Having spent 15 years in civil service, I find a lot in this post to agree with. It is much, much too hard to do things in federal government. And I learn a lot from all your posts.
But I would urge you to take seriously the role of the courts in creating this mess. There are bad lawyers. But the good ones often are warning the agency about real hazards that can waste enormous amounts of agency effort. Go read a regulatory preamble from the 1970s. It’s a hoot. The agencies often took a few pages to say “here’s what we’re doing”, offered a minimal justification, and that was it. Now, a rulemaking is a multiyear saga, as the agencies jump through every hoop, and know the courts are at the end of the gauntlet. A lawyer who doesn’t warn the program staff what can happen if, say, you end up in front of a judge in ND Tex, is not doing their job. If you don’t document everything to the nth degree you are going to have to do it again. Period. An agency can spend hundreds of pages documenting its reasons, but if the court doesn’t like the way it handled a few comments? Do it over.
Maybe more importantly, recent cases are have made it so easy to sue - and to reopen longsettled decisions - that it’s almost malpractice if the private bar doesn’t tell their clients to sue. Was an agency rule upheld 15 years ago by a court that gave the agency Chevron deference? Find a business willing to serve as name plaintiff and sue - this time the agency gets no deference - and statute of limitations isn’t even a problem.
I don’t know who is tracking this, or how, but I’ll be shocked if there isn’t a rapid increase in litigation challenges - which takes up massive amounts of staff time and makes everybody more cautious. Don’t even get me started on the other signals courts have sent about where they might go. A lot of uncertainty raises transaction costs.
I’m not saying it’s the answer to go back to the 1970s. That was excessive the other way. But the courts are a deeply entrenched, massively powerful force that will create more and more and more transactional costs unless they are compelled to change. Don’t want scared bureaucrats who triple-check everything and write impossibly burdensome memos? Do something about the courts. If things stay as they are, and staff is cut, just wait and see how slow and ossified the govt is going to be - you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Completely agree. Do you follow Nick Bagley from UMich? He writes about this and is my guru on the topic. Would love to hear more from you on this too.
We need an overhaul and simplification of stuff like the Administrative Procedure Act, reducing the "attack surface" for litigation challenging agencies' rules. You would think that the conservative legal establishment might like such a victory over trial lawyers, but at least right now, the conservatives think they have an opportunity to simply destroy the entire regulatory system, so they're not interested in a compromise that makes the regulatory system work better. They don't want clear, reasonable rules that are issued and updated at a reasonable pace. They want no rules.
There are hints in the Gorsuch concurrence of W. Va. v. EPA of a SCOTUS majority that would uphold the constitutionality of administrative rulemaking (but consistent with the "major questions" doctrine). It'd be nice to be litigating over the constitutionality of Congressionally-enacted laws, rather than broad administrative regulations which lack democratic accountability, such that the primary way to reform them is to catch the bureaucracy in some APA procedural error in court.
The recent preliminary injunction against the USDA’s SECURE rule is an example in my field. Important simplifying reform of the regulatory oversight of certain kinds of genetic modification of crops, well-known to be free of any reasonable risk, enacted over a 4 year period of careful deliberation by highly conscientious civil servants, got vacated by the court out because of the picayune legalistic objections of a gadfly/Luddite external group.
I'm a new state employee and I see this as well. The sheer volume of work and documentation I have to create to do something as simple as reconcile a month's worth of CC charges is staggering. But it's all part of a process that, I'm told...repeatedly, is designed to ensure compliance and minimize risk of fault arising from a potential audit. The absolute obsession with process to minimize risk to your program, department, and agency murders innovation/creativity in the crib.
And you see this in leadership too - there really isn't any initiative around increasing efficiency/streamlining workflows. Coming from private industry this remains the hardest thing for me to adjust to - leadership is very different. It's less about improving anything and more about just making sure it can actually get completed in a reasonable timeframe (while adhering to process/administrative manual/legislation).
And if you want to use new technology/software to help with this endeavor? Jesus.
Sometimes, as a middle manager in a large organization, it helps to have a new guy come in, who's obviously a big jerk. Then you can kill that project which the people on your team love but it is taking half of your budget and you know it's never going to achieve any results. And blame the new guy, of course.
