Elon Musk will be in charge of the effort by Trump to cut government waste.
Problem is, most government workers actually do something necessary. The last time a government seriously slashed government workers, under Clinton, all that happened is that contractors were hired to do the work: and contractors cost more. Nor has there been any real increase in federal employees in decades. In fact, as a percentage of the US population, federal government workers are in decline.
Besides, if you’re going to actually go after waste, you need to hit the Department of Defense and allow things like Medicare negotiating drug prices.
Government is a profit center for private business, as Musk, whose businesses (especially SpaceX) run on subsidies and government contracts well knows. Musk’s savings will turn into money for the rich and corporations.
A few genuine “savings” may be made by slashing enforcement of things like environmental laws, but they will be paid for in different ways.
Oddly, the best way to save the government money would probably be to reduce use of contractors and hire more government employees and the best way to improve the top line would be to hire more auditors for the IRS and have them go after the rich.
The real world isn’t the world of outraged right wingers, alas.
bruce wilder
The neoliberal “hollywoodization” of professional salaries since Reagan, combined with ceilings on Federal civil servant headcount, means that the Federal government has very little in-house expertise. There are no Energy Department civil servants who actually know the engineering details of drilling or fracking or capping. There are no NHTSA engineers who know much that is useful about designing automobiles or trucks for safety. The Department of Education, like university Schools of Education, is every bit as stupid and useless as right-wingers make it out to be. The Defense Department and the Intelligence Agencies — which won’t be touched by Musk — are completely corrupted by the career paths promised by Defense Contractors to careern military, combined with the military culture of rotation in office designed to prevent any officer from having to take responsibility for organizational performance. There are too many bank regulators for too few, too big banks. Could the FDIC handle a Big Bank failure today? Unpossible.
The self-licking ice cream cone of administrative kudzu is a real thing — worst in academic environments I am guessing, but pretty bad in the Federal bureaucracy, where Congress and the Executive branch conspire to disable agency competence and integrity.
In a fully functional world, job 1 of the Federal bureaucracy would be to govern, which would mean confronting overweening figures like Musk. But, we are not in that world or anywhere near it.
Net Neutrality
I don’t have hope for the future. I’ll take action where I can, but I’ve been reading your more philosophical writings to try to keep me motivated to live the best life I can and appreciate what I still have. But it’s hard, because the fear that it could all be taken away from me is stronger than ever.
Anonymous
It’s going to be one last round of looting before the house falls down. Musk’s Starlink and Tesla are completely uncompetitive against the likes of Beido, BYD, and Xiaomi. He’s going to have to find more grifts to stay rich.
j
I should add to them government workers doing something necessary: regulation, which is in the crosshairs for Doge, also does something necessary. The good ol’ it took a law to put seatbelts in cars argument, and so on. Obviously there is regulatory capture and other pathologies, one can find it all over the US, but this in no way, shape, or form invalidates the need for regulation.
Of course no one is fighting bad regulation, because in the US political discourse, all regulation is bad, so all of it has to go. Once poison in food gets deregulated, expect poison in food again – do check out Poison Eaters to get umm… a taste of what’s to come – first, figuratively, in every field deregulated, but sooner or later, literally.
Purple Library Guy
Well, of course the Doge will cost money. Maintaining an elaborate court in Venice doesn’t come cheap!
Tc
Hire more IRS auditors? lolololol. No.
Trump radically revised the tax code in late 2017 (that no one got to see before it was voted on). Seven years later no one understands it yet. It’s unenforceable. All the auditors in the world will not make it enforceable.
Tc
Also, aside from ever increasing complexity the US workforce, whether government or private contractors, is not your grandfather’s workforce. Such hopeless incompetence. Such crappy work ethics. Such clueless yes-women and yes-men in management. I hear about it everywhere and I saw it before I retired.
KT Chong
Anyway, looking at the appointments and announcements of the cabinet members for the incoming second Trump administration, it is becoming more and more obvious to me that Trump’s second term will be as ineffectual as his first.
Trump said he would smash the Deep State, yet he appointed Marco Rubio to be lead the US State Department — the core of the Deep State. Rubio is the quintessential Deep State elite, and people used to say and laugh about Rubio being a CIA asset serving in the US Congress. He is not going to challenge or smash the Deep State.
Trump’s second term will not deviated much from his first. He will use the presidency as the opportunity to enrich himself and his family first and foremost. He will give Israel a free pass to do anything and everything. He will target criminal migrants and separate migrants families who JUST cross illegally into the US, (instead of doing blanket mass deportation.) He will alienate Europe, (which will be great for China.) He will lose the trade war with China, (especially because China has spent the past three years planning and preparing to deal with his return.)
KT Chong
Should have known… he is, after all, old. Old people are settled in their ways, and they do NOT change. Certainly not at 78.
Daniel Lynch
Also, if Uncle Sam does go on an austerity kick, it will likely trigger a recession, which will increase payouts for safety net services, while reducing tax revenue from payrolls, making the deficit bigger, not smaller.
The caveat is that there is no indication that Trump, for all his faults, is stupid enough to believe in austerity. Rather, Musk believes in austerity so Trump created the toothless DOGE to reward Musk for his campaign contributions. DOGE will eventually submit a report suggesting things to cut, Congress will ignore the DOGE report, by then there will be some other crisis (real or imagined) to worry about, and DOGE will be forgotten.
