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Posted this further down, but it seems relevant enough to have been a top-post response.
Bottom line- I think this OPM email event has resulted in Musk undercutting himself and DOGE for the foreseeable future, and greatly reigned in its potential to reign in agencies without the backing of those agencies own leaders.
There were two groups of people who got emotionally invested in this OPM exchange and thought it was a serious threat- people who didn't understand from the start that Musk and OPM do not have HR power over the government (and so were afraid he could fire them for non-compliance with his OPM messages and changed their behavior accordingly), and people who wanted Musk and DOGE to benefit from a presumption of HR power over the government (including Musk). As far as DOGE's longer-term ambitions go, this interplay has significantly limited Musks' potential inter-agency influence going forward, by drawing the first of clear lines on the limits of his power.
Higher up in the thread, @ControlFreak mentioned a past poster who made a general point that good leadership entails never giving an order that will not be obeyed. The original poster was making a point on individual leadership and how if you have to appeal to formal authority as a basis of leadership you're probably not the 'real' leader. Between de jure and de facto power, de jure authority only matters if it can be translated into de facto impacts. A person with a formal title but who no one listens to isn't an actual leader.
In leadership in general, this means that there are some pretty hard limits to leadership that relies on coercion. The coercive powers may be considered legitimate / followed by others, but even within the organization in which that applies, it creates cultures of compliance where people (might) adhere to the point on the pain of punishment, but little more. Despite the economic theory that an avoided cost is worth as much [value] as a benefit, people who will work harder for the prospect of carrots tend to work as little as possible to avoid punishments. Even within organizations, where you can carry out threats of negative administrative actions, effective use of threats against compliance comes from being clear, limited, and not the primary means of influence.
Outside of an organization, where you cannot carry out threats, making demands / threats you cannot enforce is worse than bad practice- it actively makes your influence worse, by highlighting your impotence.
A significant part of the fear-factor surrounding Musk and DOGE are that there are (were) no clear limits to its power. As an agent of the Chief Executive, there are significant powers that come with the President's sanction, but not unlimited ones. Just to start, the power of the DOGE under the President cannot exceed the President's on authorities. Further, even the Presidency has limitations of what it can do internally- some of these deriving from a Constitutional level (such as the ability of Congress to regulate the military), and some from established law and case law (the executive branch having to go through certain processes when making / removing regulations). And in so much that the President does support someone, that person may have a lot of power in the Executive Branch... but the moment the President does not support someone, they have no authority. Live by the sword (of Chief Executive empowerment), die by the sword (of lack of Chief Executive empowerment).
So from the start, people knew- or should have known- that DOGE's power wasn't unlimited. However, it wasn't clear where the limits were. The takedown of USAID greatly heightened this fear, as if DOGE could take down an agency like USAID, what couldn't it do? Therefore, the fear of DOGE went along with the uncertainty of what it could do.
This incident has drawn a great big bold underline of at least one limit- the DOGE does not have HR power bypassing the Department Heads.
There are long and often historical reasons why this would be a Bad Idea regardless. The term 'chain of command' exists because the 'chain' is a visual metaphor of how one link may be higher, but does not directly touch the links below, i.e. does not bypass the intermediary links. This is so that superiors do not buy their subordinate intermediaries to micro-manage subordinate echelons (where the higher level leader is often disconnected from facts on the ground), and also so that subordinates do not bypass their direct superiors to appeal to the next-higher level leader unnecessarily (both undermining the leader and distracting the higher leader). Exceptions to bypassing the chain exist, but the chain exists for a reason, and so does the metaphor.
By making the power play and being refuted, Musk and DOGE has started to expose the limits of its power.
DOGE will not have direct interaction powers with employees, and thus not be able to leverage its institutional power for maximum advantage vis-a-vis individual workers. DOGE HR efforts will have to work through existing HR channels- which in turn means through, and with the support of, the Department heads who oversee such channels.
This, in turn, makes Musk / DOGE dependent on the cooperation of Department Heads whose departments he wants to cut down- which creates a direct contradiction in interests, since institutional power = authority x manpower x money, and DOGE shutting down sub-departments would decrease.
