget, which is significantly higher despite having a much larger workforce. A few factors could explain this discrepancy:
Scale of Operations: With 8,000 people in IT, your organization is likely much larger than a midsize bank. This could mean your IT infrastructure is far more complex, supporting many more systems, services, and users, which naturally requires a much higher budget for operations and maintenance.
..
It's ok I'm sure that the 2025 fiscal year will be the one the IRS retasks to EXCLUSIVELY tax the fuck out of billionaires and cryptobros. Next stop, tariffs of cocaine submarines!
The financial services company I work for has like 30k+ people in IT.
These chumps wouldn't even make it past our initial employment screening either because we don't want shady weirdos anywhere near customer data.
Considering doge is shorthand for undateable twerp with pimples, a laptop and a can of Mountain Dew not a surprise they know less about everything but dungeons and dragons.
Like JPMorgan Chase employs hundreds of thousands of people and has fewer assets under management(not a comparable measure but whatever, looking at scale here) than the IRS manages every year in tax revenue.
These guys work for startup tech companies that never have to have anything in the same universe as a bank when it comes to data integrity, lack of downtime, etc. Completely out of their element with no idea how to manage a system that has to be perfect
“I worked for a b2b SaaS company with 17 employees where all of our data is on one managed Postgres instance on AWS, I know how to run a massive, complex financial organization”
Never mind the fact that we were dumping sensitive info into unprotected S3 buckets because we just accepted the defaults and didn't actually think... (Amazon DID eventually fix that but for the LONGEST time it was default open)
Mainframes are fossils, why would you use a mainframe TODAY...
Banks are a good comparison to government IT jobs as well, because the government has extreme data retention requirements for itself, and for banks. And you need additional IT resources to make sure that happens.
The other reason big banks are a good comparison to government for IT purposes is they also have a bunch of ancient legacy kit that is critical and requires support. I was talking to a tech lead at a top 5 bank who didn’t know what JSON was because he lives entirely in the world of mainframes
And a mid-size bank outsources a whole bunch of their operations. For example, if you have a credit card with the logo of a mid-size bank odds are that the provisioning, processing, billing & collections are done by BankAmerica, Citi, JPMC, Wells Fargo, or a handful of other very big banks.
They are destroying the United States government, as was the GOP plan since at least Grover Norquist. Their claims about finding fraud are just mouth noises to get people to argue about what their goals are rather than stop them.
They aren't capable of understanding... most of them aren't even old enough to have an adult brain yet. Let alone the life experience and self-awareness to learn from another person.
Did some quick math. A midsize bank handles up to $100B in assets. The IRS collects $5 trillion a year from $23 trillion in income. So 200 times as much money handled, in a manner of speaking. So sounds like it lines up just fine. If anything it's understaffed, but we knew that already.
Elon’s always been the investor who got lucky and his critical failure is believing this made him intelligent. He’s a slightly more douchey Chris Sacca.
Imagine your biggest accomplishment in life will be achieving staggering new levels of stupidity, all in the public eye. Someone give that moron a cookie and juice box and tell him to go sit down.
In the example, this ‘midsize bank’ is 200 times smaller than the US Treasury. So using the highest number of IT people , would need 200 times that number…
And there is no ‘midsized bank’ that has one IT person
The phrase "1-200 people in IT" is something to behold.
I mean, I would totally trust my money with a mid-sized bank that has 1 person in IT. Not at all concerned that they operate out of the backroom of a local butcher shop.
Well, let's see. In 2022, taxpayers filed 153.8 million returns. Bank of America, the largest US bank has about 69 million customers. Since BoA's IT dept has approximately 69,000 employees, the numbers suggest that the IRS is an exemplar of efficiency.
This sort of research is altogether too simple and the math is not complicated, particularly for people supposedly investigating financial fraud. Are the vultures at DOGE really that stupid or are they gaslighting us?
Yes. One small note, it should be ‘this doge’ and not capitalized. It is from about
700 BC, Roman in origin. It’s Elon’s little joke on US. Seriously, you can fact check.
Wells Fargo serves over 70 million customers worldwide. Their operating budget is 7X that of the IRS whose budget is just over $14B. IRS handles 5X as many customers. Wes Fargo spends 35X as much per customer.
Sadly most big banks cross the legal lines. TD Bank was caught being involved with criminals and money laundering. Nearly all major banks have been involved in some fraud. My point was banks are not nearly as efficient as the IRS and is the opposite of what DOGE claims. DOGE gaslights constantly.
DOGE says that they are above the law. They also claim that they would welcome a new Civil War. MAGA wants a battle to the death. They should have thought that through. They just cut off VA services. And Vets own guns and are trained in warfare. “There are no rules in war.” ~ Ginni Thomas - Ok then…
The weird thing is they seem to be both stupid and evil in a way that makes it hard to sort out when they're acting deliberately and when they're acting out of astonishing foolish ignorance.
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They're in the bottom half of the barrel, yet they're pretending to be smart.
Musk has learned that pretending to be smart in the right crowd can pay huge dividends.
https://bsky.app/profile/joocifer.bsky.social/post/3lhtgmmmgt225
Musk is basically a SBF + Holmes who raised money and bought companies (ebay, tesla, spacex) instead of trying to build them.
https://bsky.app/profile/joocifer.bsky.social/post/3lgg7geqn4s24
Just like that supposed genius tech bro who is now sitting in jail. Hehe.
