This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
One thing I haven’t heard brought up in all this shutdown talk is I that I think I remember Janet Yellen talking about needing to enact extraordinary methods about two weeks ago to stall a federal shutdown due to the debt ceiling. https://apnews.com/article/treasury-debt-limit-janet-yellen-7e598f2811d75ad5159f9338f7cdce16
So okay yeah Jan 27th. Hypothesis here, trump anticipates the dems using this as a way to hit him in the face with a metaphorical shovel, something along the lines of “republicans won’t agree to any reasonable deal and they’re the reason and this is bad” so preemptively chooses to do effectively a shutdown but on his own terms. Now the conversation isn’t republicans hit debt ceiling and can’t broker a deal but republicans have shut down these wasteful programs. Arguably the best management of the narrative I’ve seen from them in the last 20 years.
None of this is a comment on whether this or that program being shutdown is good or bad, simply that from that narrative, it’s arguably going great, and so far we haven’t hit the debt ceiling. Maybe I’ll eat my words in a few days but still so far I haven’t been hearing much about the debt ceiling being a problem since he started cutting these programs.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And what would that accomplish? You think USAID would say "Ok, you got us! We won't sponsored subversive operations in Eastern Europe anymore, and will focus on vaccines for Africans"? I think they'd use the 90 days to set up more NGO's that fund NGO's, to pretend that they never sponsored subversion to begin with.
I also think the only reason people are protesting his actions is that they know this is the only thing that would work.
... 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?
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)
NGOs have run to DC and SDNY to get blocks because those are the most politically corrupt districts. The problem for them is that the TROs are so unprecedented and off the rails that higher courts are going to need to step in quickly.
More options
Context Copy link
i don't know how blocking these cuts using the judiciary will work in the long term. unless this funding has very explicit earmarks from congress then the administration should be able to just redirect it to fund Trump allied NGOs. For example lets say judge decides you can't cut USAID funding overall then Trump just funnels funding away from basket weavers in Afghanistan to pro-life groups in China. Basically just do turnabout and then when people complain Trump is being a hypocrite by carrying out the same corruption he criticised others of doing he can claim he tried to cut the funding cleanly but the judiciary tried to stop him.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing, and nobody knowing there's anything that should be cut. Again, what good is letting them do that? Or put another way: how does that plausibly lead to cutting away the waste?
So? It already exposed who needs constant o be cut. When the Supreme Court ruling comes around, they'll know exactly where to take the hatchet to.
Because the programs will have to actually explain how they're supposed to be worth the money spent, and useless ones trying to obfuscate their uselessness can simply have their request for an extension denied. The denial process can be unilateral and impossible to appeal, if we want, and that would still be much better than freezing everything Day One while giving grifters no more of an out.
If it's so simple, howcome literally no sense be died that until now?
More options
Context Copy link
This implies that the programs did not have to actually explain before they were given money to spend.
If they never actually explained in the first place, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it?
In the alternative...
If they were useless from the start but also able to obfuscate to both get initially funded and re-funded since, why should a proposal to rely on detecting known liars after their repeated success?
Especially if the system's managers are- by the fact that they were persuaded by the corrupt lies in the first place- either unable or unwilling to screen fraud programs from legitimate programs from the start?
There are certainly reasons not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but your proposals are structured to keep the grifters in, not least because the grifters were clearly not being successfully caught by the people who were supposed to be checking for grifters.
No, it implies that they were explaining to themselves or a very friendly review board why this spending was needed. The relationship between the groups handing out the funds and the people using them isn’t like a normal business relationship. The funding group has no reason to care whether or not the program actually works. They are obligated to spend $XK on grants in a certain period, and they actually get punished for not spending the money. So if you follow tge procedure and say tge right sorts of things about your project, you get money — no matter how bad your previous track record is, no matter how obvious it is that the program you’re proposing wouldn’t work, no matter how obviously you are going to go over budget.
The only answer is to shut it down and have a complete outsider look over these grants. If they can’t explain why Iraqi Sesame Street will improve the security of the Middle East, then is needs to go.
More options
Context Copy link
They previously had to explain it to DEI bureaucrats who thought "we will abide by such-and-such buzzwords" was a good justification. The standards have changed. There is no reason to think the grifters are able to fool people who do not think "but [woke value]!!!" is a conversation-stopper; they've never had to.
