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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   14300 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Trump just announced his plans to go forward with a Milei-style AFUERA campaign radically cutting government spending and jobs. And because nothing in government ever gets done without increasing the government first, the plethora of American Departments to do Stuff is joined by one newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency. Apart from proving once again that we are living in the dankest timeline, the DOGE will also give Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy something to do.

Musk has quite the track record when it comes to trimming fat but it remains to be seen whether those skills are transferrable.

Culture War angles are plenty. It would be trivial to craft a narrative either of a hostile, "fascist" takeover of Our Sacred Democracy or of a laptop class that siphons resources from everybody else via the instrument of an ever-expanding bureaucracy consisting of bullshit sinecures for the credentialed.

But the more interesting angle is that this is a fight between the executive and the entrenched bureaucracy. Were I a betting man, I am not sure where I would put my money. Others have tried and failed to cut the bureaucracy to size. But maybe it takes a chainsaw-wielding maniac to get the job done. How is Milei doing, by the way?

I think the best thing I've read so far on DOGE is this lengthy tweet from Devon Eriksen, on what DOGE will need to be effective (and thus why it probably won't be). Some highlights that stood out to me:

Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.

  • It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.
  • It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a "ruling".
  • The only recourse against a "ruling" is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.
  • But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  • Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.
  • But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.
  • Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.
  • And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.

…

But words mean things.

When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people's lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.

…

2. DOGE must have direct oversight.

If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.

Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.

Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.

Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).

3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.

"You have to stop that now" is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.

…

Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.

Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.

Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.

For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.

This doesn't just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.

Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies' staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.

…

6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.

Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.

7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.

This eliminates the phenomenon of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing".

Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.

I would point out that much of this — treating bureaucrats as "agents with agency" and responsibility, rather than procedure-following human automatons with "bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility — runs counter to the basic Weberian character of bureaucracy (as well as the "machine mindset" and allergy to human authority characteristic of modernity). Eriksen does provide a number of likely failure modes, though.

Relevant: Dominic Cummings complaints about the UK government and its clownish bureaucracy

For the first year of Gove’s time in the DfE (May 2010 – spring 2011), ministers were up until the early hours proofreading officials’ drafts of letters and rejecting about nine out of ten because of errors with basic facts, spelling, or grammar. When I got embroiled in rows about this in Q1 2011, some MPs had been sent no reply for six months. Despite several complaints to senior officials, nothing happened, shoulders were shrugged – ‘cuts, we need more resource, lack of core skills, all very difficult’ and so on.

https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflections-on-westminster-and-whitehall-dysfunction/

The problem with Western governments isn't that they literally can't find people who know how to spell, or fix lifts, or avoid idiotic wars.

There are plenty of smart people in government and even more who are theoretically available. The whole institutional structure doesn't prioritize doing things correctly. As a collective, they pursue vibes of what they think might be popular amongst their peers (see Team Kamala's decision of why not to go on Rogan). They try to strengthen the power and control of their class and subdue any threats (this is their highest shared priority). They try to deflect all bad outcomes away from themselves. And they like to plot and play politics, diverting national resources for their own internal factional interests. That's how they rise up the ranks.

The key thing isn't scrapping programs or reducing spending but changing the whole incentive structure and culture so that stupid programs aren't initiated and wasteful spending doesn't emerge in the first place. Politicians and officials must not feel safe going 'let's invade this country for made-up reasons' and creating a mess. They must not feel safe wrecking national industries. In the private sector, if you wreck and blunder you end up sinking your company and getting removed from the leadership pool. Ideally you're sifted out through competition before you get into any high-ranking positions. You can't really wriggle out of that (though some manage it).

In the public sector, it's very difficult for even the most effective wreckers to completely destroy a country. Competition between states is quite limited in most places. Responsibility is so diffuse they can lay blame elsewhere. The culture gets more corrupt under the lesser competitive pressure.

