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People did vote for this, but they shouldn't have been allowed to. This is democracy out of control, something that the constitution was carefully crafted to prevent. Musk is running around shutting down agencies with no accountability to the bureaucracy or the courts. I don't know whether anyone except Trump can actually stop him.
If Congress, which is the body which actually passes laws, wants to stop him, Congress can. Except, to raise the idea is to immediately understand how ridiculous it is, because Congress hasn't exercised real policymaking judgment in more than a vestigial way for half a century. It's all been seconded (in a dubiously-legal manner, not made any more impressive by everyone refusing to take responsibility for calling it out) to the executive, who now is demonstrating the truth of the proverb "what the hand giveth, so it may take away."
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Neither of those are elected bodies. If the demos can't overrule bureaucrats or judges, you don't live in a democracy. I would be more sympathetic to the rule of law argument if those said institutions hadn't been trampling over them with their own regulations and rulings - again, with no democratic input whatsoever.
But if bureaucrats or judges can't overrule the demos, you have the 'two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner' issue.
I asserted a couple of weeks ago that it is not really possible for society to exist without abstract & concrete conflicts between people. In many issues, someone is going to have to lose. Democracy makes sure that the losers are the minority rather than the majority, which is preferable.
To put it another way, it is strictly better that the two wolves vote to eat the single sheep than for the sheep to order both wolves put to death.
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I think the perspective of many on this forum is that the bureaus are themselves staffed with wolves, so this is of no help, in their eyes.
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In the end, there is no substitute for good judgment, and no technology (social or otherwise) that can make up for bad decision-making.
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Accountability to the bureaucracy? Why should there be accountability to a bureaucracy!
That's not a Yes, Minister gag, is it?
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Because they are the experts. In addition to @Capital_Room's posts, there's Scott's "On Priesthoods" that goes into this.
Let's take forestry. The amount of logging or controlled burns you can do in a year is regulated by the states' forestry departments. How do they determine this? They do the science thing: compile and analyze the historical data on forest recovery, seek the opinion of external experts in local and international academia and come up with a number: you can log at most X% of forests per year, you have to burn the protected forests every Y years, pest extermination requires Z dollars per year.
If a governor is lobbied by the loggers' union to increase the logging to X+M%, by the real estate developers and insurance companies to reduce the burns to once every 2*Y years, if he promises to cut down the spending on pest extermination by 50% and then tries to force the forestry service to do all this, then his actions are deleterious!
His job is to harmonize the constraints imposed by various experts, not to choose one set over the other for political reasons.
I thought controlled burns were an example of the "experts" in state bureaucracies being terrible at their jobs and consistently screwing things up. Or at least that's somewhat true for California.
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That presumes much. First it presumes that these people even have expertise. Next it presumes that the incentive structure within the organization will lead to the right results. Third, it assumes that there are not other sources of expertise that may even be greater.
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I suspect these four words are as close to Shiri's scissors as we can get in the real world.
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Not sure why you think there aren't checks and balances. The Republicans just control the majority of the House, Senate, and Supreme Court in addition to the Presidency. Balances don't impact consensus policies. There's some court cases about things the Trump administration has done so far and maybe that will have some impact. But it's misleading to claim Trump is doing anything without the approval of Congress. Congress can't pass legislation quickly, sure, but also they would rather stay out of sight and let Trump take the fall for anything that goes wrong.
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Musk is acting on behalf of the executive branch as a government employee, and DOGE is an executive branch agency. If the executive branch doesn't have oversight and control - up to and including the ability to shut down - its own agencies (again, USAID was created by an executive order!) then we don't have a representative constitutional government with checks and balances.
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I don't see why this isn't a perfectly reasonable outcome under the constitutional framework (except insofar as the entire way the presidential election works is not the way it was meant to). The people did not directly vote for this, they voted for a representative (Trump) who said "yeah I'll get that done for you". Said representative is perfectly entitled to shut down these agencies, as he is the chief executive and they are a part of the executive branch of government. All of that seems to me to be perfectly in line with the Constitution. Whether it's wise or not is open to debate, of course, but I don't think one can accurately describe this as democracy having exceeded constitutional limits.
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A point that @Capital_Room has made over and over and many more times.
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I mean, the alternative is watering the tree of liberty.
In which case, the accelerationist inside me agrees.
No, the alternative is a representative constitutional republic with checks and balances, which has worked for the US and other advanced countries. Direct democracy means that 51% of the people have unlimited power, which invariably leads to disaster. The average person is not smart enough to be making these kinds of decisions.
This just seems like missing the forest for the trees. You are upset that unelected super powerful bureaucracy that functionally had no checks imposed upon them are being destroyed while worrying about a tyranny of the majority?
Yes tyranny of the majority is a problem. But so is giving a bunch of unchecked power to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats for decades.
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Your preferences are being checked and balanced at this very moment. 51% of the people having unlimited power is certainly preferable to 10% or much less of the people having unlimited power, which appears to have been the situation prior to the last election.
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I mean, the government is made up of average people (at best). All this does is pander to the myth that all the midwits who've found their way into federal employment are somehow our betters. And how does USAID even fit into a model of "Representative Constitutional Republic with checks and balances"? Reportedly they defied all request for information, or any external oversight at all. None of them were elected. If anything appointing a senate approved cabinet appointment like Marco Rubio as their direct administrator is restoring representative constitutional republic checks and balances.
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