curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
2d ago
The supreme court could write an opinion that said 'we are kings now'. Now, if that happened, we'd all ignore it, and appoint a new supreme court. But there's something in between that and what they're currently doing that isn't transparently unconstitutional but would simultaneously be concerning if you liked the way the government currently works. Congress could do similar, eg court packing. One might view executive orders in the same way - some are definitely constitutional but still might look like they're heading in a bad direction, others might be unconstitutional by current precedent but who knows what SCOTUS will do, and if SCOTUs rules one way then that would, in practice, expand the power.
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
No idea. Answer key?
curious_straight_ca
5d ago
USAID can easily pretend that the women's organisations in Myanmar are doing something else entirely, which is more palatable to the current administration
I don't think they can, and I don't think being shut down immediately affects their ability to do that. Most of the information was already public (DataRepublican didn't need the freeze to make those websites), and Elon's able to get his hands on the info that isn't public because Trump lets him, not because of a freeze.
What don't you understand about the entirety of Ukrainian "independent" media, and half of European leftist rags screaming about their funding being cut? We already heard the scream regardless of whether or the freeze has been blocked, so we know for sure that this is how they're funded
They would also scream if their funding was going to be cut off in N days! (For the same reason they're screaming even though the freeze was blocked). And it was already public knowledge that USAID funds media across the world, including the individual outlets.
I got it from Marco Rubio, who said it in an interview. I recall another one, where he said it specifically in response to not taking a more gradual approach, but can't find it now. In other words what you're describing is the direct result of the crackdown, not of USAID cooperating.
Rubio says in that clip that USAID wasn't being cooperative, but he doesn't mention it being related to a freeze, which is the thing I was asking about. Like, Trump didn't freeze Treasury funding, but DOGE still got access on Trump's authority, I don't see how USAID is different.
No putting people on admin leave is crucial. It is what happens when you think a business is doing crazy shit because you don’t want those people to continue to do crazy shit.
I do not understand what you are saying here. How is putting them on leave now, vs in 60 days, "crucial"? They have been doing that "crazy shit" for decades.
(And, again, judges have blocked all his big moves here, as was entirely predictable, so he hasn't even actually stopped them.)
You're doing the thing I mentioned in the above comment where you come up with post-hoc justifications for things Trump/Musk have done that are smarter than what they're actually doing.
From Musk on twitter: "We spent the weekend feeding USAID to the wood chipper." "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.". Trump on TruthSocial: "USAID IS DRIVING THE RADICAL LEFT CRAZY ... CLOSE IT DOWN!"
If you say that, and then fire all the employees, I can reasonably conclude they're not planning to spend the money on different kinds of foreign aid. If they were planning to do that, they could just Tweet/Truth it. Instead of that. They aren't.
I agree that Musk and Trump could be effectively accomplishing their goals and improving the government on net if they did different things than they are currently doing.
I also still consider it entirely possible Musk, who is very smart and capable, will realize the current approach isn't accomplishing as much as he thinks and do something else. But he hasn't done that yet.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
Government shutdowns are politically problematic because they cause government services voters care about to pause. Having this kind of narrative doesn't really help with that. The median voter's not super smart, and not super plugged into politics, but one consequence of that is they won't fall for this like 'this is good because covid' when prices o up, or conversely 'this is good because we're cutting woke government waste' when services start freezing.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
unless this funding has very explicit earmarks from congress then the administration should be able to just redirect it to fund Trump allied NGOs
Yes, I suggested doing things like this earlier. It might work. (It'd be harder for the programs other than USAID they're trying to cut, USAID is very small compared to rest of the federal government). My big criticism here is that, whatever Trump and Elon are currently doing, they're not optimizing for it working, they're trying to make it big and splashy.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
They do not get directly against the Impoundment Control Act. Take USAID. The appropriation by Congress doesn’t say “spend X dollars on items A through AAA every week.”