To take a less contemporary example, consider Admiral Yi of Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_Sun-sin

He was an incredible leader on the battlefield but he was constantly getting imprisoned, tortured and demoted by his jealous rivals and nervous superiors. The Korean governance culture was inferior, it squandered enormous amounts of talent. We can see a similar kind of suppression (albeit much less severe) on Musk under the old regime, despite him clearly being an incredible strength for America. Presumably his European equivalent got suffocated before he even got started.

That's what needs to be changed, the entire mindset. This is very hard to do, creating good institutions in the first place needed hundreds and hundreds of years of bloody wars in Europe. Maybe we could try introducing fearsome anti-corruption commissions and merit-based promotions like they have in China. But even then, there are problems with people gaming the rules: 'if the mayor is fired when a disaster kills 36 people, then all disasters will be reported as killing 35'. That example may not be specifically true but it gives a general impression.

Only a clear and inescapable need for true performance can really get it done. I don't know how to achieve this, apart from warfare or international races to achieve a certain goal.

As much as the whole doge thing warms my millennial heart, DOGE just seems like a clone of Inspector General offices, no? And the main reason those have no balls is they're staffed by people who go to the same house parties as everybody else, right? (I am just assuming, here, this seems like a likely Schelling point over time)

So the most effective DOGE will be the Musk one since he's a true outsider, then they will be less effective over time until DOGE exists just to get paid to rubber stamp things.

More and more I think this stuff is really about the people and not the positions. You can create a "Department of Screw the ATF" whose whole job is to obstruct the ATF but if you populate it with people who are drinking buddies with the ATF people they'll coordinate on one or two "hard hitting" investigations (maybe to get rid of somebody the ATF wanted to fire anyway) to make the public happy and otherwise will be in lockstep.

Checks and balances are a cool idea but it's rare to get people who are true enemies. When that happened in the beginning it was such a crisis that we got the 12th Amendment. Not to mention a literal gunfight. Later we got Brooks/Sumner. It's ugly.

Speaking personally (and as somebody who has had libertarian leanings since the age of 16) I wish Musk the best and I think there is a unique window of opportunity here but I kinda hope DOGE just dissolves itself after he's done, there is no real need for a redundant Inspector General, in fact it would be the sort of redundant bloat that DOGE exists to remove.

On further thought I take that back, a good college try at devising a "system" that prevents (reads: delays as long as possible) the inevitable corruption is a noble endeavor and I'm sorry for discouraging it.

I do wonder if the DOGE organization is just a way to offer a cudgel to the private sector that they can wield against the bureaucracy.

Right now it is mostly one way power. A regulator can come in and say "hey we don't like this" and a private company is faced with a costly and lengthy legal battle to overturn that.

Now musk can say "oh you don't like that thing, maybe you are being inefficient and need a reduced headcount".

If your goal is to reduce overall regulation it will mostly fail. If the goal is to reduce regulation for the people that have connections to DOGE then it will probably succeed.

Main problem is this is bureaucratic end-state problems. When the main reward you can hand out to political allies is an exemption from the worst regulations and taxes that everyone else must face.

Musk's been vocal about transparency and even mentioned having a public "leaderboard" for biggest wastes of government money they find; I think this is where the true potential lies. If all they do is maintain that leaderboard publicly, like a Most Wanted List for fiscal conservatives, I think it will help. Even if they have no legal power to cut funding, they can still act as a giant spotlight on some of the more egregious examples, and in turn get some organized public opinion churning on specific cases, which would be plenty useful IMO. Every little bit counts.

I’m pretty sure that describes the Tea Party era of Fox News. A giant spotlight on whatever government spending was most visible. All it got us were a few government shutdowns and a stage set for Trump.

If it set the stage for Trump, then it sure does make sense for Trumpians to support a continuous long-term version of it.

My heart is bullish on DOGE but my mind is bearish. Much of government inefficiency is not that too many people have been hired, like at X, but that its own regulatory requirements are too dense and too strict. Time and effort is sucked up by compliance, procurement, and legal. Firing people might not help, it might simply lower the resources the government has to comply with its own regulations, slowing everything down. If DOGE isn't given the power to reform procurement and cut red tape, I'm afraid it will crash and burn.

