Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
First of all, this hour's stock ticker is not "the economy". If you failed to notice for the last 200 or so years, the stock market is volatile. What happens to "the economy" remains to be seen in much longer timeframes than a couple of days. And that's btw why it is wrong for most people to engage in active trading - they trade with their feelings and not their brains (as they do most of the other things too, including - unfortunately - voting) and unless they happen to be exceptionally gifted or exceptionally lucky, they get taken to the cleaners.
I personally am not 100% happy with how Trump is handling foreign policy. The whole Ukraine thing remains very far from both "peace in 24 hours", which obviously nobody believed in, and any peace deal at all, and his actions do not seem so far to yield any results there. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and judge by the results, but unless any positive result happens soon, I must conclude the whole thing was a big failure for him. In general, he seems to have an idea of himself being this yuge peacemaker, but there are places which are not ready for peace, and trying to make peace by force there only makes things worse. It's pretty much a tradition for this to happen to Israel, and Trump doesn't seem to help there too by conducting parallel negotiations with Hamas. Same with Iran, which doesn't seem to be open to peace, so why bother? The whole Canada thing seems to be totally unnecessary - while I understand why one would want to rough up Mexico a bit with regard to what is happening on the south border, I don't see the northern border as a big priority and I don't see any use in a public fight with Canada - moreover, it could help the Left to stay in power there, which is a stupid strategic blunder, there's not many non-leftist governments in the West.
I am not disappointed with his approach on dismantling the taxes-to-GONGOs pipeline but the real battles are ahead. The budget is stuffed with all kinds of pork and spending targeted at enriching special interests, and Republicans' hands are as much in this cookie jar as Democrats are. It's one thing to cut off a woke NGO and another thing to cut off a subsidy that a Republican district benefits from. If the latter is not done, than there's no hope for any real change in budget deficits. I would still see disrupting the flow of grift money as the positive, but whether or not it will fix a real fundamental problems and whether Trump administration ends up to fundamentally reverse the course or just be a flash in a pan and the next Democrat president would just reverse everything he has done in a week - that remains to be seen. I also am happy he's taking serious steps to dismantle the DEI system, hopefully he does enough damage to it to make it hard to recover in the future. It will likely try to resurrect and reassert itself after Trump is gone, but hopefully not in a comprehensive envelope that is has been up to now, when every major company or organization must have a big DEI department and every scientific work has to have at least one section describing how it helps a preferred DEI cause. I am very interested in his efforts of reasserting the power of the executive over the unknown (this is literally true, nobody knows how many of them even exist) number of government offices that so far have been pretty much living their own lives controlled by nobody and doing whatever the hell they want. The major battles in this campaign are in the future, and likely to be fought in SCOTUS, and I hope he manages to get some good lawyers on his side, because the other side will fight him very hard on that. But at least he's trying.
I am also not sure what he is doing with tariffs makes sense. He has some bold ideas, but I am not sure they are thought through enough to actually produce results that he expects, or the ones I'd like. In some places - like established grift pipelines - the disruption itself is a good thing, but in other places just shaking things up is not enough.
As a libertarian, Trump is very far from being my ideal candidate, and I always knew that. But domestically, so far he's doing better than I expected, though it is very tentative given how little time has passed. I'd wait at least a year to make some conclusions. In the foreign policy, so far it has been rather disappointing (I don't count border control etc. as foreign policy) - while kicking Europe's asses enough to make them finally wake up and smell the Russian bear at their doorstep is encouraging, it's not enough. Unless he delivers some results - and that would require making a turn from disrupting to dealmaking - I don't see him as winning there. I am not regretting my vote, but I am certainly regretting his choices there so far.
What offices are these?
All kinds of things like CFPB which has recently been in the headlines, but there are a ton of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_United_States_federal_government and at least some of them seem to be under impression that they are not responsible to anyone. While there may make some sense for agencies like the Fed for which independence from the fleeting passions of day-to-day executive operations may be a very important feature, for most of the agencies I think being isolated from control by executive also means being isolated from control by pretty much anything. That was especially bad combined with Chevron deference, which means basically the agency, at least within its own domain, is the supreme sovereign without any check on their power. Even with that gone, having a myriad of agencies inside the government that basically conduct their own policy without any input from anywhere does not feel right.
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Assuming the current administrations statements on them were accurate, wasn't USAID literally that?
Not exactly. USAID was somewhat unique as it was created by an executive order, not by an act of Congress, and thus can be also destroyed by another executive order. However, many of the independent agencies are created by the Congress, and some like CFPB are even provided with financing schemes that makes them immune from future Congresses defunding them. Thus, the agency created this way is basically immune from either legislative or executive control (and until recently also from judicial control due to Chevron deference). The premise that Congress can create agencies which are further uncontrollable and self-perpetuating is highly questionable, just as the premise - that a lot of people on the left are advancing - that the President can only execute a very remote and hands-off control at best over those, like removing clearly criminal officers, but can not participate substantially in political control over them (somehow they never object about Democratic presidents controlling them, go figure). In a Republican (not as party, but as system of government) system in the US, this just doesn't make sense, and I am glad that Trump is pushing back on that.
Elimination of USAID however, while welcome, is unrelated to that because USAID was always on a very weak foundation compared to many other agencies which have been established on much stronger legal grounds. IMHO sometimes too strong.
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