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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25746 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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What’s so frustrating about this topic is that there is almost Zero chance it’s addressed by the government, even under trump. It’s too niche. Too many incumbents. Someone needs to get this on Elons or Vivek’s radar and hope someone takes interest. It’s the only way.

Someone needs to get this on Elons or Vivek’s radar and hope someone takes interest. It’s the only way.

Why? What would that accomplish? DoGE is a joke, powerless to accomplish anything. Malcom Kyeyune:

In truth, though, the fact that DOGE is being taken even remotely seriously is in itself a cause for concern. Trump, as part of the executive branch, has very little power to tell the legislature what it can or even should do. Whatever (minimal) authority he may enjoy leading a department named after a cryptocurrency and an online meme, Musk is at most empowered to make non-binding suggestions. Moreover, if he wants his “department” to actually receive any funding, it is Congress, not Trump, that secures it. The fact that the US state is split into three branches, each with their own remit, is something American children learn very early on. Neither Musk, nor his new boss, have the power to upend this division of power, nor fix problems outside the executive branch of government.

David A. Fahrenthold, Alan Rappeport, Theodore Schleifer and Annie Karni in the New York Times (archive link):

When Mr. Trump takes office, Mr. Musk’s group will face a daunting reality. An entire apparatus has developed over the centuries that allows the government to keep marching on in the face of economic shocks, wartime hardships, or — as in this case — political vows to diminish its size and spending.

Any effort to slash the federal government and its 2.3 million civilian workers will likely face resistance in Congress, lawsuits from activist groups and delays mandated by federal rules. Unlike in his businesses, Mr. Musk will not be the sole decider, but will have to build consensus among legislators, executive-branch staffers, his co-leader and Mr. Trump himself. And federal rules ostensibly prevent Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy from making decisions in private, unlike how many matters are handled in the business world.

…

A 1972 law says federal open-records laws apply to advisory committees. If a committee does not follow those rules, it could be sued — and a judge could order the committee to stop meeting, or order the government to disregard its advice.

…

Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy said that cutting rules would allow them to cut staff, allowing “mass head-count reductions” across the government.

Yet many of those employees have civil-service protections, meaning they generally cannot be fired without cause, or for their political beliefs. In his first term, Mr. Trump tried to shift thousands of employees into a different category, where they could be fired at will. President Biden rescinded that order, called Schedule F, when he took office.

…

Jonathan H. Adler, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, said that many of the ideas mentioned by Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy would be ripe for legal challenges and noted that many of Mr. Trump’s previous efforts to expansively use executive powers had been struck down by courts.

…

Capitol Hill has always been the place where ambitious efforts to slash the budget — from one started by Theodore Roosevelt to the commission under Reagan run by industrialist J. Peter Grace — have run aground. Members of Congress have been reluctant to cut even small programs they think help their constituents, and the law says presidents must spend all the money that Congress allocates.

…

For now, activist groups like Public Citizen, a left-leaning advocacy group, said that there was nothing about Mr. Trump’s victory, or Mr. Musk’s role at his side, that allowed them to ignore the slow legal process set up to make — or unmake — rules.

“We will use those structures to complain — and sue, if we need to," said Lisa Gilbert, Public Citizen’s co-president. “We’ll see where they start, and we’ll use every tool in our tool set to push back.”

Curtis Yarvin:

Excludes bodies that also exercise operational functions! I can’t even. But the good news is, “DOGE” will “dispense advice or recommendations.”

Let me repeat this, since it’s so funny: the “Department of Government Efficiency” is not even part of the government. It literally has no power of its own. Everything Elon will be doing now, he could have done six months ago.

The result of this exercise will be a report which suggests to various agencies how they should save money. Or something. Imagine if Elon Musk had provided “advice and guidance” to Parag Agrawal. I think he tried that first. Lol.

…

In this, DOGE perfectly echoes its 40-year-old predecessor, the Grace Commission, for which the slogan “drain the swamp” was actually coined. The Grace Commission spent $75 million to create a 47-volume report. It identified $424 billion of savings from implementing its recommendations. In the end, twelve of its recommendations were passed into law, saving somewhere between two and five billion dollars. I guess that’s a good return on a $75 million report. Let’s see if Elon and Vivek can match it.

It’s unfair, of course, to laugh. The DOGE guys understand this perfectly and have already announced that DOGE will focus on executive actions.

Executive actions are executive orders. EOs have the legal force of a tweet. You can’t go to jail for disobeying a tweet, even if the President tweeted it. Or an EO.

In real life, EOs work when they order an agency to do something it wants to do. In fact, they are generally written by the agency itself. They are certainly reviewed by the agency. EOs are not written high at 3am by Elon Musk with a sharpie on a Denny’s napkin, even if they probably should be. If you know DC, can you make something happen with an EO? Of course. Depends what, though.

…

Basically, DOGE is promising to save the government money through… bureaucratic trench warfare. If you think an executive order is in any way executive, like private sector executive, like actually executive—read about how the process works.

…

But every recommendation in the “DOGE” report, if it goes anywhere at all, will land on the desk of its natural enemy: the bureaucrat whose budget it is trying to cut. His first action will be to write a memorandum, ten times as long as the recommendation itself, about why this is a ridiculous and disastrous and impossible idea.

Getting something on Elon or Vivek's "radar" will do you no good. It's not "the only way," there's no way at all — at least, not within the system and the confines of the law. DC cannot be fixed, it can only be defeated, destroyed, and replaced.

What else is there to say except "we shall see"? I would note that everything you quoted before Yarvin is well known to Musk and Trump and has been discussed at length, and was a large part of project 2025 - they do have plans to deal with an entrenched and uncooperative bureaucracy.

As for what Yarvin said, I just think it's premature to laugh off Trump's plans before he's even in office, mainly because he won the election, secured funding for the border, escaped impeachment, pulled out of the Paris accords, met with North Korea, put an embassy in Jerusalem - my most consistent recurring memory of the 2016 cycle is "Hahahaha Trump is such a fucking moron, can you believe this chump? He can't just... Oh holy shit he did it!"

secured funding for the border

Only sections of the wall were built, most of the Mexico border wasn't secured.

met with North Korea

The goal was to get them to give up nukes and that didn't happen. Hanging out with Kim Jong Un isn't a big achievement in and of itself.

Both were claimed entirely impossible. I'm not saying Trump can do no wrong, I'm saying actions that are impossible for the blue tribe are not necessarily impossible for the red tribe and vice versa. Also activist media claim the possible is impossible when it impedes their agenda.

He didn't escape impeachment, he was impeached twice.

Apologies, please bear with me while I readjust to the motte's language norms. He was acquitted following his first impeachment is what I meant.

Relatedly, these people also probably said you can’t build a rocket ship company or an electric car company. Doesn’t mean Elon will succeed but…I try not to bet against him.

Hope you didn't lay money on twitter!

I’m not sure the Twitter purchase was always a financial one by Elon. In any event, most people predicted Twitter would fail after Elon cut a bunch of people. It didn’t. Elon was right on the business aspects. Assuming advertisers come back (which it seems they will) it actually wouldn’t surprise me if he makes a little money off of it.

I don't know if this is what you meant, but there was actually a lot of money to be made by betting against Musk during the Twitter acquisition saga: What seemed like an open-and-case of "you have to buy the company you committed to buying" was trading at a steep discount, seemingly only because "It's Elon, anything can happen".

I'm referring to the entire twitter saga, but probably mainly the additional value lost under Musk's ownership.

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