Trump promised not to cut entitlements and isn't going to cut defense, that's the vast majority of the budget not being cut right there. The rest is tinkering around the edges.

Medicare and Medicaid can be made more efficient and are the largest part of the budget.

Defense can be made more efficient without "cutting" it. Spending != capabilities.

How does this work when the budget is set by Congress and many of these jobs are required by regulations that Congress would have to repeal? Is there just going to be a massive surplus and a government that doesn't enforce the law? What happens when things like permits that are required by law to do certain things aren't issued because the remaining staff can't keep up with the demand?

It seems to me that the first step should be changing the law so that the government isn't needed to do most of the things it currently does.

Prediction- this will be a federal equivalent of those state subset commissions within 5 years. Sometimes they do good around the margins, sometimes(Colorado) they don’t, either way they’re generally uncontroversially and boring.

My prediction is that early on Musk will run into the incredibly thick red tape that normally prevents massive cuts in government, try to cut through it anyway because that's what he's used to in the private sector, and it results in some sort of lawsuit or other scandal.

I’m not discounting Musk himself doing something big. I just don’t think this will be a durable legacy.

Yeah, I'll further guess that he escalates more than anyone expects, then finds some surprising lever to accomplish something remarkable.

Betting against Musk seems like the most negative alpha strategy imaginable, yet people keep lining up to do it.

I highly doubt Musk will be able to make much progress. He might be able to bag a few high profile wins in a few places at best, but he's not going to get anywhere near the $2 trillion mark he set for himself. There's not nearly that much fat to be trimmed before he'd inadvertently start chopping off bones that people care about and would complain about loudly, and Trump isn't going to let Musk cause too many bad Fox news cycles before he snaps and it becomes a battle of the egos.

If there's anywhere to improve government that could simultaneously reduce costs and improve outcomes, it would be paring back the army of contractors the government has leveraged as a bandaid when people want to get something done, but R's slashed budgets so much that nobody in the government has the competency to do them. But undoing that would mean hiring more government employees and probably paying them more as well, which strongly goes against R vibes and is thus unlikely to be considered.

There's not nearly that much fat to be trimmed

The fat to be trimmed all comes from stuff like unions and other special interests, and you'd have to break those before you can actually cut the fat. When unions have rules like "Only janitor union members can clean floors, and only food sector union members can peel fruit", at small locations you can easily end up with multiple employees where you only need one. But you can't actually fire either employee until you get rid of the union rules, because those jobs do actually need doing.

Unions could be a source of savings, but only like 1/3rd of federal employees are in unions, and part of what makes federal employment bearable is the benefits and job security that such unions have been able provide. If Elon thinks he can get a workforce that has private sector benefits + job security, but with the paylevel of the federal government, I have a bridge to sell him. The notion that there exists huge swathes of the government where employees sit around doing nothing simply because "they can't be fired" is illusory.

R's slashed budgets so much

Wut

Ahem

I'm talking about money to government employees, not all federal outlays (which are dominated by boomer entitlements like Medicare and Social Security).

That's not a problem of budgets, though. That's just a head count. Of course, it's also highly confounded by general employment in the denominator; surely, you wouldn't say that looking at the spike in that plot in 2008 is because they suddenly decided to hire a bunch more government workers. And oh wait. Ahem, I think they say.

I can't find it right away, but Tyler Cowen recently shared an image showing the extremely different composition of the federal workforce over the years when binned by location on the general schedule; far more folks on the higher end of the schedule. This is likely much more directly in the control of the bureaucracy. Additionally, if your complaint is that entitlements are getting in the way, I'm not sure who's to blame for that.

These are both complains about how the budget is spent, not that the budget has, itself, been slashed. The latter just simply isn't true.

If you only take the raw number of employees across time then it's confounded by population growth and labor force participation. It's like not adjusting a monetary metric for inflation. So sure, the total headcount has only dropped slightly from the 90s, but if that's put into context then it's clear that the federal bureaucracy has been quite constrained as a percent of the overall labor force.

