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I think it's worse than that. Republicans no longer even know what they want in any level of detail.
Witness the Ramaswamy proposal to fire 50% of federal employees by social security number. Why 50%? Well it seems like a nice big number. Which ones? Literally just choose them randomly. It's what you get when you combine a desire for "small government" with complete ignorance about what the government actually does. He's just saying "Less bureaucracy!" without being able to specify which functions he wants to cease.
And ok, Ramaswamy is a sideshow. But it's not like the frontrunner is providing any level of clarity. "I'll repeal Obamacare and give everyone MUCH BETTER healthcare!" Ok, better how? Just "better!"
There's no proactive policy agenda. There's no vision of an ideal end state to be achieved. They aren't even radical anarcho-capitalists like Milei, they don't have the intellect or vision for even that.
This is always framed as a swipe at Trump, but it really shows how incompetent the establishment GOP is. They have hundreds, if not thousands, of people working for think tanks, policy assistants, lobbyists, etc who were supposed to be crafting a Republican alternative to Obamacare. They had multiple votes to repeal Obamacare before Trump was a political player.
It turns out they had no plan. Apparently they were just cashing paycheques and playing Candy Crush.
John McCain repeatedly voted to repeal Obamacare, campaigned in 2016 on repealing Obamacare, then cast the deciding vote to save Obamacare. He was hailed as a hero by the press for opposing Trump, but he knew that there was no plan to replace Obamacare for all of those votes and during his campaign.
Trump just assumed someone in GOP healthcare policy had done their job in the past six years.
Legislation is the job of the legislative branch. The President should have input, but he shouldn't be expected to go into more depth than broad strokes about ideas he supports and opposes.
In part it's because obamacare is more or less a globally center-right healthcare policy- it's cribbed from a bunch of euro systems that are very establishment-conservative coded.
It happens to be a giant trainwreck compared to those systems, and that's mostly the democrat's fault, but it's not like there's a right-coded twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk as to how to make it better. There just isn't a conservative-coded way to meaningfully bring health insurance costs down, although you can do some pruning around the edges. There are progressive-coded ways that would get implemented by right wing technocrats not facing a lot of scrutiny, but that is not a good description of the Trump admin.
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Yup, absolutely. This is part of the dynamic TW is pointing at in his OP - the actual policy experts are overwhelmingly Democrats. On top of that, Republicans don't reward actual expertise - no one thanks you for being the guy saying "wait, it doesn't work like that". Trump himself is ultimate form of this pathology, but it didn't start with him and it won't end when he's gone.
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Alternative view is that you’re mistaking ad copy for content. The “debates” and public appearances and speeches given to the pubic are vague on purpose. They are not meant to inform. The point is to give out nice sounding platitudes that the base hopefully claps for and that can be quote mined for advertising purposes. Saying something too specific about what your plan is will make some of the base oppose it and that doesn’t help. If you propose cutting the Department of Transportation, people who think we need it won’t vote for you. If you just vaguely wave at cutting something, everyone assumes that their programs are safe and you don’t lose votes.
I think in practice this vagueness functions the opposite way. If you said you wanted to cut program XYZ then the people in that program know you're coming for them, but people in other programs feels safe. That which is not explicitly included is implicitly excluded and all that. On the other hand if you leave the details vague you leave people uncertain about whether their program is safe. I think in the presence of that uncertainty people are more likely to infer the negative outcome (you want to cut their program) than the positive outcome (their program is safe). By leaving the details vague you can piss off everyone instead of just the people in a particular program.
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Honestly, what better way is there? The bureaucracy is self-healing, and it's too big and too complicated to operate on surgically. Obviously it will also resist you every step of the way, but I don't think even the bureaucrats themselves could make significant cuts at this stage.
So there are only two options:
Of those options, the second is politically impossible and would be rolled back even if you managed it. The first is one-time and would be difficult to roll back after a few months because those fired will have to get new jobs.
There isn't. Cutting bureaucracy has always been an applause line for the right, even more so now in the age of Trump and all his "deep state" talk. But if the ultimate goal is to save money, then dealing with the unpleasant political realities of targeted spending cuts is the only way to do it. But unless the goal is to inflict maximum chaos, consequences be damned, then Vivek's is an unserious proposal from an unserious candidate. I'm sure certain offices would handle it okay, but a lot of them wouldn't. And when these offices are critical, the fallout can be severe. What happens when your grandmother doesn't get her Social Security check? What happens when you stop getting reliable mail delivery? What happens when all the stuff your state and local governments rely on Federal grants to get done doesn't happen because the distribution of those grants goes to a standstill? How long do you think the remaining employees will stick around and work for free if this fucks up the payroll department? "Fixing whatever breaks" isn't a viable option since you'd probably spending more money to untangle the Gordian Knot that would develop within weeks.
The hope is that the decimated services immediately switch over all their efforts to the critical stuff because they’re decent people who don’t want grandmothers to starve to death and leave the makework to one side.
Would this happen, and would it be enough? I don’t know. You would have to look into crises of state capacity and the response to them. You would also have to judge how likely it is that state employees would aim to maximise rather than minimise pain to enforce rollback (quite likely, I think).
Is there any historical example of significant state simplification? Possibly the dissolution of the monasteries in the UK but that’s a rather different kettle of fish. OTOH it worked at Twitter.
(I’m not arguing for Vivek, he sounds feckless as hell, just musing about the viability of rip-off-the-plaster policy generally.)
That’s a very optimistic view of government agencies. These are the same institutions that close federal parks every time their budgets are threatened. It’s more likely that they will withhold the vital care grandmother needs so that the whole world will see how necessary they are and how evil the people who are trying to take away their money are.
There’s a pretty big difference between closing a park and letting grannies die. It might be a sufficiently large distance, idk.
Steelmanning aside, I agree with you. I’m just troubled by the fact that institutions tend to get as large and ineffectual and corrupt as they can until they collapse. I’m therefore interested in potential methods of creating a controllable disaster rather than allowing one to happen naturally.
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