I am somewhat frustrated that the National Partnership for Reinventing Government has barely been mentioned at all. Not that I'm all that surprised that Muskaswamy either are ignorant of Gore's work, or have a knee-jerk rejection of it because Gore is so uncool... But if you want an example of positive incremental work, it's there.
Mancur Olson’s seminal “Rise and Decline of Nations” highlighted that bureaucratic sclerosis was virtually guaranteed to grow with a sovereign’s age. The ONLY remedy, from history, was elimination of special interests by war/revolution with Germany and Japan as paradigmatic examples post WWII. Otherwise, “distributional coalitions” take hold like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing growth and efficiency. We have a real-life A/B test taking place right now with Argentina, which is purposefully rolling back state rules & regs (ie scraping barnacles) while California is emblematic of Hayek’s Fatal Conceit of an ordered economy via command & control. History shows, this will ultimately fail. Given the world’s growing demographic math, the only path forward is doing more with less. Embrace DOGE or suffer sclerosis and the death of democracy at the hands of populists.
Seriously? California is an economic powerhouse, wealthy beyond imagination. Argentina is a basket case with 50% of the population in deep poverty, collapsing industry and no way out of its debt cycle. Hayek was a fantasist, at best, and had zero understanding of economics.
California is far from perfect, but a lot of its problems are because it has created so much wealth, making it very expensive to live there because so many really wealthy people want to live there. CA has the 6th largest economy in the world with a GDP of $4trillion - that's TRILLION. CA Gdp grew more than 6% last year. Argentina has a GDP of $600million which is shrinking. And I would never call CA government great, but it's stumbling forward - the state is slowly forcing communities to stop blocking housing growth for example. California did have a right wing state government that embraced austerity at one point - it ended up trying to pay bills with IOUs because austerity is terrible economic policy. I live in Texas, btw, where the Democratic cities drive the economy forward despite the best efforts of the Republican state government to destroy it.
Assuming that Musk is acting in good faith seems like a huge assumption. DOGE seems to me like more grift and yet another way for private individuals to capture government for their personal benefit.
I don't assume Musk is going to act in good faith. I think we should watch closely what he does. But he has identified some problems that have been sorely neglected, and his conflicts of interests are not a reason to continue to dismiss the problems.
"But it's not as if mere attention would solve the problem. There are entrenched interests for the status quo. It's easy to imagine these as exclusively or even mostly commercial interests, but if that were true, why would it take three years to issue guidance as anodyne as the hiring memo the Biden Administration put out this summer? Among other provisions, it declared job titles could now be listed accurately (you could say it was a software developer instead of an IT specialist) and that you could now share “certs” of candidates who qualified for positions across agencies — but only under certain circumstances, and it’s still not widely done, so we mostly lose good applicants because they apply for one position and aren’t considered for others. These and a few other changes took a smart, dedicated, caring team three years to get done."
Yikes! Let me repeat that: Yikes!
Back in 1981 I was part of a team NASA put together to make recommendations on how to up their computing game, particularly with respect to AI. That's one of the problems we identified: the job classification system didn't recognize computer science and programming. You could hire mathematicians or electrical engineers but not computer scientists or programmers. That was over 40 years ago.
You are, as ever, the north star for making government truly work for the people. And your (no surprise) incredibly well-reasoned arguments here are very sobering for those of us who do tend to lean more reactionary. I think the biggest and, perhaps, simplest concern I have is not just who is leading DOGE but the way in which DOGE operates on an underlying premise that efficiency is *the* most important goal when it comes to government reform.
One thing I've always loved about Code for America and (at least sometimes) the broader ecosystem of public-interest tech is that the top priority isn't improving *efficiency* but ensuring greater *effectiveness* in the actual delivery of a service to the communities that need it most. Obviously there is overlap and great need for both, but my worry is that DOGE-like efforts on a deeper philosophical level are fundamentally changing the entire conversation. When reducing the bottom line dollar amount is made the ultimate metric of success (complete with a whole leaderboard and other honestly gross stabs at gamification) and overspending is turned into the biggest bogeyman, it's the most vulnerable communities who stand to lose the most.