To which the question you dodged repeats:
If they never actually explained in the first place to a non-DEI bureaucrat, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it to a non-DEI bureaucrat?
And they won't have to if the formerly-DEI bureaucrats are the arbitrators of such-and-such buzzwords being sufficient evidence of goodness or not, which is what you have if you insist that they review all the programs and decide which one to cut rather than let their senior executive branch leadership circumvent them and do things like cut.
Note, after all, the reason that they have to be circumvented is because they can't be replaced- the existing employment laws do not allow for just direct firing and replacement hiring of DEI-managers with non-DEI managers. Nor does the budgeting authorities allow for simply hiring a new cadre of reviewers on top of the existing ones- the budgeting authorities are only for so much money and often for so many billets, and the lawful hiring processes are controlled by the category of bureaucrats being circumvented as part of the problem.
Which is among the reasons to think grifters will still be able to 'fool' people- the bureaucracy does not reflect the viewpoint of the executive, and does not change as the executive does, and much of the bureaucracy was never fooled as much as on-board with the measure and sympathetic to keeping it for the same reason they were sympathetic to approving and keeping it before. DEI didn't force approvals of things like operas abroad- it was compatible with the ideological interests of the people who did the approving, and the people who would do the reviewing.
The DEI-shaped bureaucrats who thought 'we will abide by such and such buzzwords' are still DEI-shaped people who think DEI is Good Things that Good People do. The resistance of such bureaucrats to executive branch pressure to change was demonstrated both in the past with The Resistance 1.0, and has been explicitly called for with attempts to build a Resistance 2.0 coalition which opposes the goals, not just the means, of the DOGE.
The (many) examples of internal resistance to first Trump administration are what give plenty of reason to doubt that the current middle-management which previously regularly frustrated efforts will be sincerely compliant this time.
Given the place this thread started, I thought it was obvious that the answer is "because letting a few useless diversity programs persist for a few months before they're inevitably shut down is a lesser evil than interrupting good programs in needlessly disruptive ways". I think it's trivially the lesser evil ethically; it might very well be the lesser evil economically too, depending on how costly it is for good programs to make up for lost time once they get the green light, e.g. restarting studies from scratch or finding replacements for people who quit for lack of pay and found other employment in the private sector. (See Scott Aaronson arguing that every week the NSF is frozen harms American science's future prospects as postdocs either quit their academic career, or move abroad rather than stay in the US - something in which the most competent, most valuable researchers-in-training will be more successful than the rank and file, selecting for mediocrity among the people we'll have left once the gridlock ends.)
I am saying that DOGE should review all the programs and decide which ones to cut. It's not that much work.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
... 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.
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?
Except "women's organizations in Myanmar" will be under an "if you cut this, billions will die" item, and it will look like there's really nothing to cut.
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?
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. It was only then that we discovered that all the "independent" media in Ukraine were funded by them. You know this. How do you propose anyone finds out where all this money ends up without the freeze?
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.
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...)
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.
Cool, and I think you're the one not thinking clearly. The idea that the information will be the same is an unproven assumption. USAID can easily pretend that the women's organisations in Myanmar are doing something else entirely, which is more palatable to the current administration.
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. You're assuming and/or implying that the information would be just as readily available without the cuts, but you're not making any argument for that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
When has this slow and gradual reform worked in history, especially for something hard like shrinking government or anti-corruption efforts.
When private sector orgs want to do a zero-based reboot, they give everyone 1-3 months' notice and tell them to reapply for their own jobs while working out their notice. (And even that is a desperation move that you wouldn't do in an underperforming company that wasn't in imminent danger of failure) They don't fire everyone and invite them to reapply for their own jobs from the outside. Private sector orgs who did do that would find that everyone competent applied for a job at a competitor instead.
Isn't this the key, though? The public sector is the public sector, it doesn't experience competition in the same way. If you were going to lose your US Government job, where the fuck would you go? Who competes with the US Government from a talent-recruiting perspective? State governments? Other countries' governments? Neither of these are run like privately-owned corporations, and some of them have way more friction for joining.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
I'm not so sure. Justinian reforms took less than 10 years from start to finish. They were so successful that they're still in use today.