This would be more convincing if Elon hadn't attempted to pull almost all USAID workers off of their jobs, sending many of them back to the United States? Which is one of the things a judge blocked. Also if Elon and Trump weren't publicly clear about their desire to dismantle USAID. Judges observe the words you say online.
I agree that if Elon and Trump were smarter, they could've been creative, and tried to massively change the missions of agencies like USAID while still appearing to fulfill the requirements of legislation. He isn't doing that though.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
I do not think you're thinking clearly about this. Elon does not get different information if he cuts everything now, vs sending out an order to cut everything in 60 days. In both cases, he has to make factual determinations about how important the womens' organizations in Myanmar are.
Are you implying that all these programs clearly star what they're actually doing, and no one will try to hide their operation under a title that's more palatable to the current administration?
I don't understand how immediately freezing funding makes it easier to collect this data, I think that's something that was imagined after the fact to justify the freezes. (And, again, most of the freezes have themselves been blocked, so...)
How do you collect that information without the freeze? USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, that's the entire reason their funding was frozen
I do not think this is true? DOGE staff were inside the USAID building and had access to their computer systems. Freezing USAID doesn't affect their ability to do that.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing
... what? Some programs will say "we are destroying fentanyl labs in Mexico", and not get frozen. Others won't say that, because they're funding womens' organizations in myanmar, and will get frozen. It's the exact same thing that's happening now, except the fentanyl one doesn't get frozen.
So? It already exposed who needs constant o be cut
I don't think your logic here makes sense? How does the instant freeze help Musk distinguish between programs that do and don't deserve to be cut, vs just collecting the information without doing the freeze?
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
Making a lot of people enthused is important in politics. You have to ride the wave and short-circuit resistance. Blitzkrieg is a strategy for a reason.
The resistance doesn't feel particularly short-circuited to me. Judges have blocked most of DOGE's biggest cuts.
Giving fundees 90 days to saturate the media and hide all the bad spending wouldn’t work
What does 'hide all the bad spending mean'? How would they even do that? All of the data on their spending is, and was already, public.
The Cathedral likes long drawn-out detail-oriented battles, and the first rule of warfare is not to give the enemy what they want.
IMO, the first rule of warfare is to destroy your enemy, or at least their capacity to wage war. That isn't currently happening. (USAID funding is not even a percent of the reason the liberal media exists). "Not giving the enemy what they want" is, in this context, the first rule of being mad at your enemy on twitter.
(Yes, this is conflict mindset not mistake mindset. With mistake mindset it looks stupid and damaging to do it this way, naturally.)
This isn't about conflict vs mistake! I'm not entirely against all the libs spontaneously combusting. It's about, like, winning the conflict, which is harder than making a lot of awesome posts.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
And what would that accomplish?
... From the OP: "forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”, without also shutting down the anti-fentanyl work in mexico. obviously?
I also think the only reason people are protesting his actions is that they know this is the only thing that would work.
It is not working yet! Judges have blocked almost all of his big cuts. Because they aren't legal by established law and precedent (Impoundment Control Act). If I thought govt spending was about to permanently decrease by more than 20%, I'd be saying very different things (even though I also don't like the focus on cutting spending vs making govt better, more effective)
but I also don't think it's that ridiculous what they're doing
I actually love the principle of it! Take a competent man, maybe CEO of a successful startup, make him the CEO of the government, and have him improve it. The FDR analogy is apt. It should work.
But that requires the attribute 'competent'. Elon should be competent. And yet. I see a lot of evidence that DOGE is swinging wildly, not thinking through the consequences of their actions or how they connect to their long-term goals. The executive orders really have been poorly worded, many appear to have been hastily drafted and made with ChatGPT (even cremieux agrees with that). These were not designed to be good test cases to get a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court on impoundment. Judges don't like seeing chaos and poorly written, immediately retracted orders in a case about extending executive power. For a smaller-scale but illustrative example, cancelling Bloomberg terminals and politico pro because people posted about it on twitter was absurd. Those things are incredibly useful, and Elon is capable of knowing that.