Oh, to be clear, I'm not endorsing DOGE by any means. My whole point is that I would not go about reform this way, which is part of why I'm not in charge. What I'm saying is DOGE is what we are getting, and it will be interesting to watch what happens. We don't know what they'll do, if anything. It's slightly possible they'll realize that it's actually not a great idea to blow it all up because it turns out government is not a nice to have like Twitter but a have to have, that the people who voted his boss in actually rely on government to work. But I'd love to see him realize that his friend Larry is part of who is screwing government and the people, and decide if he's still going to disrupt the government tech ecosystem after all. I can not want him to break medicaid but still want him to fight Larry, if that makes sense.
You increase effectiveness the most by removing regulations, IMO. That maximizes upside for the public. I think this is also the top priority of DOGE, not cost-cutting.
From the Tweets, Elon does not even WANT to reform regulations. He wants to reduce expenditures. Making bureaucracies slower and more sclerotic just might save money.
The premise of DOGE is to cut expenditures in order to reduce the deficit.
Its purpose is not to improve how government functions. Neither Musk nor Ramaswamy is saying anything about making tax forms easier or application forms better. For re-emphasis, its purpose is not just to reduce the deficit, but more specifically to cut expenditures to reduce the deficit. Otherwise, they would surely be putting revenue generating actions on the table, but I have not seen anything of the sort.
The premise has nothing to do with reducing the deficit, which is going to zoom up under trump, or to cut expenditures which will also zoom up. The premise is that government should subsidize the rich and suppress the general population.
The premise that Musk and Ramaswamy present in the news is that they can reduce the deficit by cutting expenditures. We shouldn't pretend that they are interested in efficiency or in reducing the deficit through other means.
Great piece. Biggest question to me: what percentage of the opposition goes away given that Musk may be effectively vested with powers of the presidency? In your DIB example, what if the gadfly could be transferred to Alaska if they didn’t quiet down? Likewise anyone who tells you that what you are doing is illegal, whether they are right or not?
This woman saw herself, I think, as a whistleblower. It may not sound like it from my post, but I think whistleblower protections are important. They're just also weaponizable, and the more very specific procedure and process, the more possible weapons you have laying around. I guess it starts with Why was this woman so set on taking down Eric? I don't know, but what it felt like was that she was comfortable with the pentagon as it was, and had a sense that change would be bad in some way. I believe she thought she was acting in the public interest, though I saw it differently.
Which is just to say it's hard to take away whistleblower protections just for the gadflies and not for the Colonel Vindmans. But I think the ability to empower the latter and defang the former is possible in degrees, and part of that is by having less surface area for attack, by forcing objections to be more clearly grounded in substantive, rather than procedural, violations. And, of course, not having so many overly detailed procedures.
But to your question, I struggle to see how operationally Musk will be able to operate with the powers of the Presidency. He'll have to whisper to Vought or whomever and hope Vought see it the way he does. There's a lot to be said about the difference between what Elon wants and what Trump core wants, and how that's all going to play out.
I guess the answer is that the gadfly could always have been transferred to Alaska. Carter could have done that. He'd have almost certainly faced a lawsuit alleging retaliation. None of that is different starting Jan 21, except that the courts are going to be jammed with so many lawsuits they can't keep up. I have no idea how that will play out.
A lot of these problems are endemic to large organizations, public or private. Risk aversion, opaque lines of authority, entrenched incumbents, vendor capture, and weak management is common even in our at-will large corporations. When I was starting out in business, we had a fruitless engagement with a big company that couldn't get past the door. I gave up and told one of the managers that it was impossible to do business with them. He interrupted me, mid rant, and said: "You think its bad, but I have to work in this environment, it's much worse for me".
"Democrats did not do this work. "- ?? From what I saw, Pete Buttigeig and team at DOT improved operations a lot - in particular the Key Bridge recovery was impressive. Lina Kahn got a lot done in one term at FTC. NLRB was super efficient. The vaccine distribution fix under Biden was amazing and saved tens of thousands of lives. CFPB did impressive work. FEMA has been efficient. No?
“DOGE is about to crash into this wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo” (I’m not sure it’s even weaponized—maybe it just exists even for those who are eager to change the status quo.)