Unless you count "slow and gradual reform" as "the entire government collapsed and reformed, but the country's name didn't change"- and seeing as how most countries (or rather, the government that claims those same borders and the same name) have only existed for 30-70 years I think "no reform, then massive radical reform" matches history a little better.
More options
Context Copy link
This is just incorrect. 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.” No there is a broad grant for the president and his delegate to use broad discretion.
Thus the president pausing payments isn’t impounding the money; it is the president figuring out what he wants to do with the broad grant given to him.
The Impoundment Act doesn’t come up until after a long while the president eschews spending anything. Of course with a Republican congress hopefully he can get a simple vote and the money is returned.
Now you might say “then why is he blocked.” The answer is forum shopped handpicked judicial activists have issued TROs where they don’t really need to justify their arguments and they don’t really expect to win on appeal but the hope is that delay favors the bureaucrats which it does.
I think this ultra vires judicial activism should be grounds for impeachment.
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.
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.
And firing the people who you think are doing crazy shit doesn’t mean you intend to not do anything with the cash. Hell Rubio was instructed to think through things.
Maybe the problem is the judges were listening to the wrong media.
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.
Really? You don’t understand why you’d want to put an employee who is adverse to you and your plans on admin leave?
Re judges yes it is entirely predictable that the libs would forum shop and get cracked judges to issue TROs. But hopefully most wind down in a few days (and Trump is starting to win some).
Finally killing the current iteration of USAID is not incompatible with spending on foreign aide. Right no the admin thinks USAID is a front to funnel mo ey to lefty causes because it is. Killing that doesn’t mean “and therefore we will keep the funds.”
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I really don't know if what Trump and Musk are doing is good or right, and I'm far from Trump's ardent defender and fan, but I also don't think it's that ridiculous what they're doing. They're using the big tech playbook, which is what Musk is used to. Slash budgets, break stuff, and the stuff that's really needed will become apparent as a result. It's what people who want to actually make change and make their companies better will do, not what people who want to preserve the status quo at any cost. (Read: it's what actual businesses do, not governments, because businesses care about cutting out waste, and governments don't really).
Maybe it's completely the wrong tactic to take. Maybe that playbook should never be employed for government because the programs are too important to have even a temporary gap. I don't know what the right answer is. 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.
I've said this before, but I have to reiterate: applying the logic of business to government is a mistake. The difference is not that governments don't care about waste and private businesses do; there's significant political incentive to crack down on (perceived) waste. Rather, governments and businesses are not subject to the same feedback mechanisms.
The first and biggest distinction is that governments cannot (except in truly extreme circumstances) fail. Firms which make subpar decisions (I won't say 'bad', because you only need to outrun the bear) will eventually go out of business as you're outcompeted and profit/credit/investments dry up. Governments can keep spending money forever because revenue derives from taxes, not sales, and they are (usually) not trying to make a profit. You can't count on "what's really needed" emerging because your feedback mechanism doesn't respond like that. You can just break something important and never fix it.
The other big distinction is scope of interest. Businesses usually represent a narrow group of people (shareholders) with fairly straightforward interests (money). Governments not only aren't trying to make money, they represent the interests of countless vying groups. There's a great deal of disagreement on the margins about what they ought to be doing and how. You're going to get contradictory feedback on almost anything you do. One man's waste is another man's critical program.
More options
Context Copy link
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).
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Giving fundees 90 days to saturate the media and hide all the bad spending wouldn’t work. Trump would have failed just as every cost-cutting politician I ever voted for failed. The Cathedral likes long drawn-out detail-oriented battles, and the first rule of warfare is not to give the enemy what they want.
(Yes, this is conflict mindset not mistake mindset. With mistake mindset it looks stupid and damaging to do it this way, naturally.)
EDIT:
I’ll cop to this in individual cases.
When Congress wants to cut discretionary spending, discretionary spending gets cut. (Obama-era sequestration was the most recent example). Even Moldbug agrees that the bureaucracy is effectively accountable to Congress*, should Congress care to exercise its power. And in the specific context of non-defense discretionary spending, Congress routinely do care to exercise that power. Discretionary spending isn't bankrupting America, entitlements are. See for example the charts in [this report] showing overall discretionary spending growing slower than the economy over decades, and barely keeping pace with inflation in the decade leading up the the pandemic.
