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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   32899 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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What's Tulsi going to head, DHS?

I'm more interested in Musk's promised cost-cutting measures. His whole mode of operation is "guardrails and red tape are for stupid people", while federal bureaucracy is 90% guardrails and red tape. How much carte blanche is he going to get to overhaul the departments before the Congress realizes what's going on?

I once posted a hypothetical here about Trump trying to hollow out one of the noncompliant departments. I can now actually imagine this happening: Trump might be all about vibes, but Musk can easily post a department-wide email that goes, "Just to let everyone know, I've just made myself the sole AD domain administrator, everyone's access has been terminated. Attached is the list of people the new Secretary and I will interview today. If they pass, they will start interviewing more people and so on, so your access will be gradually restored in the next few days. However, I'm going to remain the only one who can approve anything in SAP until the new spending policy is in place. Oh, and let the guys who have come to fix the hinges on the server room door in"

The prospect of Elon Musk crippling the entire SAP infrastructure because they don’t want to answer his questions just made me physically cringe.

To quote Jim Hacker, Prime Minister on an overbearing Foreign Office:

"Are they here to follow our instructions, or are we here to follow theirs?"

The FO makes some good points: politicians tend to be geographically ignorant, prone to black-and-white thinking, and have short time horizons. Nevertheless, the bureaucrats are also blinkered, prejudiced, incompetent and leverage their expertise to block off any feedback or reform that might make them otherwise. Ultimately that can't be tolerated.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fVVX0lHZ8JE

What's Tulsi going to head, DHS?

somali_pirate_meme.jpg

Make it so!

What's Tulsi going to head, DHS?

Yes please, I want to find out if they put her on a watchlist (which almost certainly should be eliminated anyway) for partisan reasons. If the answer is yes, DHS should be dissolved. It's a newer agency anyway and I think the actually useful parts can just go back to being standalone or parts of other agencies. Nonsense like that should be punished severely and publicly.

It's a newer agency anyway and I think the actually useful parts can just go back to being standalone or parts of other agencies.

DHS is a department, not an agency. Apart from the TSA, none of its agencies (list) are new, or obviously surplus to requirements.

Abolishing TSA would obviously be a good idea - move the bits of aviation security that can't be privatised into the FAA, move the bits of port security that can't be privatised into the Coast Guard, and let ordinary law enforcement handle land transport security. But having the various border-policing agencies (CIS, CBP, ICE, Coast Guard) sitting in the same department is probably a good thing given how closely you want them working together.

[This may change if Trump is serious about using broad-based tariffs for revenue - in that case you probably have to unmerge immigration and customs and put customs into the Treasury so it focusses on its revenue collection mission.]

I continue to think the Secret Service should sit in the Treasury for coup-proofing reasons.

To troll the Deep State without handing too much power over to someone politically unreliable, Trump should make Tulsi Gabbard DHS inspector general.

I would generally put anything law enforcement on a national level into Coast Guard (maybe rename it to state security or something) just for the ability to unify such things under a single legible chain of command. As it sits, CIS, CBP, CG, ICE, TSA, and CG are all doing similar things and even at times crossing purposes without any cross communication possible. A bunch of Migrants picked up by the CG would be handed over to BP or ICE, but why? What’s the purpose of doing so when you can simply dump them off at a port in Mexico and shorten the process by days or weeks?

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