In terms of of whether using the term "budget" is correct here, you're slightly more correct but I'd say you're being pedantic. It should have been clear that I was talking about personnel budgets specifically, given the context of the sentence. Also, for the record "slashed" probably is less true than "constrained, especially in regards to inflation", but I digress.

Where is your evidence that the personnel budgets have been constrained, specifically, especially given that I mentioned a significant shift in the composition of the workforce by pay scale?

Here

The total percent of government spending that's going to its employees has dropped precipitously, from about 35% in the 60s to ~18% today.

That again suffers a denominator problem. That other sorts of spending have exploded doesn't tell us much about what you're making claims about. Perhaps something like this would show the precipitous decline that very neatly corresponds to some notable R actions taken? (Click max x-axis, I don't remember how to embed that into the link.)

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Francis Fukuyama publishes a letter to Musk with regards to DOGE. He tells Musk that the number of Federal employees have remained about the same for 50 years. Young people don't go into the Federal government jobs, so they're filled with older people and about a bagillion contractors.

Under these conditions, you cannot fire your way to excellence. Government work needs to be made attractive to younger, tech-savvy people; they need the flexibility to go in and out of federal employment and not be subject to a Government Service pay scale for job categories created 70 years ago, when most bureaucrats were clerks and typists.

This probably won't happen. I thought this was interesting though:

Many conservatives believe that government bureaucrats have too much discretionary authority and use it to enact a liberal agenda, thereby eluding democratic control. This does occur in some instances. But the real truth is rather the opposite: bureaucrats spend way too much of their time complying with hundreds of rules mandated by Congress, rather than using their independent judgment to make decisions that lead to good results for citizens

We need to cut back government regulation of many parts of the private sector. But we also need to deregulate the government itself, and allow those who work for it to actually do their jobs.

I agree that bureaucrats spend too much time in byzantine labyrinths and upending many of those could be good. However, if faceless bureaucrats act upon me as a lowly private citizen I have little to no legal recourse.

Fukuyama -- and Musk probably -- want a younger, more efficient bureaucracy with less red tape and nonsense. I would also like the boot to not be wasteful and do good things. Still, I hope Musk, et. al. keep in mind what he means to destroy, rebuild, and design. He means to resole the boot that can and will stamp on my face. It's not exactly a great boot in its current form, but let's not go making it more monstrous than it needs to be.

Francis Fukuyama publishes a letter to Musk with regards to DOGE. He tells Musk that the number of Federal employees have remained about the same for 50 years. Young people don't go into the Federal government jobs, so they're filled with older people and about a bagillion contractors.

This is a very stupid take and anyone who has worked as, with, or around the federal government will tell you so. Maybe it is true of very low GS level positions who are essentially secretaries and janitors, but it isn't true of anyone writing and promulgating regulations or enforcing them. Those positions attract very qualified people. Unfortunately, those qualified people take the jobs because they exactly want POWER and the forces surrounding them prevent them from doing anything innovative or good with said power. But those positions are filled with people who have resumes that would make the average hiring manager go "oooo".

Thus the issue of the revolving door and capture of agencies by Goldman and other such firms. But the reason is that those people are Goldman level qualified. The problem isn't quality. It is agenda and structures.

Why listen to a person that has been consistently wrong? The guy is the epitome of the Intellectual Yet Idiot.

Much of Fukuyama’s work laid the foundations for ideological analysis performed by the “alt” left and right today. His most famous work (which is pretty much the famous “nothing ever happens” meme) was prescient in countless ways. He’s a smart guy, and he hasn’t been more wrong than most people, here or elsewhere.

Fukuyama's work exists in the world of ideas, not of reality.

Fukuyama wins if his ideas sound convincing to other academics. But that doesn't mean his ideas work. Experience gained through trial and error will always trump academic theory in the real world. I don't think his voice adds much value here honestly.