The reason why cost-cutting politicians fail is that entitlements (and old-age entitlements in particular) grow faster than they can cut discretionary spending. You don't need shock-and-awe to cut discretionary spending, which is all Musk is doing so far. If Musk makes a serious dent in Medicare fraud (which he hasn't even started trying to yet, and won't be able to do by grepping lists of payees for woke keywords) he will save far more money than he could
Incidentally, in countries that haven't become pensioner-gerontocracies, you can really cut spending (including the equivalent of entitlement spending) the normal way. Canada and Sweden both cut spending by 7% of GDP in the 1990's, in both cases all that was needed was an electorate which cared about deficit reduction (which the US electorate claims to). The problem in the modern day (not just in the US) is that there are a lot of pensioners, and they vote. And the experience of the UK from 2010 through Brexit is that if you try to cut everything else faster than the welfare-state-for-the-old grows due to population aging, things start falling apart.
* In the sense that Congress can control budget, and has the ability to punish individual Deep Staters who defy it in a way the President does not because being criticised by name in a Congressional committee report is career-ending for a senior career civil servant.
More options
Context Copy link
It’s also why the absurd TROs are so undermining—delay plays to the bureaucracy’s advantage
More options
Context Copy link
The resistance doesn't feel particularly short-circuited to me. Judges have blocked most of DOGE's biggest cuts.
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.
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.
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.
I'm willing to hear arguments otherwise, but from where I'm standing this is good.* To the extent that the blocks have an effect at all, it forces more and more of the apparatus and legal precedence that needs to be cut down and replaced onto the side of wasteful spending. If my experience of Brexit is any guide, people aren't going to say, "well, judges blocked it, it must be bad," they're going to say, "why is a judge able to block my elected president, let's get rid of this".
*Obviously, it would be best if the cuts had been carried out quickly without being blocked, but that was never on the table.
Given the complexity of spending on any serious scale, it is totally impossible to request information in a way that is: (1) readable on any practical time scale, (2) comprehensive enough to allow detailed audit. So you have to rely on people to provide honest summaries of what they've been doing, and nobody ever does when their career and budget are on the line. Impounding the money first switches the focus to "prove we need you, stat" rather than "find a good excuse for the stuff you've done so we don't cut you". EDIT: that is, it gets status quo bias on your side, forcing recipients of grant money to work harder to earn your approval rather than merely avoid drawing your attention.
That is the goal of warfare. Obviously destroying your enemy's capacity is important but to do that you have to attack in ways they find difficult to counter. That means NOT allowing them to find reasons to stall you, and it means backing them into positions that are difficult to defend. In this case, that it is not legally possible for an incoming president to halt using taxpayer money to fund trans operas in Colombia. And cutting the left-wing patronage network off at the knees is destroying a big part of their capacity, even if you don't save that much money.
Yes Minister is a classic in the art of bureaucratic stalling, and in the hiding of incompetence and corruption, written using real (secret) interviews with top-level politicians. Basically it boils down to the fact that the bureaucracy only has to stall you for a relatively short time before you're snowed under with crises and no longer able to be proactive. That's why speed and optics matters more than efficiency right now - you want to be on the front foot for the hard part of the campaign. Most effective politicians seem to work in this way: Teddy Roosevelt, Tony Blair. You have to get public support and a feeling of momentum, and then you will have the leverage to force your way through.
Stalling Technique
The Five Standard Excuses
Of course, all of this could still fail. But it's looking good right now, and it's looking far better than everyone who's tried to achieve spending reductions.
If my experience of Brexit is any guide, the people who told the necessary lies to get the median voter to believe that the government was their enemy and the system that had delivered decades of peace and prosperity should die in a fire are high on their own supply and it is going to end in avoidable harm to the country, landslide election defeat, and wailing and gnashing of teeth in opposition.
To take an obvious example, if DOGE and its supporters believe what they are saying on social media about how closing down USAID is successfully defunding a vast left-wing conspiracy then their OODA loop doesn't have ground truth in it.
It seems relevant that the tories won in a landslide after brexit and only lost after several elections and mismanaged leadership changes.