But I’ve also been thinking along these lines with a couple of scenarios that involve DOGE having to abandon their all-encompassing slogan-based plans and start reforming the Federal government on a smaller scale. The most probable scenario is that their currently threatened measures will prompt such an outcry from the public that either Trump or the GOP will make them pull back. If the stock market reacts negatively, all the better.
Or, when they confront “the wall” of bureaucracy, they realize how unintelligent their slogans make them look. They become interested in the kinds of actual challenges that Pahlka writes about. In other words, they start “paying attention”. They read “Recoding America” and realize that they have stumbled into a role that can re-charge their jaded, oligarchic intellects and have meaningful, historical impact at the same time.
As for the finger-wagging on social media, it seems to be yet another instance of the Manichean thinking that’s taken over country. I think of Machiavelli, who was an ardent republican and yet took great pains to help his own autocrats govern better (after all, he had to live with the results.) There may come a time for outright condemnation of the Trump administration, but for now we need to pay close attention for ways to influence its intentions and motives.
Having spent 15 years in civil service, I find a lot in this post to agree with. It is much, much too hard to do things in federal government. And I learn a lot from all your posts.
But I would urge you to take seriously the role of the courts in creating this mess. There are bad lawyers. But the good ones often are warning the agency about real hazards that can waste enormous amounts of agency effort. Go read a regulatory preamble from the 1970s. It’s a hoot. The agencies often took a few pages to say “here’s what we’re doing”, offered a minimal justification, and that was it. Now, a rulemaking is a multiyear saga, as the agencies jump through every hoop, and know the courts are at the end of the gauntlet. A lawyer who doesn’t warn the program staff what can happen if, say, you end up in front of a judge in ND Tex, is not doing their job. If you don’t document everything to the nth degree you are going to have to do it again. Period. An agency can spend hundreds of pages documenting its reasons, but if the court doesn’t like the way it handled a few comments? Do it over.
Maybe more importantly, recent cases are have made it so easy to sue - and to reopen longsettled decisions - that it’s almost malpractice if the private bar doesn’t tell their clients to sue. Was an agency rule upheld 15 years ago by a court that gave the agency Chevron deference? Find a business willing to serve as name plaintiff and sue - this time the agency gets no deference - and statute of limitations isn’t even a problem.
I don’t know who is tracking this, or how, but I’ll be shocked if there isn’t a rapid increase in litigation challenges - which takes up massive amounts of staff time and makes everybody more cautious. Don’t even get me started on the other signals courts have sent about where they might go. A lot of uncertainty raises transaction costs.
I’m not saying it’s the answer to go back to the 1970s. That was excessive the other way. But the courts are a deeply entrenched, massively powerful force that will create more and more and more transactional costs unless they are compelled to change. Don’t want scared bureaucrats who triple-check everything and write impossibly burdensome memos? Do something about the courts. If things stay as they are, and staff is cut, just wait and see how slow and ossified the govt is going to be - you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Completely agree. Do you follow Nick Bagley from UMich? He writes about this and is my guru on the topic. Would love to hear more from you on this too.
We need an overhaul and simplification of stuff like the Administrative Procedure Act, reducing the "attack surface" for litigation challenging agencies' rules. You would think that the conservative legal establishment might like such a victory over trial lawyers, but at least right now, the conservatives think they have an opportunity to simply destroy the entire regulatory system, so they're not interested in a compromise that makes the regulatory system work better. They don't want clear, reasonable rules that are issued and updated at a reasonable pace. They want no rules.
No, just by and large, they want those rules written by congress
And they don't want to bunch of discretion by the administrative state
“the conservatives think they have an opportunity to simply destroy the entire regulatory system…”.
Exactly. O
There are hints in the Gorsuch concurrence of W. Va. v. EPA of a SCOTUS majority that would uphold the constitutionality of administrative rulemaking (but consistent with the "major questions" doctrine). It'd be nice to be litigating over the constitutionality of Congressionally-enacted laws, rather than broad administrative regulations which lack democratic accountability, such that the primary way to reform them is to catch the bureaucracy in some APA procedural error in court.
The recent preliminary injunction against the USDA’s SECURE rule is an example in my field. Important simplifying reform of the regulatory oversight of certain kinds of genetic modification of crops, well-known to be free of any reasonable risk, enacted over a 4 year period of careful deliberation by highly conscientious civil servants, got vacated by the court out because of the picayune legalistic objections of a gadfly/Luddite external group.
https://natlawreview.com/article/district-court-grants-summary-judgment-part-plaintiffs-vacating-and-remanding-final
One of thousands of such across all domains we can anticipate when DOGE starts getting real.