The real danger to domestic programs is not from DOGE but from Wall Street — regardless which Wall Street party controls Congress.
marku52
Immediately disband the dept of ed and HUD. At least half of the Three Letter Acronym agencies should be disbanded as unconstitutional.
And obviously the massive bloat of 4 star generals should be trimmed. (We have 4X the generals and 1 tenth them men under command as in WWII)
And lets actually complete an audit of the pentagram. Who knows how many more $150,000 Boeing soap dishes might we find.
Ah hope springs eternal
Feral Finster
A lot of government employment is basically a PMC jobs program. A lot of diversity coordinators, committees, interdepartmental liasons and the like could be cut, with no meaningful effect on output. In fact, the consumers of government services would never know the difference, would never know that the Ombudsman was gone.
That said, the DOGE will cost money and fail in its purpose. Those government employees will not go quietly into real jobs, and their union and their management (remember, public choice theory dictates that the prestige of a government organization is tied to budget and headcount) will fight tooth and nail for them, keeping procedures tied up for years in the courts. Hell, they’ll simply ignore mandates that they don’t like and make the administration go to court to get them to comply, sucking up more time, attention and resources.
different clue
@Tc,
Did the worker-incompetence and crappy work-ethics set in before the advent of union busting, free trade, etc? Or did it begin developing after the advent of union busting, free trade, etc.?
different clue
Trump was always just a loudmouth Trojan Horse full of Project 25ers, and he was always too dumm-stupid-ignorant and too proud to realize it.
When Trump says ” Deep State”, he means the people in government who were mean to him. When Steve Bannon, Stephen Moore ( the Man from UNCLE KOCH), etc. say “Deep State”, they mean the 3 letter agencies created to regulate product safety and purity, environmental safety and survival, etc. When Steve Bannon says ” Deconstruct the Administrative State”, he means Make Pollution Great Again)
Musk will learn enough about the workings of the Federal Administrative Departments and Agencies that he will be able to learn where all the grifting opportunities are. He will help himself to further billions or tens of billions of tax dollars, probably per year, after leaving “office”. He won’t mind being painted as a “failure” when he goes, because he will be leaving with all the wiring diagrams of where and how the money flows, and how to tap into it. And that will be his true success.
I don’t know about Ramaswindle. He strikes me as being very verbose in order to cover up being not very bright. His rise to wealth and fame was so sudden as to make me think he is somebody’s curling stone, just like Obama was.
Anyway, I voted for 4 years of semi-peace and semi-quiet for people like me, if not me myself, to begin building durable attack-resistant survivalism; to be better able to weather The Trump Next Time once it happened in 4 years or 8 years or whenever. But it is going to happen starting now, and people will have to survivalize as best they can right where they are at.
This might be a good time to review some of J R “Bob” Dobbs’s advice . . . sayings like
” Act like a dumb-shit and they’ll treat you as an equal” and so forth and so on.
Go gray in place.
Put on your best dumm normie disguise.
spud
m own personal opinion,
to me understanding what fascism is really boils down to two basic tenets, all other results are simply by products of fascism, those by products are many, and take all sorts of forms that befuddle those who try to pin down what fascism is.
the first one, the elevation of capital over labor. this is a act of violence. and it can take many forms. under woodrew wilsons fascism, that elevation was police goons and national guardsmen busting unions, and throwing union organizers in jail. a form of violence.
bill clinton found a way around that, simply by pass the violent acts of elevating capital over labor, by allowing capital to simply pick up and move, leaving behind vast areas of america, to rot into ghettos, a form of violence.
the second one, the elevation of capital over sovereignty, democratic control and civil society. this is a massive act of violence that allows capital free reign over a entire nation, or nations.
the by product is, if the capitalists decides they want a entire nation, or nations, they use economic intimidation, coercion, and domination via free trade agreements.
if the target nation, or nations rebel, the economic acts of violence are replaced with actual physical acts of violence, such as terrorism and war. again, all by products of fascism.
if certain people, or peoples stand in the way of capital, first comes economic violence, if that does not work, then genocide, actual physical violence. again, a by product of fascism.
i am certain we could find many other by products. these are the most obvious ones.
so its not really hard to understand what fascism is, nor identify who are and who are not fascists.
so its the elevation of capital over everything, and the violence in many forms are the by product used to attain that goal.
most people who are fascists, do not even know they are fascists.
Jorge
Elon Musk thinks he is the real President. He will be kicked to the curb like Bannon & Gorka were in 2017, for the same reason: he will try to upstage the King.
But then we come to the fun part: I learned recently (no idea if it’s true) that people who divest assets when going into government service get to escape income tax on those assets. Musk sells out billions in stock tax-free, flails around a bit, gets booted out, pays no tax.
mago
I’m not an electrician, but if I were I wouldn’t dare touch the federal bureaucracy’s rat’s nest wiring.
That mess is self perpetuating with diverse cells and conflicted and conflicting factions.
No Muskrat’s gonna fix that, but he might avoid the steel traps that would break his leg.
It’s all dogey , doggy and dodgy any way you look at it.
Step back Jack move over rover let the ubermenschen take over.
Something.