Will they look back in middle age and cringe at their ignorance?
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/doge-staffer-corcos-wife-ties-russian-oligarch-1235291673/
https://bsky.app/profile/joocifer.bsky.social/post/3lhtg722bqs25
- W.C. Fields
It's Trump's understanding of it that's fucked, so he thought it was going to be like Star Wars.
These IT kids have never worked a proper job, they don’t know shit about shit. Idiots
These are idiot 4chan poster crypto nerds.
Obviously I wouldn’t disparage anyone in my profession.
If you think "dev" is somehow divorced from IT, you are the same kind of idiot they are.
-- Phil Karlton
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/4950298-kamala-harris-insane-clown-posse-endorsement/
I was really prepared for that subculture to be riddled with bigotry, so meeting a few Juggalos was eye opening.
ICP's not my bag, but the enthusiastic Community solidarity they have is astounding.
The US government employs a large number of network engineers across various agencies and departments. For example, a job posting from February 2025 shows the General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) company was seeking
Their hypothetical midsize bank has "between 1 and 200 people" - call it 50 people - and a $20 million budget. The IRS has 8,000 people and spends $3.5 billion (respectively 160 times and 175 times more than the bank). Seems to scale OK? What did they expect?
If they can BS people into believing the IRS should be gutted, they will ensure billionaires and corporations never get Audited
The doge boys have broken hanlons razor and are acting with malice
Get fucked, moron
But they also think that Mainframes are fossils and nobody should be using them any more...
https://simpleflying.com/553-billion-military-aircraft-more-than-half-us-defense-acquisition-costs/
I mean, the base premise is stupid already. But even using it, that's- well within the range they praised.
Watch as the titan of toughness meets his match-consequences. Turns out,even gods can throw tantrums.
So "Three ring binders from god"...
It should have enough kinetic energy to knock some sense into them if properly heat shielded...
The IRS has more than three times the clients and less than 1/3rd of the staff as a bank.
📌
Chase customers: https://thefinancialbrand.com/news/banking-branch-transformation/jpmorgan-chase-says-its-branch-strategy-supercharges-growth-162719
Number of IRS employees: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/hiring-retention/2025/01/irs-workforce-surpasses-100000-employees-but-faces-war-of-attrition-retaining-staff/#:~:text=Recent%20data%20shows%20the%20IRS%20grew%20its%20workforce,keeping%20that%20level%20of%20staffing%20won%E2%80%99t%20be%20easy
Number of taxpayers: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20taxpayers%20filed%20153.8%20million%20tax%20returns%2C,income%20tax%20rate%20in%202022%20was%2014.5%20percent
By a weird coincidence, I looked this up just yesterday.
But then that's the point here so...
Dismantling the gov and intimidating the population is the objective.
Idiots our here embarrassing the profession of restructuring w/ span ratios of 1-200 in IT of a small bank as actual comp for IRS
Musk acts like McKinsey would also use chainsaws 🙄
*not MMB but MBB (McKinsey Bain BCG)
*not our, but out here
He'll regret what he has done when he becomes old enough not to be on his parents' health insurance any longer.
Attend your local event on April 5th! Fight for our freedoms the right way, with non-violent protests and with your wallet!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/mar/22/trump-administration-authoritarianism?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001118004/e3f4f284-f32c-4f7b-bd7f-58e4f2a36d13.pdf
ChatGPT response :
It sounds like you're comparing a typical midsize bank's IT operations and maintenance (O&M) budget to your organization’s O&M budget, which is significantly higher despite having a much larger workforce. A few factors could explain this discrepancy:
..
Around 2.000 people worked with IT. There was a saying, 'IT is banking, banking is IT'
Old mainframe systems where you can't afford to get it wrong and that you do all inhouse are not cheap.
This isn't the area you cheap out on.
Oh, darn...sorry, they're slowly closing the education establishments down...
These chumps wouldn't even make it past our initial employment screening either because we don't want shady weirdos anywhere near customer data.
Mainframes are fossils, why would you use a mainframe TODAY...
/s
Banks are a good comparison to government IT jobs as well, because the government has extreme data retention requirements for itself, and for banks. And you need additional IT resources to make sure that happens.
Genuinely asking.
They are very dumb, and they are very willful.
They also assume that they know everything because they're geniuses (their mothers told them so)
Lying is the word you're looking for, for what they're doing
Just making shit up
Instead of asking people who know they act like there’s no answer.
In the example, this ‘midsize bank’ is 200 times smaller than the US Treasury. So using the highest number of IT people , would need 200 times that number…
And there is no ‘midsized bank’ that has one IT person
They may as well compare goats and bankers
I mean, I would totally trust my money with a mid-sized bank that has 1 person in IT. Not at all concerned that they operate out of the backroom of a local butcher shop.
700 BC, Roman in origin. It’s Elon’s little joke on US. Seriously, you can fact check.
Despite all that $ they misuse records & open fake accounts
I am confused.
Musk's chainsaw hacking of government services is by design. He directs his boys to follow Zuckerberg's dictum:
"Move fast and break things. The idea is that if you never break anything, you're probably not moving fast enough."