Apologies for the typos. iPhone at lunch…
Isn't the solution to get actual legislation through congress?Instead of trying to do it through the administration street of state?
I'm a new state employee and I see this as well. The sheer volume of work and documentation I have to create to do something as simple as reconcile a month's worth of CC charges is staggering. But it's all part of a process that, I'm told...repeatedly, is designed to ensure compliance and minimize risk of fault arising from a potential audit. The absolute obsession with process to minimize risk to your program, department, and agency murders innovation/creativity in the crib.
And you see this in leadership too - there really isn't any initiative around increasing efficiency/streamlining workflows. Coming from private industry this remains the hardest thing for me to adjust to - leadership is very different. It's less about improving anything and more about just making sure it can actually get completed in a reasonable timeframe (while adhering to process/administrative manual/legislation).
And if you want to use new technology/software to help with this endeavor? Jesus.
Sometimes, as a middle manager in a large organization, it helps to have a new guy come in, who's obviously a big jerk. Then you can kill that project which the people on your team love but it is taking half of your budget and you know it's never going to achieve any results. And blame the new guy, of course.
I am somewhat frustrated that the National Partnership for Reinventing Government has barely been mentioned at all. Not that I'm all that surprised that Muskaswamy either are ignorant of Gore's work, or have a knee-jerk rejection of it because Gore is so uncool... But if you want an example of positive incremental work, it's there.
https://www.govexec.com/management/2013/04/what-reinvention-wrought/62836/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/has-government-been-reinvented/
And if you look around at the pockets of government that are still highly competent and get high satisfaction ratings, like these...
https://slate.com/business/2013/07/renewing-your-passport-visit-the-incredibly-efficient-new-york-city-passport-office-on-hudson-street.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/casey-cep-ronald-walters-the-sentinel-who-is-government/
...you can see the fingerprints of the NPRG and its relentless focus on efficient customer service.
Mancur Olson’s seminal “Rise and Decline of Nations” highlighted that bureaucratic sclerosis was virtually guaranteed to grow with a sovereign’s age. The ONLY remedy, from history, was elimination of special interests by war/revolution with Germany and Japan as paradigmatic examples post WWII. Otherwise, “distributional coalitions” take hold like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing growth and efficiency. We have a real-life A/B test taking place right now with Argentina, which is purposefully rolling back state rules & regs (ie scraping barnacles) while California is emblematic of Hayek’s Fatal Conceit of an ordered economy via command & control. History shows, this will ultimately fail. Given the world’s growing demographic math, the only path forward is doing more with less. Embrace DOGE or suffer sclerosis and the death of democracy at the hands of populists.
Seriously? California is an economic powerhouse, wealthy beyond imagination. Argentina is a basket case with 50% of the population in deep poverty, collapsing industry and no way out of its debt cycle. Hayek was a fantasist, at best, and had zero understanding of economics.
California's not wealthy because of all that red tape
The way to combat bureaucratic sclerosis is to give Democrats time and majorities, not to embrace Hayek's crackpot theories.
I feel like California has had Democratic majorities for a long time, and has only gotten worse.
California is far from perfect, but a lot of its problems are because it has created so much wealth, making it very expensive to live there because so many really wealthy people want to live there. CA has the 6th largest economy in the world with a GDP of $4trillion - that's TRILLION. CA Gdp grew more than 6% last year. Argentina has a GDP of $600million which is shrinking. And I would never call CA government great, but it's stumbling forward - the state is slowly forcing communities to stop blocking housing growth for example. California did have a right wing state government that embraced austerity at one point - it ended up trying to pay bills with IOUs because austerity is terrible economic policy. I live in Texas, btw, where the Democratic cities drive the economy forward despite the best efforts of the Republican state government to destroy it.
Again, the wealth generation in CA, is in spite of the state government policies not because of them (or at least not the recent ones)
Much of that wealth is generated by silicon valley. Silicon valley didn't happen because of CA red tape.
And of course a lot of people have historically wanted to live there because of the very nice weather.