And, as a political strategy, it's just as questionable. You can't cut the federal budget 20% by cutting DEI contracts, you'd need to cut special ed programs, student aid, social security, medicare, the military, etc. Other than the military, all those things are good! (edit: this was ambiguous - I meant cutting all of those things, other than the military, would be good). But it's going to be incredibly difficult to cut those without Congress, that's even farther out there than cutting USAID. And Trump isn't really doing anything to appeal to the swing votes in the narrow Senate or House majorities. So we're going to get small cuts, unless something else unexpected happens. And any plausible funding bill seems likely to cut taxes much more than DOGE's savings will be. The deficit keeps increasing. Voters won't notice DOGE's savings in the noise. So all you get, in terms of building political power, are the headlines about how DOGE CUTS $100M CONTRACT FOR VENEZUELAN TRANSGENDER HOMELESS SHELTER. it's good to cut that, but nobody's going to remember it four years from now during the next election.
What I'd want to see from DOGE are things like - streamline the TSA. Build a hundred nuclear reactors on federal land. Prosecute a lot more PPP fraud. Radically restructure the NIH to fund science better. This is building! I don't expect anything like that though. (That'd take more than a few months, and Elon said he'd only focus on DOGE for a few months).
But it's certainly interesting that they're trying something so unique. Where every other politician has claimed to want to make changes and failed to do so, this strategy might succeed, because it's never been tried before in government.
It has been tried. The thing that got us the Impoundment Control Act was Nixon impounding!
And even ignoring that, given all the above, how new is this really? This administration wouldn't be the first one to try and trim government waste.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
I don't understand what you mean. 90 days is not 'slow and gradual'. Slow and gradual reform by the standards of history is decades. Trump's in power for four years.
Also, under the current strategy all of Elon's big cuts have been blocked by judges, because they go directly against the Impoundment Control Act (passed the senate 80-0 in 1974 and affirmed by SCOTUS at the time), among other things. Courts are slow, 90 days is a reasonable timeframe. So the current strategy isn't actually working better.
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
It feels like a lot of people here are doing the same thing progressives do when asked to defend affirmative action - they just come up with reasons why it might be a good thing, don't think about if it makes sense in context, and then argue it. Yeah, we need diversity because it makes teams more effective, diversity means different backgrounds and experiences, and look at this n=25 study from 2008!
In this case, Trump could have just said 'this funding freeze will go into effect in 90 days', and the agencies and departments would've all started begging for their money pretty quickly, without actually being defunded. Or just, like, used any other method of investigating what the government's spending money on, such as Google or the large amount of public data. These programs weren't secret, all the info was on the web! Actually shutting it all down immediately doesn't accomplish much, other than making a lot of people mad or enthused on twitter.
curious_straight_ca
10d ago
It's just that it's not absolute! Having a constitutions moves you most of the way from 'the sovereign does whatever it wants' to 'you must strictly follow this document'. Just not all.
(I'm not claiming that the above is the way most lawyers or legal scholars would phrase it, although the article I linked was from a very good legal writer who also actively works on appellate and supreme court cases)
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
That’s the world of the original intent of the laws
Yeah, and I think this is substantively, object-level worse than the current system. I want to go to a restaurant in Florida without thinking about Florida food safety laws. For someone who lives in a smaller state, I want EPA regulations to apply to economic activity in neighboring states, because I ultimately share their air and water. In general it's sometimes easier to notice examples of regulatory overreach and don't notice all the skulls that regulations exist to patch up.
It would allow local restaurants to compete against the chain restaurants by giving them enough of a break that they can stay in business because they don’t have as high of a cost to own or run a business.
Right but it'd give them breaks on things like 'the food not having parasites and bacterial overgrowth' and pesticide use. I don't want that!