A while ago I came to the conclusion that any intellectual (or ”intellectual”) commonly being discussed here is a sign that their main skill is filling pages and pages with nonsense and that I should simply completely ignore anything that intellectual says. It works remarkably well.

In the private sphere Musk also has the advatnage that he can attract top talent on prestige. Government workers enjoy the opposite of that. The most common response to someone pontificating on government work is "the job security must be nice." In other words, you're only going to be fired for terrible malfeasance, not for run-of-the-mill incompetence. And as a result there's not a whole lot of competence on display among the federal government workforce.

To make the government leaner and more effective, I'd couple cuts with an increase to prestige. Make government jobs highly sought after. Make the pay something like 95th percentile for comparable industry jobs. Make expectations high, with a target on attrition at well above zero. Grant benefits that are simply unavailable outside of the federal workforce. They could have immediate access to Tier I support at other federal agencies. Access to exclusive spaces at national parks. Franking privileges. The rights of an FFL without the paperwork. There are many possible privileges that would cost very little.

The goal should be for people to react to someone saying they work for the feds with the same respect and fascination as say, a rocket engineer for SpaceX.

Government jobs (at least the ones with policymaking discretion) are highly sought after.

Making federal employees a higher tier of citizen is a horrible idea that would contribute to the Sovietization of society and is directly contrary to the American ideal. The government being generally low quality is fine (though the floor should be higher than it currently is) it just needs its scope massively reduced. If it had the scope reduced to match capabilities, then you don’t have to increase capability

Furthermore, one way to lower the temperature in politics is to reduce the size of government.

When the government controls everything, the question of who controls the government is paramount.

And as a result there's not a whole lot of competence on display among the federal government workforce.

While there are certainly plenty of examples of this, I don't think it's as universal as is often claimed. I've known government technical folks that are incredibly competent and focused, especially in leadership roles. Sometimes you get folks in over their heads, but I don't know that the general low-level public-facing employees (social security office staff?) should be taken as typical examples. And honestly I've had pretty good experiences even with my local mail carriers and park service rangers. I've seen general-level officers speak a few times and always been impressed -- memorably, one gave an hour long technical keynote with slides without ever glancing at anything but the audience.

There is a lot of pride and patriotism, and to be honest not even that bad of pay, in the federal service in at least some areas. On the other hand, they are hamstrung by a very risk-averse culture -- nobody ever got fired for adding an extra protracted approval process or required training -- and by complicated rulebooks cooked up in response to the last few thousand times someone defrauded the government. There is certainly room for substantial improvement.

Government workers enjoy the opposite of that.

Depends on which part of the government, and which part of the country.

Looking at PMC-tier jobs, the military officer corps is more prestigious than comparably competitive private-sector careers in the red tribe, and comparably prestigious in the pro-establishment bits of the blue tribe. The career foreign policy bureaucracy is the other way round, of course. Teaching is almost always government work, and carries more social prestige than you would expect given the average SAT score of Ed school entrants. In my area (finance) government jobs are prestigious because quite junior people at a regulator or in the Treasury can make quite senior people at banks jump.

At the blue-collar level, law enforcement and various types of public safety work analogous to firefighting are pretty prestigious, as is the NCO corps (at least within the red tribe).

The point is that there are a lot of jobs that are "cool jobs" to a subset of the population that mostly can't be done outside the government, and very few of them come with the "government job" stigma. The "government job" stigma as I perceive it mostly relates to people doing and supervising routine office work (DMV staff being the paradigmatic example), who are assumed to be lazier and dumber than their private-sector counterparts.

There is also a set of jobs where the prestige doesn't change when you move between the private and public sectors because the job doesn't. A professor at a State university enjoys the same prestige as a professor at a comparably elite private university. A doctor or nurse doesn't gain or lose prestige if they take a job at a VA or municipally-owned hospital. If anything, a USPS (or Royal Mail in the UK) postman enjoys more prestige than a UPS/DHL/Amazon deliveryman.

The goal should be for people to react to someone saying they work for the feds with the same respect and fascination as say, a rocket engineer for SpaceX.