But many people like my family have fled there in recent years. Tired of high costs, too much red tape, and high crime.
Assuming that Musk is acting in good faith seems like a huge assumption. DOGE seems to me like more grift and yet another way for private individuals to capture government for their personal benefit.
I don't assume Musk is going to act in good faith. I think we should watch closely what he does. But he has identified some problems that have been sorely neglected, and his conflicts of interests are not a reason to continue to dismiss the problems.
Has Musk identified any problems not previously identified (by you, or others)? It seems like his main benefit is his lack of inhibition.
One of the best essays I’ve ever read. Subscribing.
Thank you!
You say:
"But it's not as if mere attention would solve the problem. There are entrenched interests for the status quo. It's easy to imagine these as exclusively or even mostly commercial interests, but if that were true, why would it take three years to issue guidance as anodyne as the hiring memo the Biden Administration put out this summer? Among other provisions, it declared job titles could now be listed accurately (you could say it was a software developer instead of an IT specialist) and that you could now share “certs” of candidates who qualified for positions across agencies — but only under certain circumstances, and it’s still not widely done, so we mostly lose good applicants because they apply for one position and aren’t considered for others. These and a few other changes took a smart, dedicated, caring team three years to get done."
Yikes! Let me repeat that: Yikes!
Back in 1981 I was part of a team NASA put together to make recommendations on how to up their computing game, particularly with respect to AI. That's one of the problems we identified: the job classification system didn't recognize computer science and programming. You could hire mathematicians or electrical engineers but not computer scientists or programmers. That was over 40 years ago.
You are, as ever, the north star for making government truly work for the people. And your (no surprise) incredibly well-reasoned arguments here are very sobering for those of us who do tend to lean more reactionary. I think the biggest and, perhaps, simplest concern I have is not just who is leading DOGE but the way in which DOGE operates on an underlying premise that efficiency is *the* most important goal when it comes to government reform.
One thing I've always loved about Code for America and (at least sometimes) the broader ecosystem of public-interest tech is that the top priority isn't improving *efficiency* but ensuring greater *effectiveness* in the actual delivery of a service to the communities that need it most. Obviously there is overlap and great need for both, but my worry is that DOGE-like efforts on a deeper philosophical level are fundamentally changing the entire conversation. When reducing the bottom line dollar amount is made the ultimate metric of success (complete with a whole leaderboard and other honestly gross stabs at gamification) and overspending is turned into the biggest bogeyman, it's the most vulnerable communities who stand to lose the most.
Oh, to be clear, I'm not endorsing DOGE by any means. My whole point is that I would not go about reform this way, which is part of why I'm not in charge. What I'm saying is DOGE is what we are getting, and it will be interesting to watch what happens. We don't know what they'll do, if anything. It's slightly possible they'll realize that it's actually not a great idea to blow it all up because it turns out government is not a nice to have like Twitter but a have to have, that the people who voted his boss in actually rely on government to work. But I'd love to see him realize that his friend Larry is part of who is screwing government and the people, and decide if he's still going to disrupt the government tech ecosystem after all. I can not want him to break medicaid but still want him to fight Larry, if that makes sense.
You increase effectiveness the most by removing regulations, IMO. That maximizes upside for the public. I think this is also the top priority of DOGE, not cost-cutting.
This is uninformed. It depends on the regulation and the implementation. Have you read Jennifer’s book?
Thank you for putting into words how messy and frustrating government reform is - showing why transformation is so hard but still so important.
Wow. A lot to digest! My respect grows with each post.
From the Tweets, Elon does not even WANT to reform regulations. He wants to reduce expenditures. Making bureaucracies slower and more sclerotic just might save money.
Remember Elon's motto is "Cut too much, then restore some."
That doesn't work when you cut and kill, unless, like Jesus, you can
reverse death. Elon MAY believe that.
If he fails, so what? He returns to his "private" life, and poor dead people stay dead..
The premise of DOGE is to cut expenditures in order to reduce the deficit.
Its purpose is not to improve how government functions. Neither Musk nor Ramaswamy is saying anything about making tax forms easier or application forms better. For re-emphasis, its purpose is not just to reduce the deficit, but more specifically to cut expenditures to reduce the deficit. Otherwise, they would surely be putting revenue generating actions on the table, but I have not seen anything of the sort.