... Also as many of the regulations stifling local businesses are state-level or local as are federal, so I'm not sure this'd help in the long run.
The problem is that the definition of “interstate” has been stretched beyond all reasonable definitions
Yeah, it's an example of 'constitutional statesmanship'. The law says one thing, but it's just quite a lot better for the outcome to be the other thing, and this law's in the constitution so nobody else can change it - so let's just do the other thing. It shouldn't happen often, but it should sometimes! I mean, the decision giving SCOTUS the power to invalidate laws was itself an example of statesmanship, it's not really in the constitution either.
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
I think the Trump admin settled the cases for cash, but I'm not aware of anything else. But, like, that's a specific example of overreach. I think agencies that truly had 'functionally no checks' would be able to get away with a lot more than that.
curious_straight_ca
11d ago
Indeed, it seems like they [USAID] used these programs to help maintain control Over the narrative and therefore Congress
What? This is completely implausible. I genuinely don't understand how one could believe this on any level other than 'someone on twitter said it'. So much money and energy is put into political ads, political entertainment, and such that what USAID is doing domestically is not relevant. It's absolutely true that USAID does a lot of media in foreign countries, and it's not necessarily untrue to describe it as propaganda aimed at foreign countries. But not the united states!
if the statute is ambiguous, then we defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law provided it is reasonable
It could be reasonable to describe this as 'giving agencies too much power. It's just not a lack of checks and balances though. Courts still often blocked agency actions, and agencies still couldn't do most of the things they wanted to. Like, I think you're making a good argument for 'agencies had too much power', but that's literally a different thing from 'functionally no checks. No balances'. They have, like, 50% too little checks and balances.
curious_straight_ca
12d ago
I think that's a great example of aggressive reinterpretation of the constitution effectively changing the meaning. To some extent I think that - constitutional statesmanship, legal realism - is a good thing - I don't think the country would be better without the interstate commerce hack, I like that I can buy food in Alabama and know it's bound by federal regulations. (The alternative isn't no regulation, it's just having individual states set all regulations, I odn't think that's necessarily better).
I don't think that's a good example of a 'lack of checks and balances' for 'the administrative state'. It's an example of a negotiation between different centers of power, where the judiciary grants somewhat more power to the legislature at the expense of the states. The legislature has selectively granted a small amount of that power to the administrative state.
curious_straight_ca
12d ago
There should have been someone better that would be willing to potentially burn their reputation in order to strip DEI from the Dept of Defense and make other needed reforms.
There are a lot of conservatives in the military, I find it very unlikely there weren't people willing to do that.
curious_straight_ca
12d ago
I gave an example with Austin, I think that's a pretty central example of qualified. The bios of other recent secdefs from wikipedia are also good examples.
curious_straight_ca
12d ago
I don't think this is true! All of Elon's biggest recent moves directly go against the Impoundment Control Act, an act that passed both houses by huge margins, to prevent exactly defunding parts of the government directly authorized by congress.
curious_straight_ca
12d ago
Imo there's clearly a lot wrong there. But this is one of the places where 'fire 80% of the people' isn't a good idea. It's often +EV, but a 20% chance of destroying twitter is fineE, it's just one website, while being ready for a conflict three months from now is critical. What you'd basically want to do IMO is let most of the bloated but currently working stuff continue to exist while you build something better.
curious_straight_ca
12d ago
Are they worth a damn or just a signal that for example Lloyd played politics really well?
I think there's still a significant meritocratic element left in the military! And that's not just credentials, those are roles he occupied where he did command a lot of people.
Necessarily that meant picking someone who doesn’t have the credentials but hopefully has innate competency.
I wouldn't have complained if they'd picked, like, a very successful founder/CEO to modernize the military. That'd be great, actually. Instead they picked a Fox News host. "hopefully has innate competency" ... isn't very convincing tbh
One reason is maintaining the facilities and very expensive machines that hard science labs use, 70% extra makes sense for those
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