SpaceX is a small, elite firm, so the fair comparison is a small, elite part of the government. But I think in most bars in most of America, a Navy Seal is less likely to be buying his own drinks than a SpaceX rocket engineer.

In any case, the question isn't "How do you make a senior policy-making role in the Commerce department prestigious?" because those types of roles are already ultra-prestigious. The question is "How do you make the IT guy at the SSA who makes sure pensions are paid on time as prestigious as the IT guy at Google who keeps the site up?" - because those are comparably responsible jobs.

Grant benefits that are simply unavailable outside of the federal workforce.

The pay yes, but this I'm not sure that would be a very popular move. From my understanding of them, Americans hate privilege. Even if money obviously changes everything in practice, they love the idea that they are all technically equals in the eyes of the law, of bureaucracy, etc...

Frankly even the pay might be a tough sell: if we’re looking to slash wasteful spending, why would we pay bureaucrats even more?

(Yes, yes, I’m aware that the goal is to hire talented bureaucrats who will use their prodigious skills to bring government closer to private-sector levels of efficiency and productivity and thus more than make up for their higher salaries. But it’s hard to get buy-in from the public, especially the Red Tribe, on such second-order concerns)

The issue is that pay increases for government employees just means poaching talent from the private sector. You’ll increase government efficiency at the cost of lower private sector efficiency. There’s only so many competent people. Raising pay doesn’t make more of them.

Great point, and one which I didn’t consider. The model I was going off of was Singapore, which famously compensates its bureaucrats quite well both in terms of money and prestige. The government even pays for top students to attend elite universities in the US/UK, but with the requirement that those students come back and work in the civil service for a period of time, or else be on the hook for the tuition bill.

The opportunity cost of such elite human capital going to work for the government is probably not that huge, as measured by the impact on Singaporean gross domestic product: the cream of the crop can certainly generate much more value in the private sector, but in almost all cases, making boatloads of cash requires employment abroad and hence not contributing to Singapore’s GDP. Indeed, it’s not unheard of for FAANG to buy top-notch Singaporean Stanford/Harvard/MIT CS grads out of their tuition bonds with the government, so that they can stay and work in the US (and while it’s true that some tech giants have a presence in Singapore, it’s almost invariably an Asia sales office without any serious product/engineering work going on).

By contrast, the US has a much deeper pool of high-paying, high-prestige jobs within the country that our hypothetical elite government employment scheme would compete with/crowd out.

I think the pay might work because it can be presented in multiple ways. Much is made in tech of the 10x engineer. Instead of saying you're going to increase salaries, say you are reducing the salary mass by replacing 10 checked-out, unmotivated, aging, inflexible paper-pushers with 1 young well-paid bureaucrat, 1 part-time tech consultant and an OpenAI enterprise account.

But maybe it takes a chainsaw-wielding maniac to get the job done. How is Milei doing, by the way?

Reasonably well, but for reasons that are generally non-transferable to Trump. Milei's success / continued political survival was in large part because the economic issue of government bloat / inflation were central to his election. He was able to win election and maintain support despite warning upfront that things would get worse before they get better because he was very clear there would be pain, and the voting public accepted the legitimacy of that in order to address a broadly recognized problem that had decades of buildup.

The Trump context is considerably different. Trump beat Biden, and the electoral college makes it more decisive than the vote difference otherwise would, but Trump ran on a generalized vibe rather than an explicit and widely accepted problem. Particularly since US problems aren't the same sort of 'within the Executive sphere' as Milei faced. Milei had to deal with executive patronage networks / make jobs / inflationary policies, but the US challenge on the budgeting sense is the automatic entitlement spending, not the bureaucracy administering it. The sort of cuts to be needed would need to be legislative, and the sort of sphere that Trump has tended not to challenge.

This will be interesting, in the sense of interesting times, but the chainsaw will probably go after the wrong institutions to meet it's stated goals (but which probably will meet less-stated goals).

the US challenge on the budgeting sense is the automatic entitlement spending, not the bureaucracy administering it.