That doesn't mean such things won't happen- the Trump administration has appointed a lot of department heads with skepticism towards their own departments for a reason, so there probably will be grounds for cooperation if DOGE finds and raises an issue [Department Head] is sympathetic with. DOGE may also be able to pull another USAID scalp, by breaking down a quasi-independent organization (and, like USAID, nominally putting it into another department- which increases the department's potential institutional power).
But it also means that if DOGE/Musk come head to head with [Department]/[Department Head], Musk will either be blocked or have to appeal to Trump to override...
...and if/when Trump sides against Musk, that will be yet another nail tying down the limits of Musk/DOGE's influence.
For such an easily predictable- and I'm fairly sure predicted- sequence of events for an overreach, Musk started to dispel the ambiguous premise of power that DOGE depended on, and has starting revealing the outlines of his institutional influence. Not a good plan, given it was both unnecessary and will limit the credibility of his future threats, and something that anyone who opposes Musk should be thankful for Musk's decision to pick a fight with his nominal political allies, the department heads who just pushed his demand back in.
I don't think there is another USAID-sized scalp to pull. There is a reason why the right-leaning man in the street always picks foreign aid as the first thing to cut - it is by far the most unpopular medium or large government programme.
One of the problems that conservatives have governing is that they have convinced their own supporters that the government spends large sums of money on wokestupid bullshit, when in fact wokestupid bullshit is cheap and healthcare for gramps is expensive. The $880 billion in Medicaid cuts in the House Budget resolution dwarf anything DOGE is doing - indeed I am cynical enough to think that a large element of what DOGE is doing is kayfabe to make susceptible voters think that the extension of the Trump I tax cuts is being paid for by something other than Medicaid cuts.
I agree that another USAID-sized scalp is unlikely. I also think that the social spending cuts are where the real money are. I'd even agree that DOGE and USAID are basically a smokescreen / firecracker diversion- the loud sparkly distraction to the much more substantitive cut that couldn't be done without it.
I think there are other scalp areas to pull, though I think it's far more likely to be in collaboration with agency heads rather than in antagonistic opposition to them.
The USAID takedown was not-so implicitly staged (physical resistance in a non-working Sunday in DC, for Rubio to be appointed on Monday?) over the access to the data networks, using the executive authority card borrowed from Trump. This was part of the Trump Administration's establishment of control over the information space (literally) of the executive branch, and to demonstrate formal control over the information.
This establishes precedent that allows / enables / 'forces' Department Heads to grant some level of access to DOGE to various networks for program reviews. And these, in turn, 'force' Trump appointees- many viewed with skepticism or hostility- to either go along with unpopular things ('I can't help it, DOGE made me), or- as in the case of the OPM- champion their agency against the DOGE. (See the OPM email- bad from a DOGE-independent-power perspective, good for making alignment with the agency head seem good for continued employment as a protector.)
I'm all on board with the kayfabe, and suspect that going forward access to data won't be so confrontational, and DOGE will often happen to identify areas that Secretaries and such won't be so unhappy to 'have' to cut.
Thanks, I've been learning a lot from your comments.
I'm reading today that Trump has again reaffirmed his support for Musk and OPM issued a memo calling for significant RIFs.
Do you anticipate large scale (50%+) reductions across most agencies, and how does this square with the proposed budget that will apparently add trillions in debt? What am I missing?
I'm most interested in how all this shakes out politically. You can fire all these people, but when these salaries amount to a tiny fraction of the budget and is an easily exploited issue for your enemies (e.g., firing veterans and people close to retirement never looks good), and there isn't much progress in reducing consumer prices, you'd think the House and Senate could easily flip in two years.
Not really, no.
Reduction in force applicable consistent with applicable law runs into the point that applicable law is what authorizes and appropriates for those work forces. Moreover, the OPM memo makes some, hm, substantial carve outs.
So if you're not even touching the Department of Defense (which according to google has about 1/3rd of the non-military government labor force, or 30%) and you're not touching the postal service (one fifth, or 20%), in just two carve outs you've already exempted over 50% of the government's non-military employee base. And on top of that, if the analysis of the welfare state cuts is that cutting hurts, don't.