The premise has nothing to do with reducing the deficit, which is going to zoom up under trump, or to cut expenditures which will also zoom up. The premise is that government should subsidize the rich and suppress the general population.
But upward transfers that DOES require cutting some expenditures. Deficits will increase.
The premise that Musk and Ramaswamy present in the news is that they can reduce the deficit by cutting expenditures. We shouldn't pretend that they are interested in efficiency or in reducing the deficit through other means.
Great piece. Biggest question to me: what percentage of the opposition goes away given that Musk may be effectively vested with powers of the presidency? In your DIB example, what if the gadfly could be transferred to Alaska if they didn’t quiet down? Likewise anyone who tells you that what you are doing is illegal, whether they are right or not?
This woman saw herself, I think, as a whistleblower. It may not sound like it from my post, but I think whistleblower protections are important. They're just also weaponizable, and the more very specific procedure and process, the more possible weapons you have laying around. I guess it starts with Why was this woman so set on taking down Eric? I don't know, but what it felt like was that she was comfortable with the pentagon as it was, and had a sense that change would be bad in some way. I believe she thought she was acting in the public interest, though I saw it differently.
Which is just to say it's hard to take away whistleblower protections just for the gadflies and not for the Colonel Vindmans. But I think the ability to empower the latter and defang the former is possible in degrees, and part of that is by having less surface area for attack, by forcing objections to be more clearly grounded in substantive, rather than procedural, violations. And, of course, not having so many overly detailed procedures.
But to your question, I struggle to see how operationally Musk will be able to operate with the powers of the Presidency. He'll have to whisper to Vought or whomever and hope Vought see it the way he does. There's a lot to be said about the difference between what Elon wants and what Trump core wants, and how that's all going to play out.
I guess the answer is that the gadfly could always have been transferred to Alaska. Carter could have done that. He'd have almost certainly faced a lawsuit alleging retaliation. None of that is different starting Jan 21, except that the courts are going to be jammed with so many lawsuits they can't keep up. I have no idea how that will play out.
A lot of these problems are endemic to large organizations, public or private. Risk aversion, opaque lines of authority, entrenched incumbents, vendor capture, and weak management is common even in our at-will large corporations. When I was starting out in business, we had a fruitless engagement with a big company that couldn't get past the door. I gave up and told one of the managers that it was impossible to do business with them. He interrupted me, mid rant, and said: "You think its bad, but I have to work in this environment, it's much worse for me".
"Democrats did not do this work. "- ?? From what I saw, Pete Buttigeig and team at DOT improved operations a lot - in particular the Key Bridge recovery was impressive. Lina Kahn got a lot done in one term at FTC. NLRB was super efficient. The vaccine distribution fix under Biden was amazing and saved tens of thousands of lives. CFPB did impressive work. FEMA has been efficient. No?
Say more about what Khan has done outside of those headline lawsuits?
Blocking the Kroger/Albertsons merger.
and
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases
“DOGE is about to crash into this wall of weaponization of the complexities of law, policy, regulation, process, and lore in defense of the status quo” (I’m not sure it’s even weaponized—maybe it just exists even for those who are eager to change the status quo.)
But I’ve also been thinking along these lines with a couple of scenarios that involve DOGE having to abandon their all-encompassing slogan-based plans and start reforming the Federal government on a smaller scale. The most probable scenario is that their currently threatened measures will prompt such an outcry from the public that either Trump or the GOP will make them pull back. If the stock market reacts negatively, all the better.
Or, when they confront “the wall” of bureaucracy, they realize how unintelligent their slogans make them look. They become interested in the kinds of actual challenges that Pahlka writes about. In other words, they start “paying attention”. They read “Recoding America” and realize that they have stumbled into a role that can re-charge their jaded, oligarchic intellects and have meaningful, historical impact at the same time.
As for the finger-wagging on social media, it seems to be yet another instance of the Manichean thinking that’s taken over country. I think of Machiavelli, who was an ardent republican and yet took great pains to help his own autocrats govern better (after all, he had to live with the results.) There may come a time for outright condemnation of the Trump administration, but for now we need to pay close attention for ways to influence its intentions and motives.