I’m not sure how true this is. Most times people complain about government spending it seems to relate to corruption, cost disease, and regulatory costs: Broadband programs that provide access to ~0 people for billions of dollars, bridges that cost 100X what they should, hospitals needing 10 administrators for every doctor etc. All of these are executive issues. The complaints about the actual literal entitlements ordered by Congress usually come up as complaints of vote buying, and regardless aren’t the core of the problem.

Those could literally all be true without caveat, and it wouldn't matter in the budgeting sense since those may seem like big numbers in absolute terms but are proportionally very small compared to entitlement spending. It doesn't matter of bridges 100x or even 1000x more than they 'should' if the budget is spending thousands times more on entitlement spending than on bridges.

To wit- according to the Biden administration earlier this year, the US has $40 billion allocated to spend over 5 years on bridges. By contrast, the combined Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare spending in 2024 is $1.67 trillion, and expected to rise to 3.1 trillion by 2033.

Put another way- 5 years of all bridge spending is less than 3% of one year's medical spending, and shrinking. You could make that $40 billion 10x, 100x, or even 1000x more efficient, but no matter how efficient you spend 40 billion it's a drop in the entitlement spending. Sure, you could argue that there are savings to be made there... but then you're not going into the discretionary budget administration, you're going to the automatic entitlement spending, which goes to the laws rather than the executive administration thereof.

Part of that's just baked into demographic politics.

When the Americans legislated Social Security in 1935, FDR signed a law that authorized payments for those 65 or older when the average American lifespan in 1935 was... 61 for men and 65 for women, according to a quick google search.

Today, social security can begin between ages 62 and 70 depending on your preference of payout amount... when the average American lifespan is about 75 for men, and 80 for women.

It fundamentally doesn't matter in a budgeting sense how efficient you are at executing the discretionary programs if the entitlements previous created on the assumption that less than half of people would live long enough to see them are instead expecting to pay for more than a decade. When you start adding in medical spending, which costs increasing with age, you're adding more. This is an issue of law and what the legislators deem is the appropriate entitlement, not administration of that amount. No matter how much you save on the executive side- and it can be very good to have more efficiency there!- it's not the central or determinative issue.

Is the average lifespan in 1935 one of those situations where its mostly just a higher rate of infant mortality?

Two arguments here:

1.) Government spending: consider that the massive efficiency issue applies not just to bridges, but to nearly all government spending of any kind. While bridges alone are a small cut, it’s significantly more expensive to spend 10X or 100X for many different things.

2.) The issue goes beyond government spending to include government cost. Cost includes the expenses that are offloaded to the private sector, many of which are executive in nature. Rolling back a wide swath of administrative regulations could massively increase private wealth and save the public fisc indirectly. This also applies to the healthcare spending that makes Medicaid so expensive. That 10X multiplier is there as well (more than in most industries really.) Cut medical regs, increase doctor supply, etc etc.

The administration will have trouble with this politically though, since the second type of cost saving doesn’t show up in a straight “spending in 2022 vs spending in 2026” analysis

I'm hopeful, but I can't stop laughing at putting two executives in charge of the new department in charge of reducing redundancy. Given that both are presumably running other actual businesses, there will probably also be an acting leader or chief of staff who runs DOGE on the day to day.

This is going to be an adventure.

As someone who has had two bosses before, I know it can be a complete disaster, especially when they have very different personalities and priorities.

but I can't stop laughing at putting two executives in charge of the new department in charge of reducing redundancy.

This is a great, hilarious point actually!

How is Milei doing, by the way?

It's progressing slowly, but it is happening. The problem is that a lot of the waste is in the other branches of government (Legislative and Judicial), or directly in the provinces (kind of, but not quite, like states), both of which the executive has a harder cutting.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that in fiscal year 2019, the federal government spent about $300 billion on civilian personnel, including wages, salaries, and benefits.

80% of that number is $240 billion dollars. Posting this in case anyone other than myself was curious.