There is an expression that when you look in terms of overall budget, the US is either a welfare state with the world's biggest military, or a military with a welfare state. The welfare state is the dominant part of the budget by far, and most of that spending is automatic based on eligibility and not discretionary spending. Of the discretionary spending, about half is on defense.
Trump is not a fiscal conservative.
Trump is in an alliance with fiscal conservatives, who believe that cutting the scale government is key to reducing / reigning in government spending. In turn, these fiscal conservatives don't believe that the military should be cut, but tend to believe the better way to control military spending is to avoid various conflicts (like Ukraine support).
There is a confluence of interests in that Trump wants to cut the government because he views it as a basis of resistance (because the Democrats loudly boasted of the fact last time around), and the fiscal conservatives see it as an opportunity to cut back the regulatory state (which includes advocating for / overseeing constant expansions of entitlemet spending).
This is why the framing has been 'efficiency' and 'waste' rather than the people executing them per see. USAID was publicized in the way it was because it was an easy scalp with a number of silly things to point at. Discussing the waste in turn distracts from who was administrating those actions.
This is also why OPM's memo talks in terms of 'redundancies' and 'low performers.' If a veteran is fired because they were a bad worker, the political salience is lost if it turns into some form of 'bad worker says he shouldn't be fired because he's a veteran.'
None of these parts are about consumer prices, which themselves have a politically priced-in expectation of rising due to the trade barrier disputes.
Setting aside the end of some artificially low prices that were pursued last year for domestic political advantage (such as the Biden administration cutting off LNG exports in 2024, which forced the gas to be sold domestically for cheaper domestic industry and all that matters), Trump's base generally has priced in that trade disputes mean short-term issues for longer-term improvements.
The less politically engaged may not, but that won't matter as much for another two years.
Again, priced in.
Which is why Trump and Musk and such are going in quick and hard. They have probably built in the assumption they won't be able to make such cuts later. Trump is a lame duck president regardless, and you should generally expect the governing part to lose their trifecta quickly.
I endorse Monzer's interpretation that a fair bit of the recent discord is basically just a smoke screen / distraction at some proposals to cut more politically popular things which amount to larger fractions of the budget.
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No, this is just a dodge, because wokestupid rarely gets its own line on the budget. the hundred mil for nursing home administrators who certify that all their employees have taken trans-affirming elder care training from wokestupid 501(c) comes directly out of the money for real care, and if you cut it you're obviously trying to murder grandma.
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Okay but Trump, who backs Musk, can fire the department heads at will. And has done for many other departments.
So getting them on board seems relatively simple.
This assumes the conclusion that Trump will back Musk over his department heads, regardless of what political costs Trump would pay. When Trump is also backing those department heads. That is, after all, why they are the department heads.
Which, in turn, leads to the natural policy level counter-play: to pit Trump against Musk, by having political allies in Congress- such as the Chairpersons of the committees who stand to lose if Musk has his way- to hold Trump's legislative agenda hostage in the senate. They hold Trump's agenda at risk if Trump fires Musk's target of the hour and clears the programs they cared about. Trump tells Musk to not get in the way of his (Trump's) priority.
At which point, you are transitioning to two separate additional limits on Musks' power: the requirement for active support from Trump, and the power of Congresscritters to trump Musk with Trump.
Even if Trump wants to back Musk over the department heads, firing a senate-confirmed department head is a politically expensive to Trump because he has to get a replacement confirmed. In addition, Trump knows that running a revolving-door administration was part of why he got so little done in his first term.
So the newly-confirmed appointees have a degree of power in their own right. Musk's power, on the other hand, is entirely borrowed (unless he has rooted enough government systems that he is able and willing to blow up the government in classic "don't fire the sysadmin until his replacement is in post" style.)
We are in full agreement! I endorse your elaboration.
The premise that DOGE can fire anyone derives from a misreading of the USAID takedown. That created confusion / alarm, but the idea that Musk had firing authority over anyone, even Trump's appointees, is a misreading.
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