The 2019 election was before Brexit. The reason why the Tories won in a landslide was because Parliament was seen as holding up Brexit, and the central campaign pledge was to "Get Brexit Done".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm sorry, but the reason Brexit ended in landslide defeat for the Tories is because the Conservatives removed the shield that had allowed them to lie about wanting to stop immigration, and then tried to keep lying anyway. It was absolutely 100% avoidable. An own goal the likes of which politics has rarely seen. The only thing I regret about Brexit is believing them when they said, "we would like to do what you want, but the EU won't let us". That's clearly not a problem here because Trump is just going ahead and doing what he said he was going to do.
Yes. That's an inherent difficulty when you are actually trying to defund a vast left-wing conspiracy. Ideally it wouldn't have come to that, but it has.
That is certainly part of it, but the Conservatives lost as many votes to the left as they did to Reform, and a party which picked up all the Tory and Reform votes* would still not have won a majority. The Conservatives defeat in 2024 was extremely overdetermined, and the fact that they had screwed up everything possible about the implementation of Brexit was most, but not all of it.
* Which they couldn't have done because Reform was mobilising 2019 non-voters with an anti-system message in a way an incumbent party couldn't.
Forgive the brief reply, but my read is different. I think that a lot of those who voted labour did so out of desperation at the state of the tories and distrust of Farage, rather than a sincere desire for left-wing or more moderate government.
The Tories were quite capable of mobilising voters with an anti-system message, and succeeded in doing so in 2019, but they couldn't do so in 2024 because the pro-system MPs had stifled meaningful reform and then regained control of the party. The Tories ran on the worst of all possible platforms: a schizophrenic mix of pro/anti-system rhetoric, a record of dismissing radical politicians like Braverman whilst bringing back corrupt Establishment figures like Cameron, and a record of failure at achieving meaningful change. They had also been mullered by Covid (which I don't blame on them specifically, most of the hysteria was ginned up as a doom loop between the press, the doctors, the public, and Captain Hindsight) and Ukraine (the sanctions produced economic pain which was blamed on Brexit).
If they had been able to push through immigration reform, at least made a start on DOGE-like pruning of the left wing state, and Covid/Ukraine hadn't happened, they would have been fine I think. Some voters would have punished them for perceived failure on Brexit, but not many.
Ultimately, the tl;dr for why the Tories lost in 2024 is that they were so incompetent in government that you couldn't tell whether they were failing to deliver on a right-wing agenda or failing to deliver on a centrist one.
And part of the reason for the incompetence is that they were high on their own supply over Brexit. The discussions within the Conservative party in 2024 were not about "How do we do the hard work of replacing EU policies on agriculture, immigration, customs administration etc?" (which needed doing, and either wasn't done or was botched with visible consequences), it was "How do we spend the £350 million a week Brexit dividend?" (which was always only £160-180 million because Johnson and Cummings lied about the numbers, and which in any case wasn't available for the first few years because the government negotiated a deal including a divorce payment). A large part of why the Boriswave happened is that Cummings thought (he boasted about this on his blog) that Brexit defused the immigration issue without the need to actually reduce immigration, because we had "taken back control."
Another part is that they chose a leader whose character made him unsuitable for executive leadership because he was able to tell the lies needed to win the Brexit referendum.
And another part is that the purge of people who were insufficiently Brexitty left the incoming Conservative govenment short of talent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Assuming you trust what's on the web, which maybe you shouldn't given that USAID has channeled funds ostensibly meant for Pakistan into "making Cuban Twitter" as part of a scheme to somehow undermine the Cuban government.
One potential benefit of these sorts of purges is that it helps consolidate US spending into something that's more legible to the executive branch (and Congress). Now, given that the executive branch has a history of lying, not only to Congress but also to the Executive himself I think it's good that the entire system is flushed from time to time and programs restarted from scratch to ensure that there can be proper oversight and accountability. I mean, think about it - if we just wanted Good Government Programs to run with minimal confusion, we'd get rid of democracy and elections and call it a day.
However, frankly, it is hypothetically possible that every single program is doing something Good And Useful. It does not then follow that no programs should be cut. If the national debt is actually going to be a problem (and probably it is) we should not spend beyond our means. Just as in our personal lives, that means that there will be some good things that we can't have. I won't be particularly sad about INL (which is a shady bunch in my book) being temporarily shut down in Mexico. Possibly the US government would want to shut it down any way as they might be approaching the problem of drug flow from Mexico a little differently, I'm not sure.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link