I have never seen an efficiency or anti-bureaucracy agency having much influence. They are politically sidelined and no one cares too much about waste of a few millions here and there, when the government budget is trillions.

Firing hundred thousands of government workers are also a no go, because of its effect on the economy and midterms and the media reporting extra hard on any adverse effects it will cause.

My bet is DOGE won’t closing the budget deficit and after a few month Elon Musk will get bored/frustrated and leave.

With the economy running at full employment, I think the effect on the economy would actually be positive.

The big class war of our era is between the people who live off the system and thsoe who pay into it. The welfare class and the sociologists are on the same side while a plumber is on the other side. The welfare class and the sociologist both want a big public sector while a plumber has little need for the welfare state. The women voting left trope isn't entirely true. Single women who get paid through the government are solidly left while women who don't fall into this category are far less radical. Women aren't really swinging the the left as much as they are increasingly single and employed in the public sector.

Much of the radicalism among the left probably stems from many in the left investing 6 years into getting a master's in something with a strong ideological bent, being entirely reliant on the government for the job and their social status. They are terrified of ending up as someone in East Germany with a masters in Leninism.

The most important thing the right can do in order to secure a long term future for itself is to reduce the size of the left's client classes.

Pop quiz: which of the following jobs contribute more to Democrats than Republicans?

  • Flight Attendant
  • Bartender
  • Librarian
  • Taxi Driver
  • Pediatrician
  • Architect
  • Carpenter
  • Park Ranger
  • Gardener
  • Chef
  • Union Organizer

Answers. I think your category completely fails to capture our red/blue divide. Is that because you borrowed it from Ayn Rand?

Any proper system has to explain the machinist vs sheet-metal-worker divide (around a 30-point difference) and I have yet to see one that does.

Small business (possibly owner or part-owner) vs union shop, I suspect.

Isn’t “welder” likely to be a union shop, too? And I’m not even sure what qualifies one as a “machine operator.”

Machine operator is a pretty basic role. If you’ve ever used a 3d printer and had to deal with leveling the bad, clearing stuck plastic, verifying that prints are proceeding correctly etc. it’s basically that but with bigger machines.

Unironically the most interesting thing about this dataset is it sorts "Web Developer" into "IT" and not "Engineering." I have no doubt many flame wars could be fought over that one.

And the second most interesting thing is that the most Republican professions work with fossil fuels, and the most Democratic professions work against fossil fuels. Forget about Black Lives Matter, the divide between the left and the right seems to be about Black Gold.

Umm, yes. The GOP is most accurately described as a pro-fossil fuels Party which supports the interests of social conservatives(not necessarily socially conservative interests) and tax cuts.

I would add a lot of other “female” coded jobs (eg HR) are largely (though not entirely) created by the government but paid by private sector directly.

This is good for dogecoin.

The DOGE combined with the pending executive order to review military officials for "requisite leadership qualities" make me think he might actually make good on the Project 2025 promise to do some housecleaning in the bureaucracy. I'm not holding my breath, but, we'll see.

The speed at which the transition team is moving gives at least the superficial appearance that they learned something from Trump's first term. They know how they were stymied the first time, and they're making efforts to prevent that from happening again.

review military officials for "requisite leadership qualities"

Man, this article is the perfect example of how dishonest the media have become. Sure, they can fabulate that he wants to purge the brass to have loyalists for a coup, but the brass fucking lied, kept crucial information from him and undermined him the first time around. He would be stupid NOT to purge them. Biden should have purged them after he got hit by the trap they left for Trump with the Afghanistan widthdrawal.

How were they stymied last time and what are they doing now to prevent that?

I dunno, it just seemed like the right thing to say.

EDIT: Permanent unelected bureaucrats were instrumental in blocking the implementation of certain Trump policies during his first term. The fact that the transition team has already floated multiple proposals for trimming the bureaucracy seems to show that they’re aware of this fact and have a strategy for dealing with it.

My impression is that GOPe political appointees were responsible for more obstruction and sabotage than the Deep State.

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